Maybe, this is not the best day for the federated code forge community...
]]>The programmer has a theory of the system, developed in concert with that system. That theory is a mental model, a map of the system, problem space, and how it might react to changes in the future.
This is how I've been thinking about the value I bring to the company for a long time. Mental model of the problem space, simplified model for the software solving the problem, and the ability to translate between them. Many times I saw how the engineering team has the best understanding of business at the technical level. And how adding new requirements for an existing product requires rethinking the model.
On a surface level you can't tell much difference between a commit of a senior and a new team member. That's what makes people think that LLMs are a threat to the craft of programming. But there's no substitute to the deep understanding of a system that people posses. LLMs has to rebuild the context in every session, it's different every time and never complete.
]]>main()).
This is mostly common sense, and I've seen more specific and more generic versions of this design many times. I never meant to write it down, as there's no novelty in clean code layout, until I made a habbit of explaining this to LLMs over and over.
]]>Reviewing slop is no fun. That guy sure saved some of his time creating this pull request. Or did he just transfer it to me?
I see people who have no business building software produce more code than I can review. And then they me ask questions about their code that a junior developer wouldn't.
]]>respond, and get_credentials.I'll put it here: derangedpirawd@gmail.com
]]>This clicked with Martin Fowler's observations on pair-programming with LLM.
From my personal experience, I can see parallels between outsourcing and LLMs. Outsourcers can be good or not technically, but they will never build enough domain-knowledge of an in-house team.
Company can gain short-term boost in productivity by using an external team. Losing a chance to have people who deeply understand the system few years down the road.
Or they can acquire some technical debt by rushing developers in a crunch. Bad code is nothing new.
But now the choice is made not by management but by individual contributors. They can go slow, using LLM to validate and challenge ideas and approaches, and building the system (along with their domain knowledge) themselves. Or they can go fast by letting LLMs go wild. Of course, there's a middle ground and we're yet to discover the golden spot.
]]>The experience is extremely frustrating, and many times I wonder if I should have just write it from scratch myself. But at this point sunken cost fallacy kicks in and I force myself through cleaning up the mess.
I've done plenty of cleanups through my career, and it's never fun. But this is the only way to keep my pants on.
]]>One thing I took away as a Staff Engineer, is that I gotta up my game in specs, tests, and constraints when working with code generation. So far I was inspecting/rewriting the code and guiding the model. The doc suggests that building a verifiable test harness first gives better results. I'm not quite sure, though, how is it supposed to mix with explorative work, where you learn as you go, and you don't know where you gonna land.
]]>fetch.
That I can't fetch pages through iframes.
All for security reasons.
I can't fetch HTML on the server side, because with the current AI crawling environment, plenty of platforms block it.
The bookmarklet allows running arbitrary Javascript, and works in practice, but Safari doesn't let adding bookmarklets to the toolbar. There's a workaround with favourites toolbar, but then you gotta have another horizontal row for just this toolbar.
Basically, the only technically feasible way to reformat arbitrary website the way I want it to look is to make a browser extension.
Something I wouldn't tackle before Codex.
I learned that you can make an extension for Chrome and Firefox by adding a standard manifest.json, which is pretty reasonable approach.
Of course, to make it available to others you need to have a paid extension marketplace account, and go through the hoops of review and what not.
Then I learned that for Safari extension, the same functionality involves like 20 files, mostly scaffolded by XCode.
A ton of bullshit, and signing, and I managed to have a Safari extension as well.
The way extension works:
.dev top-level domain is HSTS-preloaded.
It means that .dev websites can only be accessed through HTTPS (not HTTP).
HTTPS is cool and everything, but there's a side effect.
Which comes from using VPN, and internal resources.
These days, I only consider Let's Encrypt for SSL certificates. Unfortunately, my DNS provider doesn't expose API access, which makes DNS-01 challenge automation impossible. That leaves me with only HTTP-01 challenge, which means I need to have my host exposed to the public internet. Which is not the case.
But hey, the resource is already accessed through a VPN, so it's encrypted in-transit the best way possible.
That makes HTTPS redundant.
Okay then, let's use plain HTTP, right?
Not if you're on .dev domain, you don't.
Thanks to HSTS, HTTP protocol is off-limit.
It fetches a page from a given URL, passes it through main content extraction and cleaning, and presents in a distraction free layout using Solarized Dark theme.
Here's an example of what it looks like:
https://reader.demin.dev/?url=https://peter.demin.dev/life/feb-13-2026_0.html
The evening I spent openining random pages in full-screen mode and enjoying distraction free content.
In the spirit of minimalism I made this service a socket-activated Go binary. So it doesn't take any of the precious RAM on my tiny VPS when idle, but also has a very small runtime footprint:
○ reader-api.service - Reader extractor API
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/reader-api.service; static)
Active: inactive (dead) since Sat 2026-02-14 05:44:36 UTC; 3min 13s ago
Duration: 68ms
Invocation: 03e5cdeca63e4b60bc0d3c073ed2872a
TriggeredBy: ● reader-api.socket
Process: 1325849 ExecStart=/opt/reader/reader (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 1325849 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Mem peak: 3.2M
CPU: 45ms
Feb 14 05:44:36 demin-dev systemd[1]: Started reader-api.service - Reader extractor API.
Feb 14 05:44:36 demin-dev systemd[1]: reader-api.service: Deactivated successfully.
Feb 14 05:44:36 demin-dev reader[1325849]: 2026/02/14 05:44:36 listening on systemd activation socket
Can it get more minimal than that? I don't think so.
Please don't scrape whole internet through my proxy.
UPD: I quickly realized that in addition to being a public unauthenticated proxy, this service also exposed my VPN network in a limited way. I considered various ways to harden this setup, and decided to just move it inside of the VPN perimeter.
So, you can't see it, but be consoled that I still use it and it's going great.
]]>In a way, I get the same effect in my RSS feed. When I have 100 posts to go through, I skim and skip quickly. But if I have just a few, I read them through. Same goes for email digests, if they try to cover too much ground, the value of each item is lost in the overwhelming deluge of information.
]]>
Maybe, this is not the best day for the federated code forge community...
]]>ChatGPT to the rescue, here's my prompt:
I need a complete recipe for Pavlova cake with weights in grams. I need it nicely formatted for printing on a single page. Make it an HTML page with printer-friendly styles.
Copy'n'Paste the HTML to a file, open it and send to printer.
~/.vimrc:
set background=dark
" set background=light
I would go and move the comment to the other line whenever I needed to switch to another mode. Until today, I discovered this jewel from Vinit Kumar:
function! ChangeBackground()
if system("defaults read -g AppleInterfaceStyle") =~ '^Dark'
set background=dark
else
set background=light
endif
endfunction
call ChangeBackground()
It detects the current Appearance setting and picks the corresponding Solarized theme.
Thank you, Vinit! And thanks to hnpwd for connecting me with Vinit!
]]>On the note of automatic distribution of 4KB chunks through the network, I wonder how long before DMCA watchdogs start sending their letters to all owners of a chunk of a copyrighted content. With IPFS and BitTorrent node owner at least controls what content to store and serve.
]]>This seems to be a viable way for individual bloggers to get the discoverability they miss by not being on a "big" social media platform. For me, Kagi Small Web is a fun doomscroller-kind time killer. When I tried importing the OPML file into my My RSS feed reader setupRSS feed reader, I noticed that a uniform format and an unfiltered stream of content is not engaging at all. Most of the posts don't click with me. But when the presentation changes with every post, I spend more time exploring the content.
Can't say that I discovered anything interesting to subscribe to, though. But that might be an effect of informational overflow. Which is supported by my observation of myself skimming quickly through a list of 10+ unread posts, while indulging fully when I only have a couple.
]]>Let's see what the people working on PEP 492 are up to:
uv.The rest of the people I never heard about:
gh api --paginate users/peterdemin/starred --header 'Accept: application/vnd.github.star+json' | jq . > gh-stars.json
Here is an extreme case for most, but very real for Anna's Archive, Libgen or Z-Library operators.
- If you are under heavy police pressure from a surveillance government like the US, you are better off using a Live USB and a VPN with killswitch enabled when connecting to your server(s), avoid DNS leaks to Google or your ISP, and so on.
- Consider using a disposable device for it. Canvas fingerprinting is a real thing.
- Consider using a disposable disk for it and be prepared to dump it away. Disk forensics is also a thing.
- Proton suite is unsafe and a honeypot, please do not use it. Tuta is a much better option.
- Tor is slow, overhyped, flagged by tons of web firewalls, and not useful for pirating. Your traffic will stand out like a bright red light. I would strongly discourage using it for clearnet browsing. Hosting and browsing onion services is fine.
- You will need to connect with people on platforms like Signal or Telegram, where you need to use a phone number to register. Services like https://hstock.org and https://sms-activate.org do help a lot. If you use yours and police request your data, you are fucked.
- Do not expect services to encrypt your data, do it yourself. E2EE is a fairytale unless you actually set it up.
Get cryptocurrency in an anonymous way, and start using it!
I feel something romantic about this level of paranoia. Luckily, neiter I nor anyone I've ever met had to apply any of these technics.
]]>type="html".
So I had to switch to CDATA encoding.xml.etree library doesn't support CDATA (CPython#81055 hanging from 2019).ET.register_namespace('', 'http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'),
I should do ET.Element(..., nsmap={None: 'http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'}).So, business as usual.
]]>I wish I could remove Vagrant from my setup, but that would mean reimplementing the following steps, that I'm not too keen on:
After all this good work, I looked at my GitHub repo with a lonely 1 star, and "unpublished" it. It's a fun thing to hack around, but a hard thing to share with other people. So far, I learned that most people are pretty secretive about their home media library setup, and not interested in cooperating or consolidating.
]]>The first challenge came from Terraform provider for libvirtd being not an "official" Hashicorp thing, but a "learning platform" for a random stranger (No offense, Duncan Mac-Vicar P., thanks for doing what you're doing).
The second challenge was that the Duncan's provider got a major rewrite and all Terraform recipes from the tutorial had to be migrated.
The third challenge was that Ubuntu 22.04 has some weird issue in libvirt apparmor configuraion. Apparently, a VM doesn't get permissions to any of the volumes created specifically for it. There should be a script that generates a list of volume paths somewhere, but who knows what happened to it.
After 3 hours of battling every part of the "Future of DevOps", my ChatGPT browser tab started to run out of memory, and I gave up. Looking back, I love how simple my Vagrant setup is, and I want to extend my gratitude to Mitchell Hashimoto for building it. I still want to make my silly home VM work without dependency on any external dependencies (except stable Ubuntu/Debian repo), so if I get more time for this project, I'll try vibing raw libvirt config.
]]>Well it took me 2 full-time weeks to properly implement a RAG-based system so that it found actually relevant data and did not hallucinate. Had to:
Each step would take me more than two weeks, and still have gaps. But when you’re working alone, and you’re the only judge of your work, it’s easy to overestimate its quality.
]]>| Emoji | Gen Z Meaning | | ----------------------------- | ----------------------------------------- | | 💀 (skull) | I'm dying (laughing) | | 🤡 (clown face) | You're a clown | | 😭 (loudly crying) | Overwhelmed joy / cute overload | | 😅 (grinning face with sweat) | Stressed but okay / sarcastic | | 👍 (thumbs up) | Passive-aggressive sure / OK | | 🙏 (folded hands) | Thank you or please / hope so | | 🔥 (fire) | Lit / very good / attractive | | 👀 (eyes) | I’m watching / tell me more | | 🙃 (upside-down face) | This is terrible / FML | | ⏳ (hourglass) | Hot / attractive | | 🙂 (slightly smiling) | Ironic / awkward smile | | 😲 (shocked combo) | Shocked / wow | | 😚 (kissing face) | Sounds good / ohhh | | ❤️ (heart) | Softening tone — doesn't always mean love | | 🤪 (zany face) | Goofy / weird / silly mood |
And here's a new addition, that I find more interesting:
👾 (space invader) means "Maybe" because maybe aliens exist.
]]>Here's an excerpt from NPR:
Satantango, Krasznahorkai's first novel, came out in 1985. It's about a pair of swindlers and a nearly abandoned collective farm. The book was made into a seven-hour movie in 1994. And The Melancholy of Resistance, which is one sentence that runs over 300 pages, is about a strange, ghostly circus appearing in a small town with a giant, dead stuffed whale.
Wow, wow, wow, hold on, what? Okay, I guess, that clarifies a couple moments for me. Mainly, should I ever check again on Nobel prize winners in literature.
Oct 8, 2025 - Stanislaw Lem explaining ChatGPT in "The Cyberiad":
— What exactly is this Adviser supposed to do?
— It should answer every question, solve every problem, give absolutely the best advice and, in a word, put the greatest wisdom entirely at my disposal.
]]>One thing that makes this movie special to me, is a song by a Russian artist Dolphin, Слышишь, released the same year, as the movie, written from the Coop to Murph, including a verse of the unbearable longing experienced by Murph.
]]>Of all three, only the first one is available to people outside of the code owners. The other two take so much effort to maintain, that only the owners have the capacity to hold.
]]>