ghoul2

Why not implement it via the ISP? the isp just bills the customer 0.055eur per GB downstream, and remits the tax collected to the govt?

yes, somewhat sarcastic - but the point being, they DID seem to understand the stupidity, and thus the long-way around approach: ISP -> classifies the origin and reports to govt -> then presumably govt sends a tax notice to the origin?

I am a programmer cause thats what clicked in my head at 6-7 years old, with access to a ZX Spectrum and its manual. I didn't know one would eventually make a career of it.

Coding, computers, building whatever shit I wanted: that's the first thing that 'made sense' to me. And remained the only thing. What else am I gonna do?

Touches on a pet peeve re India: Selecting India locale changes ALL numbers to the lakhs/crores style separators (first separator is at the thousands' mark, then subsequent ones are just two decimal digits, not three: "4,567", but then "12,34,567", not "1,234,567")

Now the thing is, this convention is typically used in India for money, and possibly for stuff like population counts (though a lot of companies have converted to the western-style millions/billions seperators even for money) - but not in general for scientific/engineering stuff. One never says 1,23,456 kCal. But theres no way to define this in the locale.

So I end up just being on en-GB instead (en-US has that messed up mm-dd-yy thing, so is a nono).

I do something exactly like what the parent said, and my own view.

The question isn't about figuring out junior or senior. Its about the candidate being able to think thru a problem. They don't even necessarily have to be good at articulating their thought, I just want to see how (and if at all) they are splitting open the problem, walking thru it, figuring it out and then converging on something that (at least to them) feels like a reasonable solution.

If they get stuck, I am happy to help them out, without disrupting them or deviating them. If they go down a wrong rabbit hole, I may ask a leading question that helps them realize the issue and gets them back on track.

The bar isn't being set higher. Its just that there are a LOT of people interviewing (in my experience) unfortunately, who seem to be unable to model problems in their head, model how their code would work (mentally model the execution of the code), and reason things out. They have frequently coasted on blind copy paste from stackoverflow/help/tutorials. A huge fraction.

I also have been coding for a LONG time (older than you), and in the early days, this sort of conversation didn't have to be explicitly asked for, it happened naturally, like in every interview (where I was the one being interviewed) - cause you present me with a problem, and I can't help but be nerd-sniped by it. People who were candidates for tech jobs were there only cause they actually went into it with a bit of love/passion/skill.

But then it became a large industry, and most people who went into it were not 'hackers (problem solvers)' at all. They just liked the great pay. They may even be intelligent, but a lot were not capable as independent code owners. Still useful for basic crud with the right frameworks/etc. So thriving in enterprise applications, java/c# mega-platform/mega-framework domains.

no NFS?

I searched around when ubuntu did that 'unity' switch a LONG time ago, found Mint, and have been on it all this time. The team has repeatedly showed themselves to be calm, sober, sensible decision makers - I still use mint the same way I started. They are not prone to fits of 'redo everything', force this, snappify everything, simplify everything so that nothing can be done. Version to version, things just keep getting better, slightly, improving upon the previous version, without breaking what was working fine.

Linux has been daily driver for ever, I have never, in my 30+ years run windows as my main desktop (went from DOS directly to linux, slackware at that time). I hate things being forced on me, changing out from under - its very disruptive.

Linux Mint - just works. And has been for a long long time. Thanks to a small, brilliant, sensible, stable team.

I expect mainly because the coding models are trained to roleplay that process and don't work as well if they can't pretend to use git

The article doesn't cover this, but, a huge contrast is Torrent Power (Ahmedabad/Surat), which has consistently (over many decades, the ahmedabad power company is actually over 100 yrs old) maintained world-highest levels of electricity supply and service quality, distribution losses, billing efficient. Beating Tokyo, equaling Singapore.

Zero load shedding, on-site within 10 minutes typically in case of fault reports, ALL supply lines underground. Planned maintenance schedules communicated week+ in advance (rare, once every few years).

it was just

  10 PRINT "my first name"

on my zx spectrum, as a 6 year old. did me in. not even a loop. Just seeing that on our color TV (also new at the time, in my country).

I would say ALL of science, not just "much" of it. The difference between math and science is that in science, hard reality is the bottom line. No matter how good your model, how much data you have, what p values you get against simulations - hard reality wins everytime. Thats also why the so called soft "sciences" aren't sciences at all: they are not dealing with hard, objective reality at all.

Math + real world observation -> science

The traffic still has to flow from an india provider to the international leg and back via the domestic provider.

In anycase, then they should document it clearly that they have unacceptable insertion latency in india and the free plan is entirely unusable for india. Instead of advertising '10 pops in india!!'

I also believed that, but at least for India, this doesn't work in practice. Unless you atleast do the 25$ pro plan, cloudflare routes even india-to-india, hell, even mumbai-to-mumbai and aws_mumbai-to-cloudflare_mumbai traffic via Marsaille!! Not even Singapore. The unstated reason is that indian transit is expensive, though I fail to believe its cheaper to go from mumbai to marsaille and back to mumbai.

I am guessing the real reason (and at this point I am discounting incompetence - this has been true for years, so they are aware). You switch to the pro plan for the zone and everything now routes within india, 100s of milliseconds of latency saved.

Its even worse for workers and workers AI and embedding search. I found multiple seconds of latency, all vanishing the moment the zone is on pro plan (It seems R2, workers, workers AI - none of them are deployed in an India POP - unconfirmed, of course, cause there is no way to actually communicate with cloudflare).

Now 25$/month isn't much - though it does change calculations compared to "FREE!!" - but I would have liked to know this going in, instead of discovering this after having made the commitment. Seems like a deliberate dark pattern, to force people into the pro plan.

Shame, really - I love the CF stack(workers and DO are just so fantastic to build on), but these shenanigans, plus the utter refusal to provide ANY level of support, keep souring me on them.

This seems a worsening that seems to have started at Opus 4.8. When I (was forced to) switched from 4.7 to 4.7, I noticed that 4.8 had a very strong bias against viewing tool output or reading files. It ALWAYS wanted to 'grep' things. So for example, it would run the test suite and grep for 'PASS', thus completely missing the 4 tests that FAILed. Its bias is so strong, that it does this despite explicit instructions to the contrary, and continues to do so even after having noticed its own mistake, in the same (claude code) session.

For editing files, it again seems to prefer writing small python scripts, rather than read the file and rewrite it (even small files, like notes). This again causes it to constantly miss duplications, inconsistencies, etc.

And from 4.8 to 5, it doubled down on this. At this point not moderately-long-horizon task is getting done consistently, due to its pigeon-hole view of the workdir.

Anybody else notice this?

if sqldump isn't a backup, what is?

Exactly.

I am now looking at 9 to 10x the app code, for non trivial stuff. And this is not just the usual unit/integration/e2e suites too. Extensive deadcode, field use, code shape tests (ast walking) - god objects, 15-param helpers, wrapper-piled-upon-wrapper, badly named (a skill) functions/methods/objects, path-dependent artifacts, etc. There is no way I could have written all this manually.

It doesn't guarentee high quality OR reliability or readability or maintainability, but does reduce churn and makes me feel a bit more confident about deploying route A work product in prod.