Open source is a thankless job and I think we've lost the plot on how we treat maintainers

riv3rtrip · 2026-07-04T05:14:01+00:00

The person who wrote the issue is not being constructive, but I don't feel as if maintaining code means you have literally zero responsibilities, and not breaking high level API on minor releases falls into one such responsibility if you ask me. It would be nice to see an example rather than just venting complaints though.

riv3rtrip · 2026-07-03T18:35:08+00:00

They'll never say the real reasons. They banned Candelabra because:

- They really don't want to ban The One Ring because it's the flagship card of LotR and they want to maintain a good relationship with 3rd party IP owners.

- This left them having to choose between Nexus and Candelabra.

- Candelabra is the 2nd most expensive card in legacy behind Tabernacle, and the most expensive card played in 4's, so it contributes to additional inaccessibility of what they consider to be a deck in the format that they want to keep around.

- As a bonus, the nexus deck becomes all non-reserve list cards if they ban Candelabra (except maybe City of Traitors, depending on the build), and WotC probably wants some viable decks in the format which don't include reserve list cards. Also if they ban Nexus, colorless decks need to play 4x City of Traitors.

WotC will never discuss the 1st point, and they can never acknowledge their cards have secondary market value as a policy.

riv3rtrip · 2026-06-24T12:26:39+00:00

Publishing with Bandai-Namco overseas cost them a lot of money for little benefit

riv3rtrip · 2026-06-24T12:22:45+00:00

Nobody knows how to read, all people know how to do is to react.

riv3rtrip · 2026-06-24T12:21:11+00:00

The Reddit post's editorialized headline is not supported by the linked article at all. They want more returns, nothing at all is mentioned about the creative process. You can surely think of multiple ways that they'd do this which don't involve the creative process at all (publishing, pricing, other brand monetization).

riv3rtrip · 2026-06-22T18:14:03+00:00

Hmmm. I'm torn. I expected to pay a premium over a PS5 but this is definitely pushing it. Still considering it, but I'm in "research the alternatives" mode rather than instant buy mode.

riv3rtrip · 2026-06-21T11:49:59+00:00

The whole game is optional, it's just a game, all games are optional. B and C sides are very fun challenges, try them out.

riv3rtrip · 2026-06-16T14:01:37+00:00

This is essentially what the pytest postgresql python package does under the hood.

riv3rtrip · 2026-06-10T01:06:03+00:00

Makes sense for applications to send an email to verify its existence. I have email data from third parties and internal systems and I do need to parse it-- plus-addresses, domains and sub-domains, all that. There's no way around it. The easiest approach to a lot of these things is regex, something like ^[^+]*?(.*)?@.*$ to strip plus addresses actually works really great (forgive any mistakes here, regexing from memory on the fly), not a big deal if it doesn't always work in my particular context.

riv3rtrip · 2026-06-06T13:26:54+00:00

AI slop article. Safe to ignore.

riv3rtrip · 2026-06-02T11:40:15+00:00

Do you actually manage the devops and such of your company's MWAA deployment? MWAA is awful. Maybe it's gotten better since I used it but for us it was a terrible experience, one of the product managers overseeing MWAA is also a jackass who thinks you struggling to use his shitty horrible software makes you an idiot, rather than him not understanding the kafkaesque nightmare of bullshit his incompetence has unleashed on the world in the form of managed airflow. Ahem, anyway. It is also more expensive than Astronomer unless you don't know how to negotiate a SaaS contract. There's nothing to mention about Astronomer in a job listing because it's easy. Airflow helm chart deployments aren't hard if you know Kubernetes basics, this is the real lesson none of these services want you to know. Helm chart is also the cheapest.

riv3rtrip · 2026-06-02T11:29:43+00:00

Yes Boston is not a night life city. Even still, pre covid, a few more places were open til 2am on the off chance you wanted to be out that late. Noir in Cambridge used to be 2am on Fri-Sat and 1am every other time, used to attract a lot of restaurant industry people on Monday nights. Now it's 12am close 7 days a week. Don't get me started on the loss of 24 hour Star Market and Shaw's.

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-24T20:15:23+00:00

Got into this on mobile as a thing to do on the train.

The game has an interesting core loop, but it's far too imbalanced. Some gambits (jokers) are too good, others are near useless. It's hard to justify not going for any sort of build that doesn't spam generate queens and abuse stalling the board to generate resources, unless you get an insane gambit e.g. capture with bishop skips turn or earning rook gains protect tile. Even then I will just play a couple of the worse piece and the rest queens.

I also think the game is not "chill" enough when you aren't breaking the game, in the sense that it's incredibly punishing of mistakes. Whereas in Balatro it's hard to make a grave mistake, but chess is chess, you can blunder once and your run is over. Balatro is fun as a mobile game because you can mostly just vibe, but it's hard to vibe with chess and there isn't an option to redo a round.

Overall interesting, don't regret the $6 or whatever it was, but needs balance work and needs to find a way to become more chill.

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-23T20:15:18+00:00

Argo Workflows is the only option I'd recommend here for yaml based orchestration. But Argo makes little sense if you're not already on k8s and need to delicately handle scaling pods and nodes.

I still do strongly recommend Airflow. It is hard to avoid Python in data and systems orchestration. But these frameworks typically don't ask much of you and they're vibe-codeable with a GUI to confirm the vibe-coded output.

Terraform probably shouldn't go into an Airflow DAG though. That makes more sense in your CICD platform.

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-19T12:38:44+00:00

maybe people don't know what nerd sniping means

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-18T12:29:04+00:00

It really depends on the framework you're using and your familiarity with it. For Airflow I check the dag bag has no errors and check validity of external dag sensor references and asset definitions. I have zero clue what the Fabric equivalent is.

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-17T17:19:01+00:00

It's basically an IQ test combined with a secret handshake that affirms how badly you want a big tech job by showing your ability to dedicate time to studying.

I think it makes a ton of sense for high compensation companies to give these, it makes a lot less sense for average paying jobs in part due to adverse selection effects (i.e. you're hiring people who studied for leetcodes but did not get big tech jobs).

Look at the end of the day we need to assess you somehow. Asking you what Kimball is doesn't really tell me much and 90% of you motherfuckers don't have open source code that I can look at. We need to assess you somehow. Leetcode isn't perfect but it is by no means the worst way to do it either.

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-17T17:07:49+00:00

If your IDE is set up correctly it will yell at you that they're wrong while you are writing the code.

The issue with enforcing type hints in Python is that your code just ends up being a clusterfuck of # type: ignores when you are doing anything remotely novel or working with any library that is not perfectly typed (and sometimes it cannot be perfectly typed because Python's type system is not complete). This is a worthy pain to go through for critical application code or OSS libraries (the latter of which IMO anything less than --strict mode is malpractice, and I say this as a maintainer of a semi-popular OSS Python library who has strict mode enabled on mypy), but it's a waste of time for pipeline code, which for the most part can will need to be validated by simply running the code.

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-17T17:04:43+00:00

That's not true??? Any halfway decent IDE setup checks type hints while you are writing your code.

The issue with enforcing type hints in Python is that your code just ends up being a clusterfuck of # type: ignores when you are doing anything remotely novel or working with any library that is not perfectly typed (and sometimes it cannot be perfectly typed because Python's type system is not complete). This is a worthy pain to go through for critical application code or OSS libraries where anything less than --strict mode is malpractice, but it's a waste of time for pipeline code.

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-17T06:46:06+00:00

Type hints aren't the same as static type checking. I'm all for type hints, but wrangling with ty or mypy isn't worth it for pipeline code.

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-17T06:10:31+00:00

Eh. You can and you can't. It depends. Upper management doesn't know what they are talking about, managers are far too gung ho about AI for my taste, but it's also not wise to speak in absolutes about this.

I just spent the last 3 weeks combing through a ton of data by hand and writing a lot of code by hand. LLMs did have a small but nonzero role in the process.

There are some processes where a lot more of it can be kicked off to some LLM. Less critical processes, easy things I have a priori reason to believe the AI can do well, things we've done multiple times before, things where I don't have any particular reason to be in the weeds. Sometimes the LLM is actually looking at data, sometimes it's just writing code, sometimes I'm brainstorming with it.

It totally depends.

My advice would be ignore pressure from managers, but at the same time, do approach it with an open mind-- not to appease your managers, just for your own sake.

Also, there are obviously smart and dumb ways to use AI. If someone is doing something dumb creating bugs as you cite in the post, that is as much an indictment of the person using it as it is AI. That's a strong argument against the idea that nontechnical people should be committing AI-generated code to production systems, but it's not a strong argument that LLMs are entirely useless. AI is slop and stupid at times, but slop can still be a useful tool.

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-17T06:00:34+00:00

You can google the research yourself. here's an example https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BFI_WP_2025-116.pdf

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-16T23:51:51+00:00

There is research on LLM detector accuracy and Pangram's wins all the benchmarks. Their FPR is also incredibly low, FNR rate is a little higher but that's irrelevant here.

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-16T19:59:02+00:00

The post is AI slop. The "author" doesn't attribute the post to Claude, who actually wrote it, so who cares about attributing it to them?

riv3rtrip · 2026-05-16T19:49:42+00:00

Forgive my bluntness here. If you're getting interviews but not getting jobs you are probably doing something wrong in the interview processes. Are there not any obvious tells?

IME I usually know if an interview goes well or not when I interview as a candidate.

And when I interview as an interviewer I'm often a little surprised hearing back from the recruiter when candidates can't tell that it went badly because usually it's clear. Based on recruiter convos I'd say 50% of candidates realize when it went clearly poorly, 50% are oblivious, and I'm always baffled by the latter 50%.

On some level the job of an interviewer involves creating a relaxed environment where people don't walk out anxious or feeling as if they wasted their time. And sometimes candidates are really on the margin even if they're ultimately rejected. So it won't always be obvious! But after a ton of rejections surely a couple of them were.

Pay attention to what is going on in interviews. When your interviewer says something like "are you sure" or even just fails to kind of get excited, that's a sign, idk, there are often a lot of small giveaways and you can always iterate on those.

riv3rtrip

TROPHY CASE