This is trading a good developer experience for a bad user experience. There are situations where it makes sense to force manual retry, but there's no reason to apply one universal rule to all possible situations. Lack of considering nuance for your situation is just intellectual laziness.
My point was that just throwing exponential backoffs at the retry problem is not a magic solution
I don't follow how being cautious about avoiding multiplicative layers of backoffs is trading a good developer experience for a bad user experience. The described situation is an awful user experience. Simply adding a retry and calling it a day sounds like the easy developer experience at the expense of the user experience
> The described situation is an awful user experience
Sure, the worst case scenario is. 99.9999% of the time, a transient error will actually just work on the first or second auto-retry and save your users the effort of paying attention and manually retrying things. This is especially prudent for background tasks where the failure may not be noticed right away; coming back to something fire-and-forget 30m later to see it never tried to finish is not a good user experience.
> My point was that just throwing exponential backoffs at the retry problem is not a magic solution
Nobody said it was. In fact, I suggested the exact opposite - a proper solution takes dev effort. Adhering to an iron rule of "just make them manually retry" is throwing your hands up and not even trying to solve the problem because laziness is convenient.
I responded to a post that merely linked to the Wikipedia article for exponential backoff (in response to "I'd be interested to hear other strategies in [protecting against retry storms]")
The original article is precisely about the degenerate case and the difficult work of dealing with it
> This approach works for transient or low-rate failures. However, during moderate or severe degradation, it becomes counterproductive. Aggressively retrying against an already struggling service increases load, accelerates failure, and amplifies retry traffic across upstream dependencies. What begins as a localized outage can quickly escalate into a stack-wide incident—ultimately degrading, or in the worst case, completely breaking, the end user experience.
Building from source is nowadays writing one sentence in a chat box. Your idea of extra work is either unbelievably lazy or perhaps outdated by a few years.
> 1. I have had them subtly mess with websites I am working on and I probably wasted multiple hours troubleshooting an issue that wasn't an issue
If your website is going to be used by people with an adblocker, discovering that an adblocker unintentionally breaks your website is a feature of using one, not a bug.
That is true, but does not help a person who is not building a given website.
I have had financial websites impacted by adblockers, which is why I stopped using them. (I do not work on all of the teams building the financial websites I use.)
3 clicks to disable an adblocker on a financial website seems like a trivial price to pay for mental wellbeing and tens of hours of your life not watching video ads, but you do you.
This is just my hypothesis, but I believe the language barrier is an issue. English is effectively a necessity for programming because real programming languages with ecoystems, error diagnostics, documentation, and useful articles/blogs/books are written in English. Japanese software developers know enough to get by, but they're still by-and-large insulated from the Anglosphere learning culture, where ideas and best practices rapidly propagate in the open. I'm not involved in hardware, but I'm guessing this is less of a barrier for hardware because hardware/documentation tends to be proprietary rather than open anyways, so whereas the Anglosphere gains a cumulative learning advantage from an open source + technical blogging culture in their fluent language, this does not manifest so much in hardware.
The Japanese economy is not, in any sense, destroyed. It doesn't get the infinite exponential growth unhinged economists want, but life on the ground is stable, wealth inequality is low, cost of living is low, average quality of life is very high. It is the perfect counterexample to the doctrine of chasing line go up.
For most of human history, children very much would appreciate inheriting crafted goods. The kind of rampant, commoditized consumerism where we routinely snub our noses at and throw away perfectly useful goods is a rather recent trend.
For most of human history, children and parents lived together or close by, and parents died earlier in the child's life. If your parents died and left you an heirloom dining room table, it was quite likely you just didn't have a table, and at most you lived a few blocks away, so acquiring it was easy.
I'm in my 40s. Both my parents are alive, and have a house full of stuff. I live in a different house, 3.5 hours away at highway speeds, full of different stuff. It doesn't really matter to me if my parent's dining room table is a nicely crafted table - I have a nice table, and I don't need two dining room tables. Getting it to my house is a tremendous hassle. Picking between them is a tremendous hassle. And then I still have all the other stuff - the hutch, the chairs, the couches, the beds - and only one sibling to split them with.
"Rampant, commoditization consumerism" didn't cause this, longevity, freedom of movement, and independent living caused this, and I wouldn't trade those away for an heirloom table.
My parents aren't leaving me any crafted goods when they pass.
They had beautiful, carved wooden dressers and wardrobes from their parents that they, naturally, did not appreciate and take care of, so they turned into garbage and were thrown away when they became too dilapidated to move to another building. They were replaced with the standard fare particle-board-and-laminate Ikea-type trash that I definitely do not want. It's falling apart already and they've only had it a few years.
If they had maintained the furniture they were given by their parents, I would love to keep them around in my home and give them to my children when I pass, too. But I don't want cheap, mass-produced garbage from my parents simply because it belonged to my parents.
For most of human history we were riddled with parasites and children would appreciate being less riddled with parasites.
My wife and I are both the youngest in our families, and all of our extended family uses us as a dumping ground for stuff to they're too guilty to throw away or donate. About 10% of the time it's something actually useful, 90% we already have a better version of whatever it is or simply don't want or need it.
No, I'm not taking my father in law's perfectly good TV. I have a TV, and the one he bought was mediocre at best when it was new.
Here's a secret. If you have family members that you know struggle to throw stuff away, and they offer it to you, just take if their hands and dispose of it yourself.
> No, I'm not taking my father in law's perfectly good TV. I have a TV, and the one he bought was mediocre at best when it was new.
Look, I'm not saying there aren't reasons for it. Obviously the economic value of a TV is now low. If you're posting on HN, chances are you can afford a new TV in a day's work, which may be less overhead than storing a TV for when you or someone else might need it in the future. At the same time, this is a historical abnormality. A television is a miracle device made with extremely advanced, relatively speaking, technology. 50 years ago, it would have been insane to snub your nose at that. To you it's a disposable good, to an older generation there is no reason to view it as such (and, I'd argue, this cultural value of disposability that is being forged is extremely bad and not actually sustainable for our society long-term).
All very true, but doesn't change the fact that my dad's house is more than 1000 sqft bigger than mine and when he goes I will have literally no place to put his stuff.
The point of the article is that most of what's being left is low economic value. When my great aunt died she had a collection of painted glass/plaster birds (not by any famous artist or anything, just mass produced stuff) that had been sitting in display cabinets for decades and nobody wanted.
It isn't an artifact of modernity that people don't want stuff like that. And as for stuff that is an artifact of modernity, the generation entering their 80s today lived through the widespread adoption of color TV, the moon landings, the space shuttle, cable TV, mainframes, PCs, CDs, VHS, DVDs, the internet, cellphones, smartphones, and freaking microwaves, never mind all the advancements in autos. You'd think someone with that lived experience would understand that times change and their kids might not want all their old stuff for the same reason it's been sitting unused in their garage/basement for decades.
My diagnosis is it was boomers who wrote the script for "The Goonies", specifically the line "Goonies never say die!". They came up in an era where rampant consumerism was encouraged and even directly subsidized as a political policy, hell it was how we beat the commies! Hard to be a good consumer past a certain point if you're too aware of your own mortality.
Well for most of human history if you inherited something you inherited the building that contained that stuff. And the industry around it that used that stuff.
These days the inheritance will include mostly junk. Old, worn out, low quality items, clothes, furniture, appliances, etc. Nobody says no to the one thing they need but can't afford, they say no to having yet another item they have no need for and its only value could be sentimental but otherwise it's a burden, one other thing among many to store somewhere, or throw out/donate/sell.
Do you need and can afford to keep somewhere another 6 creaky chairs, a big worn out dining table, bags of old clothes that don't fit anyone, outdated and broken electronics that probably don't work anymore, and so on? Even memories like pictures and videos are sometimes too much. They used to be a couple of photo albums, half with people you wouldn't even recognize, now there are TB of digital ones.
> That said, I was not feeling much of an accomplishment, rightfully so. I used to enjoy the learning and the struggle that came with it.
> Yes it does suck that the joy we had while building has been sucked out of us
> For my hobby projects tho, I will continue to YOLO it and build stuff fast without necessarily knowing about the details.
I don't understand this conclusion. LLMs sucked the joy out of it, didn't feel rewarding, you're forced to use them at work, so you decide... just keep doing it at home, too? Why not actually learn to build a proper PCB knowing you can do much better than this horrible (despite being dead-simple) board that only got there with the help of your expert colleague's guidance anyways? Don't succumb to utter laziness and deny yourself the satisfaction of learning new skills, that's letting the thing rot your brain out worse than any TV ever did.
You are right. What I meant in my conclusion was more about : "I will use these tools to generate parts of a project I don't necessarily care about." I already started learning about proper PCB design, and I am actively fighting against choosing an LLM instead of grasping a concept fully. It's something I am struggling with, but all this is new for most of us. Hoping I will find a good balance at the end. Thanks for your remarks :)
Fair enough. I think there is great value to using LLMs to assist in learning new hobbies, helping lessen the friction, and doing research. I just think it's sad if you let them replace your thinking completely instead of augmenting it. Cheers for the human-written blog post, I did enjoy reading it.
> I think there is great value to using LLMs to assist in learning new hobbies, helping lessen the friction, and doing research
Claude (web) saved me a ton of money with a new hobby. I was curious about astrophotography and had a budget to fill in any missing pieces from my existing photography kit. The conclusion was basically: "get a $20 intervalometer and a wall-wart battery[1]. The lenses you've got are fine, the tripod you've got is fine, and hey good news, Jupyter and Venus are near conjunction so if you can find somewhere dark where you can shoot to the west, you can get a pretty cool timelapse this weekend"
Later on also provided some rough guidelines for the partial lunar eclipse that resulted in some pretty amazing photos.
Since then I have been doing a bit of research on getting a real mount, so that initial budget will probably get used, but it'll be a) for kit that I genuinely don't have yet and b) spent after I've already confirmed that I thoroughly enjoy going out and photographing the stars for hours and then stitching all those photos into timelapses or other neat stacks.
[1] I'm not sure what the right name is for this. One end is battery-shaped but has a wire that plugs into a wall-wart instead of having to switch batteries. I had an existing 500-Wh 120V battery bank thing and it was more than enough to run the camera for 6 hours.
Your post and the link to KiCadRoutingTools is going to result in me finishing a project I started 6 months ago and have just let sit and linger because, like you point out, it was only the boring parts left. Fable found a bit of a showstopper in my design yesterday (an LDO that was right near its limits) and suggested a replacement, Opus filled in all of the missing pull-up/pull-down resistor values, double-checked all of the decoupling caps, and then did floor planning on the PCB side. I just installed KiCadRoutingTools and am getting close to happy with the state of the board and will likely be ordering them tomorrow!
The "pragmatists" who get excited developing a prototype for a week before they realize they will never be able to ship something anyone else will use because each trivial change becomes exponentially more difficult for the LLM to implement and completely impossible for the "pragmatist" to reason about, with every new commit liable to break something else.
Still waiting for this revolution of amazing 10x software! It's been 10 months since Everything Changed in November, surely the 10x pragmatists could have leveraged their effective 8 years of development time? Or maybe we'll move the goalposts again and say that actually, Everything Changed with Astra, we'll just need to wait another three months?
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