Agent is also a long established term:

https://www.eginnovations.com/blog/agentless-vs-agent-based-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/js8h65/looking_fo...

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.2.0?topic=tools-performanc...

https://jolokia.org/agent/jvm.html

https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/javase/j...

Appreciate the references, I was the New Relic Ruby agent maintainer in 2010, as an additional reference. And we called it an agent, because it was hosted on the customer's infrastructure, but they didn't maintain or control it, we did. Regrettably no license to kill, and not much in the way of secrecy or gadgetry.

> no license to kill, and not much in the way of secrecy or gadgetry

Insofar as you know.. there could be plenty of killer secrecy and gadgetry that was surreptitiously injected by your build/deployment/distribution systems ;)

it was ruby, so I did in fact know ;)

Edit: the customers, in some cases, did indeed run interpreters that were bad, but that's not my lookout! Buy me a fancy beverage and I'll tell you a story sometime

What is it about a tool, running as your own non-root user, installed in your home directory, that makes it scary?

Let's say this is widely used and let's presume that a specific version has a security issue. With everyone having their own copy of the binary on every host versioned at the time they first ran a command on that host, or any decently sized fleet, it'll take a big effort to track down and ensure all versions have been updated or removed (to be re-generated later).

Frankly, we would re-kick our fleet ahead of schedule rather then try to remediate it more manually. But we re-kick our fleet on a rotating yearly schedule, so it's not too much an effort to re-kick it earlier. It's a completely automated system in place now.

Suppose there are two options: remaster the game with AI assistance, or don’t remaster the game at all (because that would entail porting 72,758 lines of assembly by hand, and the time-to-reward ratio would be deemed to low for most people).

Why complain about the outcome? The old game remains available, and you can play it for free. This isn’t some zero sum situation where the existence of the remastered game sets the world back in some way. I could see being more interested (or only interested) in playing the original, but I don’t see what motivates the negativity.

> I don't require the circuit boards in my electronics to be hand-drilled either.

This is the exact example I used the other day. Same with pick-and-place, CNC for subtractive manufacturing, 3D printing for additive, plastic injection molding, etc. I wouldn't want to live in a world where the only option for products produced by such automation were instead done one-off by artisans. Sure, if you want a hand crafted laptop where everything (save for the silicon, I suppose) was hand carved, hand placed, hand soldered, etc, you should, by all means, be allowed to pay $20,000-$200,000 for that privilege, instead of ~$2,000.

It's bizarre to me that so many developers are overly attached to typing every individual character. If I could get paid for my sense of knowledge and good judgement to design software while delegating 100% of the process of creating to a team of engineers, I would. And as a staff engineer, I'm already close to that, but there are things I have to roll my sleeves up and handle myself.

It makes me wonder if these same people take issue with task delegation in software development: is it also problematic when a staff engineer delegates tasks across teams, or a senior engineer mentors a junior developer?

It's such a stifling, self-limiting belief that it's actually saddening :(.

It's also a hypocritical belief: the machine they used to type out these thoughts were assembled in a factory, using CNC, pick-and-place, laser engraving, plastic injection molding, etc. With the exception of a few things (ex: the silicon itself) all of these things could be hand crafted - it would just make the price of computer impractical. Commoditization is a good thing, and automation is necessary for that.

I can only imagine that what is actually happening is that these people are attached to the craft of software development, and AI represents a threat to that, just as CNC milling has displaced manual machinists. But then everyone would be better off if they found an appropriate place to vent that frustration (a therapist? a friend? like-minded forum dedicated to AI complaints?), rather than projecting onto (and leveling complaints at) people using AI.

If said staff engineer would then claim junior’s work as his own, then yes. But for an entirely different reason, as well as this whole analogy doesn’t work here.

I am almost certain that, on a daily basis, you use dozens (or hundreds) of things that:

1. Were produced via plastic injection molding.

2. Were machined by CNC.

3. Have PCBs that were fabricated by machine, milled by machine, and populated via pick-and-place machine.

4. Were laser engraved, or silk screened, or printed.

5. For food/foodstuffs: were processed in an automated factory.

When you use all of these things, do you complain about using/consuming something that someone "couldn't be bothered to hand craft"?

If you don't see/anticipate the utility in a thing (like I don't have any interest in wicker baskets, hand crafted or not), why complain about that thing, instead of just moving along? I'd get it if you wanted to provide constructive feedback, but you can't do that if you're not willing to read the code.

Harboring (and expressing) negative sentiment for things that you opt to not be involved in sounds like a recipe for misery, as there's an infinite number of things to actively dislike if you go looking for them: movies/music that aren't to your tastes, mediocre restaurants, cities you wouldn't want to live in, etc.

I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that full text search systems are ultimately a convoluted way of performing O(N) regex searches? If not, I don't see how you arrive at the conclusion that this is "the same as grep in a memory/ directory".

The memories are stored as OKF (Open Knowledge Format), which is markdown + frontmatter (+ constraints/schema imposed thereon).

Having an inverted index (as with FTS5) is useful in that, for a basic single-term lookup, you reduce a sequential scan, O(N), down to O(log N). For small N, the performance difference might not be meaningful. Performance gap widens with more sophisticated queries (boolean operators, ranking, etc).

Probably not, given that "terrific" was almost certainly used sarcastically here.

“that code” refers to the body of the loop.

Unless the loop is unrolled, yes, there is a branch to exit the loop. But then that doesn’t matter because the whole goal at the beginning was to avoid branch misprediction (which is not the same thing as avoiding branches entirely).