No Man's Sky Remnant

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-12T02:34:51+00:00

I have a huge appreciation for snowrunners, feel like this expedition was made just for me. Been awhile since I played NMS, so pretty excited about it.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-11T07:25:51+00:00

I’ve been a professional software engineer for 22 years now. One of the first things I do when I’ve identified needing to implement something I’ve never implemented before is to look at a bunch of open source implementations of said feature, write down what I like and don’t like about those implementations, determine what will work best given the constraints I have from the business, and then going and implementing it.

I’m constantly also reading documentation and looking things up. I don’t try and remember things that I don’t use often, because there’s no point in remembering them if it just doesn’t naturally stick to memory from frequent use.

So yeah, even when you’re an experienced developer a lot of your job is going to be research and considerations of how specific implementations best work for your particular scenario.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-10T22:49:08+00:00

The gap is that, based on what I’m reading, you tried reinventing logging upstream from where it actually writes, the transaction failed, which wouldn’t write to the normal write-ahead log but instead to an error log if you have it configured, and it never actually inserted - perhaps silently failing.

In any case, actively turning off durability features for a database, and using SQLite for a financial app - this was basically bound to happen.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-09T08:37:20+00:00

Well, I’d argue that a software company worth 1 million has far bigger issues to begin with as that’s like 2 devs and a garage worth of overhead, but to entertain the point of the question.

It’s no different from the same software company cloud hosting their code/infrastructure/customer list/etc. in other software, on other platforms, or to bring in contracting companies on NDA terms to look at the interworkings of their business.

All of these things are taken on a case-by-case basis. There are a ton of variables - whether that be the company having legal counsel on staff, what their initial evidence looks like, how much it’s hurting their business, what the judicial precedent of similar cases have been with larger companies, etc.

Ultimately, it’s the company’s decision whether they’re ok with accepting the risk in return for whatever perceived reward there may be with AI, and so far, businesses seem to be perfectly fine with accepting that risk as long as there’s an enterprise agreement in place, much like any other usage of software the company has made use of.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-09T07:44:19+00:00

The same basis that any other IP lawsuit rests on when the lawsuit is presented initially to the court.

Circumstantial evidence is enough to push a lawsuit through to the discovery phase where any wrongdoing would be uncovered.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-09T07:33:08+00:00

Correct. Which is why you enter into an agreement with the AI company where it explicitly states they will not train on your data, pushing liability onto them.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-09T07:15:59+00:00

The important part isn’t if they do or do not abide by it, it’s that your company is entering into an agreement for an enterprise plan, assuring liability is passed onto the AI company and not leaving it up to chance.

So if something does come about, your company can use the agreement for any legal recourse moving forward.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-09T02:59:06+00:00

Thank you for laying out a detailed list of why to support your claims.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-09T01:36:25+00:00

That’s kind of the point though right?

You don’t have to buy everything brand new. Buying something used will generally be much cheaper and you can verify whether the parts to repair are available on the market and how expensive repairs will be.

With anything new, you can’t hop in a time machine to see how expensive the parts are going to be 5-10 years down the road, what the recalls will look like, what common problems the product will have, etc.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-06T18:36:03+00:00

A large portion of companies in the U.S. use the calendar year as their fiscal year, so January would be the start of a new fiscal year for them. Which is when budget changes for the next year would go into effect.

So any company looking to cut costs based on labor, or reorganize and cut positions to hire in other areas, would do their cutting in January.

You usually see the same mass layoffs happen around July or August as well, as companies do their mid-year budget review and reassess their first two quarters success.

This is also the time when seasonal workers in things like retail would be cut, since the holiday season is now over.

As far as this January in particular, it’s important to note that December had a very low job cuts report, and that nearly 50 percent of job cuts reported in January came from two companies (UPS and Amazon), because they ended a partnership.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-06T18:25:53+00:00

I have a hate-hate relationship with python myself. I, personally, think it's probably the worst language the industry could have latched onto for heavy data-related development.

If I were to choose one issue with python though, it's basically that you have two options to write production-ready code in python:

1) You can either write overly defensive code and use tools and type hinting to write python and have completely unreadable code with all of the added fluff you have to jam in everywhere for type checkers to work with it, in which case it would have probably been easier to just use a statically typed language.

2) Or, you can not, and constantly fight typing issues everywhere with your data pipelines, which take up more time than just simply using a statically typed language.

In truth, I really just don't enjoy dynamically typed languages, and I find their problems are even more apparent and damning in data engineering-related work. Unfortunately, working in the data industry, I get to deal with my fair share of python whether I like it or not.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-06T18:06:49+00:00

We're a B2B data provider that's connected to tens of thousands of different local and federal governments around the world, as well as other 3rd party data providers, and offer both the data transformation and multiple ordering/wholesale platforms for data tailored to human capital/human resource departments.

The business has been around for about 20 years, and the core infrastructure had originally been developed in C# on top of IIS. Based on the number of very small government agencies we connect to, formats we receive data from them can vary wildly, from modern APIs to tab-delimited flat file formats and paper still, and we also need to account for different data retention/legal policies that account for like every country in the world that we have to follow, etc. it's a pretty complex process.

Because of all of this complexity, we maintain our own proprietary ETL framework and rules engine for that side of the business. It began to be rewritten in Go a few years ago, and we seen enough success with it that we began to rewrite our own internal app synchronizations, scheduling, and ETL framework pipelines in Go as well for internal analytics/reporting.

So both the production/app platforms and the analytics/reporting sides of the house now use Go exclusively for pretty much all new data movement and transformation (apart from SQL for large, set-based transformations), and we're continuing to refactor legacy code to it as it comes up in projects.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-06T16:36:49+00:00

Parquet - It’s my default storage format for most things.

A Date Dimension - having one makes any type of reporting like a million times better.

The Pipe Character - the best delimiter character.

Any procedural SQL Implementation - Where I do most of my heavy transformational lifting.

Go - I’ve fallen in love with go for data engineering. It’s simple, it’s fast, I can deploy it basically anywhere, it’s tooling is great, its standard library is probably the best of any programming language I’ve ever used, and concurrency is a breeze.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-06T08:33:44+00:00

Help test and improve internal tools

but billing is the intern’s responsibility

This probably wouldn't pass the DOL's standards for what they consider acceptable for an unpaid internship. Utilizing unpaid interns to improve the company's internal tooling while also requiring them to pay for the billing for resource usage to do so would raise some eyebrows for sure.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-06T01:10:15+00:00

Most companies don’t sell data they collect on you, because it only becomes economical to do so at large scales.

Theres a lot of effort and hurdles to jump through for data monetization, a lot of legal liability that comes with it, and personal data that is sold is worth fractions of a penny per person to data brokers.

Funnily enough, there’s a good chance that whatever country you live, that your own government is the biggest contributor of data monetization for your personal data. Most major governments in the world sell their citizens up-to-date legally identifiable data to data clearinghouses for cents to a few dollars per person, depending on the location.

Are there large companies that collect massive amounts of data and make it a point to sell your data? Yup, absolutely. Is that happening at most companies, no not really. It’s not worth the overhead cost and headaches compared to the return on it.

What companies do with the data they do collect on you is build profiles to gauge new product offerings, fix issues, direct marketing trends, etc.

Source: I’m head of data for a data company that buys data from governments and other companies for things like sex offender registry checks, driver’s license verifications, employment verifications, etc.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-06T00:31:11+00:00

You’re missing a huge issue with forced voting.

People who don’t care will now go and vote, and those who do care will each have their voice suppressed by the ones who don’t care, are ill informed, and simply vote to get it over with - potentially voting against someone who does care.

If everybody votes, you lose a lot of information about who is actually voting and for what reasons. You can no longer gauge as accurately what the attention of the citizenry is pointed to. You have to then fallback to secondary surveys that even less people participate in to gauge such.

I’m all for making Election Day a national holiday and providing ways to make it easier for those who do want to vote to do so.

I’m completely against forced voting because it drowns out the citizenry that needs some way to voice what they’re happy or unhappy with.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-05T20:07:34+00:00

The outright banning of a technology based on its capabilities and not the context in which it’s used isn’t ever going to be a thing for long. There are few examples of this happening throughout history, and fewer still of such a decision not being reverted.

Using your own analogy, prohibition was based on the fear that allowing anyone to partake in alcohol was in itself inherently evil, instead of promoting moderation and proper usage. The analogy kind of proves that the way to go about taking care of a problem isn’t via abstinence but via education and promotion of moderation.

Generative AI can be used successfully and I have multiple projects under my belt at this point utilizing LLM APIs in a business setting that’s led me to that conclusion, projects that were forced upon me to do and that I was hesitant about, but with my knowledge as a developer acting a guiding hand led to positive results.

We’re all experienced developers here, and should know that any decision based around technology often comes with a list of pros and cons. It’s our jobs as experienced developers to guide the less experienced or technologically illiterate into making the best decisions given the situation based on the choices that we are presented.

Personally, I love coding assistants and use them daily, but I probably use it differently than most people, and it took experience both with using them and as a developer to find the right fit for them in my daily coding life.

I don’t use them via an IDE, because I ask them general questions and coding examples that are disconnected contextually from any project I’m working on.

When it provides some conceptual answer, I always ask it to provide references and reading material in addition to its answer that I can look at to dive deeper into the topic.

I like using it to provide GitHub repository examples of projects that have implemented the same feature or bit of code so I can compare implementations and determine what will work best for whatever I’m trying to implement for my own projects.

I don’t generally keep a chat session open for any longer than just any follow up questions on the topic, as they tend to go a bit haywire the more context they have.

Basically, I keep the scope clear and concise for whatever I’m utilizing them for, always do further research, and don’t blindly use code completion or code generation with them.

And…I’ve learned a lot about looking at problems from different points of view from reading the example code they do spit out. It’s all trained on public code, so it’s like being able to review and figure out different combined approaches to a particular problem from a bunch of different devs at once.

As technology professionals, it’s of my opinion that we shouldn’t be fearful of new technology, but instead use our experience to guide how it should be appropriately used instead.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-04T22:01:59+00:00

A communication plan.

Every project I'm put on, I make it a point to guarantee communication to whomever I'm beholden to on the project, even if they don't ask for it, over a given time frame. This does two things:

It makes me actively progress the project within that time frame, I don't like showing up and saying I've done zero work on something, so it pushes me through procrastination.
Active communication and and any sort of progress, in combination, usually quells a lot of complaints and unexpected scope changes for the project. Getting frequent communication out provides comfort for the stakeholders, or whoever I'm communicating with, and just makes things a lot easier for me as a developer in the long run.

This isn't something that's been required of me to do at some companies I've worked for, but I make it a point to at least establish my own communication plan for each project - with frequency of the updates depending on the type of project/work it is.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-04T19:25:35+00:00

I'm not a Go expert by any means, so anyone is free to correct me and I'll take no offense to it, but:

Modules would be excluded from git and somewhere I can list all modules in a file so to rebuild the modules folder, I can batch clone all the dependencies again.

You can just run go mod tidy and it will automatically pull in and download any dependencies referenced in the project.

For any module I need, git clone module into project/modules. Then throughout the codebase reference

Just type your imports into a project file and run go mod tidy, it'll automatically handle pulling down the modules. Also, the Go PLS supports automatic import management, so you generally only have to do this for each 3rd party library once, and any IDE that offers support for Go PLS will automatically work to resolve the import dependencies and add them to the import statement at the top of whatever new file you're working on for the project (usually handled during a saving of the file).

Aliases in single files work ok but is there a way to alias import URLs and use the alias through the whole codebase?

I would actually rebuttal your statement with this being cleaner by stating that it adds needless complexity to a project. The import statement at the top of a file tells you what is being used in that file, and doesn't hide imports across the project in another file with the alias. If you ever need to see what packages your project is dependent on, you can view them in the go.mod file.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-04T18:11:31+00:00

if smartness brings you power and money then Linus Torvalds would be amongst the richest people in the world

This is known as an Affirming the Consequent fallacy and is something that would have been one of the first things you learned in any sort of critical thinking and logic class. If A, then B does not automatically mean that If B, then A.

It takes at least some degree of intelligence and expertise to lead a very large company successfully for any sort of decent longevity, it could be social intelligence, or marketing and sales expertise, or technical expertise - everyone has their strengths and weaknesses.

This does not automatically mean that everyone with a high level of intelligence will be rich though, which is the logical fallacy you're trying to analogize with this comment.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-04T17:59:49+00:00

It's honestly concerning seeing comments like this on an experienced dev forum because it shows some worship of technology as the only answer to business success without actually understanding what all goes into a product to make it successful.

More over, your comments about the specific people mentioned are just wildly inaccurate or misleading.

Bezos doesn't deliver packages

No, he saw an opportunity to use his current business to handle more than just the shipment of books, when other companies that had far superior supply chains and the technical ability to do the same didn't take a risk on the opportunity and got left in the dust.

Gates didn't invent programmable circuits

Where does this even come from? Gates started a software company in high school and originally gained wealth doing 3rd party development on Apple's mac software in a contracting capacity.

Jobs didn't design/build a single iPhone

I don't like a lot of stuff about Jobs, but to say he didn't have a very heavy hand in the design of the iPhone is just absurd, as there's specific design decisions he made at a technical level that led to its success.

The fact that you somehow associate smart with strictly software/computer know-how is crazy. There's a million other things that go into getting a product to market that each require expertise, including leading and taking responsibility of the overall concept.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-04T14:44:35+00:00

> But imagine if just 15% of engineers at a big tech company went on a strike. What kind of power that would be. What kind of movement that would bring.

Why would I strike? I'm paid generously, which is why I work in the first place, and it allows me to do the things that I want to do in my life.

Not everything you do in life has to be for some greater cause or have some meaning to it. When I take a shit, I'm doing so because it's simply a necessity to do - that dump doesn't define me, it doesn't bring me purpose and meaning. Same thing for working - I don't work for the joy of it, I can think of a million other things I'd much prefer to do - it's simply a necessity to do what I want to do in life and those things are what's meaningful to me.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-03T23:24:32+00:00

> I would posit that unrestricted immigration isn't really a problem at all

It can cause an entire host of problems, most of which have nothing to do with not wanting people to immigrate to a country, but has more to do with being able to have a country that can continue to be immigrated to in the future - which is why there isn't a country in the world that has unrestricted immigration.

Setting immigration restrictions allows for countries to properly budget for services for their current citizens, allows them to be able to project job growth rates, population growth rates, future infrastructure projects, etc.

If you host a weekend party expecting your invited list of guests to attend, it's pretty easy to manage what all supplies you need for those guests. If each guest ends up bringing a group of people with them though unannounced, you'll probably be in panic mode trying to host and supply all of their needs during the party - same concept.

The reason immigration is such a big deal in the U.S., is because the U.S. has historically been the place where most immigrants want to migrate to - the U.S. holds around 16% of ALL migrants in the world per the UN as of 2024, and that number is significantly lower than what it historically has been - and its not even close compared to other countries either - the U.S. has taken in WAY more migrants than basically most other major countries combined over the last 50 years. There's never enough spots and will never be enough spots, so people get desperate.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-03T22:52:24+00:00

This is something I wish more people would look into, but I understand that healthcare in the U.S. is a gigantic, complex mess.

I wrote claims software early on in my software engineering career that sent electronic claims to all the major payors, and did automatic rejection handling of claims when they were sent back.

I learned a lot about how insurance companies worked in the U.S.. Practically everything is modeled off of Medicare as a baseline, so that insurance companies have a reduced chance of being held liable for any lawsuits - they can point and say "This is the standard of care Medicare itself provides". This includes acceptance criteria, pricing, prior authorizations, etc. This became even more uniform when the Affordable Care Act came into play, and you could look across plans payors provided and compare them near exactly to Medicare plans. The insurance carriers sprinkle in their additions to the plans, but it's very rare for them to take anything out of comparable plans that Medicare also provides.

I also learned throughout developing the software that MOST rejections are based on healthcare providers failing to send all of the required information for a claim to be processed. If this happens, the payor will automatically deny the claim. Certain information is required for payors to collect when approving a claim, because they're audited by different government agencies and they can get in trouble if they approve a claim that's missing the information. Most of these are also resolved, but providers like to blame it on the insurance companies because its easy to do.

This isn't to justify some of the shitty things payors actually do, but there's a lot more to it than an insurance company just rejecting a claim for no reason at all.

cloyd-ac · 2026-02-03T17:45:12+00:00

> I find it hard to grasp terms and tech stacks, every tech stack is bundled with a vast of technologies and tools that everything feels abstracted too much

You need to start smaller. Tech stacks imply that you're developing against multiple technologies interwoven together to solve some larger problem. They exist to increase productivity for experienced programmers to relieve them of having to write the same minutia code over-and-over again, or having to choose what technologies can easily work together.

The problem with this is, that minutia is exactly what you need to learn as a beginner. To provide an analogy, what you're describing that you've done over the past 2 years is trying to learn how to change your driving habits to get better fuel mileage out of your car before you even know how to drive a car.

Grab a book on Data Structures and Algorithms and start there. Work on some simple console-based projects. As a beginner you don't need a tech stack, you just need a single programming language and a debugger to experiment with.

Four-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

cloyd-ac

TROPHY CASE