@katachora@hachyderm.io
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

katachora

@katachora@hachyderm.io

human. technologist. gen-x. Seattle. nerd. large systems architect. veteran. introvert.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

kellogh, to llm
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

there’s a big need for something stronger than , but more flexible and cheaper than a giant all-knowing .

A great part about RAG is that it’s just a database. You just issue INSERT/UPDATE and yeah, that’s how you maintain knowledge. No million dollar training process

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh The more I dig into "2024 AI" the more I feel like it is no more likely to solve for symbolic reasoning than "1959 AI" or "1985 AI" because we still don't have the scale to compete with organic cellular density and that makes not optimizing for more achievable goals, like machine-built expert systems (what I think your middle ground turns out to be) all the more aggregious, since we really do have breakthroughs in 2024 that can propel us forward compared to 1959 and 1985.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

I told y'all, cops don't do what you think they do.🤷🏿‍♂️

Black folk know this from lived experience. Some white folk only learn this when they go to report a theft or sexual assault and find out that the $11B/year NYPD are not equipped to handle that.

15K NYC bikes stolen a year!

https://www.404media.co/nypd-bike-lock-chain-kryptonite-columbia-university-protests/

1/n

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@mekkaokereke if only there were an effective program for reducing bike theft that NYC could model on.... https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/local-news/vancouver-sees-bike-thefts-drop-66-since-partnership-with-online-registry-project-529-8678333

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@mekkaokereke heh, sounds about right. My wife had her identity stolen by someone to sign up for a cell phone account and get a free iPhone when we lived in NYC and the NYPD were similarly useless.

Ultimately it was American Express (who weren't involved at all) who gave us the right contact at Sprint to fix the "I didn't sign up for this" part of the problem.

If we tracked local law enforcement effectiveness with the same vigor we did pro sports.... different world.

molly0xfff, to web
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar

If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the , what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?

No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@molly0xfff I think that pretty much everything on and about the Web was better, in some real sense of the word, in 2007 than it is now. The Web really peaked around 2012, but 2007 was the last time it felt like it wasn't out to get us and we were out to get them.

  • We were generally trying to invent new, not replace old with " but over HTTP"
  • We were generally ok with the non-dynamic Web Site
  • Individual creators and ideas mattered more than corps and agendas
  • it still felt cool to code
katachora, to random
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

The reality has always been that your knowledge and experience don't belong to anyone but you, and now we get some policy to back it up. Yay.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/04/23/ftc-noncompete-agreements/

kellogh, to random
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

who tf made it thursday already

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh Thor.

katachora, to random
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

Luke-warm take:

If you are concerned about bots harvesting your website, authenticating clients on connection and asking people to pay for your content is the only real solution.

401 + 402 = traffic commensurable with the quality of your content

mralancooper, to random
@mralancooper@hachyderm.io avatar

Six workers fell off of the Key bridge and drowned. I gotta think that's grounds for a manslaughter charge for the ship's captain and owner.

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@mralancooper @wtrmt the manslaughter charges should go towards the people on land who knew there was a problem soon enough to stop traffic but didn't bother to tell the workers.

If you want to punish the boat owners, take the boat and the cargo, pull their license to dock at US ports, and fund the USCG to start actually inspecting every cargo vessel before it docks or sails.

Money talks, prison is for peons.

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@simon_brooke @mralancooper @wtrmt I don't disagree, but that clearly isn't the world we live in, so all I'm saying is that if you want to change how the people at the top behave you have to take away their capital to change their incentives for action.

kellogh, to random
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

i’d argue that technology has never replaced any jobs, not directly

even computers — in the 1940’s there were people, called “computers”, that did calculations. the job is entirely gone now, ofc, but they were replaced by software engineers, not electronic computers directly

when someone is setting out to “replace a job” with tech, they’re probably misunderstanding some aspects of the job. For computers, there were human aspects, like interpreting the problem

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh sounds like "autonomation not automation" which is high concept inside-baseball from old Toyota

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/autonomation

Elendol, to random
@Elendol@hachyderm.io avatar

Part of me feels like we messed up somewhere when we started to need configuration languages. Who is going to configure the configurators? Or is this a good thing? (of course relying on 200+ different configuration languages is not great)

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@Elendol I submit that it stops being configuration when you are big enough or complicated enough that you need a configuration language - and that you are now programming the state of a system.

At which point you ought to be asking all sorts of questions about why a human is needed to set the state of the system at all.

We are well past this being crazy and in flaming hot insanity range when you need several MB of yaml to set the state for a service.

kellogh, to random
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

PSA if someone gives you a statistic and it's 80% of literally anything, we have a technical term for that and it's called "bullshit"

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh this is only true 80% of the time

kellogh, to random
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

it used to be normal to run your entire application, including the database, on a single computer

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh and, when you really get honest, how many applications or services that are spread out over multiple computers or data centers really MUST be?

Like, one customer per computer isn't a terribly bad architecture when you aren't farming your customers for data to sell.

jimfl, (edited ) to random
@jimfl@hachyderm.io avatar

We use the term “Security Architecture,” as though the drapes were a load-bearing member of a building.

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@jimfl yes, yes, all the yesses.

using "architecture" when you mean "design" is such a peeve of mine.

Also, any use of "architect" as a verb,

norootcause, to random
@norootcause@hachyderm.io avatar

We are forever riding the edge of going out of control.

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@norootcause ”...everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?"

joelanman, (edited ) to postgres
@joelanman@hachyderm.io avatar

for a site where users make posts (like this one!) is UUID v4 in Postgres a good way to go for the URLs? They're very long, eg:

a0eebc99-9c0b-4ef8-bb6d-6bb9bd380a11

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@joelanman

Personally, I like URLs that are calendar-oriented because they feel more like Cool URLs: eg, '''fqdn/u/@username/YYYY/MM/DD/<title or id>''', in which case the UUID feels like a lot of bits for a message id until you get to hyperscale (billions of messages per day).

I guess the question I'd ask, "is this post a (micro)blog or an (ephemeral)message. Ephemeral_messages, I'd argue, don't need Cool URLs, microblogs do.

katachora, to random
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

Watching a debate on the internal Slack channel about how our newly acquired (as in we bought their company) devs don't know how to dev into cloud infrastructure that requires they authenticate to the environment, so they want to take down the authentication to dev and staging so they don't have to change their workflow.

This is not how to spend a Friday.

I can't even.

katachora, to random
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

If your product is so complicated and hard to use that you need to create an LLM chatbot just to help customers understand it, maybe the problem is you, not them.

Just sayin'.

kellogh, to random
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

i’m at that point where i can take one glance at a press release and know with certainty that the product is absolute crap once you get past the demo

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh Its becoming endemic; at this point I'm getting comfortable in the "crap until proven valuable" camp.

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh direction matters, a lot for me - if it is bad and getting worse I'll probably choose to take the pain. If it is bad and getting better, I might use it to escape the pain for a little while. In neither case will I let it become a dependency, because it is fated to get replaced.

In the purity of things I get to decide without other inputs, I also set an expiration date - when the time is up, a whole new evaluation starts to see if the pain it solves is still greater than the pain it is

hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

"Dynamic proxies are slow."

M'dear, do you realize how many network calls are involved in the construction of this obejct? How many database operations I need for it to be practically usable and finish processing it? How many of those operations need to be sequential?

I can fit so, so many dynamic proxy calls in one millisecond. So many.

I simply cannot be bothered to worry about something in the 500ns range when that's the backdrop.

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna so true.

Also, if they are caring about ns but not building their own hardware, it feels particularly ungrounded.

kellogh, to random
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

the Calling Bullshit book was really good, but one thing i didn’t entirely buy is that “mathiness” is bullshit. imo if an equation has one or more variables that aren’t easily quantifiable, it’s obvious that it’s not real math. further, i think those “mathy” equations are very helpful for illustrating relationships between things. but idk, maybe some people are fooled into thinking it’s real math?

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh @Xoriff two takes:

1: This is why most economics-is-a-science arguments are bullshit, since every economic model has these kinds of variables in the critical path.

1/

katachora, to random
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

Gnawing on the idea that post-modernism might be a reaction to complexity... a lie that permits us to exist in a world filled with unnecessary complexity by people and organizations seeking power... that the lie isn't a coping mechanism, but rather is the way power-seeking achieves gains.

Shades of gray is a very post-modern thing which obscures that humanity has a pretty good consensus on what is good or bad. But shades of gray is very convenient when you want to do bad, but appear good, etc

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh maybe calling it post-modern isn't correct, but my main point is that I'm twiddling with the idea that we (America, but also "the Western world") have these mythologies and a complex set of lies that prop them up, but not only is it mythology and lies, but the reason for the myths turns out to not be what we thought it was.

And the generational impact of the mythos is that socially, the idea that anything can be un-mythological is unthinkable.

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh and yet, the reality of the world is very un-mythological, and that gets us extremism, and scale, and "the economy", and a slew of things that, when you try to consider them with any sort of deliberation or objectivity, are mostly bad, but we accept them as mostly good.

And I wonder about the ideas that led us to this point and how, structurally, they are part of the problem.

All of which just points to how there isn't a lot of laudable philosophy happening in the early-mid 20th c.

katachora,
@katachora@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh yep. Particularly if "complex society is inevitable" is one of these myths.

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