Why is my Lambda function getting retried when getting synchronously called from the command line?

I recently ran into a surprising behavior when calling a Lambda function from the command line that I thought I'd share.

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Posted on 2024-09-13

Tips and Tricks Picked Up From Using a Large Language Model to Search My Personal Wiki By "Vibe"

Recently, I wanted to find a document in my personal wiki that mentioned the idea of "there will always be another coding task" - unfortunately, traditional search came up short here, because I couldn't remember the exact wording I used, only the "vibe" of this particular phrase. However, I've been looking for a reason to use a large language model (aka LLM) with my wiki, and while there are other techniques that could accomplish the same goal, this seemed like as good an excuse as any to try it out! I learned some tips and tricks along the way, so I thought I'd share - if you just want the tips, feel free to skip ahead to the Summary - otherwise, read on!

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Posted on 2024-09-06

Thinking about Clever Code

The trick I covered in my previous post got me reflecting on "clever" code. Most developers I know (myself included) have learned to mistrust clever code - we see it and the intuition we've developed provokes a gut reaction of "oh no, how can this blow up in my face?"

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Posted on 2024-08-09

A neat trick I found in glibc

While digging in and doing research for my previous post, I came across a really cool trick that glibc uses to provide a single macro for invoking system calls, no matter how many arguments they take. I thought I'd share the trick here, along with an explanation on how it works for those unfamiliar with the C preprocessor.

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Posted on 2024-07-24

bpftrace: needing to cast when filtering on negative numbers and why

A few months ago I was using bpftrace to implement a program to monitor writes to a specific directory, and while working on this program I encountered some noteworthy behavior around bpftrace and its filters that I thought I should share.

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Posted on 2024-07-02