Andy Hill

Andy Hill

@ahill.net

seattle software engineer, linux, transit, music, weightlifting, hiking, cycling ahill.net (personal) / dev.ahill.net (tech)

76 followers105 following107 posts

Andy Hill reposted

Some big news: @ducklabs.com is joining AWS, with the move expected to complete by early September. Our team will stay together in Amsterdam, with more resources to take DuckDB, DuckLake and Quack further - while the open-source Duck Stack remains free under MIT license ducklabs.com/news/2026/08...

ducklabs.comDuckLabs to Join AWS, Projects to Remain Open SourceDuckLabs provides services around the DuckDB in-process OLAP data management system directly from its main developers.

Andy Hill reposted

The real "administrative bloat" in education is the money that schools are being forced to fork over to tech vendors that can just keep jacking up their prices year after year, because it would cost even more to rebuild the systems and retrain the people that were built/trained on that tech.

Jess Calarco@jessicacalarco.com

Of course, there's basically 0 chance that the cost of ChatGPT for all stays at $13M/yr. The whole ed tech model is to offer an initial price that's ridiculously low, get schools hooked (ie, by helping them embed the new tech in all their systems), then jack up the price for contracts long-term. 3/

Andy Hill reposted

The problem with hiring “AI natives” is that if you aren’t careful then all you’ve done is hire people who were very good at asking ChatGPT to do their homework.

Andy Hill reposted

Do you know how long people have been playing professional baseball and how hard it is to be the first player to ever do anything let alone something this spectacular

Sarah Langs@slangsonsports.bsky.social

JOSHUA BAEZ IS THE FIRST PLAYER IN MLB HISTORY WITH 3 HOME RUNS IN HIS MLB DEBUT!!!!

i was recently reminded of the most savage restaurant review: “i went and got a COVID test after eating here because the food had absolutely no flavor”

Saturday I made a fun app: - Give an LLM with export of my RSS feeds in OPML - Every week, an agent wakes up, looks at various sources for new sites w/ some criteria (infrequent posts, not sales, etc) and pull requests them the OPML file. So far I found new interesting sites I’ll subscribe to.

Next I’ll add some cleanup for dead sites, and ways to prevent the same sites from showing up over and over in pull requests (disallow lists, I guess?).

how the hell did anyone in the 90s actually read Gene Wolfe‘s New Sun series before e-readers with builtin dictionary lookups? did they actually use a dictionary at least once per page?

Andy Hill reposted

Very useful post from Bryan breaking down the challenges of growing engineers in the land of AI

Bryan Liles@bryanl.dev

If coding is your favorite part of software engineering, keep coding. AI doesn't stop you. But if coding was the only part you were good at, that's a different conversation. The job was always bigger than the code. #bransoncognac blog.bryanl.dev/posts/ai-sen...

Andy Hill reposted

Replying to @lizthegrey.com

You can vibe code your way to a working prototype. You cannot vibe code or one-shot your way to a competitive product that works at scale. The hard part isn't writing code; it's the architectural supervision.

> British Chaos refers to a cluster of TikTok personalities that “once might have just been a local character in a pub in Stevenage but have become international celebrities 👏

Andy Hill reposted

Replying to @doop.bsky.social

I ran a fairly large blog commenting platform in ~2001 and was taken by surprise when performance tanked because some blog entries suddenly had tens of thousands of comments. Turns out Japanese teenagers were picking a random blog each day and using the comments as a chatroom.

Andy Hill reposted

It feels like the internet‘s cooked us into presenting every position in the strongest moral terms and responding to every disagreement as an all-out attack that must be annihilated before it destroys everything and it seems not great

🎵 last night was the first night in eons i played a bass trombone part. The lowest notes were occasional F1/G1s while regularly cranking out E5-D5s gave me a new appreciation for lung capacity

mspaint traffic notices from WSDOT

WSDOT Traffic@traffic.wsdot.wa.gov

The cute animals got stuck in traffic, so this time you just get Greg. Greg's here to help you get through Seattle during the full NB Revive I-5 closure from I-90 to NE 45th St this weekend. From 11:59p Fri. to 5a Mon. NB I-5 will be clamped shut (closed). Express lanes open northbound.

I wish I knew. It’s also painful for client side metrics on empheral workers.

Does anyone know why all cloud-native open source ecosystem uses pull model to expose their /metrics (instead of pushing the metrics)? Pull model is really poor when the metric cardinality exposed on a single endpoint increases.

@stevekamb.com is there a place to buy a digital copy of Level Up Your Life? Ideally for a Kobo device. I saw your note about an updated version coming in 2026, but I’m having trouble waiting that long.