What the author is missing is that in his decision to limit the use of LLMs in his work, he omits the part where he “can”. E.g. he is resourceful and accomplished enough to be able to do the work he desires with no LLMs - but most people actually can’t. There are whole swaths of people software engineers that don’t write tests because “it slows them down” but they have never learned how to write testable code. And when thrust into an environment where they need to learn quickly - they don’t really have a way not to use ai, if they don’t someone else will, and take all the credit.

Learning how software is built is hard and gruelling work, and you need to constantly invest in yourself. Trouble is there is no time left to “go back to basics and learn FP” for example, because you also need to keep up with all the new LLM stuff happening on top of that.

It is easy for us who already have the foundational knowledge to be able to step back, take the wheel and try to do it ourselves, but plenty of people simply don’t have that option.

And I expect this trend to deepen and broaden. There will definitely be a lot more “witches” than actual engineers.

People learn what they need to learn to be successful (if they want to be successful). The newer generation of coders will learn exactly what it takes to be better than their peers, and that will still include building rock solid, highly performant software to beat the competitors, or they'll lose their jobs and someone better will do it.

If they do it entirely using AI to code, and the end output is good enough, they'll learn all the right skills to do this.

Human's always think everything is sliding into doom, and inevitably, it doesn't.

I think the right term for highways or most other car roads is “car sewer” - you need very specialised equipment to navigate them, they are deadly, smelly, loud and unpleasant. One of the worst environments humanity has produced.

Yes they ship people around somewhat fast. Slower than possible with other methods, and the cost is incredible - economic (much more expensive per passenger than almost any alternative), political (they inherently divide people, dehumanise and make people never really share a public space), health - they reduce lifespan by both lowering living quality as well as directly killing a staggering amount of humans per year).

And we have learned how to build better places for humans that do not need these coffins on wheels - if you visit any European capital, and most Asian ones - you will see environments built for humans, not cars - soo much nicer.

So cars as a technology have definitely not been beneficial to humanity overall, but it has been somewhat useful to some.

I think strongtowns were very good advocates of what places in America could like if you look beyond cars. I personally like the “not just bikes” channel though.

I had fun “hacking” my router that turned out to be just unzipping the file with slight binary modifications, it was so simple in fact I just implemented it in a few lines of js, even works in the browser :-D

https://ivank.github.io/ddecryptor/

“The weirdest people in the world” - has a very good roots cause analysis of all this.

Basically banding into groups and guarding against outsiders is the default human behaviour. It just works that way if you do a game theory analysis of our social structures. They usually don’t scale too well, but that’s what we revolved to do as social creatures.

It’s actually and very counter intuitively the Catholic Church that lead us to individualism, common laws, nationalism, even the Industrial Revolution and the scientific method.

It sounds bizarre but if you follow the historical logic, in a round about way it has paved the way for the modern world, which the rest of human civilisation was forced to adopt, either to compete or at gunpoint.

There are few books I read in a year that change the way I look at the world, “The Weirdest people in the world” was definitely one of them.

Interesting claim, though not enough detail to disagree with constructively. I'd agree that the Catholic Church had a big influence on our history of course, though among the things you mention I would only count common laws as being intertwined with Church history, everything else pre-dating it or being independent of it in my understanding.

I'll have a look at that book however: what were the other books?

Capital in the 21 century, how to win and influence people, Sidhartha, meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the mars trilogy, the nurture revolution.

These are off the top of my head.

The Catholic Church thing - yea that was quite unexpected for me, and apparently accidental for the church too - the basic premise was - they banned cousin marriage, and heavily enforced it throughout all of society - kings to peasants - this drove people to move around and settle outside of their home towns, driving up individualism and just changing the way our brains work on a neurological level - we have always been a close nit kin social structure animals.

The e book explains it quite well with tons of historical data, neuroscience, comparisons with different countries, continents and social structures.

It got me to “understand” India on a much deeper level since I moved here from Europe, and not get pissed off at people for “not thinking things through”. But also appreciate how small and consistent things can drive profound changes. Also how did china/ussr speed run the Industrial Revolution so quickly - spoiler alert - they copied the same “ban cousin marriage” thing

I will agree with some of those - although i would say Christianity rather than the Catholic Church specifically for most of it.

The Catholic Church did ban marrying first cousins and some other relatives (there is a complicated rule) which broke up clans. It also deserves a lot of credit for the scientific method, although that was not a deliberate strategy - it just emerged from theology and lots of educated people within in.

On laws and nationalism, there were many states and legal systems that predate it. Rome or Athens in Europe, empires, kingdoms, even a republic or two elsewhere. Legal systems go back to Hammurabi. Breaking up clans (requiring better laws) and distinguishing between secular and religious laws are something it deserves credit for.

I am puzzled by what the Church contributed to the Industrial Revolution though.

We did a similar Claude code mandate a few weeks ago.

Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and automation, that making them use superpowers produced better code, but also started adding a test pyramid.

The mandate was actually phrased in a way that you must produce industry standard code, and if you struggle with it you can use cc to bridge the gap.

Honestly I worry that this way devs will produce higher quality code, but will not understand why, how to measure the “quality” and steer towards it themselves.

At this point though the founders were pretty adamant with the code quality and lack of tests so this seemed like a reasonable way for the company, and I am curious to see how such a mandate affects code, deliverables and individual’s knowledge.

So far it seems to be working as intended, but it is early days.

> Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and automation

Frankly if your devs weren't doing this stuff before, forcing them to do it with AI assistance is probably going to be counter productive. If it is possible to produce good quality code and tests and such with LLMs, it is not likely by forcing LLMs on people who didn't care about code quality or tests before

IRGS domestic propaganda has always been that US is a military murderous malevolent regime, mercilessly going after their land and their children.

With just a little bit of propaganda spin, or even without it, US just proved to the entire Iranian population that IRGS was right all along.

This should strengthen or even harden their regime as they will have new generation of hardliners join the movement.

This is like 1930s Germany kinda thing. Who won or lost is semantics at this point, the regime is free to spin it any way they want, and will have quite the support to do it.

Is this the “city experience” in general or specifically for the United States? It famously has very poor urbanism so might not mean the same as in Europe for example.

I have grown up in rural Russia in the 80s and that was also similar - a forest started 50m from our house and I would just get lost there from time to time - not fun for my parents but magical for me.

Then we moved to the middle of a European capital city (Sofia) and I _still_ had almost a forest right next to the apartment block we used to live in - enough of a forest that as a 10yo kid I could find a nook to build myself a small hut with a burning fireplace inside it and nobody complained.

There are plenty of big European cities that are 10-20mins short unsupervised trip to a wilderness that a kid can do.

For example - Valencia has an uninterrupted bicycle highway that gets you from the city center to a wilderness preserve and a beach in less than an hour cycling.

To me all of these nature vs city laments are just US car dependency. Cities don’t have to be this way at all.

A lot of areas in Western Europe are either completely deforested or have very weird low-density half-dead wooded areas, especially Germany. One has to go all the way to Poland/Serbia/Bulgaria to get a real forest experience again.

A good way to destroy real forests is moving a lot of people closer to them to have a forest experience near their house.

Surprisingly, this seems to be not true. Moscow, a city of 10+ million people, has huge forests inside or adjacent to the city limits. People leave rubbish here and there, but unless forests are rezoned and actively developed as "recreation zones" or some such, they are doing okay. One can easily find more species of birds in a large Moscow park than in the whole of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The trick is not depleting the ecosystem to begin with.

Some of this is being slowly reverted:

https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/2de...

This is very nice, but unfortunately, it will take forever (in human-life terms) to bring "real" forests back.

(In my previous post, I forgot to mention stunning rainforests near Sintra in Portugal.)

Is it worth the price of energy sovereignty though? You are not just buying electricity, you are buying future independence. It might be worth it if you factor that in.

And don’t forget all the other expertise that comes from being a country that is able to build reliable nuclear reactors. China is _the_ production superpower not just because it can build x or y, it’s because it has all the supply chains to be able to do it at scale.

If a country invests into that expertise - you get a lot of very capable engineers, a lot of tech and supply chains to deal with making it all happen, again and again, at scale. That in itself would be something that can offset the raw “price” of a single reactor, though it is very hard to quantify.

Like how much has USA actually lost by relinquishing its historical role of guarding international trade? Maybe it won some independence, but maybe the upstream effects to its economy would be bad?

We don’t know for sure about nuclear, but when a similar scientific project was put on a national scale - the space race - USA got silicon valley out of it.

Also it has interceptors, which allow you to build easily reusable pieces of code - loggers, oauth, retriers, execution time trackers etc.

These are so much better than the interface fetch offers you, unfortunately.

You can do all of that in fetch really easily with the init object.

   fetch('https://api.example.com/data', {
  headers: {
    'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + accessToken
  }

})

There are pretty much two usage patterns that come up all the time:

1- automatically add bearer tokens to requests rather than manually specifying them every single time

2- automatically dispatch some event or function when a 401 response is returned to clear the stale user session and return them to a login page.

There's no reason to repeat this logic in every single place you make an API call.

Likewise, every response I get is JSON. There's no reason to manually unwrap the response into JSON every time.

Finally, there's some nice mocking utilities for axios for unit testing different responses and error codes.

You're either going to copy/paste code everywhere, or you will write your own helper functions and never touch fetch directly. Axios... just works. No need to reinvent anything, and there's a ton of other handy features the GP mentioned as well you may or may not find yourself needing.

Interceptors are just wrappers in disguise.

    const myfetch = async (req, options) => {
        let options = options || {};
        options.headers = options.headers || {};
        options.headers['Authorization'] = token;
    
        let res = await fetch(new Request(req, options));
        if (res.status == 401) {
            // do your thing
            throw new Error("oh no");
        }
        return res;
    }

Convenience is a thing, but it doesn't require a massive library.

That fetch requires so many users to rewrite the same code - that was already handled well by every existing node HTTP client- says something about the standards process.

It could also be trivially written for XMLHttpRequest or any node client if needed. Would be nice if they had always been the same, but oh well - having a server and client version isn't that bad.

Because it is so few lines it is much more sensible to have everyone duplicate that little snippet manually than import a library and write interceptors for that...

(Not only because the integration with the library would likely be more lines of code, but also because a library is a significantly liability on several levels that must be justified by significant, not minor, recurring savings.)

> Because it is so few lines it is much more sensible to have everyone duplicate that little snippet manually

Mine's about 100 LOC. There's a lot you can get wrong. Having a way to use a known working version and update that rather than adding a hundred potentially unnecessary lines of code is a good thing. https://github.com/mikemaccana/fetch-unfucked/blob/master/sr...

> import a library and write interceptors for that...

What you suggesting people would have to intercept? Just import a library you trust and use it.

Your wrapper does do a bunch of extra things that aren't necessary, but pulling in a library here is a far greater maintenance and security liability than writing those 100 lines of trivial code for the umpteenth time.

So yes you should just write and keep those lines. The fact that you haven't touched that file in 3 years is a great anecdotal indicator of how little maintenance such a wrapper requires, and so the primary reason for using a library is non-existent. Not like the fetch API changes in any notable way, nor does the needs of the app making API calls, and as long as the wrapper is slim it won't get in the way of an app changing its demands of fetch.

Now, if we were dealing with constantly changing lines, several hundred or even thousand lines, etc., then it would be a different story.

But you said so yourself they are necessary… otherwise you would just use fetch. This reasoning is going around in circles.

Why the 'but'? Where is the circular reasoning? What are you suggesting we have to intercept?

- Don't waste time rewriting and maintaining code unecessarily. Install a package and use it.

- Have a minimum release age.

I do not know what the issue is.

but it does for massive DDoS :p

> Likewise, every response I get is JSON.

fetch responses have a .json() method. It's literally the first example in MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/U...

It's literally easier than not using JSON because I have to think about if I want `repsponse.text()` or `response.body()`.

that's such a weak argument. you can write about 20 lines of code to do exactly this without requiring a third party library.

Helper functions seem trivial and not like you’re reimplementing much.

Don't be silly, this is the JS ecosystem. Why use your brain for a minute and come up with a 50 byte helper function, if you can instead import a library with 3912726 dependencies and let the compiler spend 90 seconds on every build to tree shake 3912723 out again and give you a highly optimized bundle that's only 3 megabytes small?

> usage patterns

IMO interceptors are bad. they hide what might get transformed with the API call at the place it is being used.

> Likewise, every response I get is JSON. There's no reason to manually unwrap the response into JSON every time.

This is not true unless you are not interfacing with your own backends. even then why not just make a helper that unwraps as json by default but can be passed an arg to parse as something else

One more use case for Axios is it automatically follows redirects, forwarding headers, and more importantly, omiting or rewriting the headers that shouldn't be forwarded for security reasons.

fetch automatically follows redirects, fetch will forward your headers, omitting or rewriting headers is how security breaks… now a scraper got through because it’s masquerading as Chrome.

What does an interceptor in the RequestInit look like?

A wrapper function around fetch… that’s what interceptors are…

It also supports proxies which is important to some corporate back-end scenarios

fetch supports proxies

Haven’t seen the movie yet, but the book is definitely one of my all time favourites, so I would recommend reading it regardless of the movie.

The way the book is structured there is only one big reveal that would be spoiled by the movie, but I don’t think that was the most interesting thing in the book anyways, it was all about engineering, the scientific method and all that, and I think that will still hold before or after watching.

The one big exception I’ve found to “read the book first” advice to me has been “the expanse” there the books and the series were so great that they sort of complemented each other, and the advice there is “definitely do both”. I was reading the books and watching the series in parallel - side by side.

I do hope Hail Marry is like that…