Ruby news

The drama continues to rumble on with the core language group now taking on responsibility of the dependency management from the US Ruby Central group.

I’m not sure this really represents any recognition of the problems or humility amongst those involved but does seem to be recognition that a permanent community split is a possibility.

With all the turmoil Ruby 4.0.0 was also released which introduces a new just-in-time compiler and a new isolation construct called a Box which seems pretty interesting idea (although with a Java background I’m going to struggle to remember what Boxing means in Ruby).

Durable Lambdas

AWS adopted a pattern that was being widely used for checkpointing in Lambda functions by offering an official implementation Durable Lambdas. Tough on those building a business around this concept.

AI and LLMs

Recently a poorly managed project managed to end up emailing luminaries from the coding world (Simon Willison has a good breakdown of what happened) drawing annoyed responses from Rob Pike and Rich Hickey (Github login required).

What struck me about the responses to the original posts is the number of people who essentially said You should be grateful. There were also a lot of people telling Rob Pike to get on bandwagon or be left behind.

It is true that there is potentially a future where coding in its current form no longer exists but the hectoring that people start adopting it right now is insufferable. Particularly if buying a Claude subscription is seen as something necessary for programmers to pay for.

People still seem to be confused about the rate of progress with this models and assume that is continuing to be linear despite the lack of progress in novel problems versus trained sets. The claims that “these models are just going to get better” are not grounded.

I’m not a complete hater though, there was a good example of using AI (and as the example points out, human) skills to achieve helpful outcomes.

The Reverse Centaur

Cory Doctorow released an essay that contains a really interesting frame for judge the impact and value of AI adoption.

I saw my first Reverse Centaur at work not long after where a supplier wanted to introduce an AI automation that would essentially handle the work of constructing emails to people based on a standard communication plan. The human in the loop was responsible for checking and sending the email but the idea was that the AI would compose the emails. The goal was efficiency and it was clear that the process simply wasn’t reliable enough to be completely automated and that the human was really just a human shield to blame if the automation went awry.

There are really good uses of AI in customer care but this was thoughtless and clearly aimed at “workforce reductions”.

Links

• Dependency cooldowns I didn’t know this was a feature of Dependabot and it makes sense to take a breath for most dependencies while potentially manually applying those that you know will affect you and which have a time window.
• Datacentres in Space this idea seemed a bit ludicrous despite the attraction of solar energy and cooling. This post confirms that it seems to be another attempt to hype share prices.
• Astral beta released their Python type checker ty and sadly I don’t think I have a codebase sufficient to really check it out but this is a pretty significant contribution to the Python tooling space