...and to laugh a little every time it calls me "commander" or asks "What's the next mission?" or (and this is the best one) it uses the catchphrase I gave it which is "it's probably fine" (and it uses it entirely appropriately...I think there must have been a lot of sarcasm in qwen 3.5's training data)

and I've treated it like it's already been compromised the whole time.

And I bet they paid a bit of rent for the privilege. Pretty cool.

In a very real way, a codebase is a conversation among developers. There's every chance the next guy will be less familiar with the code than you, who just did a deep dive and arrived at some critical, poorly documented line of code. There's an even better chance that person will be you, 6 months from now.

Use opportunities to communicate.

as a nearly perfectly uninformed occasional consumer of space-related articles, I can say it makes a lot of sense (to me) why we'd use something like that to move things around the solar system.

I upgraded to homogenous ubiquiti/unifi when I set up a point to multi-point on my farm because I thought it would make that part easier. Surprisingly, those links aren't really baked in to the rest of it, but the router and wifi antennas that I've installed around those links "just work" with a private, protected, and guest network.

I used to have to update two different routers with the same SSID, username and password to make "hopping" from one to the next "seamless" and, now that I've got 8 wifi antennas in a mesh with a single UI to configure them all, I can't even imagine how I'd do it with the hodge-podge of gear I used to work with.

And I'm probably going to buy a travel router, but I'm wondering, if I use it connect to the hotel wifi, will I be able to use the thing as a wifi hotspot as well or do I have to use an ethernet point because the wifi is "taken"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGV_h36uZ5E

But AI can do some architecting. It's just not really the sort of thing where an unskilled person with a highly proficient LLM is going to be producing a distributed system that does anything useful.

It seems to me that the net effect of AI will be to increase the output of developers without increasing the cost per developer. Effectively, this will make software development cheaper. I suppose it's possible that there is some sort of peak demand for software that will require less developers over time to meet, but, generally, when something becomes cheaper, the demand for that thing will tend to increase.

I think the rumors of our demise are overblown.

Every time I see someone kitted out in VR gear, I think about his prediction that the Star Trek holodeck will be humanity's last invention and I'm very glad they don't have a button that can beam the next person waiting for their turn into a concrete wall.

TBH, if you would've asked me yesterday if I'm the sort of person who might get sucked in by a cliffhanger story about a numpy replacement, I'm pretty sure I would've been an emphatic no.

But I have, in fact, just tried random things in numpy until something worked...so, you know...tell me more...

There a things that I immediately replace when they break or get lost: bolt cutters, dremel, leatherman. There's software like IDEs, Zim, Inkscape.

It's very much like losing a limb when any of it is unavailable and it's absolutely true that there are folks out there who did their job so well as to make them indispensable.

Great post.

My take on it is that, if you're going to write a decorator, make sure you test it thoroughly and be sure to cover the ways that it will actually be used.

To properly handle a decorator that needed to be called both with and without arguments, I ended up writing a function decorator that returned a wrapped function when there were no parameters provided for the decorator (*args param to the decorator function undefined) and, otherwise, returned an instance of a class that defined __call__ and __init__ methods.

I'm still a bit surprised that I had to do it that way, but that's how it shook out.

I gas-up my car when my tank is below 1/4, so it's a little disconcerting to have a red battery indicator with an exclamation point on it...not enough to actually want to use it with the cable plugged in, but still...