Google ads are very time & location dependent, the fact that it's showing to you might be a bad sign since you are most likely not close to Durban and this seems like an ad you only want to run locally.

Yes our ads were geo-fenced when I had them on. We have always had a good web presence, I think the conclusion is that nobody looks for services on Google, and our reliance on it above other channels is now no longer viable

Everybody looks on Google for services; or ChatGPT googles/bings it for them. Still the same.

We had a 10x jump just last month for my own company.

For bigger company I consult with we had stable revenue last 2 years even though search traffic declined by 50%, our Google ads still perform the same. In general buying intent still seem to come through Google, only 10% via GPT.

It will become more and more, but a full drop in 3 months means something else is wrong.

If I google for kids show in Durban, even if not from Durban, I want to see Durban related results.

It seems to mostly ignore Claude.md

If you can test how often it is being used by having a line in there saying something like “You must start every non-code response with ‘Woohoo!’”

It’s told to only use it if relevant because most people write bad ones. Someone should write a tool to assess CLAUDE.md quality.

It does, Claude.md is the least effective way to communicate to it.

It's always interesting reading other people's approaches, because I just find them all so very different than my experience.

I need Agents, and Skills to perform well.

All I use is curse words and it does a damn great job most of the time

Same here :)))), he's really good at understanding when you're pissed off.

I thought I was the only one.

Yep, that usually works best.

On paper yes, but every time my flight was delayed in EU the airlines (KLM, Lufthansa, RyanAir) always had a cop out, weather, airport issues, etc. and I didn't get compensated. Even though other planes managed to fly in the same conditions.

If they refuse you can escalate or hire a company that will negotiate for some percentage of profit. In most cases I had this problem they gave me a refund, but sometimes I had to argue a bit.

I used to work at one such company. The process can take a long time but it is mostly hands-off for the traveller and success rates are high once the case has been taken.

Edit: and also, these claim-assistance companies work on a winning fee.

I’ve tried those as well, they only take easy cases you can do yourself as well

Yeah had so many discussion with senior developers in my life to argue for just keeping things simple, but my god they love abstractions. They are clearly always very smart and understand the code base well. Maybe it’s their intelligence wanting to be more utilised or maybe they are bored and trying to over engineer simple problems

I would narrow this down further. Programmers (myself guilty) live abstractions they control. It gives them the ability to tweak little things and feel like they've done it in a more maintainable way.

Programmers HATE using other people's abstractions, which is why "mini frameworks" tend to tall apart after expanding to teams that don't have control over it. In my experience, this leads to new mini frameworks wrapping the first one, forever targeting a static version of the underlying MF, to allow for adding new appendages without going through a gatekeeper.

It is easier to write your own code than to understand someone’s else code.

It would be much better if we get more humble people who get down to work to understand why and how existing code or framework works instead of trying to work around it or simply throwing all away and writing their own code.

Thera are of course some exceptions - but those are like pro athletes - no you are not the one, learn existing code instead of making excuses about some edge cases you ran into so you have to rewrite all from scratch.

It's a mixed bag.. If you spend much time in a poorly reviewed ecosystem then you are quickly taught that if you try to make things work in their broken crap you will lose a lot of time and have no code to demonstrate you were working at all.

If you always inject the same repair layer approach of your own crap then you ship more reliably and have your pleased client and your lock-in. The pleased client then has to decide if they should listen to a replacement who says you are insane but can't seem to ship anything.

This view needs to be balanced. There's a lot of cases where the previous code didn't abstract the domain well, or the domain has changed (mostly at the application level). Fighting the ill-fitted abstraction is a real chore in this case and quickly lead to complex code.

I'm all for aggressive refactoring if it leads to something simpler.

It sounds like you are agreeing - that digging into the existing layers can be a good idea that is often neglected or resisted to a fault. That we should treat existing software less like black boxes.

There are caveats here too of course - forking every single thing and excessive NIH syndrome comes with their own costs and risks.

But the whole software stack is built on abstractions on abstractions on abstractions. Its just a matter of finding the right ones

You know what I feel when I see someone adding a dependency injection framework to a micro micro service with merely 6 classes...

I remember using Laravel a while back and it had quite some magic but it was done right and made a lot of things much easier

I actually wonder how much traffic they lose this way. My employer doesn't allow me to book with them because the agent doesn't list them. Even though I want to go to Cambridge, quite annoying.

If your job is paying, why do you complain?

Late reply: because noone else flys to Stansted directly at that time. And via Heathrow is another 2h extra.

I try to spend the company’s money with as much care as I spend my own.

Yeah I think the real values is for the Solo developers, indie hackers & side projects.

Being unrestrained by team protocols, communications, jira boards, product owners, grumpy seniors.

They can now deliver much more mature platforms, apps, consumer platforms without any form of funding. You can easily save months on the basics like multi tenant set up, tests, payment integration, mailing settings, etc.

It does seem likely that the software space is about to get even crowdier, but also much more feature rich.

There is of course also a wide array of dreamers & visionairies who know jump into the developer role. Wether or not they are able to fully run their own platform im not sure. I did see many posts asking for help at some point.

As a solo grumpy senior, I've been pumping out features over the past 6 months and am now expanding into new markets.

I've also eliminated some third party SaaS integrations by creating slimmer and better integrated services directly into my platform. Which is an example of using AI to bring some features in-house, not primarily to save money (generally not worth the effort if that's the goal), but because it's simply better integrated and less frustrating than dealing with crappy third-party APIs.

Trying to understand what this means.

Did the bad route cause an overload? Was there a code error on that route that wasn’t spotted? Was it a code issue or an instance that broke?

It says network routing issue.

Network routes consist of a network (a range of IPs) and a next hop to send traffic for that range to.

These can overlap. Sometimes that’s desirable, sometimes it is not. When routers have two routes that are exactly the same they often load balance (in some fairly dumb, stateless fashion) between possible next hops, when one of the routes is more specific, it wins.

Routes get injected by routers saying “I am responsible for this range” and setting themselves as the next hop, others routers that connect to them receive this advertisement and propagate it to their own router peers further downstream.

An example would be advertising 192.168.0.0/23, which is the range of 192.168.0.0-192.168.1.255.

Let’s say that’s your inference backend in some rows in a data center.

Then, through some misconfiguration, some other router starts announcing 192.168.1.0/24 (192.168.1.0-192.168.1.255). This is more specific, that traffic gets sent there, and half of the original inference pod is now unreachable.

Thank you for that explanation!

it means their servers were unreachable due to network misconfig.