Extroverted Developer

Just like the Guilded Age robber barons. Only academics who study this time in history will know the name.

Unlike Julius Cesar, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Socrates, Abraham Lincoln

The difference? Introspection

There are several debates happening in the tech industry right now amongst software engineers. One of them goes along the lines of “If you don’t read the code the AI is producing, then how do you know what it does?!”

Things I find strange about this argument:

• No software engineer has read every single line of code that goes into a project
• Most don’t read their own entire code base, let alone any libraries or dependencies that go into them
• Reading code alone doesn’t tell you how it _actually_ works when you put everything together.
• NASA Showed that a formal code review process (reading the code) catches somewhere between 60%-90% of defects [Source 1, Source 2]

The serious answer to this is: Regardless of how code was created, you need to test it in order to know that it does what it’s supposed to

It doesn’t matter if you wrote it, you don’t know it works until you test it.

It doesn’t matter if an AI wrote it, you don’t know it works until you test it.

It doesn’t matter if another team wrote it, you don’t know it works until you test it.

It doesn’t matter if a compiler generated it, you don’t know it works until you test it.

There are many ways to verify code

• You can write automated testing of all sorts
• You can have formal verification systems such as algebraic types and rust’s borrow checker
• You can have humans manually test things
• You can have users test things

But in the end it’s the verification, the convincing yourself it works, that matters for taking responsibility. Not whether you read it or not.

Looks like Oil prices are going to remain higher for longer than everyone would like.

If I was trading individual stocks I’d buy Amazon. I see their Rivian made delivery vehicles everywhere!

EVs were already significantly more efficient than ICE cars, but now with the price of gas Amazon is going to be laughing all the way to the bank as their investment pays off long before anticipated.

I’ve made another Chrome Extension that I always wish had existed. Mr. Rate It All! – it allows you to rate anything you can select on a webpage.

The problem: Restaurants in NYC try and do a lot of things, but many are only good at a few. Their Chicken Parm is excellent, but their spaghetti and meatballs, maybe not so much. Delivery apps only let you rate the entire restaurant, not the items themselves.

Mr. Rate it All! fixes that, but it doesn’t stop there — you can rate literally anything on any webpage you can select. Think: Jobs on a job boards, private ratings of dating profiles, fashion photos on a blog, heck rate individual paragraphs in a news article if you like.

All private, saved locally on just your browser, never sent anywhere.

And if, like GrubHub, they break selection because of their fancy web app – you can simply hold down Option+Drag mouse to allow highlighting (ALT+Drag on Windows, CTRL+Drag on Linux).

I’ve submitted it for approval to the Chrome Webstore, but while I wait for approval I like to give non-muggles early access. Feedback appreciated.

Github Repository Here: https://github.com/Xatter/rateitall

UPDATE: It’s been approved in the Chrome store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mr-rate-it-all/lahklfafggahlaiadnedcmfimjdabhab?authuser=0&hl=en

It is generally true that if you can fool developers into thinking they are “mastering” something hard (as opposed to learning tolerance for something badly designed), you can build a fiercely loyal priesthood.

– Avdi Grimm

Turns out the blockading of a trade route is a big deal and worthy of the Jedi’s attention

NGL, feeling pretty smug about driving an electric car right now

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”

Steven Winterburn

I just got my new MacBook Pro M5 Pro and I wonder if I made the wrong choice not buying the highest end laptop I could get.

For the first time in my life it seems like computer components are getting more expensive over time, not less.

It started with GPUs. Most GPUs were < $1000 for most of my life, the top of the line was $1000+ and people thought you were crazy for buying a Titan X or whatever. Now days a 5080 is almost $2k by itself.

Because of all the data center build outs RAM has 3x in price. Latest is that SSDs are becoming scarce and expensive.

Then, Iran goes and bombs Amazon data centers in the middle east because they couldn’t tell if they were being used by the US military or not to run analytics/AI – that’s legit military reasoning to me. Data centers have just become military targets because of the way militaries around the world use the cloud/AI. But everyone destroyed eliminates more of the compute supply.

I’m thinking I should maybe buy go back and buy a better laptop NOW before the price spikes

Just canceled my 1Password subscription. I too received the email that the price was going up by 40% for the family plan.

So I had Claude install Vaultwarden along side everything else I already self-host and canceled the subscription. I’m not sure which feature they thought warranted the increase but I assure you it didn’t.

Remember that SaaS stock market crash recently?