Dane Hillard

My interview with the esteemed and heavily opinionated programmer, Steve Yegge, is live across all platforms. If you could only listen to one episode of the SourceForge podcast, this might be it folks! There are a ton of takeaways from this episode. On Chat-Oriented Programming (CHOP) and the future of programming: "I’m going to make the claim that ... line-oriented programming, which we’ve done for the last 40, 50 years, ... is going away. It is dying just like assembly language did, and it will be completely dead within five years." On the empowering effect of AI-driven coding: "We’re moving from where you have to write the code to where the LLM will write the code and you’re just having a conversation with it about the code ... That is much more accessible to people who are just getting into the industry." On advice for young programmers: "If you want to blog, if you want to have an impact, if you want to be a great programmer, if you want to be great at CHOP, I think you should really seriously consider actually upgrading your reading skills. You can do it. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s a skill that you can practice just like juggling or painting or whatever. And the better you get at it, the easier time you’re going to have with life." You can watch on YouTube or stream it on all major podcast platforms: https://lnkd.in/g8Kb2PKn #CHOP #Sourcegraph #Interview #Programming

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A post about some of the ways I try to meet the needs of a browser DevRel team that need to share information about new things, with those of developers who need to know what actually works now. If you write or speak about the web, perhaps some of these ideas will help you too.

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I had a great time diving into the technical weeds of design system engineering on the Syntax.fm podcast with Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski. We cover a lot of ground here! https://lnkd.in/eJjnNZZ6 “What’s in a design system figma library isn’t as much of a spec for developers to build it out. What this figma library is a promise of what is in code. It is a representation of what exists in the coded design system.” #designsystems #frontend #ui #design #development

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All those attending #Measuresummit2024, please proceed to Tamás Geiger's wonderful presentation on how to configure consent mode correctly. There is not another tutorial quite like it. Please check it out here! Now! https://lnkd.in/erDcuhMV

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Looked into how much AI slop is on Medium. I'm not sure what surprised me more—the sheer volume (between 40-48% of recent posts, according to two different analyses) or Medium's response (that it doesn't really matter as long as most of it goes unread). Unlike platforms like LinkedIn or Meta, Medium has taken a stand against AI pablum and tries to elevate human writing/ limit the reach of AI and other spam. It hasn't stopped this flood—but I do think CEO Tony Stubblebine makes some persuasive points about how what matters most might be surfacing/boosting good human work rather than trying to detect every piece of AI spam. Thank you to Pangram Labs and Originality ai for taking the time to run platform-level analyses at my request, as well Reality Defender for spot-checking articles and NewsGuard for sharing its own experiences. Read here: https://lnkd.in/gmcWnDiv

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Check out the latest feature in #Minder, the open source software security platform from Stacklok that helps developers and maintainers continuously secure their projects!

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Hey folks! I'd like to more formally introduce and talk about a few of the projects we're working on towards improving large-scale bioinformatics analyses (one of which was developed during St. Jude's KIDS24 Biohackathon)! If you're not aware, my team started a project called St. Jude Rust Labs (https://lnkd.in/eXY_9dJ8) where we're rewriting a more foundation for bioinformatics analysis in Rust. This cuts across more than just workflow execution, but, recently, we've been primarily focused on improving the experience of working with the Workflow Definition Language (WDL) at scale. To that end, we've released a number of projects, including: - We've written a complete lexer/parser for WDL v1.2 language (https://lnkd.in/eGWHSM2g). Anyone can use this foundation to build tools for WDL. - We've written a VSCode plugin that includes a language server protocol (LSP) for linting and validation directly in your editor (https://lnkd.in/euApG9tF). - And, announcing today, we've started down the road of writing our own WDL execution engine spread across the Crankshaft (https://lnkd.in/et_RFkA3) and Sprocket (https://lnkd.in/eUTuPE68) projects. Crankshaft was prototyped during the St. Jude Biohackathon last week—it's a _headless_ workflow execution engine, meaning that, in theory, others could come along and write drivers for Crankshaft built on NextFlow, CWL, Snakemake, etc. As I said earlier, our team is really focused on WDL specifically, so we're going to continue building out a "head unit" for Crankshaft using WDL. That being said, I would love to see other community projects popping up and using the core machinery for other workflow languages. Thanks to all of the individuals who participated on our Biohackathon team (Kevin Benton, suchitra chavan, Braden Everson, Andrew Frantz, Michael Gattas, Peter Huene, and John McGuigan)!

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On my list of things to do in the next year or two is to convert Pragmatic AI Labs to a #publicbenefit corporation. Why? Humans > Profit. One of the reasons I created #pragmaticailabs is to "do good by doing well" and why we equally share ALL PROFIT with authors we partner with. Something RARELY SEEN in the world of content. Many companies take 90% of the profit and explain it with convoluted tricks and games. All courses on #edx here: https://lnkd.in/eEER-SU2 https://lnkd.in/esqnzyC3

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RIP Cover Letters 1956 - 2024 Cover letters were an annoyance to begin with, but in the days of one-click job applications and LLMs, they serve no purpose and only waste everyone’s time and bandwidth. Find out why at The Career Toolkit Blog. #hiring #coverletter #llm #jobs

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Some straight talk about why #platformengineering initiatives fail and how to make sure that doesn’t happen on your watch. Check out the latest from The New Stack and Jennifer Riggins. #DevEx #DevOps

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Ready to revolutionize your approach to platform engineering? Join us at SKILup Day: SREs and the Rise of Platform Engineering on April 30, 2024, to explore the evolution of SREs in platform engineering. https://bit.ly/4az7z8R Discover how SREs are reshaping DevOps workflows at scale, playing a crucial role in driving efficiency and resilience. At SKILup Day: SREs and the Rise of Platform Engineering, we’ll discuss: ➡️ Resilience Redefined: SREs leverage platform engineering to fortify systems against disruptions, ensuring uninterrupted service delivery even amidst unpredictable challenges. ➡️ Scalability at the Core: Through Platform Engineering, SREs architect solutions that effortlessly scale with evolving demands, enabling businesses to adapt and thrive in rapidly changing environments. ➡️ Efficiency Amplified: By embracing automation and data-driven decision-making, SRE-led platform engineering maximizes operational efficiency, empowering teams to focus on innovation and strategic initiatives. Don’t miss out! Register now to gain valuable insights and actionable strategies on how to empower your journey to SRE and platform engineering. https://bit.ly/4az7z8R #SKILupDay #SRE #PlatformEngineering #DevOps

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🌶️🔥🚨 #HotTake. Did you hear people are using #ChatGPT during interviews? Not just for technical questions, but also behavioral questions as well. I'm not shocked one bit, and I think this is a good thing. The problem has always been with low quality interview questions, like the ones screening for memorization, obscure/pedantic technical regurgitation, or cookie cutter STAR method questions. Some people game the system by excessively studying for interviews and companies get tricked because their interview process is secretly terrible. Further, use of AI is going to be an essential part of all our skillsets and I mean every single white collar job. Ones who use AI will outperform ones who don’t. We can’t fight that shift in tides. It’s like the teacher who encouraged her students to write their papers using GenAI, but then turned the assignment into an in class review exercise of what AI wrote instead. So hopefully #GenAI tech will force companies to hire engaged and talented individuals who possess the necessary critical thinking skills and ones who leverage AI to enhance their work vs automatons who are great at responding to interview puzzles.

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Relative Color Syntax — Basic Use Cases https://buff.ly/4dkuje5 As of last month, Firefox 128’s support of the relative color syntax means we’ve now got support across the board. I’m excited about that as it’s an extremely powerful way to manipulate colors in CSS. Plus it was part of Interop this year so that is further proof that is trucking along nicely.Source: Relative Color Syntax — Basic Use Cases – Frontend Masters Boost (https://buff.ly/3X3dKxG)

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Sitting here working on some pretty fun technology tonight, it struck me where humans might sit comfortably in an AI world. The jobs will be about **taking responsibility**. Here's what I mean: I just deployed a set of software frameworks and components to the cloud (including Langchain, which is super fun), and I really enjoyed doing it. Github Copilot, other AI tools and some talented creators on YouTube made the job something I could do during this early stage of development as I prove out what I have in mind for this application. But at some point, it's not that I will want to hire an engineer to do what I can't do, but instead to take responsibility for ensuring that a set of systems are implemented right, maintained in good working order. And I'll want someone to ensure that we keep innovating and evolving those systems. So, even though I could get AIs and AI agents doing a lot of the work, I'm still going to need someone with experience, good judgment, and foresight to major on this stuff as I tackle other things in both the system and the business. Taking Responsibility is the job humans need to focus on.

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Unapologetically Technical's newest episode is now live! In this episode of Unapologetically Technical, I interview Hubert Dulay the author of Streaming Data Mesh and Developer Advocate at StarTree. We talked about his early experience with web backends like CORBA and SOAP and how those prepared him for data work. He shares his advice for those with web development skills to transition into data and what it's like for a person leaving a company after a long tenure there. We discuss his time at Cloudera and Confluent and how the data industry has changed over time. We talk about his recent experience with Flink and StarTree. We go in-depth into streaming data mesh, covering what it is and how to create real-time data products. We discuss the ways teams can create joined or enriched data products across domains. We round out the discussion with some tips on how to get data mesh adoption. Watch the full episode here:

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This is a good statement of the limitations of RAG with respect to generative AI accuracy.

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AI systems routinely outperform humans, affirms the Stanford AI Index Report 2024; Should we be worried? There's hardly a day that goes by without someone speculating if AI systems like GPT-4, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude 3, and now LLaMA 3 are becoming sentient, the fear being that AI's intelligence, what we better know as artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial super intelligence (ASI), will exceed that of the most intelligent humans, making it a sort of Alpha Intelligence that may eventually even enslave humans. While #Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang proposed that AGI would emerge within five years, and Ben Goertzel foresees it happening in just three years, Elon Musk predicts that by the end of 2025 or early 2026, AI will be smarter than any single human, and probably smarter than all humans combined by 2029. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, too, has announced that his company is entering the race to make an AGI but did not provide any timeline. These are all credible voices and we must pay attention. But one also needs to pay heed to equally-accomplished voices like those of Yann LeCun, Andrew Ng, and Gary Marcus, who have begged to differ and have consistently tempered expectations in the context of AGI. Early this month, even Stanford University's seventh edition of the AI Index report weighed in on the same topic, insisting that AI systems like GPT-4, Gemini, and Claude 3 are "impressively multimodal" and "routinely exceed human performance on standard benchmarks". The report, however, qualifies that current AI technology continues to have limitations and cannot reliably deal with facts, perform complex reasoning, or explain its conclusions. What do you think? LiveMint https://lnkd.in/g8VmStwv

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If you're connected with me, you know I scream about how necessary integrations are. Check out this piece where I explain more for insideBIGDATA!

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