๐๏ธ - 2025-11-02 - ๐ 4
The thing I value most in a fellow programmer or developer is a rather ill defined and loose concept of "good taste".
"Good taste" is a very subjective thing, which encompasses a lot of stuff - it can be all kinds of things, from naming things consistently, choosing a reasonable level of abstraction, using tools in ways where they work well, all the way to not using tabs but spaces, and having a favourite text editorยน.
One side effect of using AI to program I think I have observed recently happens during code review.
Sometimes, when doing code review, I will see some solution that I don't like or understand, and I will ask why it was done in that way, and not in [my preferred] way.
Usually this sparks a discussion: the author will "defend" their choice of solution, perhaps pointing out some good reasons that I have overlooked (as a reviewer, you are usually not as deep into the code and problem space as the author, so this happens more often than you'd like/think) or some drawback of the alternative I am proposing that I didn't think of.
It is like the IKEA effect, where if you have put something together, however shabbily, you tend to get more attached to it.
I, as a reviewer, learn about how they are thinking, what made them get to the solution they implemented, and hopefully my questions give them some different perspectives on what might be worthwhile to consider.
Regardless of whether we agree on keeping the current solution or changing it, we both learn something about the code, the solution, and each other's way of thinking. Either of us, or both, expand our idea a little bit about what our shared concept of "good taste" is.
However, recently, I think I have observed this not happening. Instead of engaging in a discussion of the solution, the author will just say "Ok, I will change it", and ask their AI agent to rewrite the code in the way I suggested.
Since I am always right and always knows better than everybody else, that's of course always great.
Except... is it, now? I don't learn anything about why they made those "wrong" choices, and they don't learn why they should have done differently in the first place. And if my suggestion was bad, for some reason or another, my feedback doesn't get challenged and, perhaps, rejected. Sometimes a third solution might have emerged from our discussion.
When you think about a solution and implement it, you feel some sort of responsibility for - and maybe even pride in - in your choices. If you just had an AI minion do it for you, and it can redo it easily, however big the change might be, you don't care.
But somebody has to care.
Somebody has to care about solving the problem in a reasonable way, about making things that last, about quality.
Somebody has to have good taste.
AI doesn't.
"Ah, but that's where I as a human manager of AI agents come into the picture," I hear someone answer. Yes, perhaps, right now, or in the beginning, but will you keep doing that? Will your taste improve? Or will you become lazy and just accept what slop the AI spits out with less and less discrimination, as time goes by? Will you hone your skills and become better at what you do? I don't think so. The feedback loop isn't there, the gradual improvement of our common understanding of good taste is lost.
I don't want to be a manager of AI agents, and I think you don't want to either. Not if you want to develop good taste, learn, and become better at what you do.
Yes, a wise man once said that laziness is one of the great virtues of programmers - I think I'll add that it doesn't mean mental laziness, but rather laziness expressing itself in avoiding spending time doing repetitive and unchallenging tasks.
ยน While I prefer Emacs, it doesn't matter which one. (Although I will deduct points for having an IDE as your favourite, of course.)
๐ค๏ธ - 2025-08-23
Monday and Tuesday this week The Smashing Pumpkins played Vega in Copenhagen. I managed to buy (expensive) tickets to the Tuesday concert.
Myrkur was the support act, which at first glance seemed a little odd, genre-wise - but in the introduction of a song, she mentioned that Billy Corgan had helped write it, so that gave away the connection.
Smashing Pumpkins played quite a lot of songs from Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness, which of course was well received by the audience - it is hard to deny that they are some of the best songs by the band, and from that time.
The sound was okay to good, sometimes a little muddled, I found.
They showed that they can still make noise, especially Bodies was pretty thundering. There were also more pretty moments, like the quiet parts of Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans.
Surprising me - and maybe a lot of the audience - was a cover in the middle of the set, "Take My Breath Away"! Corgan sounds like Corgan, and that is not a very crooner-like voice, so that was a fun interlude.
We also got a quite heavy, thumping version of Ava Adore, which was nice.
At one point Billy Corgan explained that he had visited the free town Christiania earlier in the day, "We played there in 1992, do you remember that, James?", to which James Iha replied: "No, I don't" - heh :-)
After a good concert the band left the stage and did not return for any encores. Not that they were needed, but that took me a bit by surprise.
It was fun to see such a big band in such a relatively small venue (audience ~1550), and nice to see that they play some of the oldies currently.
๐๏ธ - 2025-08-10 - ๐ 2
Yesterday the Debian project released version 13 called trixie. I have been running it on my laptop since May, with the only problem being GnuPG.
After the release finished yesterday, I upgraded my two tiny virtual private servers - an arm64 at Hetzner and an amd64 at Akamai Linode - which went without a hitch.
Today it was time for my hat shelf home server, here are my notes:
- On the VPS's ping as me stopped working until I installed the package
linux-sysctl-defaults which was not installed for some reason.
- The format for sources for apt has changed, easily updated with
apt modernize-sources, for my local package reposity I had to fill in the Signed-By: line manually.
- On the hat shelf server I had at some point removed the
postgresql package, not sure why, so it didn't offer to upgrade the PostgreSQL cluster from version 15 to 17. Easily fixed by installing the package. It's a dump/restore so it took a while (~30 GB on disk).
- The
isc-dhcp-server package is running out of support, so I have to look into replacing it on my local network with something else. Works for now.
- Dovecot took some work to get going, I had to update
auth-system.conf.ext, 20-imap.conf, and 10-mail.conf - TLS/SSL and password related keywords had changed, and also how to say that email is stored in mdbox format, and I had to explicitly comment out the mail_inbox_path default line to allow mail to be delivered.
- The configuration of bind had to be modified as I used views and a default include outside a view was not allowed.
- Upgrading PostgreSQL did not do the materialized views I use for free text search, so I had to
REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW search_index; a number of times.
- Recompiled lantern, illuminant, sixpence, and sundial to make them run. Only had to adjust bogus version limits in .cabal-files. Happy about the
update_* scripts I have!
- feedbase-web runs, but can't compile, due to the Spock library, it seems, so I will have to rewrite it to use twain instead.
- Had to install a newer version of weewx, because the version I was using complained about some Python
six.codes library missing.
Pretty smooth sailing, well done everybody contributing to Debian!
๐ฃ๏ธ - 2025-07-30 - ๐ 1
I have closed my Microsoft LinkedIn account.
If you want to get in contact with me, my website is where to find me. Hosted on my own computer, using my own software - email, nntp, xmpp, ActivityPub welcome.
See you around!
๐ ๏ธ - 2025-07-20 - ๐ 1
Let's say you for some reason have to reboot your NFS server, and after it has started up again, some of the clients can't mount the file systems they usually mount. Others can.
If you then check dmesg on the NFS server and you see messages like this:
rpc-srv/tcp: nfsd: got error -104 when sending 20 bytes - shutting down socket
rpc-srv/tcp: nfsd: got error -32 when sending 20 bytes - shutting down socket
and you start searching for those error messages without finding anything enlightening... The answer might be: DNS!
We had this with an NFS server at work, and it turned out that it came up after reboot with DNS servers - configured specifically for the network interface?! - that were not able to resolve the hostname from the IP-address of some of the clients.
Yes, the venerable "reverse DNS must match NFS client hostname"-problem.
It took us a while to hone in on as those error message did not scream rDNS to me. However, as soon as we fixed the DNS resolver configuration, everything started working again.
I dislike the meme "It's always DNS", it's in the same category as "RAID is not backup" and "The hardest problems in computer science are [software development challenges that are not computer science]" - but this time, it was DNS.
