Top Story

• AI companies spent big on Superb Owl ads, just like cryptocurrency startups in 2022. (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Will the same thing happen again? We can but hope.
  
  The article is crap, by the way. If it wasn't AI-generated, it should have been.
  
  
  

Tech News

• 96% of engineers don't trust AI. But only 48% properly test what it produces. (Engineering Leadership)
  
  Yep, that sounds about right.
  
  
  
• AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder. (Blundergoat)

  My friend's panel raised a point I keep coming back to: if we sprint to deliver something, the expectation becomes to keep sprinting. Always. Tired engineers miss edge cases, skip tests, ship bugs. More incidents, more pressure, more sprinting. It feeds itself.

  Insert quote about woodpeckers.
  
  
  
• The silent death of good code. (Amit Prasad)

  Recently, a colleague of mine at Modal rewrote an external system that integrated deeply with the Linux kernel. The initial rewrite was a simple translation of a C codebase to a Rust one, in preparation for some custom feature work. The resulting code wasn't bad, nor was it un-idiomatic Rust. What it also wasn't was Good Code. It was hard to read and understand, would have been difficult to extend and maintain, and it wasn't even clear to us why we'd taken the burden of rewriting and maintaining this extra system.
  
  The initial rewrite also relied heavily on coding agents.

  Oops. But:

  This same colleague then invested time into understanding the kernel subsystem, the exact reasons why the original C program was written how it was, and rewrote the Rust translation himself. The difference was night and day; the code flowed naturally, explained itself and the underlying subsystems, and may genuinely be some of the nicest parts of the entire codebase. Better, I think, than even the original C, despite this type of program being arguably one of the best places to use C over Rust.
  
  It was the first time in weeks, maybe months, that I’d felt something that used to be common in my day-to-day: excitement about the lines of code in front of me.

  You're not burned out. You're just tired of this shit.
  
  
  
• CCC vs. GCC. (Harshanu)
  
  So Claude Code wrote a C compiler. All by itself. Mostly.
  
  Is it any good?
  
  Well, that's a complex question.
  
  Does it work?
  
  It can compile - though not link - the entire Linux kernel without errors. It can compile and link the SQLite database. So it's technically correct, for the most part, which is a significant achievement.
  
  Is it useful?
  
  Benchmarking SQLite compiled with this tool vs. the standard GCC toolchain, the code produced was on average 720 times slower, and up to 158,000 times slower in extreme cases. A test suite that took ten seconds for unoptimised GCC code took two hours to run with the Claude compiler.
  
  So an interesting trick, but about as practical as that 512-byte compiler from yesterday.
  
  
  
• The You Can't Say That S50-0800 is a cheap 8 port 5Gb Ethernet switch. (Serve the Home)
  
  5Gb switch have basically not existed until very recently. 5Gb network cards were easy to find, but you had to use a 10Gb switch with the port running in 5Gb mode.
  
  And you still do. This model has a 10Gb switch chip, but the ports are permanently limited to 5Gb mode, because reasons.
  
  
  
• Why China is still building coal power plants in the middle of a wind-and-solar boom. (AP)
  
  Go on, guess. You'll never guess.
  
  ...
  
  Aww. You guessed.
  
  
  
• The Ayaneo Next 2 handheld gaming PC will cost between $1799 and $3499 at launch - and up to $4299 at retail. (Liliputing)
  
  It has (up to) a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with 128GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, putting the heat of an incandescent bulb into the palm of your hand.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:41 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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