пивной негодяй (truhán de la cerveza) ඞ

Re: A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work

> Platform teams are engineering-led rather than product-led. There is almost never a product manager handing you a roadmap, no revenue line to follow, and no market to lose.

It's precisely because of this framing and mentality that platform teams don't actually serve people well and are usually highly dysfunctional towers of people inventing work.

The fix for having no market is to act like the teams you serve could leave. This whole article lists signals, and none of them is that. Being captive does not mean the users or internal teams don't have other options and don't notice. Being product-led means caring about your users. A platform teams should be product-led, not engineering-led in that very narrow meaning. Otherwise you invent work as this article so wonderfully exposes.

dabedee, 21 hours ago

Re: Claude Opus 5.5

The meaning isn't clear at all. So open for interpretation that it is meaningless. That's the whole fucking point. For all I know they are "pacing the frontier", or not. The fact that there's no meaning to it let's you know that it was a pointless waste of tokens and attention.

mpalczewski, 13 hours ago

бывшие сотрудники Anthropic такие типа

Планирую в следующий раз на вопрос банка о моем гражданстве ответить: “I identify as Taxonomically Ambiguous”

Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

I am a big fan of both, but I think what's missing in reality, but in their fiction (and cyberpunk fiction in general) is a sense of coolness and caring about aesthetics. For all the evil that the mega corporations do in a Gibson novel, they still have an aesthetic appeal.

Real-world corporations aren't that interesting. Amazon, Facebook, or Google have nothing "culturally" or aesthetically on Hosaka, Arasaka or Sense/Net.

Which is really the tragedy of it all: we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.

keiferski, 1 day ago

Re: The August 17 outage

> Both incidents were capacity failures at their core. We failed to scale critical components before demand exceeded their capacity.

This is the wrong way to think about this because there's no such thing as infinite capacity. A large distributed system will be simultaneously mostly idle and (in some subcomponents) overloaded. The root cause is not "a component didn't have enough capacity (because of auto scaling failures)", but rather "this complex system collapses (rather than degrade gracefully) when demand exceeds capacity".

When components reach capacity limits, the excess traffic of the lowest priority should be rejected. Rejected traffic should not be retried — in fact, not only should clients not retry these errors, these errors should cause client-side throttling. Traffic isolation should be applied — if the cause of the overload is a single client/customer system, no other system should be affected.

Nearly a decade ago I wrote about some of the techniques we applied at Google to implement these protections: https://sre.google/sre-book/handling-overload/ Most other large internet services have since copied them, afaik.

afc, 3 hours ago

Re: Don't Paste the AI, please

Heh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is:

Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Even if you’re fundamentally using Claude to gather your thoughts or help you prepare a response, you need to be writing it yourself, in your own voice. Not having Claude ape your voice, or “make it sound less like AI”. You, directly. Doing this will further reinforce your own understanding of the state of things, the same way teaching someone is the best way to learn. As a guideline: for Slack and email comms, this should be near-universally written as you. For deliverables that are longer form and follow a template like proposals, roadmap/discovery work, etc., use of agents is expected but, see Principle #2. (Own the Output.)

disillusioned, 4 hours ago

социальная реклама в Берлинском метро - знакомые проверили — не фейк 🤦‍♀️

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

We have LLMs try to generate descriptions of PRs for us and they're pretty universally disliked. They're always overly-complex descriptions of the mechanical changes and have no sense of motivation.

Also, a huge reason to understand the code yourself is to make sure the LLM isn't wrong, but this doesn't work if an LLM is itself generating the understanding.

alecbz, 16 hours ago

this one's my favourite, so many memories 🥹🥰

https://everyuuid.com/

Every UUID Dot Com
In case you forgot one

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

On social media, I saw the much more vulgar

“Learned engineering just to become the condom between Claude Code and prod”

And that (re)framing helped as well to think about the “what are we even (left) doing” as an industry

gregsadetsky, 5 hours ago

Re: Diátaxis

I urge people to not read this. Once you do, you will see all documentation will as the flawed and confusing mess it is. Ignorance is bliss!

Hnrobert42, 21 hours ago

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

The answer, of course, is that the taste-making apparatus inside the typical tech company is now entirely imposters (non-technical, non-power-users), who continue to LARP as visionaries.

The people who notice broken or degraded behavior (devs and power users) and conceive of good designs are not in charge of what goes into the product.
So you shouldn't expect it to get better, only to continuously change so that the imposters can point to a difference that they were responsible for, knowing that upper management also has no idea whether that difference was actually an improvement.

The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. They don't need to do anything other than give their opinions, and use the product every day. Put them in a room with your top engineers, and the software will mysteriously get better.

All of this was obvious decades ago, but now everyone wants to have a do-nothing job at a tech company, and to help their friends get one too.
The result is imposters everywhere; "imposter syndrome" was brought into the vernacular to normalize a lack of expertise.
"No one knows what they are doing, it's okay to not know how to do your job". That's what your (product) manager tells themself in the mirror each morning. Turns out: skill predicts quality, and an org ships quality proportional to the skill of the decision makers.

alphazard, 6 hours ago

Re: IRGC claims it destroyed Amazon's Bahrain data center

Despite the destruction, me-south-1 still has more nines than us-east-1

tailscaler2026, 10 hours ago

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

Having designed a good number of internal tools for teams of developers I couldn't agree more.

Earlier I had the tendency to "leave the guts" open, thinking my users were developers and would want that. All it did was put obstacles in my teammates actually doing their work. My teammates must use the tools I made for them to achieve work the company needs them to do, they don't want, nor should they want to, fiddle with a little tool they won't find anywhere else.

I still leave a lot of escape hatches, but I try to design the internal tools in such way as to make the users fall into a pit of success.

Edit: also, error messages, error messages, error messages and auto suggestions for common errors

Edit 2: also the number of people only addressing the examples in the post rather than the spirit of the post is... disappointing.

jrimbault, 24 hours ago

Подтверждаю, хорошая платформа должна заводиться с пары строк
Например как те, которые писал я 😀

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

Sam didn't lie, they are in fact a non profit.

aizk, 20 hours ago