jakub_g

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há 11 diasdiscuss

Semi-related piece of advice for younger folks:

When you join a new team, don't try to change team tools, processes etc. starting in the very first week.

Most things are the way they are for a reason. Your "obviously better" idea may lack the full context. Start with observing the situation, talking to people to build understanding and historical context, and don't jump to conclusions too early.

Sometimes you'll be right, and things are suboptimal and based on long-outdated assumptions. Then, it's great to change them and improve! Freshman eyes are great for spotting such inefficiencies, and "new blood" is critical to make the team well-functioning and to improve the legacy stuff.

But improving and rewriting everything all the time has a cost. If you do too much of it too quickly, the team loses the understanding of long-stable processes and things. You may become a bottleneck as the "last person who touched this" in too many areas. People also have limited bandwidth to support your "rewrite everything" ideas every day, while trying to move on with their tasks.

Don't hesitate to suggest improvements, but please be mindful about the volume - especially in times of AI where everything can be vibecoded in an hour.

Finally, some "objectively better" things have no business justification. Improving performance of a piece of code than runs once a month? There's probably 10 more important things to do in your backlog.

há 19 diasdiscuss

I've heard stories like "fine, we'll take your debit card, but only if you also pay a non-reimboursable $$$ deposit in cash" for car rental. (Mostly in central/eastern Europe.)

(From what I was told, the thing in favor of a credit card is that the rental agency can put a hold on the security deposit for much longer than on a debit card: a few weeks vs a few days).

há 19 diasdiscuss

The animations and comparisons of current vehicles with two-three decades ago are extremely informative indeed.

há 23 diasdiscuss

I don't believe so do for two reasons:

- everyone assumes their program / website is the only thing running at the machine at a given time, and dev machines are always more powerful than user machines

- it's not really lack of advanced data structures and algorithms that result in the bloat most of the time but the fact that programs and websites are delivered by large teams, there are dozens of submodules that are often loaded even when not needed, and doing it properly is hard to architect to without getting into big complexity and gnarly bugs waiting to happen when someone from other team modifies something and does not know full picture. So it's cheaper to just keep things the way they are to reduce complexity of architecture and fragility.

mês passadodiscuss

Talking the "Sleep" button...

Back in 2000s, there were some popular cheap external keyboards with three extra buttons between the delete/end/pgdown row, and the arrows.

The first of those buttons was "power off" sitting just below "Delete".

Example: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hendry/330827330

It was pure madness because it was guaranteed to push this button by accident on a daily basis.

I can't imagine someone using computers for more than 5 minutes could have designed this.

mês passadodiscuss

I used to check a few times per month, but recently the number of submissions went through the roof, which makes me less likely to check.

mês passadodiscuss

One annoying thing is that those "non-standard" ETF variants have much higher management costs than basic S&P500 / All World ETFs.

há 2 mesesdiscuss

Note: it's about Bolt.com (fintech), not Bolt.eu (taxi).

há 2 mesesdiscuss

> ... While most enterprises were nationalized, authorities gave permission to small-scale private workshops like his to operate

Fun story: the city of Nowy Sącz (80,000 habitants) has a very high percentage of millionaires compared to other cities. One of the reasons was that as the city is in a mountainous region hence not well communicated, the communist authorities were less strict there and allowed for private businesses to grow. As the communism ended, the region basically had a head-start compared to the rest of the country.

há 2 mesesdiscuss

There's a famous table with what Brits say vs mean:

https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/ha0rz/britis...

e.g. "very interesting" -> "clearly nonsense"

há 2 mesesdiscuss

I have the same observation, when I need to ask someone to repeat, it's usually not because I didn't hear the sound, it's that my brain CPU struggled to process and decode the sound fast enough. Sometimes I ask to repeat and while saying it, the background brain CPU thread figures out what was said.

This usually happens in my non-native languages (but not only), and especially for speakers with accents I'm not used to.

há 2 mesesdiscuss

Reminded me of this old, pre-LLM git docs generator:

https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/

há 3 mesesdiscuss

According to [0] the military was basically doing under-the-radar preparations in the last few weeks before the attack, because the official narrative was that nothing's gonna happen.

> A small group of officers at HUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, did begin quiet contingency planning in January, prompted by the US warnings and the agency’s own information, one HUR general recalled. Under the guise of a month-long training exercise, they rented several safe houses around Kyiv and took out large supplies of cash. After a month, in mid-February, the war had not yet started, so the “training” was prolonged for another month.

> The army commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, was frustrated that Zelenskyy did not want to introduce martial law, which would have allowed him to reposition troops and prepare battle plans. “You’re about to fight Mike Tyson and the only fight you’ve had before is a pillow fight with your little brother. It’s a one-in-a-million chance and you need to be prepared,” he said.

> Without official sanction, Zaluzhnyi did what little planning he could. In mid-January, he and his wife moved from their ground-floor apartment into his official quarters inside the general staff compound, for security reasons and so he could work longer hours. In February, another general recalled, table-top exercises were held among the army’s top commanders to plan for various invasion scenarios. These included an attack on Kyiv and even one situation that was worse than what eventually transpired, in which the Russians seized a corridor along Ukraine’s western border to stop supplies coming in from allies. But without sanction from the top, these plans remained on paper only; any big movement of troops would be illegal and hard to disguise.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/feb/20...

há 3 mesesdiscuss

I tend to document some tricky non-obvious pieces of knowledge directly above the relevant code. "We have to do X below instead of obvious-first-idea-Y because Z".

Any time a refactoring comes up which moves code around, AI (or my coworkers) remove those comments without thinking twice, and I need to tell them "hey this is still valid".

há 3 mesesdiscuss

My favorite are the systems where you can only issue one token, so that you can't do a zero downtime rotation by creating new one, making it active in your system, and only then removing the old one.

In some cases this makes rotation a big event to be avoided because costs are higher than gains.

há 3 mesesdiscuss

I always wanted to make feature flags system where each FF must declare an expiration date max 1 year in the future and start failing CI beyond that date to force someone to reevaluate and clean up.

It's just too easy to keep adding new feature flags and never removing them. Until one day the FF backend goes down and you have 300 FFs all evaluate to false.

há 3 mesesdiscuss

FWIW, IBM has been increasing TPF costs dramatically since mid 2000s, which prompted the GDSes to go through decade-plus efforts to migrate away from it, to the cloud.

há 4 mesesdiscuss

> 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data

Just FYI how this generally works: it's not developers who add it, but non-technical people.

Developers only add a single `<script>` in the page, which loads Google Tag Manager, or similar monstrosity, at the request of someone high up in the company. Initially it loads ~nothing, so it's fine.

Over time, non-technical people slap as many advertising "partner" scripts they can in the config of GTM, straight to prod without telling developers, and without thinking twice about impact on loading times etc. All they track is $ earned on ads.

(It's sneaky because those scripts load async in background so it doesn't immediately feel like the website gets slower / more bloated. And of course, on a high end laptop the website feels "fine" compared to a cheap Android. Also, there's nothing developers can do about those requests, they're under full the control of all those 3rd-parties.)

Fun fact: "performance" in the parlance of adtech people means "ad campaign performance", not "website loading speed". ("What do you mean, performance decreased when we added more tracking?")

há 4 mesesdiscuss

"Everything is beta or deprecated."

há 4 mesesdiscuss

Semi-related, something that kind of irritates me is the usage of "as" in online newspapers headlines:

   "$Something-is-happening as $Something-else-is-happening"

It's usually written in a way that might be suggesting a direct link between the two things to a layman, but often there's none, other than the fact those two things are happening around the same time.

This can be disorienting when the reader is not familiar with the subject discussed, and lead them to wrong conclusions.