Panta
Amateur developer, professional contrarian.
I post whatever comes to mind, kind of just what I'm thinking about at the moment. Tends to break down ~ 50% tech, 50% whatever. @thepanta82 at twitter.
https://pantas.net
- Last time I picked DB tech, I opted for doing raw SQL over query building. Reason: experience from a prev project, where converting from SQL to a knex command chain was super annoying. If I was picking today, I'd 100% go for a query builder. LLM solves the conversion now.
- Tech influencers used to be upstream in the dev FOMO pipeline. "Here's a new lib all the cool kids are using, but you can't because of your trash legacy project." But since AI tools aren't tied to a codebase, we're now all following along and FOMO-ing at the same time. Hmm.
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- Very similar to EU laws, interestingly.
- I managed to setup zero downtime deploys WITHOUT clustering, staggered migrations, or blue/green deploys. Frankly, it was way more DIY than I thought it would be. Reverse proxies should just come with this stuff built in.
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- It's interesting that even he seems to have bought into the mirage. It's true when they say many successful people have no idea why they are successful, like how a bird can fly without understanding the physics of flight.
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- As an engineer who builds products, I can attest we generally want to build more products rather than do sales. As Groucho Marx said, you wouldn’t want to meet an engineering team that would want to meet you.
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- Back there I could fly a gunship. I could drive a tank. I was in charge of million dollar equipment. Back here, I can't even close a B2B SaaS deal!
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- There is no click. Just a slow smolchy binding of flesh and machine over years.
- After getting used to typescript's various forms of template strings and unions, it's hard to go back to only having ordinary opaque strings in other languages.
- Most remotes works like UDP rather than TCP, and it's kind of annoying.
- Factory functions > constructors in js. The reason: they can be async. With constructors, you often end up in an awkward state, where the class exists but isn't valid to use yet. Sometimes necessary, but still annoying.
- When I first start a cursor project vs when it matures a bit.
- AI can generate any image, except all the ones I need. AI can write any text, except any I'd want to publish. AI can code any program, except the ones that matter.
- Oh God, it escaped control. The jihad has began.
- This app is the worst. Don't use it. The reason: pg collation is subtly different on mac vs linux, where your actual stuff will be running. Run db in docker or remotely instead.
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- Everything this tab group touches is our kingdom
- Today: Working on Mac is both satisfying (hardware) and infuriating (macOS). 15 years ago: Working on Mac is both satisfying (OSX) and infuriating (hardware).
- Wild how the internet turned out to be just a temporary caching layer for the internet archive.
- I used to hate bash. Always kept an eye out for a more sane shell environment. I no longer care. GPT writes that slop for me now. Its obscure syntax no longer hurts. AI will enshrine bad languages forever. We will never get rid of them. But maybe that's OK.
- "A meeting can completely kill my flow" ANY context switching can kill the flow. Even between projects, or different types of work. It's just that most corporate devs only do one type of technical work, so all their experience with flow interruptions is centered on meetings.
- CSS tip: if you can't get a smoothly looping animation (eg. due to quirky way percentages work in different contexts), just increase the duration. Your visitors will probably never notice it glitch out once every 10 minutes.
- Thank you tailwind, for no longer having to name things.
- This is how Butlerian Jihad begins
- Best UI-s are deeply hardcoded. Strings, images, colors - all directly produced and manipulated by your own code. The moment you start extracting "content" into resources, CMS-s, translation files etc, the end product starts to suffer. (you gain other benefits, though)
- We've adopted anarcho-tyranny for privacy. People who can harm you get all your private data, and people who can help you get none.
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- People who can harm you: - governments - criminal orgs (who can buy leaked data) - to an extent, big tech People who can help you: - health startups - researchers - small businesses
- Time for the monthly Apple humiliation ritual
- Chrome dev tools is probably the best suite of development and debugging tools in the world, across stacks. I am suspicious of any framework or coding approach that makes it less useful. I'm specifically thinking of: - tailwind - binary RPC protocols - RSC
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- Programming never hit the level of market saturation where there is more programmers than work. While that is an ever-present reality for artists. In other words, programmers are probably a bit spoiled by the good times. If AI came a few years later, maybe we'd feel differently.
- Common senior dev mistake: just because something is easy, doesn't mean it will be quick.
- PostgreSQL devs (smart): "We must make sure only superusers can create extensions, because extensions might allow arbitrary code execution." PostgreSQL users (dumb): "Oh... I guess I'll just use a superuser for everything." Safety FTW
- Even with mostly copy-pasting existing playbooks, it still takes me like half a day to do a new deployment (FE + BE). If I was doing this all the time, I can see how a PaaS or some fancy infra solution would be very tempting, even if I'd pay it off via bandwidth tollbooths.
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- Also, it can only work once
- The only new web framework I need is something that can be served straight from backend, with zero build or separate deployment. I've been playing with preact a bit, but its fenced strings feel a bit annoying. Still experimenting.
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- TIL they have branded insults, like anamorphic cartoon characters
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- I'm bearish on some of the safety design features. Blocklists and the ability to detach quotes will push the norms towards bubbling, rather than the PvP world of twitter
- "I don't need to learn vim and type at 120wpm because I spend more time thinking anyway", he yawned lazily, in the 30th minute of hunt and pecking his way through a simple refactoring. Sure thing, bro. Def some big thoughts brewing there, between memes and misspelled AI prompts.
- I don't want to rely on 3rd parties because they inevitably screw something up and cause me grief. > But don't you also screw things up? Sure. But I am just 1 person. There's only so much I can screw up. And if (when) I do screw up, it's def gonna be in the pursuit of the updates I care about 1/3
- A vendor chasing their own commercial goals and metrics, on the other hand, will screw up stuff I was perfectly fine with staying as they were. And these screw ups compound with the number of vendors I let into my system! 2/3
- No I don't want "security" updates or any other kinds of updates. I want things to exactly as they are, into infinity or until *I* decide I need them to change. 3/3
- Is it even possible to rebase a hefty side-branch without having to do a bunch of fixes afterwards? And if not, don't you just end up with a lot of broken project snapshots in git history? There's gotta be a better way.
- Technology will unlock having weak men without transitioning to hard times.
- Sooo, how much of your S3 costs are just files you've lost reference to, so now they are just sitting there, unused, costing you money, forever? Asking for a friend.
- Every crypto gets pumped and dumped, every model gets swapped with a quantized version, every saas gets enshittified. Rugpulling is the most common chatacteristic of modern tech.
- Open source programs have so many little friction points that don't get fixed, because each one is the cornerstone of some regular contributor's built up habits. But computers are now getting old enough that we'll learn if OSS can improve like science - one funeral at a time.
- Any AI trained on bluesky's data firehose will only be able to talk about social apps.
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- An advantage of leader-centered party, like the republicans. The disadvantage is a weaker bench, filled with sycophants.
- Naysayers are more often right, but less often successful.
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- Simple tweaks can lead to >100x speed improvements on large enough datasets. Nothing will come even close to that in your typical day to day programming.
