You can nerf network performance in the browser devtools or underprovision a VM relatively easily on these machines. People sometimes choose not to and others are ignorant. Most of the time, it's just the case that they are dealing with too many things that are vague making it difficult to prioritize seemingly less important things.
A number of times I've had to have a framing discussion with a dev that eventually gets to me asking "what kind of computer do your (grand)parents use? How might X perform there" around some customer complaint. Other times, I've heard devs comment negatively after the holidays when they've tried their product on a family computer.
> Other times, I've heard devs comment negatively after the holidays when they've tried their product on a family computer.
I worked for a popular company and went to visit family during the winter holidays. I couldn't believe how many commercials there were for said company's hot consumer product (I haven't had cable or over-air television since well before streaming was a thing, so this was a new experience in the previous five years).
I concluded that if I had cable and didn't work for the company, I'd hate them due to the bajillion loud ads. My family didn't seem to notice. They tuned out all the commercials, as did a friend when I was at his place around a similar time
All it takes is a change in perspective to see something in an entirely new light.
I’ve never had TV, and have used ad blockers as long as they’ve been a thing. (Until 1⅓ years ago I even lived in a rural area where the closest billboard of any description was 40km away, and the second-closest 100km away.) On very odd occasions, I would get exposed to a television, and what I find uncomfortable at the best of times (notably: how do they cut so frequently!?) becomes a wretched experience as soon as it gets to ads, which it does with mindboggling frequency. I’m confident that if I tried actually watching that frenetic, oversaturated, noisy mess on someone’s gigantic, far-too-bright TV, I would be sick to the stomach and head within a few minutes.
More to the point; colour and font rendering are typically "perception" questions and very hard to measure in a deployed system without introducing a significant out of band element.
Network performance can be trivially measured in your users; and most latency/performance/bandwidth issues can be identified clearly.
Chrome devtools allow you to simulate low network and CPU performance, but I'm not aware of any setting that gives you pixelated text and washed-out colors. Maybe that will make a useful plugin, if you can accurately reproduce what Microsoft ClearType does at 96dpi!
Simulating low DPI displays is built in to Safari's dev tools, but it's not of much use, considering the different font rendering between the platforms.
> Developers working over 1gbps Internet connections often don't realize the data gluttony of the software they write.
As a developer and AirBnB owner, what I’ve also noticed is the gluttony of the toolchain as well. I’ve had complaints about a 500/30 connection from remote working devs (very clear from the details they give) which is the fastest you can get for much of the metro I am in.
At home I can get up to 5/5 on fiber because we’re in a special permitting corridor and AT&T can basically do whatever they want with their fiber using an on old discontinued sewer run as their conduit.
I stick to the 1/1 and get 1.25 for “free” since we’re so over-provisioned. The fastest Xfinity provides in the same area as my AirBnB is an unreliable 230/20 which means my “free” excess bandwidth is higher than what many people near me can pay for.
I expect as a result of all this, developers on very fast connections end up having enough layers of corporate VPN, poorly optimized pipelines, a lot of dependency on external servers, etc that by the time you’re connected to work your 1/1 connection is about 300/300 (at least mine is) so the expectation is silently set that very fast internet will exist for on-Corp survival and that the off-corp experience is what others have.
Not only bandwidth but also latency can vary dramatically depending on where you are. Some of your guests might have been trying to connect to a VPN that tunnels all their traffic halfway around the world. That's much, much worse than getting a few hundred Mbps less bandwidth.
I wish we could have this as a permanent sticky for this website. It's out of control, especially with web stuff.
Spotify's webapp, for example, won't even work on my old computer, whereas YouTube and other things that you'd think would be more resource intensive work without any issue whatsoever.
I tend to use older hardware and feel like I’m constantly fighting this battle. It’s amazing thr hardware we have and I have to wait for dozens of seconds to start an app or load a web page.
Philosophically I am with you, e-waste and consumerism are bad, but pragmatically it is not worth punishing yourself from a dollars and cents standpoint.
You can jump on Amazon and buy a mini PC in the $300 range that’s got an 8 core 16 thread AMD 6800H CPU, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, basically a well above-average machine, with upgradable RAM and storage. $240 if you buy it on AliExpress.
You can grab a MacBook Air M2 for around $500.
Why suffer with slow hardware? Assuming that using a computer is at least somewhat important to your workflow.
You need two "classes" of developers; which may be the exact same people - those who are on the fastest, biggest hardware money can buy - but you also need some time running on nearly the worst hardware you can find.
At a "rich world" company that wants to make money, it's completely rational to not give a shit about "poor world" people that won't make you much money (relatively speaking) anyways. It basically only makes sense to milk the top leg of the K-shaped economy.
Conversely, it opens up a niche for "poor world" people to develop local solutions for local challenges, like mobile payments in India and some of Africa.
I agree, but developers don't have freedom over the product. Product managers are the ones who have a say, and even then, they are in a strict hierarchy, often ending at "shareholders". So, many of the wrongs come from the system itself. It's either systemic change (at least an upgrade), or no meaningful change.
Why can't you? In my experience, scaling Kafka was far easier than scaling our RabbitMQ cluster. We started running into issues when our RabbitMQ cluster hit 25k TPS, our Kafka cluster of equivalent resources didn't break a sweat at 500k TPS.
What sort of systems do you work on to require this kind of traffic volume? I've worked on one project that I'd consider relatively high volume (UK Post Office Horizon Online) and we were only targeting 500 TPS.
I'm not sure how many of these there are, but they're very significant.
These are bot networks run by big firms just building reputation overtime, to be switched on during some huge - usually political - campaign.
Suddenly, in some point in the future, all these "legitimate" looking "people" start inflating discourse against some political figure in some country and completely flip the democratic game.
It happened way too many times in the past decade.
Just yesterday my cursor agent made some changes to a live kubernetes cluster even over my specific instruction not to. I gave it kubectl to analyze and find the issues with a large Prometheud + AlertManager configuration, then switched windows to work on something else.
When I was back the MF was patching live resources to try and diagnose the issue.
But this is just like giving a junior engineer access to a prod K8s cluster and having them work for hours on stuff related to said cluster... you wouldn't do it. Or at least, I wouldn't do it.
In my own career, when I was a junior, I fucked up a prod database... which is why we generally don't give junior/associate people to much access to critical infra. Junior Engineers aren't "dangerous" but we just don't give them too much access/authority too soon.
Claude Code is actually way smarter than a junior engineer in my experience, but I wouldn't give it direct access to a prod database or servers, it's not needed.
what value would that provide? If we give claude code access, even though very risky, it can provide value, but what upside is to letting junior to production?
Best way to avoid this is to force the LLM to use git branches for new work. Worst case scenario you lose some cash on tokens and have to toss the branch but your prod system is left unscathed.
I thought the general point is that you can't "force" an LLM to stay within certain boundaries without placing it in an environment where it literally has no other choice.
I was diagnosing an issue in production. The idea was to have the LLM would need to collect the logs of a bunch of pods, compare the YAML code in the cluster with the templates we were feeding ArgoCD, then check why the original YAML we were feeding the cluster wasn't giving the results we expected (after several layers of templating between ArgoCD Appsets, ArgoCD Applications, Helm Charts and Prometheus Operator).
I have a cursor rule stating it should never make changes to clusters, and I have explicitly told it not to do anything behind my back.
I don't know what happened in the meantime, maybe it blew up its own context and "forgot" the basic rules, but when I got back it was running `kubectl patch` to try some changes and see if it works. Basically what a human - with the proper knowledge - would do.
Thing is: it worked. The MF found the templating issue that was breaking my Alertmanager by patching and comparing the logs. All by itself, however by going over an explicit rule I had given it a couple times.
So to summarize: it's useful as hell, but it's also dangerous as hell.
yeah claude is really eager to apply stuff directly to the cluster to the wrong context even with constant reminding that it rolls out through gitops. I think there's a way to restrict more than "kubectl" so you can allow get/describe but not apply.
Exactly. I'll need to dig deeper into its allowlist and try a few things.
Problem is: I also force it to run `kubectl --context somecontext`, as to avoid it using `kubectl config use-context` and pull a hug on me (if it switches the context and I miss it, I might then run commands against the wrong cluster by mistake). I have 60+ clusters so that's a major problem.
Then I'd need a way to allowlist `kubectl get --context`, `kubectl logs --context` and so on. A bit more painful, but hopefully a lot safer.
Blaming Tylenol is actually a surprisingly harmless and almost a relief. Remember it used to be vaccines until a few days ago. Antivax sentiment is not inconsequential to the average person. Gun rights are not inconsequential to the average person. Women rights are not inconsequential to the average person.
I get that some progressive arguments seem to be only relevant to particular audiences - "why should I care about trans rights if I'm not trans?" - but reality is these are a small portion of the actual discussions which take a disproportionate amount of atention from issues that do affect everyone.
I'm not an American, I don't live in the US and I generally keep away from politically charged topics on Hackernews, but I feel I must add to your comment a bit.
I would aggree with you that this "is just theatre" and as long as whoever is in charge is looking into the important stuff on economics and public policy, we could ignore the theatrics. I don't think this guy is doing a good job on the "important" stuff, but that's beyond me and I don't really have a say on tariffs, immigration or whatever else on someone else's country.
However, the "theatre" he does hurts real people in the real world. Trans people get killed or refused care, kids get shot in schools and even his own allies get hurt in the heat of the political theatre he creates. I must say I'm actually kind of glad he switched aim from vaccines to Tylenol: the whole antivax thing was extremely dangerous to the population as a whole, while blaming Tylenol will maybe hurt some pharma sales that's all. I wish he went with this discourse from the start, instead of spreading fear over vaccination during the times the World needed vaccines the most.
With that said, my whole point is that, unfortunatelly, political discourse has power, even if it's just theatrics. I wish you folks had more than two options in the US so you wouldn't need to choose his hateful and harmful discourse over the opposition, but sometimes you have to make do with what you have and it's not going to be good.
In politics - facts are immaterial but emotions and simplicity count.
I don’t agree with the administration on abortion and trans policies. There is a lot more to trans than just trans men in women’s sport and bathrooms.
Immigration enforcement should have better due process and it should be welcomed by both Democrat and republicans. There is no reason for democratic law makers to claim not to comply with federal law.
Either way - the points I put out is something I hear often in the US. Most people get shutdown in public for even appearing to agree with the current admin on policy even if they don’t agree with the implementation theatrics. It’s a bit of a shit show here when it comes to having an honest conversation.
Harris made several grandstanding stunts at the border and talked about her record on crime and immigration enforcement, and backed off on trans questions where she could (saying she would leave it to the states)
This basically had no impact because the political ads just said she was going to open the border and use your taxes to pay for transing your kids anyway. The Dems can't reasonably change how they're viewed in the media environment and if they do manage to take out a moderate position on something they'll just be seen as the slightly less effective option - once everyone agrees the border needs to be tougher, why not vote for the party that's louder on immigration anyway?
Developers writing software on 64GB M4 Macs often don't realize the performance bottlenecks of the software they write.
Developers working over 1gbps Internet connections often don't realize the data gluttony of the software they write.
Developers writing services over unlimited cloud budgets often don't realize the resource wastes into which their software incurrs.
And to extend this to society in general.
Rich people with nice things often alienate themselves from the reality of the majority of people in the World.
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