magnio

> Who's checking?

Yeah I sympathize with people saying software developers should not be called engineers too.

> On Mac, some command-line tools included with macOS or the Xcode Command Line Tools (including curl, git, python3, ruby, perl, and openssl) check certificates against /etc/ssl/cert.pem. For certificates that chain to a root CA certificate in this file, these tools don't check Apple's block or whether the certificate has been revoked. This file will be updated in a future macOS update. If you use these tools and don't want to wait for the update, you can remove root CA certificates from the file.

What a clusterfuck

Uhm, disallowing third-party stores, sure, but you draw a line that allows a non-jailbroken and updated device to be able to access company data? How is the lack of third-party app stores gonna prevent someone from sending sensitive data through the Mail app or to iCloud? Shouldn't company devices be managed with MDM to begin with?

If it gets better and better for the next 40 or so years, will your career exist?

I'm a bit bumped when I first saw pi is moving from bash to codemode and also adding MCP, since I thought that loses the purity and simplicity of the "use bash for everything" philosophy. However, after reading more about it, I realized codemode is just a slightly enhanced version of bash: more complex, sure, but likely more robust, secure, and efficient. For those who, like me, don't get the point of this change, here is how I understand it.

The first tool execution runtime in harnesses are direct tool calls with JSON or XML, such as the Read and Edit tools. As an escape hatch, we have Bash tool that allows arbitrary code execution on the host running the agent. The downsides of using bash (on the host) as the main tool execution runtime are:

- Syntax and obvious errors only surface at runtime

- Unergonomic orchestration of parallel and background tasks

- Verbose command output cluttering context

- Dependent on the host environment, packages versions, etc.

- No security measures by default.

To me the last point is the biggest inherent weakness, usually mitigated by creating a dedicated unprivileged user or running bash in a sandbox.

Note that direct tool calling is kind of the polar opposite on these points: syntax errors are caught early, orchestration can be done with some wrapping tools, command output is controlled, and most importantly they are more sandboxed. On the flip side, they obviously have way less power, necessitating Bash tool in the first place.

Codemode is the middle ground between these two extremes. It actually can be derived simply by one idea: what if we replace Bash by another language that can be checked for obvious errors, i.e. type checked?

Everything else falls out from there:

- Any language would do, but I think TypeScript fits the balance between safety, speed, conciseness, and popularity in training data.

- If we use TypeScript, might as well run it in a sandbox as JS runtimes have been designed with this in mind for 20 years

- Orchestration comes for free from the JS runtime. It's not more powerful, just more ergonomic.

- Since the tools are controlled by the harness and not dependent on the host, cloud agent becomes easier.

- With this in place, MCP are not very different from a tool provided to this sandboxed runtime.

Overall I find the benefits compelling enough, but we'll see if the heavily-RLed models these days will use it effectively.

The more I read these ass Claude Opus writings the more I believe AGI is further away from us.

I find it's surprising that people doubt the effectiveness of Pangram when I feel like its job has gotten easier ever since Claude models got RLHF to death with its bizarre punchy negatives and tortured analogies, making AI writing much more noticeable than the GPT 4o era.

> He described waking up to thirty PRs every morning, each one pulled overnight by someone's AI, and needing to make snap judgment calls on every single one. The temptation to delegate the review itself to an AI was enormous. But, as he put it: "at that point, what am I still doing here?".

It's so funny and somber to see programmers having an existential crisis when they get a glimpse of what work is like for business managers, the demographics many programmers detest.

I am also guilty of holding the business majors in contempt back in college, and now here I am, doing what they are doing in office in a much more indifferent and unenjoyable manner. At least I don't get into trouble with HR from calling my agents a stupid fuck (yet).

I used Better Auth for my mobile app backend. It works okayish. My biggest complaints are the OpenAPI specification gets little care, as it mainly caters for JS frontend, and breaking changes in patch version are more common than most packages.

I saw on Twitter that in an ML course at Tsinghua University, one of the tests asks students to write quizzes that fail the most LLM models as possible.

What if we create a benchmark that works like this and assigns ELO scores? Models fight head-to-head by writing a question, a bug, or an incomplete implementation, which the opponent has to answer, fix, or finish.

i like the COPY and logical replication improvements. Currently I back up my PG database with a sidecar Databasus instance that is heavier than my entire backend + DB + Caddy!

(LLM writing rant below)

---

> That alone tells you something: Users had a real need, and the ecosystem filled the gap.

> This sounds straightforward, but it solves a real operational problem.

> None of these change the world. All of them make day-to-day data workflows better.

> The easy thing to do here is list planner changes and call it done. But the more useful takeaway is this: Postgres keeps getting better at recognizing the shape of common queries and doing less unnecessary work.

> [Proceed to list planner changes]

If Orwell were alive today, he might declare himself illiterate in English and learn Klingon just to avoid having to read these.

Yeah, the big 3 cloud markup is so high that most VPS providers can hike price 10x and they are still cheaper.

Heck, mise has an HTTP backend that can install binaries from any URL. I use this to manage Atlassian CLI, whose official Windows binary is not on winget.