featured in #421
All The Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About When Building Products With LLMs
- Phillip Carter tl;dr: (1) Context windows are a challenge with no complete solution. (2) LLMs are slow and chaining is a nonstarter. (3) Prompt engineering is weird and has few best practices. (4) Correctness and usefulness can be at odds. (5) Prompt injection is an unsolved problem.featured in #418
Lua: The Little Language That Could
- Matt Blewitt tl;dr: “Lua is probably my favourite “little language” — a language designed to have low cognitive load, and be easy to learn and use. It’s embedded in a lot of software, such as Redis. It’s also used as a scripting language in games such as World of Warcraft and Roblox via Luau. This post is a brief love letter to the language, with some examples of why I like it so much.”featured in #418
The Case Against Relying Solely On DRY
- Ashley Peacock tl;dr: Instead of being applied when needed, Ashley believes DRY is thrown around anytime duplication is spotted, and this leads to worse code in the long run. Ashley walks through why duplication is not the root of all evil, and why it’s perfectly fine to repeat yourself sometimes.featured in #398
No-Code Has No Future In A World Of AI
- Ravi Parikh tl;dr: Ravi Parikh, CEO of Airplane, discusses how AI-driven software development will dwarf no-code tools' capabilities and eventually make no-code obsolete.featured in #394
I’m Now A Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer
- Filippo Valsorda tl;dr: "I now have six amazing clients, and I’m making an amount of money equivalent to my Google total compensation package, which proves the thesis that it’s possible to be a professional maintainer earning rates competitive with the adjacent market for senior software engineers... I’m sharing details about my progress to hopefully popularize the model, and eventually help other maintainers adopt it, although I’m not quite ready to recommend anyone else drop everything to try this just yet."featured in #387
Ordering Numbers, How Hard Can It Be?
- Orson Peters tl;dr: "From challenging a variety of people to write a correct implementation of is\_less\_eq, no one gets it right on their first try. And that’s after already explicitly being told that the challenge is to do it correctly for all inputs. I quote the Python standard library: “comparison is pretty much a nightmare.”"featured in #385
Microfeatures I'd Like To See In More Languages
tl;dr: "Since I spend a lot of time in niche obscure languages, I also encounter a lot of cool QoL features that most people might not have seen before. Here’s a few of them!" Hillel discusses: (1) Number representations. (2) Balanced string literals. (3) Generalized update syntax. (4) The Chapel power hour. And more.featured in #378
Tech Predictions For 2023 And Beyond
- Werner Vogels tl;dr: The CTO at Amazon elaborates on the following: (1) Cloud technologies will redefine sports as we know them. (2) Simulated worlds will reinvent the way we experiment. (3) A surge of innovation in smart energy. (4) The upcoming supply chain transformation. (5) Custom silicon goes mainstream.featured in #374
The Cloudy Layers Of Modern-Day Programming
- Vicki Boykis tl;dr: "Instead of working on the core of the code and focusing on the performance of a self-contained application, developers are now forced to act as some kind of monstrous manual management layer between hundreds of various APIs..." Vicki shows us how this manifests.featured in #373