aeldidi

I've had better experience with LLMs translating than any bespoke translation tool, oddly enough. LLMs seemingly have a very good handle on regional varieties. As an example, I've never found a good translator for Lebanese/Syrian Arabic dialects, but ChatGPT was able to easily translate for me, even getting right some lesser used rural accent quirks which I didn't even know how to translate (similar to something like "y'all" in english).

To be fair, I wasn't using it in the way the parent comment described, for me I said: "this person speaking Lebanese/Syrian Arabic said something that sounded like [try my best to replicate the sentence]. What did they most likely mean?" and got a pretty much spot-on answer.

I wonder if this ability translates to other languages, but I wouldn't be able to tell. My Arabic is "good enough" to tell that the translations I got were good, but I'd be interested to here from someone who knows more if, for example fuzhounese translation is any good.

The withpersona.com URL seems to return 404.

The Acid2 test is the benchmark you’re thinking of, for anyone not aware: acid2.acidtests.org

There's an odd trend with these sorts of posts where the author claims to have had some transformative change in their workflow brought upon by LLM coding tools, but also seemingly has nothing to show for it. To me, using the most recent ChatGPT Codex (5.3 on "Extra High" reasoning), it's incredibly obvious that while these tools are surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-scoped tasks, they immediately fall apart when faced with the types of things that are actually difficult in software development and require non-trivial amounts of guidance and hand-holding to get things right. This can still be useful, but is a far cry from what seems to be the online discourse right now.

As a real world example, I was told to evaluate Claude Code and ChatGPT codex at my current job since my boss had heard about them and wanted to know what it would mean for our operations. Our main environment is a C# and Typescript monorepo with 2 products being developed, and even with a pretty extensive test suite and a nearly 100 line "AGENTS.md" file, all models I tried basically fail or try to shortcut nearly every task I give it, even when using "plan mode" to give it time to come up with a plan before starting. To be fair, I was able to get it to work pretty well after giving it extremely detailed instructions and monitoring the "thinking" output and stopping it when I see something wrong there to correct it, but at that point I felt silly for spending all that effort just driving the bot instead of doing it myself.

It almost feels like this is some "open secret" which we're all pretending isn't the case too, since if it were really as good as a lot of people are saying there should be a massive increase in the number of high quality projects/products being developed. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I really do feel like I'm going crazy here.

I'm becoming concerned with the rate at which major software systems seem to be failing as of late. For context, last year I only logged four outages that actually disrupted my work; this quarter alone I'm already on my fourth, all within the past few weeks. This is, of course, just an anecdote and not evidence of any wider trend (not to mention that I might not have even logged everything last year), but it was enough to nudge me into writing this today (helped by the fact that I suddenly had some downtime). Keep in mind, this isn't necessarily specific to this outage, just something that's been on my mind enough to warrant writing about it.

It feels like resiliency is becoming a bit of a lost art in networked software. I've spent a good chunk of this year chasing down intermittent failures at work, and I really underestimated how much work goes into shrinking the "blast radius", so to speak, of any bug or outage. Even though we mostly run a monolith, we still depend on a bunch of external pieces like daemons, databases, Redis, S3, monitoring, and third-party integrations, and we generally assume that these things are present and working in most places, which wasn't always the case. My response was to better document the failure conditions, and once I did, realize that there was many more than we initially thought. Since then we've done things like: move some things to a VPS instead of cloud services, automate deployment more than we already had, greatly improve the test suite and docs to include these newly considered failure conditions, and generally cut down on moving parts. It was a ton of effort, but the payoff has finally shown up: our records show fewer surprises which means fewer distractions and a much calmer system overall. Without that unglamorous work, things would've only grown more fragile as complexity crept in. And I worry that, more broadly, we're slowly un-learning how to build systems that stay up even when the inevitable bug or failure shows up.

For completeness, here are the outages that prompted this: the AWS us-east-1 outage in October (took down the Lightspeed R series API), the Azure Front Door outage (prevented Playwright from downloading browsers for tests), today’s Cloudflare outage (took down Lightspeed’s website, which some of our clients rely on), and the Github outage affecting basically everyone who uses it as their git host.

Yep, this sums it up perfectly for me. I tend to stay away from the extra stuff since the quality is hit or miss (more often hit than miss to be fair), but really there’s something special about having something like it available. I think as a freely available package Nextcloud is immensely valuable to me. I never say anything bad about it without mentioning that in the same breath nowadays.

That sounds really promising, maybe my family would be better suited to something like that.

I will say though, Nextcloud is almost painless when it comes to management. I’ve had one or two issues in the past, but their “all in one” docker setup is pretty solid, I think. It’s what I’ve been using for the last year or so.

I use my Nextcloud as a general file storage thing, I just emphasized the photo aspect because that’s my family’s main use case.

I have heard of Immich though, perhaps I owe it an honest try someday.

Nextcloud is something I have a somewhat love-hate relationship with. On one hand, I've used Nextcloud for ~7 years to backup and provide access to all of my family's photos. We can look at our family pictures and memories from any computer, and it's all private and runs mostly without any headaches.

On the other hand, Nextcloud is so far from being something like Google Docs, and I would never recommend it as a general replacement to someone who can't tolerate "jank", for lack of a better word. There are so many small papercuts you'll notice when using it as a power user. Right off the top of my head, uploading large files is finicky, and no amount of web server config tinkering gets it to always work; thumbnail loading is always spotty, and it's significantly slower than it needs to be (I'm talking orders of magnitude).

With all that said, I'm so grateful for Nextcloud since I don't have a replacement, and I would prefer not having all our baby and vacation pictures feeding some big corporation's AI. We really ought to have a safe, private place to store files in 2025 that the average person can wrap their head around. I only wish my family took better advantage of it, since I'm essentially providing them with unlimited storage.

There's some truth to this too honestly. At $JOB we prototyped one of our projects in Rust to evaluate the language for use, and only started using Docker once we chose to move to .NET, since the Rust deployment story was so seamless.

Yeah that's becoming increasingly true. I guess it really depends on what your setup is.

This is a really nice insight. I think years of linux have kind of numbed me to this. I've spent so much time on systems which use systemd now that going back to an Alpine Linux box always takes me a second to adjust, even though I know more or less how to do everything on there. I think docker's done a lot to help with that though since the interface is the same everywhere. A typical setup for me now is to have the web server running on the host and everything else behind docker, since that gives me the benefit of using the OS's configuration and security updates for everything exposed to the outside world (firewalls, etc).

Another thing about packaging. I've started noticing myself subconsciously adding even a trivial Dockerfile for most of my projects now just in case I want to run it later and not hassle with installing anything. That way it gives me a "known working" copy which I can more or less rely on to run if I need to. It took a while for me to get to that point though