Many devs get a productivity boost from using ChatGPT (,…) or Copilot in their day-to-day jobs, and this is generally fine unless organizational compliance concerns make this a problem. So, should devs be able to augment their capabilities using ChatGPT during (remote) tech interviews? Here are a few ways recruiting is changing, based on my observations while making several lower-budget hires over the past few months. Take Homes. I’ve never been a fan of Take Homes (IMO it’s rude to ask for several hours of a candidate’s time), but they are effectively useless now that ChatGPT exists, unless you plan to repeat similar vetting in person at a later stage in the interview process.

I read a post on HN about somebody who used ChatGPT to invent the rules for a new human language. I thought it would be interesting to see if ChatGPT could also be used to create a new programming language. I won’t bore you with too much of the dialog, since we’ve all seen impressive exchanges so far. This post summarizes what I learned about working with ChatGPT to do a task like this.

Recent versions of Ubuntu turned on a particularly annoying feature: intrusive system notifications that warn of the pending update of a Snap managed application. Here’s an example: Aside from this notification apparently not being tied properly into the KDE notification system (it doesn’t show in the list of recent notifications that’s available from the system tray notifications widget, and so therefore seems to be using a different notification system), this highlights a particularly annoying (and anti-user) line of thinking by the Snap development team.

I bought a Unihertz Atom XL in early 2022, aiming to find a small phone with a long battery life. I wanted a phone that was less obvious in my pocket, was easier to hold and navigate with one hand, and, I hoped, would be a little more utilitarian and a little less addictive. There are almost no Android phones out there under 5", and so very quickly I ended up browsing Unihertz’s catalog, and I settled on the Atom XL.

The seemingly tranquil river, over one kilometer wide, rounds a bend with increased urgency and plunges dramatically into an 85 meter deep fault marking the edge of the prehistoric volcanic plateau. Downstream, the Pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, ancient forests beaten back by apparently endless pasture and fields, among the greatest agricultural expanses on the planet. A thousand kilometers upstream, a mountainous region near Brazil’s coast. The same fault is exploited by the 2nd largest hydroelectric dam in the world, just 25 kilometers away on a different river, the construction of which in the 1970s flooded the world’s largest waterfall by volume, Guaíra Falls, which was dynamited for good measure once safely submerged by the reservoir.

“Internationalization” is, roughly speaking, geek-speak for the process of supporting multiple languages on a website. For a company doing business in multiple countries, it needs to be done - otherwise you’ll risk losing the attention of people who don’t speak your development team’s native language. There are standards defined that specify what language to serve a website in to a particular user. So why do some of the world’s biggest sites get it wrong?

The internet is not as good as it used to be. Information is siloed into walled gardens like Facebook, Nextdoor, and so on. Google results are saturated with SEO spam. Wordpress is a mess that keeps on chugging through inertia; Medium, while clean, is behind a paywall; Reddit and Twitter are increasingly hiding their value behind registration and/or paywalls; Substack is fine if you want to be paid, but is yet another commercial enterprise that will take articles offline if and when it goes boom.

When you search online for lists of recommended routers to run DD-WRT on, Asus comes up frequently, even in non-SEO-driven listicles. This is quite frustrating, because for the past few years Asus have blocked (most) third party firmware from being installed. When you try to upload firmware using the admin UI, you get a message that says roughly “for compliance reasons, we do not permit third party firmware”. That’s not entirely true though, as they do permit the third party Asus Merlin firmware to be installed; when I asked their tech support if they endorsed or recommended it, they said no, and told me to revert to stock firmware if I’d installed it (which I had, as an experiment.

Road engineers in Costa Rica do not worry about snow and ice. Whereas highway builders in the US might dynamite a chunk of a mountain to provide a road that maintains a reasonable gradient as it climbs, the road engineers of the tropics are happy to run straight upslope if there’s no good alternative. Asphalt was laid surprisingly recently on some relatively important routes; the Costanera, for example, which is the coastal “highway” that connects Jaco to Paso Canoas at the Panamanian border, was only paved in the early 2000s.

People Love Institutions Institutions are comforting and predictable. They bring some measure of order to the world, even when that order is rife with inefficiency. When we moved to Costa Rica, one of the surprising differences that we encountered was that there is no postal delivery service. Because there’s no postal service, there was never any need for mailing addresses, and so houses and businesses are often referenced by landmark. I shit you not, we visited a freight importer’s office whose address was “200 meters west of the Firestone”.