hardware on S Anand

Things I Learned - 16 Feb 2025

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Connected Papers shows papers similar to each other based on co-citation and bibliographic coupling for ~50,000 papers.
Notes from a fireside chat with Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO, StackOverflow, and the StackOverflow team
- There’s a signal that software demand is growing in 2024. Many more students took the StackOverflow survey in 2024. So more students (or other professionals) are shifting into / starting to learn software development.
- The AI Index is a good resource for AI trends.
- Experts are better able to use AI for writing code. Less experienced developers are more likely to use AI for code reviews, project planning, etc.
- There’s a 5% decline in favorability for AI tools compared to 2023, maybe due to disappointing results.
- Pilot groups working on AI are 25-30% more productive. They’re the most enthusiastic. For the rest of the company, it drops off to 5-10%
  - #LEARNING Benefit comes from NEW people becoming programmers, not existing ones getting more effective?
- StackOverflow wants to be where the developer is.
  - The programmer workflow was: Google -> StackOverflow -> GitHub.
  - Now it’s changing to ChatGPT / Cursor -> GitHub.
  - StackOverflow has a partnership with OpenAI and working on a plugin. Same with Google’s Duet AI, GitHub Copilot, many others. They’ll link to StackOverflow.
- StackOverflow is driving integration actively through an enterprise Overflow API
- Q: What tech have you seen blaze through the ranks?
  - Prashanth: Abstraction wins. Stuff that abstracts away things well and more wins. This includes Gen AI.
  - Erin Yepis: Rust (from 3% to 12%). AWS has steady growth.
  - Erin Yapis: I have a time series spreadsheet that I’ll publish.
- Q: What technologies are unusually tightly coupled?
  - Prashanth: AWS & Google Cloud are tightly coupled.
- Q: We have an engagement problem. Might be India-specific. What are low-effort high-return mechanisms to increase engagement.
  - Eric Woodring: Rather than a static web page, integrate it using the API. #TODO
  - Ben Marconi: Use LLMs to write post mortems and push to StackOverflow. #TODO
  - Eric Woodring: “Hydrating” the community helps.
    - We take repeat questions on Teams / Slack and seed them using LLMs.
    - We integrate with the API to auto-add Q&A.
    - Transform documentation into Q&A. Potentially UPDATE existing Q&A if it’s wrong.
- Q: What unexpected lessons about developer behavior have you learned while running StackOverflow?
  - Prashanth: We didn’t expect developers moving away from Google. Now it moved to the IDE.
- Q: What are you learning about developer learning behavior?
  - Ben Marconi: Generating LLM-based onboarding documents.
  - Using StackOverflow for Teams to identify who the experts are to contact for specific topics.
- Q: Are you thinking about leveraging Stack Overflow’s knowledge base for personalized or interactive learning experiences? How?
  - Prashanth: Traditionally, people use StackOveflow for productivity, learning, and flexibility (i.e. to ask/answer questions asynchronously without breaking their flow). So yeah, learning is important for us. (Duh!)
- Q: Could Stack Overflow’s interactions help evaluate the accuracy and relevance of LLM-generated code? Or provide potential metrics on quality?
  - Prashanth: LLM accuracy improves by ~30%. Upvotes / downvotes are reinforcement learning (RL) in steroids, so that helps.
- Q: What are your thoughts on reliance on LLMs potentially deskill-ing developers?
  - Prashanth: A real issue for junior developers, not for senior ones.
  - They’ll come across as knowledgeable.
  - Make internal evaluations and interviews more rigorous.
- Anand’s requests for action:
  - Could I get a copy of Erin’s spreadsheet? Vivek Narayanan will follow-up.
  - Could you help me learn more about hydration? Nick Madison will set up a meeting with customer success group.
I switched to fish shell mainly because:
- Autocomplete and tab completion works perfectly, out-of-box.
- Syntax highlighting is beautiful
- Great multi-line editing
To format with VS Code Ruff, you need to point the ruff.interpreter setting to a Python interpreter. You can’t run the ruff server without Python, even though ruff itself doesn’t need Python.
cd checks all paths specified in CDPATH for the directory name and changes to the first match. That’s pretty convenient!
Flipper Zero is now on my list of “To Buy” tools. It has a variety of hardware devices including NFC, RFID, Bluetooth, Infrared, etc. and is great to reverse engineer or hack devices.

Ubuntu 8.10 on a Dell Latitude D420

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Here’s the fastest way I’ve found to install Ubuntu on a USB flash drive, for my Dell Latitude D420. (Pendrivelinux.com is a great resource for this sort of thing.)

Ingredients

One large USB flash drive like this one. Not less than 4GB. I’d suggest 8GB or more
One CD (not a DVD)
Ubuntu 8.10 desktop CD ISO
IMGBurn or any other CD burning software
Direct Internet via LAN cable (without proxy, without wireless)

Installation

Burn the Ubuntu ISO file on the CD
Press F12 when the laptop boots up, and select CD/DVD Drive as the boot device
On the Ubuntu splash screen, select “Try Ubuntu without making any change to your computer” and wait
Insert the flash drive
Go to System > Administration > Create a USB startup disk and follow instructions there
Once done, remove the CD and reboot using the USB flash drive (pressing F12 during the boot sequence)

To enable wireless, which won’t work by default

Connect to the Internet using a LAN cable
Go to System > Administration > Hardware devices
Select the Broadcom LAN driver, and activate it

That’s it. It’s been a fairly painless installation.

I do have one big crib. I planned to use Hibernation (or suspend-to-disk on Ubuntu) to switch between Windows and Ubuntu. But there are a couple of problems:

Hibernate doesn’t work on Ubuntu. I need to reboot Ubuntu every time, and that takes 3 minutes
When Windows is hibernating, Ubuntu can’t access any files on the hard disk

This means switching between Ubuntu and Windows is roughly a 6 minute shutdown-one-OS-reboot-the-other process rather than the 1-minute hibernate-one-OS-resume-the-other that I had had hoped for.

Another minor problem I have is that our Exchange server doesn’t seem to have an IMAP interface, at least that I know of. So I can’t check mail. But like I said, it’s minor. I just forward mails from my BlackBerry to GMail.

Comments

deeaycee 19 Jan 2009 10:50 am: Your post is how I got my wireless working. Thank you.
I’m also using a Dell D420. I have 8.10 on a 8g Attache flash drive. I ran into a problem while updating. I’m stuck at kernel 2.6.27-7 and it should be updating to 2.6.27-11. The error it gives has something to do with running from a live-cd. After some research, I found that there is a bug that prevents solid updates from the live-cd. The work-around is to actually do a real install to the flash drive from the live-cd. This presents another problem/bug. The only way to see the flash drive during the install is to disconnect the hd, so the install prg doesn’t see it. It was suggested to physically disconnect the hd, but I wonder if it could be done temporarily through the bios. I’ll try this later today. I haven’t even thought about the hibernation/suspend issues yet. Good luck!
ActionParsnip 30 May 2010 10:22 pm: orks 100% OOTB with Ubuntu Lucid.

GPS and Google Earth

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:00:00 +0000

How to use a GPS with Google Earth and map your path. Which is also a way to use your laptop and any GBP 30 GPS receiver to create a GBP 100 GPS navigator.

How iPods work

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 12:00:00 +0000

How iPods work: how the wheel and the software inside Apple’s iPod work.

Cool Tools

Mon, 17 May 2004 12:00:00 +0000

Kevin Kelly’s cool tools blog.

Blog on tech gadgets

Sat, 17 Aug 2002 12:00:00 +0000

A blog on tech gadgets. Love it!

The billionth computer

Tue, 02 Jul 2002 12:00:00 +0000

The billionth computer.

Robot-building kit

Sat, 13 Apr 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Wow! A robot-building kit with an open platform architecture. Wish I had one of these. ($1,500)

Scantips

Wed, 13 Feb 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Scantips. Ways to improve your scanning.

Graphic tablet

Mon, 22 Oct 2001 12:00:00 +0000

I bought a graphic tablet. Pretty good.

IT commoditisation

Thu, 03 May 2001 12:00:00 +0000

The Economist suggests that just as focus of the computer industry shifted from hardware to software, it is now shifting from software to online services. Which means that the computer (hardware and software) will commoditize and only web services will make money.

PC prices are crashing

Thu, 05 Apr 2001 12:00:00 +0000

PC prices are crashing. Open source hardware could possibly accelerate that.

VIAO slimtop

Sun, 07 Jan 2001 12:00:00 +0000

VAIO Slimtop is a computer by Sony which has a flat screen monitor you can write on. $3,000.