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Cake day: August 7th, 2025

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  • This does sound very interesting. I should have said the debuggers I’m familiar with don’t do it. Or if they do, I have no idea how.

    Certainly setting breakpoints on certain conditions instead of just a line, would help a lot. Being able to step backwards through the execution even more so.


  • I can also see the variables change by logging them.

    Debuggers are great if you want to see in detail what’s going on in a specific loop or something, but across a big application with a framework that handles lots of things in unreadable code, multiple components modifying your state, async code, etc.; debuggers are a terrible way to track what’s going on.

    And often when I’ve found where it goes wrong, I want to check what was happening in a previous bit of code, a previous iteration or call. Debuggers don’t go back; you have to restart and run through the whole thing, again finding exactly where it went wrong, but now just a bit before that, which is often impossible.

    With logging, you just log everything, print a big warning where the thing has gone wrong, and scroll back a bit.

    Debuggers are a fantastic bit of technology, but in practice, simple logging has helped me far more often. That said, there are issues where debuggers do beat logging, but they’re a small minority in my experience. Still useful to know both tools.






  • I’ve found it’s pretty good at refactoring existing code to use a different but well-supported and well documented library. It’s absolutely terrible for a new and poorly documented library.

    I recently tried using Copilot with Claude to implement something in a fairly young library, and did get the basics working, including a long repetitive string of “that doesn’t work, I’m getting error msg [error]”. Seven times of that, and suddenly it worked! I was quite amazed, though it failed me in many other ways with that library (imagining functions and options that don’t exist). But then redoing the same thing in the older, better supported library, it got it right on the first try.

    But maybe the biggest advantage of AI coding is that it allows me to code when my brain isn’t fully engaged. Of course the risk there is that my brain might not fully engage because of the AI.











  • No, this is wrong, this is a story that is pushed by western pundits, but it’s based on nothing.

    It’s also based on the words of Putin himself. He has frequently declared that he doesn’t respect Ukraine’s independence, that it’s not a real country, that it should be part of Russia.

    He’s really not making a secret of his imperial ambitions. I don’t know why you’re trying to sell a different narrative.

    In fact, you’ll often see a sort of double-reality in the words of western commentators, where they both make fun of Putin for declaring and stressing his red lines (and then not following through with the threats)

    I haven’t seen anyone making fun of Putin for not starting a nuclear war. Because that’s what he’s threatening. He uses nuclear blackmail to force other countries to let him take Ukraine, which ny itself is an incredibly dangerous precedent, and if it gets rewarded, he might use it again.

    The much more realistic assumption, rather than Putin role-playing Bonaparte, is that Russia feels NATO in Donbass is an existential threat and wants a buffer region.

    He wants entire buffer countries. He wasn’t content with just Donbass. It’s ridiculous that he wants a buffer, because he already has the largest country in the world. He poses a much larger existential threat to Ukraine and other neighbouring countries than they do Russia. It’s an absolute nonsense argument that tries to justify Russian exceptionalism and imperialism.