geek stuff - 2

From AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

Here's the thing that broke my brain for a while: AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That's not a lie. What used to take me 3 hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a design doc, scaffolding a new service, writing test cases, researching an unfamiliar API. All faster.

[..]

But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder.

[..]

Before AI, there was a ceiling on how much you could produce in a day. That ceiling was set by typing speed, thinking speed, the time it takes to look things up. It was frustrating sometimes, but it was also a governor. You couldn't work yourself to death because the work itself imposed limits.

AI removed the governor. Now the only limit is your cognitive endurance. And most people don't know their cognitive limits until they've blown past them.

 

From https://charity.wtf/2026/01/19/bring-back-ops-pride-xpost/

What’s wrong with operations? Ops is not a synonym for toil; it literally means “get shit done as efficiently as possible”. Every function has an operational component at scale: business ops, marketing ops, sales ops, product ops, design ops and everything else I could think of to search for, and so far as I can tell, none of them are treated with anything like the disrespect, dismissal and outright contempt that software engineering

From Martin Fowler :

One attendee is an SRE for a Very (Very) Large Code Base. He was less worried about people not understanding the code an LLM writes because he already can’t understand the VVLCB he’s responsible for. What he values is that the LLM helps him understand the what the code is doing, and he regularly uses it to navigate to the crucial parts of the code.

There’s a general point here:

Fully trusting the answer an LLM gives you is foolishness, but it’s wise to use an LLM to help navigate the way to the answer.

This post might be useful for maybe like 10 people who are running into issues when compiling software on Apple M* machines.

If you run into error like this:

ld: warning: ignoring file '/usr/local/lib/libpng.dylib': found architecture 'x86_64', required architecture 'arm64'
ld: warning: ignoring file '/usr/local/lib/libavformat.dylib': found architecture 'x86_64', required architecture 'arm64'

And you have installed these packages using brew. I verified that these dylibs are definitely for x86_64 and the linker was not going crazy. (use lipo -archs /usr/local/lib/libavformat.dylib)

Well, that was caused because  I had installed the new M3 macbook from backup (Timemachine) and the backup was created from an x86_64.  

The fix is described here

brew bundle dump --global
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/uninstall.sh)"
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
brew bundle install --global

This first creates a ~/.Brewfile and then installs back those packages.

This is a useful tool for people to check the status of a commercial flight using the tail number of the airplane, without the need to subscribe to any services. As a passenger, this is useful because you can see where the airplane scheduled to fly you is currently, which can help keep track of delays and cancellations.

The first step is to find the tail number of the flight that you are scheduled to take. Head to the airports page of flightradar24 and get to the page of the airport that you will be flying out of. For example, if you are flying out of Oakland, California, this would be https://www.flightradar24.com/data/airports/oak. On that page, click the "Departures" tab. This will give a list of flights, along with their tail numbers.

For example, assuming that you are flying on the 8:05 PM Southwest flight to Reno (WN1282), the tail number is under the "Aircraft" column (N8313F).

Once you have the tail number, you can use flightaware.com to track the schedule, current location, flight path. Just put the tail number into the search box. Another useful tool is airfleets.com, which can show complete airplane details, as well as links to adsbexchange.

This is for somewhat paranoid people. I am not a fan of grabbing docker images from docker hub, especially for base OS images. I would rather build my own images, the process is not too complex. Below is the quick way to get a base debian os container build:

sudo apt-get install debootstrap
sudo debootstrap jessie jessie/
sudo sh  -c "cd jessie/ && tar cf ../jessie.tar ."
sudo sh -c "docker import - debootstrap/jessie < jessie.tar"

Now you can check if you have the images:

$ sudo docker images

REPOSITORY              TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
debootstrap/jessie      latest              814d88e17a23        15 minutes ago      274MB

$ sudo docker run -i -t debootstrap/jessie /bin/bash
root@92d078f4f147:/# lsblk ^C

I was reading Neil Gaiman's eulogy for Terry Pratchett. This part stood out to me:

Terry looked at me. He said: "Do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered Good Omens." I thought of the driven way that Terry wrote, and of the way that he drove the rest of us with him, and I knew that he was right.

There is a fury to Terry Pratchett's writing: it's the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld. It's also the anger at the headmaster who would decide that six-year-old Terry Pratchett would never be smart enough for the 11-plus; anger at pompous critics, and at those who think serious is the opposite of funny; anger at his early American publishers who could not bring his books out successfully.

And that anger, it seems to me, is about Terry's underlying sense of what is fair and what is not. It is that sense of fairness that underlies Terry's work and his writing, and it's what drove him from school to journalism to the press office of the SouthWestern Electricity Board to the position of being one of the best-loved and bestselling writers in the world.

This description of Terry Pratchett reminded me of the character Sam Vimesfrom the Discworld series. Vimes is an idealist, but a committed cynic whose knowledge of human nature constantly reminds him how far off those ideals are. Vimes also has a dark side that comes out when Vimes loses control of his anger, especially when he temporarily lets go of "the Beast" (in the novel Thud!).