To pace something is a fairly regular formulation in racing, running, cycling, most sports. You can "pace yourself to reach the festival by bike in about three hours to not gas out". This means to control your speed and time investment intentionally so you don't run out of energy or steam and run into leg cramps before your goal. We can "pace a rollout slowly to burn out risks", or "increase the pace of a rollout due to adverse factors".
But I have noted a point to simplify my vocabulary at work to optimize the audience capable of understanding. So I rather defer the delving into deep dark corners of the dictionary derived from devouring literature to a simple intro or outro, and people find it funny, especially if the rest is easy to read. Claude on the other hand does not do that.
I would rather say the argument is simplified, but on a decent track. Because there are two angles to it.
I've been wondering what sectors I wouldn't maintain and develop infrastructure for, because I consider it a strength of mine that I don't entirely care about that. I'm not excited about your product, for good or bad.
Defense for example is on an edge there. Supporting the creation of death and suffering in other humans does not sit right with me. Being defenseless doesn't sit right either, as it can create suffering and death for people I know as well.
Online gambling is more on the nope side. Maybe with a decent regulated german company, but if you start working with some eastern-europan online video gambling sites with pretty girls as dealers, you are suddenly very close to human trafficking and many more things connected to it.
So I guess directly causing human suffering and pain is a boundary for me. And yes, if you push that argument to an extreme, if you search long enough, you realize that pure existence causes suffering to other people, animals and the planet and must be ceased.
But then there is that other side - in the current system (and arguably many before) you have to do a job to get money to live, and a lot of people like the person making cars have no choice about that. I guess we are contributing to that suffering as well by existing.
So, minimizing the direct suffering and pain I cause seems to be a sensible directive.
It's funny. My experience of running Win95-Era Games, especially more wonky one like Cavelands on Linux with Wine is far better than on Windows. And DosBox is a given. So e.g. both Civ 2 and Civ 1 are just standard launchers on my Linux box.
And with something like Lutris, it's not a lot of tinkering. "Install game from setup.exe". Done in a lot of cases, needs a few winetricks or dll overrides in some cases for the wonky ones.
It's going to be interesting, because liability cases tend to revolve around the involved people, the duty they had in a situation, and if they fulfilled that duty (or were prevented in some way by someone else not fulfilling their duty).
For example, for a runaway car (example from a sibling comment), the driver could be liable because they forgot the parking brake. The driver could be liable for a lack of maintenance and inspection. A mechanic could be liable for not reinstalling brake pads correctly. Or the manufacturer of the car or the brake pads could be liable because of a systemic defect.
Or it could grow even more complex, maybe the brakes are designed that they have to be maintained in a very specific way, and the mechanic did a reasonable maintenance and inspection but it failed later due to this maintenance. That could split liability between the manufacturer and the mechanic.
As an example, with other software, you as a developer or operator of a software have a duty to ensure it does not access computer systems you do not own in unintended ways. And this could go beyond liability into criminal territory.
It'll be interesting what OpenAI gets slapped with there.
> Skills have some instructions but are primarily informed repo specific instructions and keep their context away from the rest of the repo to keep things sanitised for me.
Skills and agents in the Claude world can also be extended and evolved over time, as they are committed "code".
For example, we have an agent which can take a statement or a support ticket and identifies the services, tenants and infrastructure components likely meant in the ticket or request. Similar to a skill, Claude can invoke this on demand in a conversation.
This started very simple, but various people spent time tuning it over the last 4-6 months. They have "taught" it to pick up on jargon from different departments, writing style of different departments, how they think about their systems.
With all of that tuning over time it has become quite "clever" in identifying the mentioned systems and - if requested - the train of thought leading to this conclusion.
Similar things are happening with skills for various task, be it Ansible integration tests, upgrade chores and so on. The first version can be fairly underwhelming, but continuously improving it after each usage can make them very powerful.
This becomes fun if you start to prioritize security work on CVEs rated higher, not affecting you, over security work on CVEs rated lower and affecting you.
Or prioritizing chasing CVEs currently not affecting you over architectural work improving security.
The CVE should be fixed, I fully agree, but where does it land as a priority? Less competent security teams push /all/ CVEs as Sev0 over /all/ other topics.
I don't have a good answer to this problem. The reality is security is becoming very important - for good reasons. If you (as an organization) are spending all your time chasing CVEs instead of the other useful things (such as what you named) you have a problem, but not fixing CVEs right away is a terrible answer. There is some hope that LLMs have found most of the existing issues and things will settled down - but only time will tell if this becomes true or not.
I agree this is a scope or focus thing. Different tools for different things.
If you are already maintaining a tool chain, a supply chain and skills in an SPA framework for multiple customer-facing, client-driven projects, I don't think you have much of a use for HTMX. Hence why at work, we have our full-time frontend engineers doing this, because it gives you the most flashy quality.
I am an infrastructure engineer. I have privately tried out a couple of SPA frameworks, The complexity to set this up for the first time is immense. And if you have rarely touched projects, the churn of the tooling and dependency ecosystem is taking up a significant amount of time for something that may be nice to have at work, or a pet project at home.
It's not cool if you have half a day to touch an old project and everything has rotted away around it so nothing interesting gets done. Something like Pydantic, Flask or Django + Jinja generally doesn't do that. And HTMX can make it nicer fairly cheaply.
I'm right with you. My dad was a farmer and taught me: First deal with the irregular, annoying parts on the outside. Create rectangles with a long side and turning space on each shorter side. Then deal with each rectangle by going back and forth along the long edge. The turnarounds are also a great place for some wheelbarrows to collect the clippings closest to the Komposthaufen.
Hence why I went for the irregular strange part on the lower left first, and then the more regular part on the right. That's the weird rain collection, herb garden, thing we have at the back.
> Then deal with each rectangle by going back and forth along the long edge.
I prefer to work in lands after I have cut the headlands. Reduces turning stress on the grass and acknowledges that the machine (the one I own, but the design is common) is optimized for use in one direction.
> People are, in heavy LLM systems, realising that the most valuable commodity is engineers knowing WTF is going on, and that loss of understanding of your codebase is the #1 blocker to actually getting things done. Any senior engineer knows this all too well
I've been pushing against this "maximum LLM driven speed" in our infrastructure as well and been working on a middle ground:
We can generate a change to Ansible or terraform code in half or a third of the time, sure. But we don't use this to make three times the changes in the same time frame. We rather use the freed up time to discuss the change, the context and the affected systems with 2-3 engineers maintaining them. And yes, at times this means us three are sitting around half a day discussing and drawing diagrams about our systems.
I'm just happy to work in a company understanding the value of speeding up less than we could in the feature direction, but investing this time in the direction of control and understanding of the infrastructure.
Yup, this is how I see teams who care about quality, design and architecture seems to use LLMs, not to "produce more and faster" but to retain same speed but with a lot more confidence and reliability. Hoping this will spread eventually, some companies seem to take a more... hazardous approach to the whole thing.
To pace something is a fairly regular formulation in racing, running, cycling, most sports. You can "pace yourself to reach the festival by bike in about three hours to not gas out". This means to control your speed and time investment intentionally so you don't run out of energy or steam and run into leg cramps before your goal. We can "pace a rollout slowly to burn out risks", or "increase the pace of a rollout due to adverse factors".
But I have noted a point to simplify my vocabulary at work to optimize the audience capable of understanding. So I rather defer the delving into deep dark corners of the dictionary derived from devouring literature to a simple intro or outro, and people find it funny, especially if the rest is easy to read. Claude on the other hand does not do that.
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