Week #62

It was a great week. I didn’t knew I would say that at the start of the week. But hell yes, a promotion, finally. A hope at the end of the tunnel. Hard work pays off in the end. I kept believing and finally able to bring smile on my loved ones.

I quoted last week about home, a family, is not something that is by blood, rather it is the group of people who strive for each others success, for uplifting each other, when one falls down the other roots for him or her, when its harsh time, everyone steps back and stays together. And I was able to experience just that. The true value and meaning of a family and life.

Not just my family. I was able to believe that the people I work with are also a family, after a long time, I was able to feel that I belong somewhere else too, I was appreciated. My work was worthwhile, the fruit of efforts are sweet, especially when you don’t expect it.

I am quite happy and in a good mood. I am not able to quit this endless loop of promising a youtube livestream but keep on failing week-after-week. This week, let’s get it right.

Quote of the week

“You weren’t rejected. You were merely redirected”

— Elaine Welteroth

Yes, I’ll go with this for the week. I did everything for 2 years. Same problem, same person. But things change, conditions change, you fight, you are put down, you try to get around it, but rejected, the journey seems over until suddenly you are automatically redirected to where you should have been. You get your validations and your result, you feel good, you move on. Simple, don’t remain stuck, don’t ask why? answer the questions what and how. You are in the situation, you have a problem to face, you can’t question nature, why it was me who was given this problem, that is not in your hand, simply answer what and how do I overcome. That puts you in way better position than grieving over the problem.

Created

Have stopped the SQLog for a while this week, was busy with other work and plus it was a festive season, so some festivities and longing for a deep mind reset.

  • SQLog: Create Table with SELECT
    • I found it interesting to populate dummy data from existing values.
    • The select statement is so plugable, it just gets into everything.

Read

  1. The beauty of Programming
    • I love this post, it propagates the love of programming really well.
    • It shows why someone is so driven and addicted in a good way to programming, it feels like he can create anything. Someone might say, i just change characters in a file and make things happen with the machines.

you can be God. On a small scale - I love the problem from the Gaussian sum. > It’s still hard to explain what can be so fascinating about beating your head against the wall for three days, not knowing how to solve something the better way, the beautiful way. But once you find that way, it’s the greatest feeling in the world. - Yes this is the quote I live for and die for, it is the thing that gets me up from the bed each day.

  1. We traded blogs for black boxes and now we are paying for it
    • We are paying for it, true, cannot stress it enough, we are just letting the humanness get away from humans. AI is doing the heavy lifting so that we can do the laundry.
    • Social media is just slippery slop of AI generated mess
    • Being authentic and miserable is more important then ever, feeling human like emotions is the need of the hour.
  2. An opinionated critique of Duolingo
    • Duolingo is a great app. But it is just gamification of user attention. I tried learning Japanese, and I can’t understand the language as a human, as a repeating process it is nice, but no, it doesn’t click
    • I am using it for learning chess, so far it looks good, its like a textbook way of learning things. Nothing personalised or very sophisticated. But the UX is cool, the interaction and user feedback is smooth and top notch.
    • It is a engineering marvel, but not on the human-like-learning path. If it can do that, it is a great app.
  3. SQL Heuristics: ORs are expensive
    • Wow! ORs are expensive.
    • I had never thought about it that way, would like to dig a little deeper here and learn more about the maths here. It hasn’t clicked all the bells for me yet.
  4. Write the damn code
    • I am just 101% on this. I want myself to start the code, the dopamine hit, the shit show. But AI is there to help, don’t use it as a one-shot thing to create a software wand, it is a great peer, a great co-pilot, you still need to know what you are doing.
    • Vibe coding is basically delaying the shooting yourself on the foot problem.
    • Get involved and get into the zone.
  5. Failing to understand exponential again
    • This person is reputed and he says LLMs are growing exponentially. Is that true? Maybe. There is value in LLMs true, it is hidden behind the hype true, the hype is infuated, true, but calling it exponential value, hmmm, maybe not.
  6. Advice I wish I knew as a junior developer
    • This is valuable. I would add, a few more points.
    • Don’t hold yourself back in diving deeper, if you find something interesting, go in all the way. You’ll find yourself in a much better place then others.
    • Just do things, there is no reason to avoid things. Just patch one library, because you thought it was bugging you, just implement a markdown parser from scratch just because you feel the need to learn the process, don’t hold yourself back just because you’d think people would judge you, they will judge you anyways.
  7. Why hiring only senior engineers is killing companies
    • Juniors with AI tools might be worth more then seniors, because of their adoption and open-mindedness.
  8. The simple habit that saves my day
    • I need to think about it, I somehow waste my evening lying down and consuming news and tech articles. That is not wrong but I need to get the true dopamine by creating something, I end up in the same cycle of exhaustive slump.

Watched

  • Cursor AI Foundations

    • It was refreshing to watch the tool that I use day to day. I don’t like much of its usage. It causes me anxiety. But knowing its capabilities and limitations is not harmful.
    • I like the way it explained, the problems with AI and its sloppiness.

  • Cursor designer builds an OS with cursor

    • This is wild, I cannot believe this, it was created by AI, half baked but still. I think it takes time to clean up the vibe-coded mess, often then not, I have to re-read and re-read until I scrape it off completely.
    • But this just doesn’t feel natural. It might be but I am not convinced. It just feels a high effort thing, not as the author described it. “Just two prompts”, “completed in an afternoon”. I am not sure that is true, could be skill issue on my end but cannot comprehend at the moment.

  • Harshad Numbers

    • This is cool. Harshad, meaning happy numbers, they result in full integers when the divided by the number itself form the sum of its digits.
    • Mathematics is so infinite, this inspires me to write code and think about problems from mathematical perspective. Yes, sometimes, that gets in the way of the actual problem, but on the leisure side, its fun to play with math.

  • Computerphile: Machine Code Explained

    • I haven’t seen such a simple explanation of Assembly Code and Memory in my life. The comparison of register as memory blocks, pigeon holes as memory units holding volatile memory.
    • I want to read this book. This is such a great visual of how memory and computers work. I think in the age of AI, shallow knowledge is no good, we need depth and low-level details, when vibe code slop fails, real grug brain developer has to roll off his sleeves and dug deeper.

  • Cluade 4.5 is the best coding model in the world? Till when

    • Claude 4.5 dropped, maybe its a 0.5x improvement, is it? Maybe but definitely it has reduced its behaviour. That is a good and a bad change.
    • Good because obviously, it should work in friendly way, AI and security right now are two separate circles, bubbles if you will.
    • Bad because now we it doesn’t quite do what it is asked to do, it might avoid the things that are not ethical, but it could have side-effects where it could reject a query which is genuine and not align with its interpretation of ethical.

Double click to interact with video

  • Claude made its own language
    • Why? Really? It goes to show that people are ready to waste money for no reasons. And AI is far far from replacing developers.
    • Cursed programming. Cursed vibes.

Learnt

  • SQL Using SELECT to populate and create a table.
    • We can use SELECT statements to create and populate tables immediately, It is usually a way to test or duplicate tables in a existing database.
    • However the SELECT statement won’t copy the constraint, indexes and all the schema of the table, it just copies the column data, the structure and not the logic behind the data.

Tech News

  • ZAI releases GLM 4.6
  • OpenaAI launches Sora 2

Models are getting launched but not having a significant bumps in their capabilities, which is a good sign for humans. But these labs are just going crazy. They are putting AI in any possible thing they can, social media, if that was not a worse place to be in, developing anxiety, loneliness and pressure, adding AI to it is going to doom the peace from humans.

Happy Coding :)

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