ivanstojic

> If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said

It’s always this tired argument. “But it’s so much better than six months ago, if you aren’t using it today you are just missing out.”

I’m tired of the hype boss.

At the same time, I actually wouldn’t mind a world in which AI agents cost $5000 a month if that’s what companies want to charge.

I feel like at some level that would remove the possibility of making a “just as good as humans but basically free” arguments and move discussion in the direction that feels more productive: discussing real benefits and shortcomings of both. Eg, loss of context with agents vs HR costs with humans, etc…

I started reading the article and immediately got hit by the incorrect statement in the opening:

> If AI agents help each support employee handle 30% more tickets, that's like adding 30 new hires to a 100-person team, without the cost.

I think this is an oversimplification designed to make LLMs seem more profitable than they actually are.

TL;DR: on-call manages acute issues, documents steps taken, possibly farms out immediate work to subject matter experts. Rate on-call based on traces they leave behind. Separate on-call with same population, but longer rotation window handles fixes. Rate this rotation based on root cause reoccurrence and general ticket stats trendlines.

Longer reply:

I have on-call experience for major services (DynamoDB front door, CosmosDB storage, OCI LoadBalancer). Seen a lot of different philosophies. My take:

1. on-call should document their work step by step in tickets and make changes to operational docs as they go: a ticket that just has "manual intervention, resolved" after 3 hours is useless; documenting what's happening is actually your main job; if needed, work to analyze/resolve acute issues can be farmed out

2. on-call is the bus driver, shouldn't be tasked with handling long term fixes (or any other tasks beyond being on-call)

3. handover between on-calls is very important, prevents accidentally dropping the ball on resolving longer time horizon issues; handover meetings

Probably the most controversial one: separate rotation (with a longer window - eg. 2 week) should handle tasks that are RCA related or drive fixes to prevent reoccurrence

Managers should not be first tier on any pager rotation, if you wouldn't approve pull requests, you shouldn't be on the rotation (other than as a second tier escalation). Reverse should also hold: if you have the privilege to bless PRs, you should take your turn in the hot seat.

Thanks for being here over the years. The faces changed some, stayed the same some, but it’s good people and good conversation!

May you all have a happy new year, and many more!

I've been playing around with a limited PCB autorouter for mechanical keyboards. You feed it a KLE layout file, and it spits out a KiCad PCB, layout map for QMK firmware, and various SVG cuts for case machining.

The country lines on the globe are ridiculously out of date, and show countries that haven’t existed for 30 years.

How would this work against scrapers that are based on driven anpproved browser instances, eg. something like Selenium?

The length of a law doesn’t reduce its murkiness - in fact it makes it more pronounced. That is why (in the common law systems) there is so much discussing and re-discussing of topics that plenty of other cases already covered, using new approach angles. If you make laws longer and more complex, you only make them serve more those that have the budget to explore all branches of the decision tree.

What happens with eSIM devices?

My TTRPG group has been playing together for several years - on and off. We'd been mostly playing D&D 5e, even though we had members clamoring for other systems. After the WotC fiasco started blowing up, we finally bought a couple of Pathfinder 2e books, ran a few trial characters and one-shots. We are now in process of starting a new campaign entirely based on Pathfinder that we expect could take a couple of months to play out.

It really only took us one session to figure out the major mechanical systems in the gameplay, and a few we are still learning about. The major component remains the role playing experience which is the same, no matter which dice you throw to decide outcomes of situations.

I think Hasbro will soon realize that while the social impact of the name D&D is deep, the stickiness of the system is much lower than they gambled on. It's unlikely that any of my member group will soon buy anything new from them.