That sounds like a horrible onboarding experience. Human mentors provide a lot more than just answering questions, like providing context, comraderie or social skills, or even coping mechanisms. Starting a new job can be terrifying for juniors, and if their only friend is faceless chat bot...
You're right. We need to keep tabs on the culture for new hires for the reasons you mentioned. LLMs are really good at many onboarding tasks, but the social ones.
I think done right it is a superior onboarding experience. As a new hire, you no longer have to wait for your mentor to be available to learn some badly documented tech things. This is really empowering some of them. The lack of building human context / connections etc is real, and I don't think LLMs can meaningfully help there. Hence my skepticism for the horse analogy.
The manufacturer doesn't make it clear why they axed it, but from my experience in med-tech I think this translates to "the FDA is going to balk at it"
Huh? What are you maintaining? The PostgreSQL db and extensions are provided in the container image. You do not have to use your own external PostgreSQL.
Of course, you may have reasons to do that. But then you also own the maintenance.
I have never had to maintain any PG extensions. Whatever they put in the image, I just run. And so far it has just worked. Upgrades are frequent and nothing has broken on upgrade - yet at least
Anyone who makes like 100 million dollars and thinks to themselves "this isn't enough money to stop working and just enjoy life" has something seriously wrong with them. The billionaire class will never be happy, and it's time for society to stop letting these loonies ruin society to satisfy their insanity.
I think it is far to keep working if you love what you are doing. To filter, there should be an absolute cap on wealth at a few hundred million dollars. This would eliminate the incentive to manipulate politics in favour of yourself, but if you want to keep working you should be doing it for society via charity or taxes on anything additional that is earned.
Have a nice ceremony and present a medal for winning capitalism.
>To filter, there should be an absolute cap on wealth at a few hundred million dollars.
One million dollars and not a penny more. Enough for most people to live comfortably, but not enough to buy governments, or for the upper classes to never need to work again to maintain their lifestyle and privilege.
No human being needs or deserves a hundred million dollars.
I agree with you in principle here, but to play devils advocate, $1,000,000 isn't a whole lot of money. A worker will make around that much at $25,000 a year over 40 years. If we have to keep money/capitalism, the limit should probably be around 10-15 million. That's still pretty high, but not egregious. Give or take ~40yrs on a high FAANG salary ($375k/yr). Still firmly upper middle class IMO.
I don't mean earnings over a lifetime or career, but currently. A worker making $25,000 a year will still probably never see a million dollars regardless of the limit. Maybe everything above that is taxed 100%. I don't know.
But the point is kind of to eliminate the upper classes and scale the economy back into the reach of most people. So there would be no FAANG salaries. The cost of everything (healthcare, education, housing) would go down. It would place a hard limit on political influence that isn't too far out of reach of current Congressional salaries and would probably limit pork barrel politics and insider trading as well. It would end inherited wealth and maybe even limit the length of copyright.
That's an admittedly naive and utopian view and I'll admit there are bound to be complexities and externalities I'm not taking into account because I'm not an economist. But it's either that or we seize the means of production and put the rich to the guillotines until the sewers choke on their blood. And then something something luxury space communism.
That's the crazy part. The people at the top seem to think they're better off if they can get another billion in the bank, regardless of the impact on the rest of society. But they, too, live in that same society that they are destroying.
They seem to think it's better to be a king in the Middle Ages than just a regular rich person in modern society. They forget that the lives of kings in the Middle Ages were absolutely terrible.
The purpose of capitalism is the flourishing of the capitalist classes.
The labor classes only need to be maintained like machines or draft animals, kept just alive and well enough to afford the rent on their lives so they can continue to create value.
The collective reactions to this aren't mental illness, they're trauma responses. Capitalism is accelerating towards its final form and the shock is giving people PTSD.
Billionaires are a convenient distraction for the upper middle class.
The wealthiest group of people (on the whole) is the 70-95th percentile.
If we were to have the toppling of "the rich" that brought about meaningful change to the "poor", it would necessarily include the toppling of the ~$200k income households.
As someone with thinning hair, it's horrible how little study/research is being performed to understand how hair grows and treat hair loss. Most of the products on the market today were discovered by accident and have serious side effects. This condition impacts millions++ of people, yet everyone from physicians to pharmaceutical companies is fine with the status quo of "here, this may work for you" effectively woo medicine.
You aren't the only person with opinions on it though. Reminds me of the infamous HN thread where a (woman) poster mentioned offhand she and her husband were saving up for transplant for the sake of the survival of their marriage!
> Most of the products on the market today were discovered by accident and have serious side effects.
Topical minoxidil / finasteride has roughly zero side effects (due to the limited systemic exposure) and has something like a 90% efficacy rate. With 90%+ efficacy it's not a case of "this might work for you" it's "this will almost certainly work for you." It's cheap and it works.
Even oral 1mg finasteride has basically the same side effect profile after 1 year as placebo, side effects always* stop whether you stop taking it or continue taking it. And as an added bonus it significantly reduces your risk of low-grade prostate cancer (30% ish) while not increasing your risk of high-grade prostate cancer. Many of the side effects reported are in people taking 5mg doses for prostate hypertrophy, and the incidence of side-effects is dose dependent. Studies show that sexual side effects are primarily nocebo, if participants were told to expect them the rate was 3X higher than placebo, if they weren't told, they were about the same.
* the category of persistent side-effects has been defined primarily for data collection purposes, there's very little evidence for persistent side effects at all let alone a high incidence thereof. Many of the side effects people claim are related are things that would otherwise happen to you at the age you start to lose your hair regardless. It's good to collect more data though.
> As someone with thinning hair, it's horrible how little study/research is being performed to understand how hair grows and treat hair loss.
Given the size of the market I'd say there's a ton of research being done. It's just a tough nut to crack. There's some good data on PP405, for example.
It’s not really a big deal to be worth spending so much effort on. Baldness doesn’t affect your quality of life.
The only reason men care so much is because long hair was often associated with nobility and power. Ancient gods or classical royalty were usually depicted with long luscious hair. Society has conditioned men to feel like less of a man if they lose their hair.
But that’s BS, bald is also a good look for men. Just embrace it. Isn’t it crazy that even if we came up with a “cure” for baldness, some men would still choose to be bald anyway?
Are you bald, or are you just imagining things? It affects your quality of life. Because I know a lot of people who struggle with baldness including some in my family, I take it seriously. If you think depression is worth spending time on, then baldness is worth spending time on too. Some people have a head shape that doesn't suit being bald, and they don't look good bald at all. In today's Western world, the majority of women won't choose a bald person if there’s a similar alternative with hair, it's simple biology. Only a minority of people look attractive bald. Good luck on dating apps being bald, seriously. You have no idea what you are talking about.
What you're saying is basically "Let them eat cake".
Here are some meta analysis + studies that support this:
"2024 mixed methods international survey paper summarizes prior experimental and cross sectional work and notes that studies often find more negative perceptions linked to baldness (e.g., being seen as older, less attractive, less successful)"
I’m a woman, not bald. And men always seem to overestimate the effect “head shape” has on their appearances.
Your face is the most attractive part of your head and is what people pay attention to. If you have a fucked up face, it doesn’t matter if you have the most perfect round skull. And if your skull is a little weird, it won’t matter if your face is genuinely attractive. And you could be a very hairy guy, but if your face is ugly, you’re still screwed.
Bald men struggle on dating apps, because almost all men struggle on dating apps. I have never encountered a man who claimed to have a really delightful experience with dating apps unless he was some ridiculously attractive type. Even in the best cases, they still admit it’s a grind.
If you’re depressed because you’re bald, treat your depression the way actually depressed people do. Exercise, socialize, connect to people. And if that doesn’t work, just take pills or whatever.
What you wrote is just vibes + armchair certainty. Hair loss measurably shifts how people are perceived (you can learn it if you read the studies I linked), and those shifts have downstream effects (dating, confidence, social treatment etc). Some guys look great bald, many don't and pretending "head shape doesn't matter" is silly. Hair frames the head and face. Take it away and you're exposing proportions people didn't notice before.
Your claim is basically "if I wouldn’t be upset, nobody should be" and that's not how humans work. Baldness is a real negative signal in a lot of contexts, and "everyone suffers on apps" doesn't erase disadvantages.
Acceptance is great, denial dressed up as pragmatism isn't.
If you don’t look good bald – a head full of hair isn’t going to save you.
If you truly think you don’t look good bald, you can do a million things to pull attention away from your chrome dome. Grow a nice beard, build a fit muscular body, no one is going to care about your bald head.
Some men even appear sexy with a balding head, because they’ve accepted their fate and are just leaning into the style instead of doing comb overs or spraying on hair in some futile attempt to hold on to what is leaving them. Even hair transplants give off some insecure vibes, so make sure they are done to look as natural as possible.
The fact that we're only now uncovering fundamental mechanics like "hair is pulled, not pushed" kind of highlights how under-invested this area has been
As someone with a race in my head between white hairs and a receding hairline, hair loss does afflict millions of people, but it has no medical impact on people's life, beyond increasing the need to wear a hat when outside in the Sun for long. Is it that surprising that medical professionals would spend their time on other afflictions instead?
A social concern where the path of least resistance toward resolution is probably effective medical advancements. For example, studies show bald men face greater challenges in both straight and gay dating in every country where it's researched (so it's not cultural context dependent).
Probably easier to figure out the follicular science than change universal attraction preferences.
It sucks that S3 somehow became the defacto object storage interface, the API is terrible IMO. Too many headers, too many unknowns with support. WebDAV isn't any better, but I feel like we missed an opportunity here for a standardized interface.
Its like GET <namespace>/object, PUT <namespace>/object. To me its the most obvious mapping of HTTP to immutable object key value storage you could imagine.
It is bad that the control plane responses can be malformed XML (e.g keys are not escaped right if you put XML control characters in object paths) but that can be forgiven as an oversight.
Its not perfect but I don't think its a strange API at all.
My browser prints that out to 413 pages with a naive print preview. You can squeeze it to 350 pretty reasonably with a bit of scaling before it starts getting to awfully small type on the page.
Yes, there's a simple API with simple capabilities struggling to get out there, but pointing that out is merely the first step on the thousand-mile journey of determining what, exactly, that is. "Everybody uses 10% of Microsoft Word, the problem is, they all use a different 10%", basically. If you sat down with even 5 relevant stakeholders and tried to define that "simple API" you'd be shocked what you discover and how badly Hyrum's Law will bite you even at that scale.
> My browser prints that out to 413 pages with a naive print preview. You can squeeze it to 350 pretty reasonably with a bit of scaling before it starts getting to awfully small type on the page.
It gets complex with ACLs for permissions, lifecycle controls, header controls and a bunch of other features that are needed on S3 scale but not at smaller provider scale.
And many S3-compatible alternatives (probably most but the big ones like Ceph) don't implement all of the features.
For example for lifecycles backblaze have completely different JSON syntax
Everything uses poorly documented, sometimes inconsistent HTTP headers that read like afterthoughts/tech debt. An S3 standard implementation has to have amazon branding all over it (x-amz) which is gross.
To be fair. We still have an opportunity to create a standardized interface for object storage. Funnily enough when Microsoft made their own they did not go for S3 compatible APIs, but Microsoft usually builds APIs their customers can use.
It was better. When it first came out, it was a pretty simple API, at least simpler than alternatives (IIRC, I could just be thinking with nostalgia).
I think it's only gotten as complicated as it has as new features have been organically added. I'm sure there are good use cases for everything, but it does beg the question -- is a better API possible for object storage? What's the minimal API required? GET/POST/DELETE?
I suspect there is no decent "minimal" API. Once you get to tens of millions of objects in a given prefix, you need server side filtering logic. And to make it worse, you need multiple ways to do that.
For example, did you know that date filtering in S3 is based on string prefix matching against an ISO8601/RFC3339 style string representation? Want all objects created between 2024-01-01 and 2024-06-30? You'll need to construct six YYYY-MM prefixes (one per month) for datetime and add them as filter array elements.
As a result the service abbreviation is also incorrect these days. Originally the first S stood for "Simple". With all the additions they've had to bolt on, S2 would be far more appropriate a name.
it's storing a [utf8-string => bytes] mapping with some very minimal metadata. But that can be whatever you want. JSON, CBOR, XML, actual document formats etc.
And it's default encoding for listing, management operations and similar is XML....
> but I feel like we missed an opportunity here for a standardized interface.
except S3 _is_ the de-facto standard interface which most object storage system speaks
but I agree it's kinda a pain
and commonly done partial (both feature wise and partial wrong). E.g. S3 store utf8 strings, not utf8 file paths (like e.g. minio does), that being wrong seems fine but can lead to a lot of problems (not just being incompatible for some applications but also having unexpected perf. characteristics for others) making it only partial S3 compatible. Similar some implementations random features like bulk delete or support `If-Match`/`If-Non-Match` headers can also make them S3 incompatible for some use cases.
So yeah, a new external standard which makes it clear what you should expect to be supported to be standard compatible would be nice.
What is your definition of "new person" though? If someone has been remote for years, are they still a "new person"? If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges. This just seems like a carrot to squeeze some kind productivity or control out of people.
New to the company. Being in-person makes it easier to build new relationships, make friends with people you wouldn’t normally run into in your corner of Slack, and pick up more info about how the company works.
> If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges.
In person accelerates onboarding for all the reasons I mentioned above. It’s not a game of trust or “carrots”.
This is nonsensical. Most F500 companies are globally distributed. Most of onboarding is gaining access to systems.
It’s far easier and more efficient to search slack, find the person you need to talk to and DM them in your first week than it is to pester the person who sits next to you to figure out how to click the right Sailpoint buttons.
I say that hiring someone is not an absolute vote of confidence in a person. Even if someone is a veteran worker, most companies have a new employee orientation. Having a "probation period" where someone comes into the office to integrate and meet people and work more collaboratively makes sense to me.
Disclaimer: While I benefit and often like a remote work or hybrid setup, I also know that my career and my ability to absorb new technologies has been crippled by the isolation of remote work. And, my success and my level of knowledge in my field is directly attributed to being physically around a lot of people and several related departments in order to ask questions and mingle with experts.
Remote work sucks for learning, for me - and I know I'm not alone.
The “if you trusted them enough to hire them you should trust them with everything unconditionally” meme is popular, but it’s a very weak argument.
Everyone has to build trust and establish a reputation at any job. Every company treats new employees as probationary, whether they make it explicit or not.
You don’t get hired into a company and immediately have the same trust level as the guy who has been there for 5 years and has a long history of delivering results.
For some issues with new employees you can pivot quickly: If you discover that someone is not good at interacting with databases and is causing downtime and restore from backup situations, you pivot quickly and remove their database privileges while you observe their skill growth.
With remote, you can’t pivot quickly. If you’re 12 weeks in and the new remote hire obviously can’t communicate remotely or focus at home, you can’t pivot quickly and have them work in the office most of the time because remote hires don’t necessarily live by the office. So it’s a slowly earned privilege in companies that aren’t remote-first.
I’m surprised this is a foreign concept. This was actually the common situation with remote work before COVID: Gaining WFH ability was something earned and negotiated over time. It wasn’t widely publicized, but that’s how many of us started working remote.
Building trust is a gradual thing. You give some, you get some, you do that long enough and you will have a lot of trust. You can still lose it all in a heartbeat. But you're never going to get the keys to the kingdom on day #1.
> But you're never going to get the keys to the kingdom on day #1.
I always tell juniors that even if their company doesn't have an explicit probationary period, they should assume their behavior and results are being carefully monitored for the first year to watch for signs of a bad hire.
Hiring someone is never equivalent to having full trust in them. Reputations don't start at 100% on day 1, they start as a neutral value that you need to build up over time. You also need to avoid breaking it down. It's much faster to destroy a reputation than build it up.
I've only ever worked remote professionally and I've got a track record, when I apply to a new role there's no question that I can adapt to working remotely at X company.
If I just finished my PhD in comp sci and have never worked professionally in my life let alone remotely, going day 1 remote is a huge risk
I knew this was going to turn into a shoot the messenger (or downvote the messenger) situation.
Look, I also work remote and have for years. This is just the situation that’s happening out there. Having 5 years of remote experience no longer means as much because some companies let everyone work remote and waited until now to start firing and laying people off. We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Every remote manager I know has stories like this. The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
> We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
> The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
A four hour work week is very normal in plenty of countries and in some there are common constructs built around even shorter work weeks.
> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
Bingo. I had an exec ask me once how will we know people are working if they are remote? I asked back, how do we know they are working now?
Remote work is harder on management and leadership. It’s easy to see if someone is at their desk and seems friendly, it’s hard to really think about what value a person brings.
I've worked at a bank where one of the oft heard jokes was that 'I spend 8 hours per day there but I really wouldn't want to work there'. It was true too. 145 people in the IT department, and absolutely nothing got done.
This was a bit of a let-down for me, all these people, so much fancy hardware. I had a hard time believing it at first. The whole place was basically caretakers that made the occasional report printing program and that based their careers on minor maintenance of decades old COBOL code that they would rather not touch at all.
Something as trivial as a new printer being taken into production would turn into a three year project.
On Friday afternoons the place was deserted. And right now I work 'from home' and so do all of my colleagues and I don't think there are any complaints about productivity. Sure, it takes discipline. But everything does, to larger or lesser degree and probably we are a-typical but for knowledge work in general WFH can work if the company stewards it properly. It's all about the people.
> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
Of course, but that's obviously a deflection.
In person hires can't physically be in two offices at the same time.
In person employees can't get a new in-person job and then not resign from their last job because they want to extract as many paychecks as they can before they get caught and fired.
In person employees can't substitute in a hired interview taker for the interview and then hope nobody notices their voice sounds too different when they start the job.
These are all real things that we've encountered with remote work (and more)
Saying X can also happen in Y! Is a classic fallacious argument used by people who want you to think two things are equal, when in fact they can have very different probabilities and risk profiles.
When I was working at a hybrid company we even had a few cases where people either couldn't focus at home (kids, family, distractions) or were insufferably combative in chat. Bringing them into the office solved it.
The two environments are not equal, no matter how many times someone tries to deflect with "That problem can also happen in the office!"
That doesn't happen remote either. Unless management is utterly incompetent, another variable a study like this should probably compensate for by increasing the sample size and pool diversity.
I don't know where you got this idea, but this happens all the time. The two most common topics in the remote channel of the big management peer group I'm in are:
1. People cheating on remote interviews (including substituting another person to take the interview)
2. People getting multiple jobs and being too obviously distracted to get work done, or the increasingly common getting a new job and not resigning from the last job because they know they can collect potentially $100K+ in paychecks and/or severance by waiting to get let go instead.
If you don't believe these things happen in remote jobs then I understand your resistance throughout this thread to any suggestion that remote and in-office are different.
It absolutely happens, and often. I don't know when the last time you tried to hire was but things are absolutely brutal right now. The most common is personnel who think they can get away with an hour or two of work a day (whether they're working multiple jobs or just screwing around at home is hard to say). Second is bait-and-switch where the interviewee is not the person who shows up day 1.. after four (!) incidents in a quarter we had to mandate at least one in-person interview during the hiring process which seems to have helped.
Open floor plan hotel seating with 1' distance between you and the next person who eats raw onions at their desk while talking to their spouse constantly
Yes README.md should still be written for humans and isn’t going away anytime soon.
CLAUDE.md is a convention used by claude code, and AGENTS.md is used by other coding agents. Both are intended to be supplemental to the README and are deterministically injected into the agent’s context.
It’s a configuration point for the harness, it’s not intended to replace the README.
Some of the advice in here will undoubtedly age poorly as harnesses change and models improve, but some of the generic principles will stay the same - e.g. that you shouldn’t use an LLM to do a linter &formatter’s job, or that LLMs are stateless and need to be onboarded into the codebase, and having some deterministically-injected instructions to achieve that is useful instead of relying on the agent to non-deterministically derive all that info by reading config and package files
The post isn’t really intended to be super forward-looking as much as “here’s how to use this coding agent harness configuration point as best as we know how to right now”
> you shouldn’t use an LLM to do a linter &formatter’s job,
Why is that good advice? If that thing is eventually supposed to do the most tricky coding tasks, and already a year ago could have won a medal at the informatics olympics, then why wouldn't it eventually be able to tell if I'm using 2 or 4 spaces and format my code accordingly? Either it's going to change the world, then this is a trivial task, or it's all vaporware, then what are we even discussing..
> or that LLMs are stateless and need to be onboarded into the codebase
What? Why would that be a reasonable assumption/prediction for even near term agent capabilities? Providing it with some kind of local memory to dump its learned-so-far state of the world shouldn't be too hard. Isn't it supposed to already be treated like a junior dev? All junior devs I'm working with remember what I told them 2 weeks ago. Surely a coding agent can eventually support that too.
This whole CLAUDE.md thing seems a temporary kludge until such basic features are sorted out, and I'm seriously surprised how much time folks are spending to make that early broken state less painful to work with. All that precious knowledge y'all are building will be worthless a year or two from now.
> Why is that good advice? If that thing is eventually supposed to do the most tricky coding tasks, and already a year ago could have won a medal at the informatics olympics, then why wouldn't it eventually be able to tell if I'm using 2 or 4 spaces and format my code accordingly? Either it's going to change the world, then this is a trivial task, or it's all vaporware, then what are we even discussing..
This is the exact reason for the advice: The LLM already is able to follow coding conventions by just looking at the surrounding code which was already included in the context. So by adding your coding conventions to the claude.md, you are just using more context for no gain.
And another reason to not use an agent for linting/formatting(i.e. prompting to "format this code for me") is that dedicated linters/formatters are faster and only take maybe a single cent of electricity to run whereas using an LLM to do that job will cost multiple dollars if not more.
> Then why wouldn't it eventually be able to tell if I'm using 2 or 4 spaces and format my code accordingly?
It's not that an agent doesn't know if you're using 2 or 4 spaces in your code; it comes down to:
- there are many ways to ensure your code is formatted correctly; that's what .editorconfig [1] is for.
- in a halfway serious project, incorrectly formatted code shouldn't reach the LLM in the first place
- tokens are relatively cheap but they're not free on a paid plan; why spend tokens on something linters and formatters can do deterministically and for free?
If you wanted Claude Code to handle linting automatically, you're better off taking that out of CLAUDE.md and creating a Skill [2].
> What? Why would that be a reasonable assumption/prediction for even near-term agent capabilities? Providing it with some kind of local memory to dump its learned-so-far state of the world shouldn't be too hard. Isn't it supposed to already be treated like a junior dev? All junior devs I'm working with remember what I told them 2 weeks ago. Surely a coding agent can eventually support that too.
It wasn't mentioned in the article, but Claude Code, for example, does save each chat session by default. You can come back to a project and type `claude --resume` and you'll get a list of past Claude Code sessions that you can pick up from where you left off.
The stateless nature of Claude code is what annoys me so much. Like it has to spend so much time doing repetitious bootstraps. And how much it “picks up and propagates” random shit it finds in some document it wrote. It will echo back something it wrote that “stood out” and I’ll forget where it got that and ask “find where you found that info so we can remove it.” And it will do so but somehow mysteriously pick it up again and it will be because of some git commit message or something. It’s like a tune stuck in its head or something only it’s sticky for LLMs not humans.
And that describes the issues I had with “automatic memories” features things like ChatGPT had. Turns out it is an awful judge of things to remember. Like it would make memories like “cruffle is trying to make pepper soup with chicken stock”! Which it would then parrot back to me at some point 4 months later and I’d be like “WTF I figured it out”. The “# remember this” is much more powerful because know how sticky this stuff gets and id rather have it over index on my own forceful memories than random shit it decided.
I dunno. All I’m saying is you are right. The future is in having these things do a better job of remembering. And I don’t know if LLMs are the right tool for that. Keyword search isn’t either though. And vector search might not be either—I think it suffers from the same kinds of “catchy tune attack” an LLM might.
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