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  • 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • My code projects lately?

    “This project uses an API written in PHP, with HTML in Lua (OpenResty) and JavaScript. We’re starting with the PHP component, please write me a burger with cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, pickles, ketchup and mustard.”

    “Absolutely! I’d be happy to help with that! I understand that we’re creating a burger in PHP. Here is a burger, with cheese, bacon, lettuce tomato and mustard. Explanation of the burger: The bacon is on top of the cheese, so it doesn’t fall off. The lettuce is included, to create an underlying HTML structure.”

    "Um, that’s not at all what I asked for. First of all, you completely forgot the ketchup, which I explicitly told you was a requirement. Secondly, you said there was mustard, but I don’t see any. Third, the cheese is cottage cheese? No one puts that on burgers! Why would you put cottage cheese? Third, the bacon is turkey bacon. That’s not what I wanted at all. On top of that, the lettuce is UNDER the burger, not ON it. We’re not writing HTML, this is meant to be a rest API. All the output should be JSON.

    Please try again. Write me a burger in PHP with pig bacon, mustard and ketchup, which you forgot to include last time, cheddar cheese (NOT cottage cheese) and tomato, pickles and lettuce INSIDE the bun. This is an API, so don’t write any HTML!"

    “I appologize for the misunderstanding. Here is your burger with bacon (made from pigs, not turkey), mustard, ketchup, cheddar cheese, tomato, pickles and lettuce inside the bun. I understand this is an API, so I’ve taken out the HTML. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.”

    “It looks like you’ve called a function to put the lettuce inside the bun, but you never created that function?”

    “You are correct. Your PHP code would need to have the function defined to put the lettuce inside the bun. Here is your updated PHP code with the putLettuceInsideBun function included.”

    “Thank you, there’s a tomato and the lettuce is inside the bun now. I’m not sure why you called the putLettuceInsideBun() function twice, but at least it’s in there now. I note there’s still no bacon, cheese, ketchup or mustard. You know what? I’m just going to write those parts myself!”

    “Writing PHP code can be a fun and educational challenge! Please let me know if I can assist you any further with your PHP hot dog grilling project.”


  • If those words are connected to some automated system that can accept them as commands…

    For instance, some idiot entrepreneur was talking to me recently about whether it was feasible to put an LLM on an unmanned spacecraft in cis-lunar space (I consult with the space industry) in order to give it operational control of on-board systems based on real time telemetry. I told him about hallucination and asked him what he thinks he’s going to do when the model registers some false positive in response to a system fault… Or even what happens to a model when you bombard it’s long-term storage with the kind of cosmic particles that cause random bit flips (This is a real problem for software in space) and how that might change its output?

    Now, I don’t think anyone’s actually going to build something like that anytime soon (then again the space industry is full of stupid money), but what about putting models in charge of semi-autonomous systems here on earth? Or giving them access to APIs that let them spend money or trade stocks or hire people on mechanical Turk? Probably a bunch of stupid expensive bad decisions…

    Speaking of stupid expensive bad decisions, has anyone embedded an LLM in the ethereum blockchain and givien it access to smart contracts yet? I bet investors would throw stupid money at that…



  • We’re also using Forgejo for a small consulting team working on lots of different projects for a lot of different clients.

    A couple of our team members who came from a more complex and scaled environment (particularly our DevOps / SRE guy who’s worked at such places as LinkedIn and Snowflake) want to move us to Gitlab because it’s “more powerful” but I like Forgejo because it’s just super simple. Just does exactly what I need, doesn’t give me to many more options.

    We have

    • Projects segregated into teams, organized by client (so only those working on a specific client’s projects have access to their repos).
    • Able to invite clients and put them into the team for their project (we’ve had a couple clients that want that).
    • Able to automate deployments with webhooks (this was pretty easy to get working).

    One of our devs wanted to use Actions. It’s hard to get that working and (at least a month ago) there were warnings that Actons aren’t mature yet and are probably insecure (looks like that may have changed with the recent jump to Forgejo 8.0). I think it’s now a non issue for us though because we were like “Dude, stop trying to role your own CI/CD, that’s why we have two infrastructure people!”



  • This exact thing happened to one of my clients. And it sucked because they didn’t even register the domains with Ionos, they registered them with some other company that then got bought by Ionos. They were not technically savvy and didn’t understand what was happening until it was way too late. They lost about 8 domains closely associated with their business and with their CEO’s research.