CategoryMisc

The METR study is wild! It’s methodoloty is unlike any other. While previous studies went ‘wide’, the METR study went ‘deep’, focusing on 16 developers (instead of hundreds or thousands), but deeply analyzing the effect on AI on those 16 developers in a way ‘wide’ studies could not. METR first identified 16 developers who were maintaining high quality...

If you have 3 apples, you take away 2, how many apples do you have? 1 of course! But then again, you took away 2, so therefore you should have 2. The question is ambiguous depends on how you interpret the words ‘have’ and ‘take-away’. Compare that to something like this: def apples_you_have (total_apples, apples_you_took_away): return total_apples - apples_you_took_away...

I was “inspired”by this post. In it, Philip Su, an E9 (Distinguished Engineer) from Facebook explains how he progressed in his career, which includes an impressive stint at Microsoft that saw him promoted every year for 8 years straight. If you have that kind of accelerant so early in your career — you’re bound to be “Successful”, or at least air-quotes...

In Software delivery there’s a famous saying: Good, Fast, or Cheap — pick 2. There’s always trade-offs. Fast and cheap can be measured easily. How much money and how much time are very simple questions to answer. You might think it’s expensive, or slow — but the objective hours and dollars are easy measurements. It’s not the same for ‘Good’ though...

While doing programming challenges in Advent of Code, I came across an interesting behavior of LLMs in coding assistants and decided to write about it to clear my thoughts. First some background. Advent of Code is a series of daily coding challenges released during the season of advent (the period just before Christmas). Each challenge has 2 parts, and you must solve part 1 before the part 2 is...

We’ve all seen the “tiny gains post”. How if you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.” Well…… First of all, 1% isn’t ‘tiny’. I know a few bankers who’d sacrifice their first born for a daily increment of 1% on their portfolio. After all, how many bankers do you...

All architects know what’s best practice, but only good architects know when to use them. I’ve been in plenty conversations where someone goes “we should do X because it’s best practice” — and act that the discussion ended. Best practice is what works for most people, most of the time. It isn’t something that works for everyone all of the time —...

It’s been 6 years now since the big sayakenahack debacle. I won’t go into details on what happened, but … I thought it’d be nice to take a stroll down memory lane with some pictures 🙂

On September 2021, malaysiakini reported on a website called mysppl, that was selling personal data online. The site used previous breached data on Malaysians, and was selling it to anyone with a credit card (or Grabpay account). Note to aspiring criminals.. the last thing you want when doing something illegal like selling personal data ,is to tie that back to Bank Account by accepting payments...

`I’ve been playing guitar for over 25 years — but I still suck at it. I spent my first ever bonus I got (~RM2,000) on a brand new Norman Guitar, and now I’m the proud owner of multiple expensive guitars and amps … but all that expensive gear hasn’t improved my playing one iota. Even though I used religiously change my guitar strings every month. The number of years...