Fr0styMatt88

It’s a tiring YouTube formula:

“Model X CHANGES EVERYTHING!” (surprised Oculus Rift face without the headset)

Some one-shot prompts for quick impact.

I get it with the incentive structure — honestly not trying to shit on any creators (hate the game, not the player) but seeing it every day is just getting tiring.

I have some memories that I know for a fact are wrong in a pretty particular way. They’ve either become attached to the wrong place or the wrong time.

Like I remember a good friend picking me up from my childhood home, yet I didn’t even know that person until I’d long moved out (many years) from that place.

Oh damn that BASIC :) I remember as a kid going to the library and devouring all the microcomputer books and trying to enter their BASIC programs, only to find the C64 severely lacking. Everyone else's BASIC was better!

I wanted to get into assembler as a kid, I'd read about assembly in computer magazines and wanted an assembler cartridge one year for Christmas, but that was a hard thing to find back in the day, so I kinda never did.

I did get the Simon's BASIC cartridge though -- that added a heap of stuff! I remember writing some massive (for me at least, being a kid) programs at the time -- games that I would spend weeks on but never finish; I fondly remember the 'big' projects I had as a kid.

It's funny this is at the top of HN right now. Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again, now that I'm not using up all my 'writing code' energy in my day job anymore. I'd love to go back and re-take my path and pick up on all the little things I never understood as a kid.

I've got the C64 Ultimate.... don't know if I see myself typing on that keyboard layout though.

I get the nature thing, but people just don’t ‘play the tape until the end’. It’s all nice until you get a minor cut and die from a simple infection.

I’ll dig up the references but I believe they were studying what happened to LLM performance as the complexity and verbosity of the code went up (ie- just letting the LLM rip without doing explicit code cleanup and simplifying).

I feel like we also miss something related to #2 (Discipline). I never needed discipline to sit at a computer coding as a kid for hours on end — if anything I’d have needed massive discipline to NOT do it.

I wonder if what we call discipline (and the resulting skill that we call talent) is really just insanely strong and aligned interest.

I often think “what will ‘maintainable’ code look like in the future?” given this kind of thing. Much of ‘good coding’ is about optimising the codebase for workability for a human intellect with human working memory.

Though having said that, from the studies I’ve come across it seems like LLMs tend to generate more verbose code but perform better over the long-term when the code is maintained and not allowed to sprawl all over the place.

I’m mainly using AI for tools development and in that context I often wonder if I’ve just developed a career-long habit of over-abstracting. Like, the tools work without all the fuss I might have put in at the beginning and you just iterate and evolve as you go.

Reminds me of when Windows security problems hit critical mass in the early-2000s and Microsoft went all-in on addressing it (this started in the XP days IIRC).

On the specific no/low-CGI bent — I find the obsession with using this (mostly false) claim so utterly disrespectful to the people in VFX that have poured thousands upon thousands of hours of their lives into the craft, only to be actively derided (or outright denied) by producers hoping to capitalise on whatever this weird obsession is.

For anyone that hasn’t seen it but is interested in the topic, this series is HIGHLY worth a watch:

“NO CGI” is really just INVISIBLE CGI - 1 https://youtu.be/7ttG90raCNo

Or like me where you get two SSDs in your pool that happen to likely be from the same batch and both decide to permanently disappear at roughly the same time :(

I have the F8 Plus, great little unit. It did need a BIOS update when I first got it to enable Proxmox/other OSes to work properly.

Recently replaced the internal USB boot drive with a small NVMe USB enclosure; using a 90-degree USB connector and using a dremel to sand away an opening for the cable to come out so I could mount the enclosure externally.

I’m running an 8-drive ZFS RAIDZ2 pool. I’m wondering if you know — are the free space recommendations around ZFS cargo or real?

Like I’m already giving up two full drives for redundancy (which saved my ass - I recently had two drives fail on me in quick succession — both SSDs from what looks like an identical batch) but then the advice is kinda saying I need to keep at least another drive worth of space free for the pool to perform well and not crap itself. That hurts with current prices for sure.

When I find myself feeling like that, a good reframe I like using is to turn those comments into commiseration; “What about trying A?” — “Yeah it’s f*ked aye, I tried A, B and C and it STILL didn’t work!”.

I think I have a similar style, I can sound like I’m ‘arguing’ with a person but really I’m arguing with my own internal model. If I say “but what about….”, “what if…..” or “then how….” I probably mean it literally as a question, not “I’m trying to poke holes in your argument and prove you wrong”. I’m trying to poke holes in MY understanding.

The most unexpected thing for me was kind of philosophical in a ‘holy shit’ way.

Cloud models still feel ‘magic’, like you send a request off and get something back, like it’s something ‘special’. I used to joke that ChatGPT might be some kind of mechanical turk underneath.

Watching a model run local on your own machine hits different — you realise that yes, it IS just a computer program. Which for me actually makes me appreciate the leap we’ve made MORE, not less. From an information-theoretic point of view, LLMs really are something special.

The fact that they are just programs, that I’ve now experienced first-hand that they’re just programs, makes all those questions around consciousness and intelligence much more interesting.

What kind of speed in tk/s do you get with the MacBook?

Your see this in coding agents too. The only times so far I’ve really seen Opus tie itself into a knot is where I’ve asked it to fix something that I thought was broken but actually wasn’t in the way I had described. It will bias towards your description (I’m guessing because that’s the most recent context it has?).

Actually, I would be really pleased if a member of Parliament asked that. That shows a level of deeper consideration.

Isn’t there a saying about there being no stupid questions, only stupid answers or something?

I think it’s the combined depth AND breadth of knowledge that can be captured by AI models that is going to make them way better than most humans at this kind of stuff.

Exactly. I was about to reply to the comment with “perfect example of not knowing what you don’t know” in terms of self-diagnosis.

My internal model is/was “if the scan wasn’t set up / can’t detect the thing, why would the statement be present at all?”.

That implicit assumption is really subtle.

I guess ‘per GB’ doesn’t really capture it, because the base number of gigabytes available to people (ie- the smallest compatible RAM kit you need to build a computer) and the base number of gigabytes you really need (OS bloat, feeling responsive, etc) have gone up so much.

Were we really paying more for RAM per GB in the late 2010s than we are now?

Just really doesn't feel like it. Interesting.

Local using Qwen3.6-27B; 2xRTX 5070Ti graphics cards; VS Code with Cline at the moment and Ollama back-end (will get to trying the others soon).

It’ll be interesting.

I’m using Qwen3.6:27B at home and mostly Sonnet/Opus (depending on the complexity of the task) at work.

You have to break things down into smaller chunks for the local models. For the bigger cloud ones they can do a lot of the broader thinking.

If we can agree that the AI model is at least as capable as a junior engineer or new contractor, how’s that different to saying “software engineering isn’t worth $200 a month”?

Has a very race-to-the-bottom feel to it.

Though in the grand scheme of it, $200/mo probably isn’t the real price either. Also looking at it not just in a vacuum - paying for a product that can change what you get from under you doesn’t seem great anyway.

At least with a locally-hosted model you know what you’re getting.

It’s interesting — my own impression kinda matches that; I’m still doing most of the thinking when using AI that I’d do before writing the code, it’s just that now the feedback loop is so much faster.

One of the artists at my company described generative AI as “I get none of the fun of actually drawing the thing and all of the work of fixing it so it works properly with what we need”. That’s not how I feel about it in relation to writing code.

Maybe I’m just tired and AI has made things interesting again.

How is the place you’re at approaching AI in this context?

As a senior I worry about the juniors coming in — Claude can do what I would have previously tasked to a junior.

I guess the shape of the junior role just changes.

As a senior you can get into a bad habit of being scared to make changes. It happens after enough experience with enough codebases.

It’s good to not just go change things for the sake of it — it’s equally as important to ask yourself if you’ve gone too far in the other direction and to always remain curious and critical of yourself.

I mean I can see it. Books are just a way to transmit one’s thoughts and experiences to other people. So it’s no different to being exposed to someone with a different viewpoint. Common sense isn’t common or innate, it’s tribal knowledge.

There’s that XKCD about someone learning something new that was just thought to be something everyone knew.

Also you don’t know what you don’t know.

Agree though — coaching and persuasion are a huge part which is why I think a lot of these books seem ‘fluffy’ if all you’re wanting is a collection of facts.

There was also the very early leak/theft of the Half-Life 2 beta source (https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_2_leak)