TehPers

I’m glad this covers UUIDv7. Unless you need cryptographically-random, unpredictable row IDs, using UUIDv7 helps a lot with the performance by making the keys ordered at least.

Am I missing something here? It’s an open source Postgres extension with a permissive license. Azure has had hosted Postgres databases for years, as have all the other major cloud providers. I’d be concerned if they were ecosystem locking the extension, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

The motivation for this extension, hilariously, is likely to run AI. With how long requests can take due to inference, durable execution is useful to avoid losing data mid-request and needing to restart the whole thing. This seems useful outside of that though, for other kinds of long-running requests.

They are not unit tests, they are integration tests. Which in my experience makes unit-testing frameworks like pytest a poor fit. I’ve also had to write my own framework, for that reason, despite preferring pytest for unit-testing.

Depends on the project of course, but you can absolutely write integration tests with pytest. In my experience, it’s easy to @pytest.mark.integration the integration tests, then pass -m to the CLI to filter between integration and non-integration tests. You can load the environment-specific stuff in fixtures that are only used by those tests as well, and do setup/teardown with fixtures of course as needed.

The differences between a human brain and any kind of model we can currently train are too great to be listed. They are incomparable. It turns out that no matter how many perceptrons you put together, you don’t get a brain.

Heck, we don’t even know how brains work, and you got people talking about how they’re making AI clones of themselves with LLMs lol.

Nobody died.

The equivalent would be putting free apples with a sticker on them saying “please squeeze the juice out of these apples all over your shirt”.

That annoying standup was, at one point, in the very early morning every day of the week for me. I was promised a 30 minute meeting (which is a long time for a standup) and I was delivered an hour long meeting instead. And holy shit can people talk in circles for so fucking long.

But hey, it was a good opportunity for me to do literally anything but work while pretending to care about whatever the fuck the other subteam decided was important enough that day to keep 20 people occupied for 30 minutes past the end of the meeting.

As for processes in general? Management has shown and now proven that all they want are code monkeys. They do not care if the product works, nor do they care how well it works. As long as someone buys it, that’s all they care about. Governments are supposed to regulate the rest of that stupid, useless shit like data protection, protecting users, preventing harm to people, ensuring people get what they paid for, and so on by making it economically unviable to ignore it (and ideally criminal, in the extreme cases). Instead, all they regulate these days are rampant inflation and accelerating wealth inequality. And by regulate, of course I mean they regulate anything designed to combat those things.

The article frames the maintainer as some kind of morally dubious person, as though they owe their code to the world. Did any of them pay to use the library? No? Cool, stfu and pin an older version of it.

Also, maybe next time you can do yourself and the rest of the world a favor by actually reviewing what your LLM will do before it does it. Or, I don’t know, just write the tests yourself I guess.

Also, if your management is breathing down your neck and forcing you to use AI, tell your management to go fuck themselves (maybe in nicer words if you want to keep your job, but hey, you can definitely burn their spare cash while meeting their idiotic quotas if you really need to know what time it is every second or two in the most inefficient and ecologically destructive way currently known to mankind).

How does this library handle control flow? For example, how can I fetch results from the DB, then for each result, execute one of several different pipelines depending on properties of that entity?

And you may have introduced some dangerous hidden bug that way, which you may not have doing it manually.

You act like I can’t read some import statements and see if they match the import statements on the other side of the diff lol.

There was no bug introduced. All the dependencies were required. If any of the imports did error, then that’s a bug with that package that got surfaced instead.

FYI in many countries the term “engineer” is protected. Software devs would not be allowed to call themselves engineers without some kind of certification.

All that aside, I think you’ll find that a majority of people on this instance write code regularly, whether as a hobby or day job. Also, at my software dev day job, we actually regularly discuss the academic research around LLMs primarily because it has a major impact on our work.

Personally speaking, what I’ve seen over the past few years is that it creates pretty demos really quickly that fall apart the minute you need to actually develop for real. The code becomes an unmaintainable amalgamation of random libraries used to do the same thing multiple ways, and my coworkers who rely on it heavily have learned basically nothing about the libraries or tools they use because they ask the LLM to do it all for them. This is also ignoring the complete lack of motivation I have now for PR reviews knowing that the same mistakes will be made again and again in the future because teaching a coworker a better way to do something does nothing to improve the output of a LLM, which cannot learn.

That’s not to say you can’t use it effectively. There just needs to be a balance between what you do as a developer vs what you have the LLM churn out quickly for you. It requires a lot of direction, enough so that I find it to be a waste of time as opposed to implementing things myself usually. Plus, I actually learn more doing it all myself, like upcoming library versions, changes in the tools and libraries I use since last using them, new language features, and so on.

While I’m not going to do a code review of your linked projects (nor do I believe that would be very useful), it sounds to me like you’ve found a way to make it work for you. That’s awesome. I, unfortunately, am regularly subjected to the slop emitted by it when in the hands of people who are actively destroying what experience they might have once had in favor of doing less work.

They are however widely known to be terrible at code

They are for large tasks. However, for simple pattern repetition tasks, they’re generally fine, code or not. I’ve had success, for example, having them remove pointless, confusing try…except blocks surrounding imports at work. I usually find that I just rewrite anything myself if it’s anything more complex than that because the code it produces makes no sense and taught me nothing.

I like to say the main problems with most projects were already the code quality and the bugs, and not that we somehow needed even more low quality lines of code.

Tell me about it lol.

Are you asking me to reject my professional daily reality?!

Nobody’s asking you to do anything. If it works for you, then that’s fine.

People are talking about the tech in general and their own experiences with it, alongside relevant research they have found. You are more than welcome to disagree with each other. Nobody is forced to change their opinions or how they work over a short internet conversation.

As an aside, LLMs, like everything else in life, require nuance to evaluate. They excel at specific tasks that are built for them, and are terrible at the wide array of tasks that are not built for them. It’s entirely possible that your work primarily lies in the former while others work in the latter space.

In this case, it’s a customer’s environment, so it’s actually not one of my direct coworkers that’s blocking this. Otherwise I’d agree.

This. I can’t get them to run lints or tests on their own, and I can’t get the person in charge of the repo to let us run the CI automatically on PR. Combine that with the rampant slop, and a good number of the PRs are just plain unreviewable.

Then you run into the other issue: the PRs get merged too fast to review them properly. How someone approves 50 changed files in a PR with +30000 and -150 lines changed in under an hour is beyond me, to be honest.

Is there a reason to believe this was written by AI?

This is a shockingly well-written article. Thanks for sharing!

The memory leaks section just feels like an introduction to smart pointers as though they’re some complex concept. Also, the page is showing its age by mentioning the now-removed auto_ptr instead of something like unique_ptr.

Anyway, scrolling down a little more:

Why can’t I assign a vector<Apple*> to a vector<Fruit*>?

This actually comes up in C# with arrays. Copying their example here:

object[] array = new String[10];
// The following statement produces a run-time exception.
// array[0] = 10;

It may have been a design mistake not to make C#'s arrays invariant, though I don’t know the state of that debate today.

When should a programmer use C over Python?

They both solve different kinds of problems. C# has a lot of overhead built into the language compared to C++, but it is also a lot easier to write. Unless you need C++ or prefer it due to experience/performance/etc, there’s no reason to choose it over C#, JS, Python, or any other language really.

So to answer your question, thet should use C++ if they need to or will work more effectively in C++, or if the contributors want to.

The anti-Rust circlejerk is strong, wow.

I have loads of software written in Rust installed, many of which I compile myself. Not once has the language choice been an issue that I’ve had with the software. Some of that software may be missing features, but that has little to do with the language and more to do with my decision to install v0.1.4 of the software.

Python, on the other hand…

And while we’re on the topic of coreutils, why does every C and C++ project I look at require me to install dozens of random libraries myself? I guess because they’re dynamically linked, which is cool and all, except the page to install each dependency has an encyclopedia of a README written in 1984 in a text file. It’s not usually an issue, just annoying.

You’re right. The only reason someone would write something in Rust is to change the license. Nobody would use Rust for any other reason, nor would they use any other language for that purpose.