markjgsmith

This is a situation I have written about so many times on the blog over the years. It happens in all sorts of different ways, but it‘s ultimately the same pattern every time. You figure something out that is absolutely crucial to everything, will make everything much much better, and you prove it and get it working, and somehow the world finds a way to block you, usually in a very offensive way.

The latest incarnation of this "phenomenon" is in the server software for my publishing tool. In the early days it was difficult to see exactly how the software would evolve, it‘s often the way with new software in uncharted territory, you have to make some guesses, some approximations, or you will be spinning your wheels for eternity trying to get everything perfect. In this instance it was about how we map a user to a repo. I decided to make the simplification that 1 user has 1 repo. If you want to have several repos, then you create several users.

I knew eventually I would need to change this assumption, but since the code is mostly object oriented and designed rather well, it's not so difficult to change this in the future. Well that time came and over the past week I made the necessary changes to change the core to be able to have 1 user mapped to many repos. In a way it seems like a big change, right at the center of the software, but when you design things well, it's not such a big change. The blast radius was very contained and I was able to get it working within a couple of days.

The very day I got it working, in fact pretty much the same hour, things in my world started to go sideways. I've written a bit about it in some short posts the past few days. Anyhow it‘s culminated in a power cut and internet connectivity issues, along with all sorts of very strange "synchronicities". Now I have internet again, but guess what, it only works for 30 seconds and then turns off for 30 seconds, over and over and over again. And you want to know another strange thing, the place where I get the internet has a rule that you can only connect one device to the internet. Kind of weird right?

It gets weirder. In the local mall yesterday, the security / doorman bloke as I was leaving quite clearly said the word "layer" as I was leaving the mall to me. Not "liar", but very clearly "layer". What‘s weird is that the feature I added right before the multi-target users was a render layers feature. I had actually added it a few weeks ago, but I documented it in the main README just a few days ago. You know in some ways, it‘s nice to get some recognition, if indeed he has somehow been looking at my code, because it‘s a very cool feature, and programming software on your own is such a thankless task it's insane, but it's a private fucking repo. How is the security guard at the mall reading my code?

You are probably thinking this is just some random freak incident, a "co-incidence", but this sort of thing happens ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

Somehow the world around me mirrors the code I write. You can call it woo, or nefarious, or whatever, but it keeps happening, and I suspect it's only going to get worse.

Abundance with scare city sprinkles. There sure are a lot of sprinkles lately.

Today I‘ve been writing documentation for my CLI rendering tool. I had a main README already but I needed to write detailed docs for all major entities the software uses. It‘s totally mind boggling how much of an incredible tool LLMs are for documentation writing. I was able to get done in a day what would likely have taken at least a week by hand, and I think the quality is far higher, because it can read the code directly and make sure it describes things perfectly, complete with neato example code snippets.

There are some of the usual signs that an LLM has been used, though I removed some of the more egregious ones. But personally I think the most important thing is that there is a complete set of accurate docs. It‘s not so annoying that is sometimes uses LLM-style. Who cares? For a one person software team, it‘s basically miracle software.

The trick to making it easy is to get it to use numbered sections and sub sections, that way after the first draft you can focus in on specific sections, rework just that bit, and then copy and paste the output right over the top of the old section.

It‘s pretty cool finally seeing the full set of docs.

Today I am just completely overwhelmed by how utterly useless people are, everywhere. I'm normally quite an optimistic person, and I'm very good at coming up with excuses for people, but absolutely everywhere I look, in every direction, it's people being useless, and having these useless petty arguments, spending ungodly amounts of time and energy being useless.

Occasionally someone pops up and they show promise, but eventually like in a zombie apocalypse movie they turn out to be useless too. Every. Single. Time.

And I'm useless too, but I sure am trying not to be. I can't imagine trying any harder, there are simply not enough hours in the day. I'm already at it every moment of every day.

Why are we all so fucking useless?

There are a lot of people in this world that want to look in the mirror but also at the same time they want to not look in the mirror. And after much wasted time of course it's not possible and they get angry and blame the mirror, often getting angry at the mirror. People often create the problems they complain about, whether on purpose or not its nothing more than a huge waste of time. A race condition death trap. Break out of the loop.

This short showing what I guess is a simulation of a 1 solar mass black hole passing near Jupiter, passed through in my feeds. You have to watch it several times to really grok what's going on. Sure hope it's a simulation. It's terrifying, even if you turn off the overly dramatic music, it just sort keeps playing in your head.

But ok so lets say you shrink that black hole down, surely eventually you get to a point where the black hole is small enough such that it's mass is similar to that of one of the many moons around Jupiter, right? Sure it might be very small because they are supposed to be so massive in terms of matter or whatever, but if they are the same mass as a moon then why wouldn't it orbit Jupiter?

If theoretically it's possible then why don't we see lots of tiny black holes orbiting planets? I just don't get how you could ever say, ok this thing is now a black hole.

I'm probably being very thick here, but I don't think black holes make sense, but also I really fucking hope a black hole doesn't pass by Jupiter or we're all going to die! Aaaah.

Two really great programming podcasts I listened to this week.

The first is from the Corecursive Podcast, in which host Adam Gordon Bell has on friend and fellow programmer Don Mckay, and they discuss their plan to win the Hutter prize, a programming contest all about, of all things, file compression. As is often the case with the Corecursive podcasts, sounds a bit dry and dare I say it dull on the outside, but Adam's story telling abilities turn this into a very fun and mind bending little adventure into compression, prediction and the limits of intelligence.

The second is from the Software Engineering Radio podcast. Host Giovanni Asproni interviews Jason Gorman about all things to do with using AI effectively in software development. It's packed with so many things I've experienced over the past several months but from the perspective of someone that specialises training software developers so his angles are incredibly well thought out. A bit like if you wanted to learn how to drive a car and had a lesson from the instructor of the instructors. He has a bit of a know it all vibe, but honestly it's not even that bad, and his takes are so darn good it's worth just sticking with it.

The first one is probably the most accessible to non-programmers, but if you are interested in how AI will effect the workplace in the future, and how things are really on the ground, you will probably like the second one.

A new header image for the blog. This one is all about the conversation in tech at the minute around open source and closed source AI.

I wanted to get away from the cartoonish images that AI always seems to produce, which wasn't easy. Gemini has real issues disentangling symetries in imags. It sort of gets stuck with things in a particular orientation then just cannot change things independently. You ask for a mirro image of a particular thing, but then it start trying to mirror image everything, and just won't give you what you originally asked for because it's not a mirror image of everything.

Anyway I broke out of the loop by being a bit less literal, and just asked for a grid of veg sushi, which reresents open source, and a grid of small cakes which represents closed source. And I added a neon sign, because sometimes they look cool.

It‘s not a commentary on food types. I‘m an eater of most foods.

Here‘s the full resolution image:

Check out the list of past blog headers here.