Lazy, lazy development.

"Job done, boss! Ready to ship to... checks notes... 3 billion users!"

"Did you test it?"

"Test? I thought we had a QA department!"

"Nah, we fired all of them a decade ago. You're the QA now."

I like to fight this kind of asinine "push back" by simply reversing the time order:

Here's an app that does 5 CDN-cached requests of its JavaScript. Demonstrate why disabling the CDN cache and splitting that into 500 individual requests is better.

Much easier to liberally sprinkle mutex locks and "Thread.Sleep(1000); // Quick fix" everywhere until the problems almost always go away!

Meanwhile the guy screaming that this is eldritch madness and can't ever work is "not a team player" because the guy that wrote the code was a hero for applying yet another layer of band aids to the gaping wounds.

See: https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-sno...

Humans can maintain a long- and medium- term memory of constraints that they consciously (or subconsciously!) apply to the code that they write. The current crop of AIs are all amnesiacs, like the protagonist in Memento, falling back onto general instead of institutional knowledge.

For now, we are safe. We can rent out our meat brains for money for a little while longer.

Next year? Who knows...

It only pushes back sometimes if you ask it to create a "repro" that can be used to verify the vulnerability in production. Often it'll oblige, especially if you warn it not to create anything that could be actually harmful.

If the frontier models get locked down so that they flat refuse to do this kind of work, but Chinese and (less capable) open models aren't, then a lot of large enterprise orgs will be left twisting in the wind.

“AI can in principle help both the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’,” -- Dario Amodei

No Dario, no it can't, you've blocked one of those scenarios.

You can't win against cargo-cult coders because they just assume you're from a different, competing cult.

They have no concept of engineering or science, they have never encountered it.

Having said that... it might justify the valuation if every other data centre build-out gets blocked by insufficient power supply.

Might.

Similarly, Google Translate's millions of lines of hand-rolled code has been entirely superseded by LLMs that do a vastly better job.

The LLM-based AI assistants are based on a wildly different technology stack with very different capabilities compared to the legacy "if-then-else" logic programming that Siri was based on.

They’re not launching something the size of a building!

I first noticed this when I had to implement a C++ client for a custom RPC protocol and the dev “on the other end of the wire” added one new “convenience” in the data types supported… which would have required me to include the entire Java runtime in my client!

All protocol specs are vulnerable to this effect where it’s all too easy to require clients to include half a dozen different regex engines, three byte code virtual machines, and most of LLVM for good measure.

It’s factual and references the state of the art — which the OP couldn’t even be bothered to Google.

How is it uncalled for? It’s here! In the public sphere! The OP published it and is showing it off!

Their grand contribution to color theory: divide a nonlinear, unspecified encoding by ten.

    channel / 10

Something worthy of HN front page would be a tiny NN that optimally allocates perceptually uniform color divisions such that +1 or -1 was always consistently what an artist would expect. That would be cool and worthy of a website and a discussion on a tech forum.

Sometimes we need to encourage something hopelessly naive, but I put my limit somewhere around… this.

Anyway, why do you care if I dismiss the OP's "contribution" out of hand? The OP doesn't care about his "work" in the slightest! To quote: "Or something like that roughly... It doesn't matter if it's not perfect."

As a consultant I come across a lot of CotS software, in-house or otherwise bespoke software, etc. Roughly 40% of the former has 100% of the minimum required number of indexes and approximately 5% of the latter. By "minimum", I mean the indexes required to avoid full scans of tables that will become large enough for this to be a problem in production.

"Disciple doesn't scale." is one of my favourite sayings now, for a reason!

1) Developers almost always work with toy data, and are hence insulated from poor indexing decisions. Problems turn up 'x' years from now. It is well established that humans learn poorly when consequences are delayed... by mere hours, let alone years!

2) DBAs and developers often have an adversarial relationship. A common consequence of this workplace dynamic is that developers aren't granted the required access to tune indexes, especially in production, which is where the issues manifest.

3) I've heard anecdotes, including here, along the lines of "XYZ cloud native / webscale database is so much faster than ABC traditional RDBMS!". Very often the difference is just that XYZ auto-indexes by default. CosmosDB, Google Firestore, Kusto, Elastic, Druid, and many columnar formats are in this category of "magically" faster!

I'm now 99% convinced that RDBMS needs to be reinvented for the modern fast-paced, vibe-coded, "I'm a fullstack(lol) dev" world where people simply don't have the bandwidth to pay attention to minutiae like on-disk sort order and filtered secondary indexes. A better fit for today's world would be a system that is: columnar by default like SAP HANA, compressed[1] by default, indexed by default (thanks to being columnar!), serializable by default, and "include batteries" like native queue capabilities so that nobody has to figure out cross-RDBMS complications like distributed transactions, outbox patterns, or deal with the consequences of a DBA rolling back one of two databases to a backup.

Oklab and the Munsell colour system are very obviously far more intuitive at low numbers of quantised steps: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MunsellColorWheel.sv...

To be blunt: your system blithely ignores the color space, gamma curves, and human perception.

There’s like… entire textbooks written on the topic of optimal encoding of hues given a fixed number of bits! That’s most of the secret sauce of Dolby Vision, for example.

Sorry to burst your bubble like this, but the assumption that “RGB” means anything at all is hilariously naive.

It’s like specifying a text format and neglecting to mention the encoding or the escaping rules! It will get mangled by the receiver.

Naively one would expect that no individual UPDATE or INSERT statement could deadlock in isolation… but there you go.

If that is possible, the possibilities across multiple concurrent data mutating queries are beyond human comprehension!

Serializable should absolutely be the default!

Similarly, all columns should be automatically indexed to at least some degree, like Postgres BRIN indexes at a minimum.

Time and experience have shown that the vast majority of developers are pathologically unable to properly define all required indexes ahead of time.

It's like saying it doesn't matter if surgery is done another antiseptic conditions if the patient isn't also given a course of antibiotics during recovery.

It's not an argument against safe practices, it's an argument for amending one kind of safety with others.