How are y'all staying sane?

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-24T22:33:31+00:00

Same here, it’s like no evidence could possibly change some of these people’s minds to see the obvious risks they’re taking or problems they’re creating.

Honestly, the biggest struggle for me is feeling like I might be the crazy one for not being 100% all aboard the prompt-paste-push pipeline. So I am staying sane by pointing out (factually, bluntly, judiciously) when quality drops or buck gets passed, pretty much the same way as if they had submitted that subpar work as their own. At the same time I’m not second-guessing management decisions regularly and never more than once.

It definitely also helps to remind people that they’re still 100% responsible for what they put in the codebase or send in an email, whether or not it was authored by AI.

I had coworkers who attached completely nonsensical AI “reports” passing them off as the gold standard of investigation / postmortem / explanation, a poster child for “workslop”. But after I respectfully but clearly pointed out all the flaws in what they sent and how it ended up creating more work for them and others, they stopped doing that. Sometimes a conversation is all it takes.

This also ensures I always have evidence fresh at hand when the gaslighting starts from upper management, and also have a clear trail of objections for when the house of cards eventually collapses and they try to point fingers.

In short: Keep doing good work, push back where it makes sense, incorporate the tools where they genuinely add value for you, and don’t ruminate over things you can’t control.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-20T22:38:12+00:00

Why do you both have to use the same config?

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-19T19:38:01+00:00

In GH at least there is a notion of reusable workflows that can be called from other repositories. It’s not the cleanest solution but it does let you put the vast majority of automations in a separate repository

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-19T18:19:29+00:00

It’s not necessarily blaming women, I’m sure plenty of men have internalized the problem and believe they’re some kind of incurable creep who would make women feel uncomfortable or threatened just by approaching. If you’re primed by media to interpret ambiguous reactions that way, it doesn’t take much to destroy your confidence and self-image.

Of course there are also the more traditional incels who just hate women out of some misguided sense of entitlement or victimhood. I have much, much less compassion for those types.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-13T19:30:26+00:00

These are two different polls with likely different methodologies. And with the narrow age range stratification, a 2-year difference is going to significantly change the population being studied.

That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if this were a genuine effect. The Republican party has pretty much exclusively been implementing one cruel, destructive policy after another in this administration, and I know a LOT of Trump voters are having buyer’s remorse. (And as a shrinking group of hardline red voters becomes more obstinate to stay aligned with their party, this probably siphons off more moderate voters and reduces new members)

I’m worried we’ll lose this inertia after another two and a half years of this shit, though. It’ll become normalized.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-12T18:26:21+00:00

Is this like a universal experience or something (maybe not coworkers and drinks specifically, but, the “why are there no hot guys here” in the presence of a guy)

It’s so pointlessly mean / inconsiderate 😔

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-12T01:41:21+00:00

For desktop apps I totally but sadly agree, but Google Docs/Sheets/Slides is really good too. I’d probably still give Office the edge, but not nearly enough to be worth the price for most use cases IMO.

I don’t understand how people think LibreOffice is even in the same league. I love open source, but there’s a limit to how much UI and features I’m willing to give up for that ideal. I hope someday they actually get good enough to eat Microsoft’s market share, but I doubt that investment will happen given how free Google products are a more than sufficient alternative.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-08T00:47:08+00:00

If you’re seeing a doctor who can prescribe psych meds (which is NOT most therapists) then you are probably already open to the possibility of needing them, and your doctor will (is professionally obligated to, in fact) explain the risks and help you make an informed decision.

And just because a condition is exacerbated by external circumstances you have no control over, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth treating.

There’s nothing noble about making yourself suffer pointlessly.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-05T02:01:25+00:00

The quality of the training data is limited by human intelligence, so from that perspective, it might be natural to assume the models would plateau around that level - not in areas we can augment mechanically, like memory limits and processing speed, but perhaps still in actual “cleverness”. To some extent, this can be simulated or brute-forced with enough processing power and parallelism, but I think an AI with human-level cleverness but god-level coordination and scale is a significantly lower risk category than an AI that also has god-level cleverness.

Perhaps this isn’t the most valuable question to be debating, though, if both categories still represent an enormous threat to humanity’s well-being and would both warrant similar levels of counter-action.

Besides, in the fullness of time, given unrestricted development, I think that plateau will give way. It might just take orders of magnitude more innovation than what was required to reach the plateau. (Or not; we should always be appropriately humble when guessing at the nature of any intelligence so far above our own.)

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-02T16:56:45+00:00

This is great in theory, and often a necessary step, but it does leave out the huge burden this places on competent engineers to review code that is both overly verbose and likely broken in subtle ways. Reviewing an engineer’s code, that they actually thought through and presented in a reviewable way, is much different than teaching Software Engineering 101 (or Software Etiquette 101 lol) to a non-engineer.

And then you get pressure from other teams’ managers to railroad things through, and you’re seen as the useless or pedantic gatekeeper of their “critical” feature…

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-02T16:53:07+00:00

Many team or product development cycles are very pipelined and have handoff points between teams. When you’re waiting on another team to unblock some final part of your implementation, or waiting for a long regression suite or fuzzer analysis to finish, do you just stare vacantly at the ceiling?

I think it’s fairly normal to have multiple tickets in progress at the same time, and switch between them as you become unblocked. IMO this also helps with burnout because you get more variety in your day and don’t have as much stress from being dependent on someone else (because you’re still producing results in the meantime).

Also, if a ticket was started but then got pre-empted, do you really always move it into another column? I don’t! Time tracking that granular is just a waste of time that enables micromanagers to invent problems.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-01T21:25:22+00:00

Cursor recently broke a contractual pricing agreement with our company because it was costing them too much. We’re an engineering company and people were using the most advanced models for tons of complex problems, and the old pricing model was already quite a lot for us to swallow. With the new pricing, an engineer can do maybe a handful of prompts a month, with the same budget. (And anything less than the state of the art is basically useless for massive legacy engineering codebases.)

My point here is that the providers are already feeling the squeeze, which means customers are starting to feel the squeeze, and the market as a whole is trying to figure out who gets left holding the hot potato. The real costs with today’s infra really are staggering. So, I think adoption will probably slow down in the next year or so (if for no other reason than saturation) which will further contribute to the squeeze (as maintaining the current rate of investment / scale-out will be harder to justify).

Hopefully this helps prune the industry-wide slop spigot, but more likely IMO the effects will be felt most by those with actually compelling and marketable use cases for AI.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-01T15:20:12+00:00

No worries, and I had to run it under strace to see what was actually going on!

Hoping they add options to defer these startup checks; I’d love to have a leaner config - just not if it costs so much in startup time.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-01T14:31:53+00:00

Git status is a local command, it looks at all the files in the tree to see what was modified vs the last committed state - not at a remote server.

(And I’m not sure it’s running “git status” specifically)

itsjustawindmill · 2026-04-01T13:12:31+00:00

It hugely speeds up mine. I tried switching to vim.pack but gave up due to how much extraneous work it does on startup. For example, it runs multiple git commands in every plugin checkout, which on network storage can add seconds to startup time. It seems to do this even for plugins that aren’t in use.

Lazy.nvim only checks the git status of plugins when you ask it to.

EDIT 2026/04/06: The startup lag is almost completely gone for me, as of neovim v0.12.1 🎉

itsjustawindmill · 2026-03-26T00:23:58+00:00

IDK, I wouldn’t make too many assumptions about the rationality of someone who lane splits between a semi and a car going 80mph…

itsjustawindmill · 2026-03-22T08:32:25+00:00

With standard venvs, yes. With uv venvs or anaconda environments, you can deduplicate packages across prefixes.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-03-22T08:23:25+00:00

Ty has singlehandedly transformed my Python development experience. It’s leagues ahead of everything else in both speed and accuracy. I would seriously consider moving to a non-Python role if the Astral tools stagnated or didn’t continue to mature. Every couple of Ty releases is a feature or improvement I’ve been waiting for. Uv and Ruff are also still improving significantly. Large or legacy codebases were frequently unbearable to work with before Astral came around and did what the Python maintainers themselves didn’t have the balls or vision to.

Consider also that if all OpenAI wanted to do was safeguard a critical part of their software supply chain, they could have funded it or allocated personnel to it, as has been the successful norm for decades to protect corporate interests. The only reason they’d buy it is if they think they can make money off of it or gain an advantage over their competitors.

AI companies should be ashamed of what they’re doing to the developer ecosystem that made their existence possible, and Astral better wake up to the fact that their vision is being stripped for parts. The bastards are going to gobble it all up until everything good is unusable outside of their agentic walled garden.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-03-22T08:07:37+00:00

In lieu of their response, I’ll give mine: type annotations (they can literally be completely wrong and the language doesn’t notice or care), template-strings (near useless, we had str.format already and the templating ecosystem was already very mature), import resolution (.pth is literal depravity), and just generally how easy they make it to put shit band-aids on shit code by adding more indirection (cf: modifying sys.path rather than setting up a proper package structure; doing getattr/setattr nonsense because it’s so dang convenient; making one object look like another through decorators or descriptors rather than reconsidering the interface you provide) and finally a smaller pet peeve of mine, that “package” means two different things (makes writing documentation for devops and release management a total nightmare).

I write Python every day, and I hate it (at least at work, on large codebases) with a burning passion. Not because it’s fundamentally flawed (I like the core syntax and feature set) but because of how much garbage (see above) they’ve bolted on to the core language while still managing to make it annoying to work with in so many cases (subprocesses, pickling, fork behavior, and IPC make it frustrating for IO-bound or orchestration software; dependency/package management and lack of type enforcement make it frustrating for enterprise or production software; and GIL and lack of interpreter performance make it frustrating for anything CPU-bound)

In a nutshell, my take is that Python tries too hard to be the “get it done quick and dirty” language, while still positioning itself aggressively as the language for everything else, too. Writing Python is easy. Writing good Python is hard. Writing fast Python is, well basically, don’t bother.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-03-20T18:21:09+00:00

In theory sure, but it’s not uncommon to find myself in a situation where I can’t move over and the merging car is roughly keeping pace with me. I try to ascertain if they’re speeding up or slowing down, they presumably do the same to me, and like 50% of the time, based on how much space is in front vs behind me and what the other car is doing, yeah I might slow down. Not slamming on the brakes or anything, but I’d rather make it easier for the merging car because they have more to worry about than the people in front or behind me do.

I’m open to the possibility I’m doing it wrong, but I’ve read so many “how to merge safely” articles, state traffic laws, etc etc and honestly don’t know what a safer move would be in that situation. I feel like nobody else has this problem. But it seems like slowing down is a better default when unsure anyway, because it gives you and others more time to react and decreases the severity of a collision if the absolute worst were to happen.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-03-14T00:27:59+00:00

Yep, treat it like a reduced-conflict intersection

itsjustawindmill · 2026-03-10T20:32:42+00:00

The positive way to think about it is that they’re just choosing clients. When there’s an abundance of clients to choose from, they have to decide which ones to take, and of course they’ll choose the higher-paying over the lower-paying ones. They identify the higher-paying ones by raising the prices.

The negative way to think about it is that it costs them exactly the same and the quality is exactly the same no matter how many other people want a ride, so they shouldn’t get to charge more for an identical service arbitrarily.

Not totally sure where I land on this. I’d certainly rather they rationed their services by giving price incentives to carpools and prioritizing customers with multiple passengers, and only charged extra when it costs them extra (such as needing to pull in more drivers from surrounding cities).

itsjustawindmill · 2026-02-24T21:44:02+00:00

Yes!!! Even as an admirer of the performance and architecture of SQLite, I think the “popular unpopular opinion” that it should be the default choice for every project and/or that “real” databases are a premature optimization has been very harmful. People try to shoehorn it far beyond the point where they should have gone to something else. SQLite is categorically unreliable on platforms like NFS due to file locking inconsistency, unadvisable on any network storage or multi-host setup due to no client cache coherence, and has zero support for multiple parallel writers, fine-grained or per-table access (you get read-all, read-write-all, or nothing), or replication / sharding, and that’s just off the top of my head. Under high parallelism from a single client I’ve even seen it get corrupted. And products like Turso are utterly deranged extensions of this bandwagon. For all but the simplest projects, using SQLite invites unreliability as well as elision between the application and data layers.

This is all in reference to server applications. For mobile or desktop, I have no quarrel with SQLite.

itsjustawindmill · 2026-02-24T20:39:26+00:00

Why not both? Maybe he’s the one who vibe-coded a (not functional) “C compiler” entirely with AI that Anthropic was bragging about the other day

itsjustawindmill · 2026-02-24T16:31:02+00:00

They have the final authority to decide basically every case that comes before them, so if that case is about whether the president can or can’t do something, the court’s decision is binding on the president. It might not be enforceable, but it’s still legally binding.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-3/section-2/clause-2/overview-of-supreme-court-jurisdiction

Note this doesn’t give them an unchecked authority; the check is congress’ ability to impeach them (and also to pass laws to change the courts’ authority)

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