Latest Posts (20 found)
iDiallo 6 days ago

Why My Asus Laptop Kept Rebooting After Sleep and How to Fix it

Three years ago, I bought an Asus laptop, specifically the Zenbook Pro 17. It's a powerful machine and works just fine for my needs, but it had one problem that made me want to either return it or throw it out the window. I would work on projects for hours on end and close the lid when I was done. I haven't manually shut down a computer in more than 10 years. I only do so after a forced update or during a debugging session. So I would close the lid, and a couple of hours later I would open it back up. Instead of waking from sleep, the computer would start from scratch as if it had been turned off and the battery was nearly dead. That meant everything I had open was closed. I'm lucky that most of the applications I run can restore a previous session, but it was extremely annoying. I had a similar issue with my previous Asus, and I had blamed Windows for it. The computer often woke from sleep just so Microsoft could perform an update, which used up all my battery. Sometimes I would open my backpack to find a dead laptop that was warm to the touch. I've written this blog post at least five times. Each time I thought I had solved the issue, but then it came back. This time, though, I think I have finally resolved it. So if you have an Asus laptop running Windows and you experience this very annoying issue, you are not alone. In my case, the culprit was the Wi-Fi adapter, specifically the MediaTek Wi-Fi 6E MT7922. On Windows: That's it. After three years of annoying restarts, this finally solved my problem. Now let me explain what was going on. When the laptop lid is closed, Windows initiates "Modern Standby." In this state, the screen turns off to save power, but the system remains partially active to maintain background network connectivity. Shortly after, Windows attempts to transition into a deeper low-power state and disconnects the network adapter to conserve battery. However, the MediaTek Wi-Fi driver ( ) fails to handle this low-power transition properly. About a minute later, it generates Event ID 1033 errors referencing a network device path (specifically in my logs). Because the driver's error message resource is missing or corrupted, Windows Event Viewer cannot interpret the error and displays a generic warning instead: "The description for Event ID 1033 from source mtkwlex cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted..." Because the Wi-Fi driver fails to sleep, it keeps the system partially awake. This causes abnormal background battery drain and heat buildup, which is exacerbated when the laptop is in an enclosed space like a bag. In response to this abnormal drain, Windows triggers Event 507: "Austerity Battery Drain Budget Exceeded." It's important to note that this event is Windows intentionally waking the laptop up to prevent the battery from dying completely. However, because the Wi-Fi driver is already in a crashed or unstable kernel state, the system fails to recover from this forced wake-up. The result is a silent system crash or thermal shutdown, followed by Event 12 ("The operating system started") , which confirms the laptop rebooted. With the fix in place, the Wi-Fi device no longer attempts to enter its power-saving sleep mode, so it never crashes. The ultimate solution would be a fixed MT7922 driver, but try as I might, I haven't been able to find one online. It's been three weeks so far, and I've been able to resume my work without coming back to a crashed computer. I hope this helps someone else. Open Device Manager . Expand Network adapters . Right-click the MediaTek device and click Properties . Click the Advanced tab. In the Property box, select Power Saving . In the Value field, select Disabled .

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iDiallo 1 weeks ago

Edge Is Pretending to Be Chrome

I don't think there was any official announcement, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft is secretly trying to trick you into using Edge. Well, it has always been trying to trick us, but this time it's even more aggressive. You can no longer tell Edge from Chrome. Just go ahead and try. Just last week, I wrote about Edge trying to get users to launch it automatically at boot time . Shortly after, I noticed that Chrome was asking for the exact same thing. Today, I clicked on the weather app on my Windows machine, and of course it opened Edge and asked me to set it as the default. I dismissed the popup and noticed that the website was pushed down from the top by another browser message, this one asking to transfer my data from my other browser to Edge. Bring your favorites, passwords, history, cookies and more from other browsers each time you browser in Microsoft Edge. I visited a few other pages and saw a bunch of ads, which reminded me to switch back to Chrome. I did, but I noticed something odd: when I tabbed between the two browsers, I couldn't tell which was which. Can you tell the difference I know they are both built on Chromium, but until fairly recently Edge had a distinct Microsoft look. It seems Microsoft is aggressively pursuing the fight for the front page of the internet. On my mobile device, I use the Outlook app for one of my email accounts. I noticed that when I click a link, instead of opening it directly in my browser, the app asks whether I want to open it with Microsoft Edge. Note that Edge isn't even installed on my device. Microsoft is trying every tactic in the book to get in front of the user. The front page of the internet is still the only race that matters for large tech companies. It doesn't matter whether your product is good or bad; your success largely depends on how many eyes you can get on your app. Google owns prime real estate. It is the default search engine on most desktop browsers. It is the default on all Android devices, with a negligible margin of error. It is the default on all iOS devices, for a cool $20 billion a year. And of course, it owns the largest ad network in the world. If Microsoft owned the front page today, it wouldn't be able to monetize it as well as Google does. It's one thing to own the front page; it's another to consolidate data from every branch of our web activity. For example, if I look up a product on YouTube on my TV, Google can later retarget me with an ad for that product while I'm reading an article on my iPhone. Microsoft has little to no presence on my iPhone. This mesh of front pages is what makes it worthwhile for Google to be the front page on every device. Even OpenAI has started tracking user web activity outside its own website in an effort to better monetize its position. Google continues to win even though its language models don't top the benchmarks and are often beaten by much smaller models. Meanwhile, Microsoft still doesn't have a model to its name, so it is trying to look enough like Google that people won't notice. Google Search and Bing Search play with the same theme. PS: It was a challenge to take screenshots for this post because half the time I didn't know which browser I was using. PS2: Edge makes it so hard to navigate between browsers because it puts each browser tab you open in its own ALT+TAB menu.

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iDiallo 2 weeks ago

It's Not Just True, It's False

We’ve given in to using LLMs for writing at work. From emails and Slack comments to full-on documentation, everything is AI-generated. However, I’ve realized it only ever saves me time when I’m being lazy. That is, it’s great at converting meetings into transcripts, summarizing those transcripts into action items, and keeping information accessible. But it’s pretty bad because the result is ridden with invisible errors. But what counts as an error if you trust the LLM and never meticulously read the output? And how much time are you really saving if you end up spending that time proofreading? I went back to a meeting transcript after a developer struggled to turn my AI-generated summary into a coherent ticket. Looking through the source transcript, I noticed that at one point it recorded the word "embroidery." I mean, we work for a large telecom company, the chances of me using that word are slim to none. Nevertheless, the AI summarized the conversation and included "embroidery" as an action item. In the words of Claude himself: It's not just true, it's false. I chuckled, but it made me think about all the BI slop we generate daily in the name of using AI technology. It feels helpful. Creating massive documents makes us look productive. Generating a pull request with changes across hundreds of files seems impressive. Asking AI to validate an idea feels instructive. Unless you take the time to scrutinize the results. I can only imagine what the world will look like when we feed all this slop back into the machine.

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iDiallo 3 weeks ago

The Front Page of the Internet Is Up for Grabs

Last week I opened Edge to test my Internet connection, because that's the only thing I use it for, and noticed something new. Right beneath the address bar was a new bar with a button offering to let the browser launch automatically whenever I start my computer. That was strange. Yes, I open the browser the moment the computer starts, but why would they want to do that for me? And just now, I opened Chrome, and saw the exact same message but for Chrome: It looks innocent enough. We all start browsing the web right away when we turn on our computers, so what's the big deal here? Well, the big deal is that everyone wants to be the front page. Defaults matter. While we all want to believe we have agency, the numbers don't lie. Most of us never change the default settings . Just last year, Google paid Apple close to $20 billion just to remain the default search engine on Apple products. While we're all distracted by the AI race, the one race that actually matters is who remains the front page of the Internet. Microsoft is trying to claim that spot by loading its browser at Windows startup. Now Google is trying to win that space back by doing the same with its own browser. On my Mac, Anthropic has been very aggressive about trying to load Claude automatically. I suspect every company will be pursuing this aggressively in the near future. The quality of your product is secondary to the exposure it gets. Not even benchmarks matter if you can't be on the user's front page. Google still holds the front page of the Internet, and that makes up for its AI model not being at the top of the benchmarks. But don't let them take this space from you. They are all fighting for your attention. I urge you to simply consider pressing the little X button they tuck into the corner. It's your computer, use it the way that suits you best.

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iDiallo 3 weeks ago

AI Forces You to Commit to Your Initial Belief

Have you ever watched any old hacker movie lately? The hacker can write at 180 WPM, never using the backspace or changing his mind ever. It’s like before they ever started, they already knew the last character they would type on the screen. But that’s not how it works in real life, at least not for me. The idea changes mid-sentence. That's probably how most of the code I write ends up. I start with an idea in my mind. I think it's brilliant, maybe it’s a way to restructure the code, an overall design, or a specific paradigm. But when I start writing it, something else pops up. Seeing it halfway down the page, I realize it's not quite what I was imagining, and I change direction. The same principle applies when I'm writing a blog post or a story. I feel like I have a perfect concept in my head, but the moment I start putting words down, things shift and I adjust accordingly. That's why the final text rarely matches the original vision. It’s as if writing itself is the process of refining the idea. This process is lost when you use AI. You don't write out the details of an idea as you go; instead, you just give it the gist of it. It generates an entire wall of text instantly, and now you're stuck reading through it while the tool tries to preserve that initial draft, or its own interpretation of it at least. You only discover flaws or attempt to pivot while reading the generated output. But pivoting inside a wall of text is much harder than making a 180-degree turn mid-sentence. If you spot a small part you dislike and try to remove it, it might break something 20 lines down, forcing you to step back and make sure everything still aligns. Using an LLM forces you to commit to your very first thought. When you write manually, every keystroke is a chance for the idea to evolve. When you use a large language model, you have to absorb the entire output all at once, which ends up being far more time-consuming.

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iDiallo 4 weeks ago

You Can Drop SEO

I started learning web development around the time the term search engine optimization, SEO, was becoming more common. You could still see the shift between pre-SEO content and post-SEO content. A popular article titled "Forgotten" (a great story) was suddenly republished as "Forgotten: My Adventures as an Employee the System Forgot to Erase." Both titles and content were filled with keywords that signaled to search engines what the page was about. Articles basically catered to the search engines and only incidentally served people. On my own website, I remember editing page titles several times, then waiting a few days to see if Google noticed the changes and ranked me better. In fact, before Google introduced personalized results, I built a tool at my job to track how our website ranked for different combinations of keywords. When personalized search results arrived, a lot of tools became obsolete. It was still useful, though, to track keywords for generalized metrics. But now AI Overviews are here. And it's not just Google's, plenty of people go straight to ChatGPT and ask the large language model their questions directly. While the information returned might be sourced from real websites, there's almost no incentive to click through to those sources. While my inbox is still flooded with people promising to improve my SEO, I think it might not be helpful at all anymore. My traffic has shifted from mostly coming from Google to just a handful of visits. Most traffic now comes from AI bots scraping my content, and RSS readers (thank you!). I take this as a relief. We can finally drop the act. We don't have to write keyword-stuffed titles and blog posts just to appear in search results. Large language models can understand our content just fine without it, and we won't be getting that traffic anyway. We can drop SEO. You can finally write for yourself. Write for your audience. No need to cater to the robots.

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iDiallo 1 months ago

We own the Glass

This was so casually uttered by LG executives in their sales pitch to advertising companies. We own the glass. What they mean is, they own your tv. They own everything on it. You may have paid for the box, but they own the glass. They can run anything they want on it, and you have agreed, in the terms and conditions, that you will inform anyone entering your household that the TV may record them without warning. TVs come equipped with microphones, wifi radio, and tracking software. That’s enough to monitor everything that’s happening around it. If you haven't watched the research video essay published by Gamer Nexus , I highly recommend it. I've said it many times before, TVs are cheap because you aren't simply watching them, they are watching you and listening, and reporting back to the mothership. This info is then used to sell you more stuff. What scares me in all this is that the solution I often tell people may no longer be true. I often tell people, just disconnect your TV from the network and you are all set. Now imagine just for a second. What if they add a cellular radio to the device? One with an esim. Then that is it. You can no longer disconnect your device from the internet. They now own the glass in your house, and have a permanent connection that you cannot disable. They own the glass. We are merely vessels to their business.

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iDiallo 1 months ago

I found an old interview mine (2017)

I was debugging an issue and I found a link to my blog! Interviewing a senior software engineer My biggest challenge isn't code per se. It is explaining to someone else what I am trying to do with the code. It is surprisingly hard to convert the thoughts in my head (or the code) into something coherent someone else can understand. I still believe that. I don't even remember when we had this discussion, but I'm glad Walter has kept it up. And a great reminder of my priorities. I'd be a writer. (not a good one, but one nonetheless)

programming Programming
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iDiallo 1 months ago

Clickable whitespace

It's easier for someone in my position, after working 20 years in this field to talk about morals. I can disagree with the choices my employer makes. In fact, I can walk away. But I remember the dilemma I felt I was in, earlier in my career. The lead developer stood behind me while I was working on a feature and asked me to make a div clickable. That's it. Technically, it's the simplest thing you can do. But, I hesitated. He watched from behind as I tabbed through every application on my computer, doing everything but what he asked. "Just make it clickable," he said again. I have made divs clickable a thousand times in my then short career, I knew that html standards were merely a suggestion. But this one rubbed me the wrong way. Instead I said, "I already have an anchor tag below, the div doesn't need to be clickable." "The fuck you're talking about? Just do it." We got into an argument, and I ended up doing exactly what he said. A little after I pushed my code, he revisited my code and added a slight delay to my click event using setTimeout to disconnect the user action to what occurred after. If what I'm saying sounds a bit vague, that's how it was framed at a time. We had disconnected the technical ask, clickable div, from the actual feature to make the whitespace on the page clickable. Let me make it even clearer. Have you ever used a coupon website? You buy something on a website, let's say nike.com. When you get to the checkout cart, they have a little box that says "enter coupon code for a discount". So you scour the web to find a coupon that will help you pay less for your purchase. You land on our website where we offer a dozen coupons, but they are all partially hidden. The section says "click to reveal". When you click, some random popup appears, then the code is revealed for you to copy and paste and you go on your merry way with a discount. Everything sounds fine so far. What you don't know is that the coupon website gets credit for the sale. A portion of the price you paid goes straight into our pocket, whether you got a discount or not. We get credit from the referral, that's how affiliate marketing works. So why is making the div clickable, or the whitespace clickable a big deal? Because it captures accidental clicks. The company doesn't care if they help you find a good discount or not. In fact, they don't even care if the code works. They just want you to click and for that popup to open so they can get the credit. My task was framed as a technical request, instead of outright saying "trick the user into clicking." When the Honey scandal surfaced, I was confused why it was news anyway. Deception in affiliate marketing is a standard. Very often we disconnect our work from the real world consequences . Back in 2019 I met this girl at a friend’s birthday party. She worked at a bank in the software development sector, and told me about the project on which she’d been working. Their system collected data from various sources on people applying for financial services (e.g.: loans) and would indicate if someone was eligible, or raise a red flag. In the latter case they would have to deal with substantial additional bureaucracy, and often times would not be able to access these services anyway. She seemed quite proud of her work, and told me her team had demoed it the previous week in front of the whole office. They’d shown the report that the system generated for each person in the team. In her case, the system flagged her as “dangerous”, and she was not eligible for a loan. Her grandmother was from Iran, and because there’s frequently cases of money laundering or other irregularities in Iran, she’s immediately flagged too. Despite her being a Dutch citizen, born and raised in the Netherlands, and working in this Dutch financial institution, her bloodline was “too risky” for her employer to lend her money.1 I was confused, and honestly, heartbroken. This person was telling me how proud they were of their work, building a system that discriminates them based on their bloodline. I questioned what she thought about it, and she explained “well, the rules are there…” —she paused a few times— “the rules are there…”. I remained silent and she eventually finished her sentence after repeating it a few times “the rules are there to protect us”. Even though this was six years ago, every time I remember this situation it brings me great sadness. Here was a person who’d worked hard to build a system which would discriminate against them, and yet stood proudly defending their work. We don't see it as our responsibility to question the system. We are happy to do the work as long as we don't see the immediate consequences. I feel this whenever I see flock cameras mounted in the street. Someone had to design them, write the code, test them, ensure that they work to spec. Someone had to install them. These are people doing a good technical job, yet I'm sure they wouldn't be happy if they were tracked by the very system. This is why I was mad when Anthropic wrote their manifesto saying they are against tracking citizens, as opposed to non citizens. You don't get one without the other. We track everyone then discriminate later. This is why I'm against age verification systems, no matter how technically impressive the solution is. Because in the end, I'm the one who has to upload my ID to a system that I cannot trust. With AI, it's even easier to disconnect your day to day work from its consequences. I understand it's much easier to ignore these things when you are just getting started in your career, but eventually, you have to voice your opinion.

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iDiallo 1 months ago

Here's a good way to present AI videos

The YouTube tag marking a video as AI-generated is as insignificant as the little "Sponsored" text in search ads. I've taught my mother and her friends to check for that tag, but most, if not all, of the videos they share with me don't even have it. Even though they're clearly AI-generated. If deception is something we want to prevent, and our parents can't tell real videos from fake ones, wouldn't it make sense to put a warning where it's actually effective? Just like movies have warnings beforehand, why not add one before these videos? It would take no more than two or three seconds, and it's entirely controlled by the platform. If someone is willing to watch the content after the warning, more power to them. But for those being deceived, this would actually help. Those are the words YouTube places on videos where it detects AI, but they're buried somewhere in the description. Why not make that notice prominent when the video starts, the same way some videos open with a "Viewer discretion is advised" notice? On YouTube or whichever platform hosting the video, the warning is not embedding into the video, just displayed before. The uploader has no control over it. While I know most people think AI videos are just fun or slop, but I argue that they can be harmful when they deceive us . They are a profitable vector for scammers, and despite YouTube's effort to curb it, they are actively promoting it in their creative studio. If YouTube actually wants to prevent fraud and scams, they can do something about it. Let users know what they are about to watch.

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iDiallo 1 months ago

Foot Guns for Sale

I don't think it's going to work out the way everybody thinks it will. The current narrative, at least the one pushed by the companies selling the shovels, is that AI will become centralized. Anthropic and OpenAI will offer safe, vetted AI. Developers will become mere prompt-engineers, submitting requests to these benevolent gatekeepers. They have tamed the dragon. We will benefit only if we become tenants to their API-driven fiefdoms, paying by the token for the privilege of renting intelligence. “They didn’t care that they’d seen it work in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory” - Clay Shirky I complain about AI frequently on this blog, but not because I don’t think it is useful. I use it quite frequently on my day to day. But what I hate is hype and fake narratives. In fact, I believe that the opposite of their narrative will come true. Technology will continue to improve whether Moore’s Law becomes a relic of the past or not. It’s been called dead, yet CPUs and GPUs are becoming faster than ever. I do not believe for one second that developers with pre-LLM experience will end up on the losing side. And if technology continues to improve, then we won’t need OpenAI or Antropic in the future. We will be able to load large open models right into our powerful personal computers with more than acceptable inference speeds. Unless you believe that computers have reached their zeniths and it is all stagnation going forward. The gap between frontier models and open-source alternatives is already all about specialty, and it will continue to narrow. And when developers ubiquitously have access to local models, they will have access to everything. Right now, companies are hoping that developers will use their AI and remain within their ecosystems. They're building guardrails, imposing limits, and designing their models to serve corporate interests first. They see developers as customers, not as threats to their business model. But I’ve seen how easy it is to switch from one frontier model to the next. In fact, some developers in my team accidentally switched by selecting the “auto” mode on their IDE. They didn’t realise that every subsequent request was from a different model. It’s the developer who will end up benefiting from this far more than the corporations will. One developer recently spent his evenings using an AI agent to reverse engineer every peripheral within arm's reach. From those devices, I’ve come away with a full plaintext command shell inside my microphone, a webcam whose activity LED I can switch off while it records, and a key light that hands out memory writes to anyone on the WiFi. He documented the entire process, implemented his own firmware update utilities, and completely enumerated the functionality of devices that were never designed to be user-serviceable. AI gave him the ability to fully control hardware that he has paid for in his own terms. Another developer created OpenLogi , a local-first alternative to Logitech’s software used to remap your own mouse button. The manufacturer was forcing users to create an online account to have access to the hardware they had paid for. OpenLogi gives full control back to the user. This is what happens when developers have the tools and the motivation to bypass corporate control. And AI is about to make this kind of reverse engineering and alternative-building dramatically more accessible. At the speed of large language models, an activist could create a brand new rotating messaging platform every week to avoid the prying eyes of an oppressive government. Someone else can review his own model and add some self improving features. In fact, you could explore new AI paradigms. Most developers I know have a side project they don't have time to work on. With AI, they will have the ability to execute on those ideas. These days, I'm able to run Deepseek on my own $400 local machine at a much slower speed, but I'm not in a hurry. Give it a couple years, I could run something even more powerful. I don't need a project management tool where I have to pay monthly. My actual needs are much simpler. For example, I actually like Jira, despite how much I complain about it on this blog. But I don't need to have Jira for myself on my personal projects. I can build a tool that works solely for my needs. I can easily build applications in environments I am not too familiar with but that are more appropriate for the task. I can build prototypes in a couple hours now and throw them away if they don't match my initial expectation. I can do so much more. Dario Amodei and others are trying to scare us with the capability of AI. They sell the fear of superintelligent systems that will render human developers obsolete or dependent. But this is not what's going to happen. What's going to happen is we will not need Anthropic anymore. Yes, they will have the high-end hardware. But we don't need high-end hardware the same way most people did not need a professional camera. All they needed was a crappy camera with a good filter to post on Instagram. Flickr was superior to Instagram, but the superior technology lost to the one that was "good enough" and in everyone's hands. The funny thing in all this is that by making everything AI-dependent, by building their moats and their guardrails and their API toll booths, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are selling foot guns. They are building the dark fibers of our era, the infrastructure that developers will eventually subvert, repurpose or simply bypass. Because eventually, we won’t ask for permission. We can just do whatever we want with tools freely available to anyone. We own our devices. We own our data. And soon, we'll own the intelligence on our own terms, without a subscription fee and without a corporate overlord. At the very least, we will get free GPUs .

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iDiallo 1 months ago

Where Did the Productivity Gains Go?

There is a machine called Productivity, and on this machine there is a knob and a button. The knob increases productivity, and the button is labeled "reset." My job was data entry at a non-profit. It was my first job in the US where I didn't have to lift heavy objects. My main task was entering collected donations into a database. The data source was email attachments, which came in various formats. Excel files, Word files, and some directly embedded in the email body. The database itself was FileMaker Pro. Every part of the process was wasteful. To receive the emails in the first place, I had to call the person who collected the donation, argue with them, and guide them through the process of emailing me the information. The donations were collected at events, and the data was often just handwritten on a note. Once I got the email, I would extract the content from the attachment and organize it into an Excel file. Then I would manually enter it into the FileMaker database, one row at a time. In a full workday, I could process no more than a dozen entries. So I decided to improve the process. I started from the end. Entering data into the database was error-prone. I had to enter the name, address, donation amount, and a plethora of other information into a single row of a database viewer, and I often put the wrong data in the wrong column. So instead, I created a form with validation. I built a standardized Excel file where the people collecting donations could enter data directly into the correct columns and send it to me. This turned out to be too much to ask. Several people didn't know how to use Excel, and it became a nightmare of technical support. Eventually, I switched to a formatted Word document. Annoying, but it worked. Lastly, I created a process. Every Monday, I would email everyone to remind them to send me their donations by Wednesday, so I would have plenty of time to enter them on schedule. The deadline was arbitrary, but it slowly hardened into policy. My system was a success. I was entering hundreds of donations every day. In terms of productivity, I had more than 10x'd my output, which I thought was a good thing, until I started getting noticed. What have you done for me lately? My productivity machine's knob had been dialed to 11. But I had also set the new standard for how much needed to get done in a day. So my manager hit the reset button. The dial went back to zero, but the expectation stayed exactly where it was. It's funny how that always happens. Increased output never turns into more free time. Instead, it becomes the new normal. Anything less looks like a drop in productivity. These days, with AI common in the workplace, every semi-technical manager has started building apps themselves instead of taking requests to the dev team. They get a rush from how much code they can produce, and they enjoy that high for a while. But they fail to see that the productivity gain only exists at the very beginning, before the app is actually in use. Once people start using it, you don't get to regenerate the app from scratch every time you want to add a feature. Instead, you have to add things slowly and carefully, without breaking what already works. All fields start green, but they brown eventually. When you get an extremely productive teammate, you start looking at the rest of the team as time-wasters. In fact, once you get used to what that teammate produces, you start treating it as the baseline and eventually you ask, "What have you done for me lately?" I was let go from that job in a little celebration, right after I'd trained my replacement. One morning, my manager simply announced that it had only ever been a summer job, and summer was ending. So my last day was set. I was too green to point out that this had never come up during hiring, and that I'd actually started well before summer began. They brought cake on my last day. What they failed to see was that my process was still very much manual. My replacement was let go when she couldn't manage more than a dozen entries a day. So much for productivity gains.

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iDiallo 2 months ago

Failing after Success

What are you supposed to do after you've created the most successful product? Not just successful, but the most useful. In an ideal world, you would sail into the sunset and enjoy your riches. In this real world, you have to come up with another, even more successful product, or you're a failure. That's why it feels like Stack Overflow has failed. I remember being in the middle of debugging my code when I copied an error and pasted it into Google. Right there in the search results, below the clearly marked sponsored link, was a link to Stack Overflow, where a user had previously faced the exact issue I was facing. I clicked on it and got "Error 503 Service Unavailable." Two seconds later, I was on Reddit, checking if SO was down for everyone else. Then Hacker News. The memes started flowing shortly after. Developers were touching grass for the first time in years. Productivity was down 100%. If there were any way to measure the success of a company, that would be it. Stack Overflow went from receiving hundreds of thousands of programming questions a day to less than a thousand today . Stack Overflow never positioned itself as just another Q&A forum. It wasn't ExpertsExchange. The whole point was that it would be a place to find answers first, then ask questions if you couldn't find what you needed. To me, it means mission accomplished. We've documented all the ways software could fail, and it became a helpful resource for everyone. That's a successful product, and the founders sailed into the sunset. Jeff is out there making the world a better place. But in our business-driven world, what's the next successful product? They failed to come up with one. Yet, given their founding principles, I think Stack Overflow should have been the perfect candidate to build an AI coding assistant. Why Cursor, Delve, or even Copilot, when you have all the world's programming Q&A at your disposal? And a permissive license on top of that. Imagine an IDE where you could contribute back to the pool. You face a challenge, you use the LLM to help resolve the problem, and you contribute your final solution back to the collective community memory. I don't know about you, but I was a big fan of the badges you get on SO. I even bragged about them on my resume. Joel promised me an "I Met Spolsky" badge, but I think he may have forgotten about it. One of the reasons people contributed to SO was for recognition, the thank-yous, and its competitive nature. Imagine an LLM that helps users and gives credit to those who contributed to the solution. Stack Overflow isn't dead as a business, so I don't think it's too late for them to develop a new product. Currently they have an AI assist button, tucked in a sidebar, an AI benchmark tool, and an MCP server for some reason. I imagine these aren't their most prominent features. You have to deliberately look for them. Stack Overflow is the perfect company to create a developer-centric IDE that can leverage all that Q&A data to improve developers' workflows. ...this almost sounds like a pitch.

programming Programming business Business ai AI
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iDiallo 2 months ago

When the Aliens Finally Came to Visit

The aliens arrived, and their first instinct was to check our networks. They accessed one of our most important websites. A government website. Unfortunately, they were met with a reCAPTCHA. Are you a robot? They are not robots. But after fifteen minutes of squinting and trying to select all the fire hydrants and traffic lights, they gave up. Defeated by a checkbox, they returned to the stars.

security Security
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iDiallo 2 months ago

Invisible Problems

During the pandemic, we completed one of our largest projects at work. To celebrate, since we couldn't meet in person, we all ordered food on DoorDash and played an online escape room game together. We were on a Zoom call, helping each other out and having fun. The first challenge was to escape a jail cell. To escape, each of us had to find clues in our own cell to figure out how to open the doors. We each had to find an object that solved a piece of the puzzle, and once we put them all together, the door would open. As a first challenge, it was easy enough. Everyone found a brightly colored object in their room and described it to the team so we could piece it together. Everyone but one team member. "Come on, read it, man, we can win this." He froze. Someone jumped in to help: "Mine was the most obvious green object in the room. Just look for something bright. Maybe blue, or orange, something that seems out of place." He didn't respond. He just sat there, frozen on camera. We figured he was having internet connectivity issues. We waited a good five minutes before he finally found it, and we moved on to the next level. I didn't think much of that day. We finished the game, we had fun, it was great. He waited until our next one-on-one to explain what had actually happened. He panicked, and he was embarrassed. It turned out he was colorblind. We were yelling random color names at him, and he couldn't, for the life of him, see any of them. As far as I can tell, I'm not colorblind, and it never would have occurred to me that this was something to account for. Just last week, I learned about Vehicle Motion Cues on the iPhone, a feature that helps reduce motion sickness. I don't think I've ever experienced motion sickness myself, or at least never in a car. Watching a blind person navigate a website was eye-opening for me. I realized that many of my past design choices would have worked against their experience without my ever knowing it. The same goes for someone navigating a computer entirely by voice. I recently rediscovered Windows Speech Recognition, which I found pretty annoying for my own needs. But for someone who relies on it for all of their computer use, it's an essential tool. A coworker once mentioned, almost in passing, that she struggles to read certain fonts because of dyslexia. Tight letter spacing and low-contrast text make some of our internal tools nearly unreadable to her. I had picked those fonts because they looked good on a demo slide. It had never crossed my mind that a font choice could be the difference between someone reading a document easily and someone giving up on it entirely. In some of our zoom calls, a teammate would often ask if he could do audio only before the call. While it didn't bother me at all, the managers kept insisting on everyone turning on their cameras. But after he used the camera for a few minutes, his connection would start dropping. I just assumed he had slow Internet. But the reality was he was located in a rural area and he relied entirely on his phone's hotspot to connect to the internet. The zoom call was using up all his data in minutes. None of these problems were problems for me. That's exactly what made them invisible. Unless you are experiencing these issues, there's little reason to ever notice them. We tend to design our tools, our meetings, and our expectations around our own experience of the world, and then mistake that experience for the default. It takes a colorblind teammate freezing on a call, or a friend who can't ride in the passenger seat without getting sick, to remind us that "normal" was only ever normal for us. You can never anticipate every invisible problem in advance, that's impossible. But at the very least, we should remember that our own experience is rarely the default. We should be a bit more curious on how others experience the tools we build.

design Design culture Culture
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iDiallo 2 months ago

BI Slop

You must use the tool. We must justify it. These aren't the words companies use, but that's what it comes down to. When you buy an expensive solution before you've clearly identified the problem, you have to use the tool to justify its line item in the spreadsheet. At most companies I've worked in, there's always some application I've used once or twice. The third time I want to use it, it's gone. If a tool isn't popular, the finance team has no trouble dropping it. But for some reason, it's different with AI. If nobody's using it, the assumption is that employees aren't being productive enough. So we got signed up for mandatory training. There was limited space, but I moved fast and got a spot. I'd been using ChatGPT since it came out, so I was hoping the training would turn me from a casual user into a pro. Instead, we were shown how to copy and paste data from Excel and other sources into the chat interface. We worked with sample data, and there was always someone in class who'd say "mine didn't work." The developers in the room asked about Codex. The OpenAI-certified instructor replied that she wasn't a developer. There was an awkward moment when someone asked if we could just use Copilot, since it's already integrated into Excel. I got my certificate. But I don't think I learned anything I couldn't have picked up with a free account on my own time. What comes with a certificate, though, is the obligation to use the tool. I had a hammer, and everything looked like a nail. Whenever I ran into dense information, I'd copy, paste, extract insight. The great thing is that the result always looks neatly presented. I didn't have time to read the dense information in the first place, so of course I wasn't going to verify whether it was accurately referencing the source material. Besides, everyone was doing the same thing. I hate it when people use AI to write a Slack message, but at this point it's inevitable. One time, after a meeting, I pulled the transcript and asked ChatGPT to organize it into action items and generate a Q&A based on the content. It gave me something very elaborate. Or at least it looked elaborate. I skimmed it and passed it along to the next person, who actually had to use it to research a project. What I failed to notice was that a large part of the document was hallucinated. Some of the action items sounded technical enough to fool me. But to someone who actually had to work on them, they made no sense at all. I'm guilty of this, and it's become the norm. The same way we use large language models to write code as software engineers, the planning and architecting behind that code is increasingly written by LLMs too. In my household, AI slop videos are strictly banned, to the point that my kids police their friends who watch that stuff. So when my son saw ChatGPT open on my computer, he asked if I was making BI Slop. "BI Slop? What's that?" "It's Business Intelligence Slop!" I was so proud of him for recognizing exactly what I was doing. And I was so disappointed in myself, because that's exactly what I was doing. The same way we scrutinize code and refuse to merge PRs that are entirely AI-generated, we need to pay attention to the other ways we use these tools. Business decisions and plans produced by LLMs need to pass the smell test before they're accepted. The issue is the same one. We merge large PRs because we don't have time to read them, then suffer the consequences later in unexpected ways. With business intelligence, we don't read the output because of its sheer volume, and we approve it because it looks good on the surface. Then, again, we suffer the consequences later in unexpected ways. This is a problem created only because we were handed a mandatory solution: use AI to justify the line item in the spreadsheet. It only saves you time in the sense that you skip reading the output, and you do that because it looks good on the surface.

career Career ai AI
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iDiallo 2 months ago

Why $550 Million Medical Debt only Cost $5.5 Million

A couple weeks ago, the CEO of Snap was all over the news in the US because he and his wife made a large donation. The weird part about it was that every news outlet that covered it had an acrobatic title where they didn't specifically say how much they donated, yet insisted on that $550 Million amount. When you read the article a bit deeper, you can do the math. They donated one hundredth of that amount. So I wondered, why did they inflate the amount in the first place? It looked like a PR stunt. This past couple weeks, I worked on a video to explain what really happened and how we should take this news.

journalism Journalism marketing Marketing business Business
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iDiallo 2 months ago

Have you read it?

I think I finally figured it out. That is, the reason why AI written articles suck: Both the author and I are reading the article for the first time. When an article is insightful I don't even mind the emdashes or that the stark truth is not X, but Y. A good take can transcend even llmism. But then you have questions, and somehow the author doesn't even know what you are talking about, it's simply because they are discovering the insight at the same time you are. They were busy, they didn't have time to write. As a consequence, they only dedicated enough time to skim the result before publishing. They don't know what's in it. You can't ask them what they were thinking when they came up with the insight because, well, they didn't think. The great article sucks because there is nobody behind it.

ai AI journalism Journalism writing Writing
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iDiallo 2 months ago

Expensive Is Just a Brand Now

You've probably heard this one before. It might have come from a parent, a teacher, or a friend who bought an expensive item and wanted to justify it. It goes something like this: A poor man buys a cheap pair of boots for a few dollars. They fall apart within a year, so he buys another pair. And another. Over five years, he spends far more than the man who bought one expensive, well-made pair up front. A pair that's still going strong to this day. And the lesson was simple: buying cheap is expensive. Buy quality, and you save money in the long run. Now swap the boots for a jacket, a phone, a kitchen knife, whatever you like. In my experience, that used to be true. I have old clothing still hanging in my closet, and they still hold together. Price and quality were correlated. If a company was going to charge you more, it needed to justify that premium with better materials, better construction, better everything. The market punished brands that didn't. But something changed along the way. This is just my own personal observation, but I'm sure you can relate: I pay too much for things that don't last. When I was growing up, we separated the real from the knockoff with a simple test. You flipped the product over and checked the tag. If it said "Made in China," you knew it was a cheap knockoff. Then, somewhat suddenly, that stopped working. Walk into almost any flagship store for almost any prestige brand today, and check the label. Chances are it says the same thing as the bargain version sitting in a discount bin three blocks away. They all come from the same factories, the same supply chains, and in some cases, the very same production line. It's not the quality of the product that determines the price. What determines whether a good sells for $30 or $300 depends entirely on the brand. Right above the "Made in China," you'll now find another line: "Designed in [prestigious country here]." The materials didn't necessarily get worse. But the price no longer tells you what it used to. When you pay that premium now, the price covers the ad campaigns, the celebrity endorsements, the logo, the history, the feeling of exclusivity, and the envy from your friends. Today, price is not a proxy for quality. Businesses are simply capitalizing on brand power, that's all. When you buy something expensive, you have no guarantee that it will last. Everything should be judged on a case-by-case basis. In fact, if you're looking for goods that last, one approach is to search for "cheap alternatives" online. The story we were always told was really about information. The poor man didn't have the money to buy quality, so he used price as a signal to gauge quality, and maybe saved up to invest in a better product. That rule has changed. Price is now just a signal of a brand's power, nothing else. To find the better product, you'll have to rely on others who've tested it and can tell you how it holds up to time.

business Business culture Culture programming Programming
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iDiallo 2 months ago

Deleting Systems You Don't Understand

When I was a kid, my father bought a family home computer and placed it in the living room for all to see. When guests came to our house, they would stop by the computer and admire its marvel without even turning it on. While everyone else was careful with the computer, treating it like an important investment, I quickly started inserting discs and installing games. One thing we take for granted today is how cheap and abundant storage is. Our family computer had a single hard drive with a whopping 2 gigabytes. That's 2 GB for Windows 95, Office 95 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Encarta 95, all my father's work documents, and the million games I had installed. I borrowed a disc from a friend that had a few dozen games on it. I installed them all. Before I knew it, I ran out of space. The computer became extremely slow, and I couldn't install any more games. I figured I needed to delete some games, but I was ten years old. I was not going to delete my games. I couldn't delete my father's stuff either, so I decided to explore the hard drive. I noticed that in the Program Files folders, every application came with a bunch of text files. Some of them were large, and they didn't look that important to me, especially the ones ending in . So I went from one folder to the next, deleting those files. There's satisfaction in gathering all those files in the recycle bin, emptying it, then watching your storage space increase. I deleted so many files that I was able to install an additional game on the computer. It was one of my most satisfying accomplishments. I had a problem, I explored the computer, and I found a solution. I played the new game until I got tired of it. In the 90s, when you were done using the computer, you clicked Start → Shut Down → Confirm Shutdown. The computer would think for about two minutes, then display in big orange letters: And I shut it down. You can imagine what happened next. The computer wouldn't boot again. Those files seemed unimportant to a child, but they are configuration files used by several applications, including the operating system. While the Windows Registry did exist in Windows 95, files were still commonly used. When I deleted them, any application or process that relied on them failed to load and simply crashed. Anyone who had anything of importance on that computer lost it. Everyone except my father, who carefully kept copies of his documents on floppy disks. He knew I was up to no good. Throughout my career, I've seen many people make this same mistake. When something doesn't look important to them, they delete it. Whether it's a programmer deleting a function that "looks stupid," or a DBA dropping a table or a single field they assume no one will miss. It's all the result of the same mindset: "I don't think this is important." It makes me think of DOGE, the real yet fictional Department of Government Efficiency. The team supposedly tasked with combing through government programs to find waste never looked deeper than the surface. Just like ten-year-old me, they looked at a department they didn't understand and decided it wasn't important. They uprooted how the entire country works just to save money, the same way I destroyed the family computer just to save storage space. Whether DOGE actually saved us any money is still hotly debated, especially when weighed against the pain and suffering it caused. Anyone with half a brain could have seen their failure coming from a mile away. The same way anyone who understood how computers work could have told me those configuration files were important. At least, all we lost in our household was time and some saved games. The American people can't say the same.

gaming Gaming
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