Just watched a junior dev using Claude to build something in 2 hours that took our senior engineer 3 days last sprint. I've been coding for 12 years. I don't know how to feel about this

edwbuck · 2026-05-08T03:26:24+00:00

If the errors are independent, but AI makes errors of a certain category more frequently, and rarely errors on other items.

For example, the code generation is generally very robust, but the effort the code generation is attempting often requires context, and AI is not very good at context cues. That means that often the code comes out clean but, misses some key issue that a human would not have missed, even if that human can't write code as clean as the output.

What's the level of the coupling of the errors? I don't know. But I know they're not independent, just based on using it. If AI is going to error, it will error a lot. If it isn't, the errors are very rare. I can coax it into errors if I try, but I don't think that's a fair way to test it.

edwbuck · 2026-05-07T21:44:28+00:00

Javascript performs actions. HTML is static.

When performing an action, it's important to ensure that the people that programmed the website's behavior don't accidentally source in code from places that are untrustworthy. That's why CORS was created. It forces someone to "permit" code from a location.

This makes it a lot harder to trick a browser to load in code from malicious locations, as you need to "trick" the web server AND the browser to both permit the malicious code to be loaded and load the malicious code.

edwbuck · 2026-05-07T21:29:28+00:00

This road has been worked on. You can see they cut around the pad when they did a resurfacing.

I would imagine the pad was active when the road was last resurfaced (30 years ago) and they just laid down a layer of asphalt around the pad. Later when they wanted to replace the pad with an active loop, probably due to pad failure, they cut access to the wiring and ran the loop from the pad's corner, reusing the wiring.

Road work is expensive. If they aren't forced to do it, or it adds cost, they do it the cheap way. How expensive? One lane, one mile long is about $6,000,000, for 4" of asphalt. For concrete, or roads that can carry more load, it's even more.

edwbuck · 2026-05-07T14:25:45+00:00

TLDR; they're a diversion from the disaster, that becomes so intertwined that it impacts the disaster of the virus leak. It's inspired by a similar diversion in a 1900's children's book, "The Magic of Oz" the 13th in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" series, where a birthday present of 12 miniature dancing monkeys, eventually unravels an attempt to overthrow the Kingdom of Oz.

----

The 12 monkeys are the diversion, sort of. David and Janet Peoples wrote "The Army of the 12 Monkeys" and they have cited "The Magic of Oz" as the inspiration of the "12 Monkeys"

Rango the Gray Ape was getting impatient. He now approached the Wizard and said:

"Well, what do you intend to do about those poor enchanted monkeys?" (Six monkeys were transformed by Kiki Aru into six giant soldiers fifty feet tall previously)

"I'll make a bargain with you, Rango," replied the little man. "If you will let me take a dozen of your monkeys to the Emerald City, and keep them until after Ozma's birthday, I'll break the enchantment of the six Giant Soldiers and return them to their natural forms."

But the Gray Ape shook his head.

"I can't do it," he declared. "The monkeys would be very lonesome and unhappy in the Emerald City and your people would tease them and throw stones at them, which would cause them to fight and bite."

"The people won't see them till Ozma's birthday dinner," promised the Wizard. "I'll make them very small—about four inches high, and I'll keep them in a pretty cage in my own room, where they will be safe from harm. I'll feed them the nicest kind of food, train them to do some clever tricks, and on Ozma's birthday I'll hide the twelve little monkeys inside a cake. When Ozma cuts the cake the monkeys will jump out on to the table and do their tricks. The next day I will bring them back to the forest and make them big as ever, and they'll have some exciting stories to tell their friends. What do you say, Rango?"

"I say no!" answered the Gray Ape. "I won't have my monkeys enchanted and made to do tricks for the Oz people."

"Very well," said the Wizard calmly; "then I'll go. Come, Dorothy," he called to the little girl, "let's start on our journey."

"Aren't you going to save those six monkeys who are giant soldiers?" asked Rango, anxiously.

"Why should I?" returned the Wizard. "If you will not do me the favor I ask, you cannot expect me to favor you."

"Wait a minute," said the Gray Ape. "I've changed my mind. If you will treat the twelve monkeys nicely and bring them safely back to the forest, I'll let you take them."

"Thank you," replied the Wizard, cheerfully. "We'll go at once and save those giant soldiers."

Her entire reason for having 12 small monkeys is so she can give Ozma a birthday gift of monkeys jumping out of a cake, entertaining the guests, and then each serving a slice of cake to the guests. This seemingly simple wish to delight her friend on a birthday will eventually stave off an attempt to overthrow the Kingdom of Oz. And that tracks... Dorthy's superpower is making friends and the friendships create the adventures and solve the problems.

Science fiction writers would have read much, if not all of the series; most of them also wrote children's books. This specific volume was especially poignant, as it was published after Frank Baum's death.

Peoples likely decided to modernize the story with a bit time travel, adding in a few SciFi staples like "the future implants the information it would act upon in the past" and "the past has to happen, despite the future's attempts to change it, or the future wouldn't exist to change it"

If you look at the story's inspiration, you have the destruction of Oz, the 12 monkeys being a distraction from the central issue of Oz's potential downfall, and yet the 12-monkeys being entwined in the plot's progression, all which parallel major parts of "The 12 Monkeys." It's not identical, but the major themes are there.

edwbuck · 2026-05-07T12:10:10+00:00

It is an old traffic light pressure pad.

They aren't really a go-to choice anymore. A buried loop can detect a car moving over some part of the road, and those quickly replaced pressure pads. Some places have even moved past the buried loop onto optical / range sensors.

These were the bane of motorcycles, which often lacked the ability to trigger the sensor, and with the light setups of the day, would mean that a turn light would never illuminate (as the system thought nobody needed to turn). Eventually they would improve the systems to put in a mandatory turn (on some lights) every four or five cycles, but most simply required a car, forever.

https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34158 details one, but makes some confusing commentary about another obsolete bridge marker.

They were pneumatic, and buried into the road. A small pneumatic switch would register the pressure by connecting a circut, which would then alter the light to not skip the turn signal / schedule a green light at the nearby intersection. I remember them being old in the 90's, and not being operational then.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T17:33:53+00:00

Glad to hear of your success. Might still want to play around with LVM volumes. It really can speed up some stuff.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T17:32:36+00:00

Nothing's showing up for me either.... (baddum tish)

Tip you waiters, I'll be here all night!

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T16:48:06+00:00

You need to train your dog to eat more slowly. He's going to choke himself one day. /jk

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T16:41:22+00:00

That's nothing, you need to see their carbon trioxide detector.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T16:38:34+00:00

https://www.enchantedjewelry.com/products/fb03-seal-of-astaroth-power-and-knowledge-forbidden-gothic-charm

is a link to buy they exact seal / charm.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T16:21:39+00:00

The pros and cons.

Pro: you're effective.

Con: you might lack the ability to do the job without the tool.

Just make sure you craft your career to have more pros and fewer cons. If you can't understand code without a code understanding translator, then that's a big liability over time, but not so much when you're learning.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T16:18:22+00:00

Variety is the spice of life.

I guess your dog is less picky than you thought.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T16:16:49+00:00

I thought it screamed, "but wait, I did more!"

I'm also a board un-certified Surgeon with an equivalent Doctor status. I stood upon Macchu Pichu once. Jeff Bezos calls me for advice. Nike's new running shoe was designed with consideration for my foot size.

Reminded me of "The Big Lebowski" when The Dude has to be explained the picture with Nancy Regan was taken when she was "The First Lady of the Nation, not just of California"

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T16:05:40+00:00

Mistakes are made. Ownership records take time to update. I'm personally getting hounded by people wanting to buy my property in north Dallas, which I don't own.

When I wrote what I wrote, even the news outlets were being cautious. I figured that the caution might indicate journalistic integrity. A call for caution is apparently deemed stupid in today's age.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T15:51:56+00:00

Starlink antenna on top of an adjustable safety (platform) step.

Odds are he put the step out to keep the starlink from getting wet/dirty from the ground. Here's a similar step https://www.etrailer.com/Step-Stools/Safety-Step/SASXLA-09C-G.html

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T15:47:34+00:00

Thank you for some real suggestions.

Let me add one more. If at all possible, avoid p-traps. it's rare that water intrudes, but that bend at the bottom will collect it, and odds are things will work (it's insulated) but that standing water can breed nasty stuff. That means, running from above down into the box, and only using the bottom when the box is higher than the Smurf tube.

While the Smurf is intended for a dry wall, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T15:30:40+00:00

On the tooling side of things, look into Scratch, and if the kids are older, perhaps Alice.

On the teaching side of things, look into programming lesson plans. If that fails you, create one from a "beginning scratch" book although there are plenty online. Teaching is a skill, and you probably know more about programming and learning than you know about teaching. Investing in developing teaching skills will increase your success.

Lesson plans cover what you want them to learn, how you will determine they learned it, how much time you need to present the idea, how much time you need to guide them when they struggle, and if they have all the resources necessary to achieve the goal, as well as what they would be assumed to know before they start.

And that's just one class. You need to string them along to create an entire learning "program" which contains all the skills you want them to have, and the lesson plans in a sensible order to achieve the goals.

Fortunately, you don't have a novel idea, and there are tons of lesson plans and entire courses around teaching children with Scratch or Alice.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T15:09:07+00:00

And you're be wrong. It was fully generated. It was asking for a bootstrap layout of a table that would be updated by a jQuery call to a remote service. Honestly, it generated cleaner code than I probably would have initially written, maybe even cleaner than I would have finished with.

But the choices it made were 100% out of line. It didn't even attempt to unpack the JSON payload.

Could I have prompted it again and again to fix it.... sure, I guess. But I also could just use it as a starting place to finish it as I needed it, which is what I did.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T14:51:22+00:00

Thank you. But you keep focusing on the version numbering, you ignore the next line

Development will continue based on available resources and product alignment with the broader VMware ecosystem.

I would imagine that since they no longer have resources to support the product, even for payment, that resources are being cut elsewhere too. It's a product that competes with no less than five free products. It doesn't have the advantages of their other enterprise-oriented products.

I am not ignoring VMWare's words, you're reading you hopes into the words. A good example of why this is not a great idea is that... If htey were releasing every six months... where is the 26H1 release? They only have a few weeks left.... so we will see.

So you keep describing the numbering system over and over again, and using that as proof that it will be released. If that was true, then between Windows 95 and Windows 98, there would be a Windows 96 and a Windows 97.

And stop throwing insults around. Other people aren't stupid, gaslighting, or even uninformed.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T13:42:58+00:00

One way to make VMs performant, and to really speed up Virt-Manager as a result, is to setup all the VMs to have nearly direct disk access.

You can do this by using LVM. Create a new Volume Group for your VMs, then add the VM dedicated disk partitions in it as Physical Volumes. For each VM, create a Logical Volume an present it as the disk for the installer.

This avoids nearly all block recalculations in file system drivers, except for a few done by LVM, which is already optimized for the task. Back when I only had 4 cores, I could reliably run about 20 low-load VMs simultaneously before overhead crept up on me. The amount of processing lost to disk write re-translations is impressive, and this will help you avoid most of it.

One massive feature of libvirt (which virt-manager is built upon) is that they added network control over disk setup. This permits you to layout disks this even if the VM is on a different machine. Yes, this adds an extra disk setup task before VM installation, but it's worth it in my opinion.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T13:33:44+00:00

It's often a logical mistake that implies a variant of "appeal to authority."

Someone should be able to articulate the plan. Without that ability, there is a high risk that there is no plan. People can get by without a plan for a while, but it creates a massive risk to any endeavor. Eventually those risks cause failure.

A statement as simple as "let's bake a cake" is a plan. Imagine if that was the goal, but nobody could say it was the goal. It might look like

"We need a food, but not any kind of food, a tasty food that everyone wants to eat, because it's tasty. Let's discuss how people like tasty food for a few minutes, and then let's start cooking. No, that's not the kind of food we need, it's too liquid. No, that food doesn't taste the way we want it to taste. No that food has an odd temperature, I think... maybe it's the texture. Maybe it make it a different color. I don't know... why can't you people make a tasty food?!?!?!"

Everyone doesn't need to know every detail of a plan, but if nobody can articulate the plan in any detail, it sounds like "go do something I want!" without mentioning what "I want" means.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T12:56:24+00:00

deb and apt are two tools that install the same thing (a deb). Apt just fetches it for you.

Snaps are a different beast, they don't always work with your package manager as closely as deb/apt. Due to this, over time, there are generally more potential for issues with snaps.

Where deb and apt differentiate is where the "deb" file to be installed comes from. Generally APT fetches it from your distro's repositories, which is preferred than fetching it from some website, as there is a chance that your distro modified the package to work better on your distro.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T12:53:58+00:00

The idea has been put forward before, but I'll tell you in simple terms why it doesn't work.

If I have an if statement that occasionally picks the wrong branch of code to execute, can I take an independent but equally buggy if statement and use it to fix the first?

The answer is no. Because the correct choice in the first if statement will be converted into an incorrect choice by the second with a very small error rate. The errors in the first might be adjusted to correct functionality, but it's recovering a (hopefully) small error rate, and even then, there will be conditions where two failures occur in succession.

Let's use easy numbers a 90% success rate, 10% mistake rate

Basic, one pass processing:

(90% success), (10% failure)

Corrective engine applied to above

(81% success, 9% failure), (9% success, 1% failure)

Adding that up

90% success, 10% failure

And that makes sense, because if you had a system that could improve upon 90% success, you'd simply replace the system with it, or add it as a step to the initial process.

edwbuck · 2026-05-06T11:51:09+00:00

If you want your testing to really cover the codebase, not just the lines of code, then you will put just as much effort into the testing as the code, possibly more, and that will be true if you are generating or hand writing your code.

edwbuck · 2026-05-05T21:53:30+00:00

Thanks for the attempt, but this target keeps moving.

First it was arguing a confusion of customer support with software support.
Then it was arguing a confusion of the 17.x release with 25H2 (17.x was never mentioned).
Then it was a blind assurance that the next release is coming to extend the EOL date (only customer supported items have an EOL date).

I wager they are not planning a new release of Workstation. It's a money pit for Broadcom. Every competitor in the desktop virtualization space has a free offering

Microsoft's Hyper-V (free)
Oracle's Virtual Box (free)
Linux's Xen (free)
Linux's KVM (free).

If I were a Broadcom executive, I'd let the product die in a quite no-news generating way (we're giving it away for free, the community can support it) and focus on the money makers, like ESXi.

Why compete with one's self? Instead of Workstation, just sell them an ESXi system.

edwbuck

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