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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You don’t even have a reliable way to keep track of your disk usage anymore. That was the final drop for me when they removed “Other locations” where I could see how much space was left. The Disk Usage Analyzer app is a complete mess and don’t give an easy “you got 10 gigs left mate.” I had to resort to the terminal to get good accurate measures. Now I have a percentage in my taskbar in Plasma.


  • I worked in software ops where part of my day was handling incidents and bring anxiety to the room when I came running to a dev team with an incident caused by their recent release. A few times it was caused by someone accidentally running a test scenario in prod. At one point I got enough and said “add a bright orange ‘test’ banner on your UI for dev environments.” Apparently that was a foreign concept to absolutely everybody, and the more I look around the less I see people actually trying to make an effort to distinguish the two to prevent such catastrophic failures. Especially when you’re handling tens of gigawatts of energy on a daily basis.



  • For a project I liked I saw that the translation of the UI was only about 1% complete for my native language. I decided to dedicate the weekend to get it above 95%. This was apparently the part that seemed too hard for most to make a dent in, but across several new versions my language is still 100%. I think my groundwork made it easier for some sporadic contributors to get a small bit of dopamine when updating the few new strings in a release to see it hit 100% again.




  • Difference is that vibe coding doesn’t create 20% more CPU usage or 30% more RAM usage because it doesn’t understand the underlying mechanics (or, it could but that is not the important part). LLMs will happily provide you with solutions that consists of plain text password storage, leaking personal information through open APIs, and business crushing vulnerabilities. A sharp developer should be able to catch that, but if you’re reviewing 5000+ line PRs daily that’s been spat out by LLMs it’ll be impossible to catch all failures. And for someone who doesn’t know all those nonfunctional requirements that a business absolutely must have it’ll become a nightmare for the receiver of the code.

    So to be clear: For functional requirements LLMs are a bit better but still needs hand holding. For nonfunctional requirements they’re dog shit as that’s the part that more often than not has to explicitly be mentioned. And being able to identify nonfunctional requirements and when they’re not met is the difference between a junior dev and a 10+ year lead.

    Slow app? Just add resources. Vulnerable app? Actual compliance and business risk.