Twixes

~30% reduction in real-world task cost vs. Fable 5 in our evals at viktor.com ! Caching goes a looong way

A bit of a love letter to internal hackathons – they're truly good IF and only if leaders lead the whole thing by example.

Average _per review_? Insane costs, that's potentially thousands per developer. Am I missing something?

This slop so annoying to see, and tiring – but worth it here – to call out.

Drop the "test". Just "stress" – it's cleaner.

Thank you, ChatGPT

An echo of Popcorn Time can he heard bouncing around the software cathedral… The takedown notices will start coming in if CineCLI is too easy to use! Though looks like it doesn't play anything itself – _might_ be safe

Halfway the this post, I realized checking the HN front page was merely a thin desire – so I'm off to read a book. Farewell!

Is there a better way to achieve engineering excellence?

Oh, welp - now here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236517

Digital Audio Workstation, which is a fancy name for a kind of app where you can make a song on your computer. Whether that's a recording of an instrument or voice, or a digital instrument playing from MIDI signal (piano, synth, anything), or recorded samples from various sources, you can put all that together however you want, including all sorts of effects (lotta plugins).

Sneaky and smooth! Reminds me so much of my side project from a couple years back: https://hubmeter.io/ – basically GitHub Detective that charts the events instead of showing them directly!

So the whole idea of "you can't eat technology" relies on the apocalypse happening imminently? Modern institutions of society are WHY our lives are full of what would be magic 200 years ago, like being able to grab a carrot from the supermarket shelf any time. With both hardware and software we've made agriculture the most efficient its ever been, and it's now so efficient it literally frees up to optimize the edges of other problems

Lofty claims are great – a propensity for them is not a given at 15, nor at any age. So many fall into the opposite scenario, of uncertainty and unknown complexity causing them to dial claims down. That _destroys_ potential.

What a harrowing account. Ended up reading all posts in the author's glioblastoma series, starting with the first one from May 2023. Devastating topic, excellent writing. I can only wish strength

Got fixed pretty thoroughly though, it seems! https://schollz.com/tinker/croc9/

The difference in tech outcomes can definitely be attributed to _European_ conditions, but regulation is extremely country-specific – the _EU_ is not the detriment (e.g. Germany might be notably bureaucratic, but the culture in Sweden differs, and so do frameworks in Poland). EU institutions are out to get the US giants, but startups or scaleups? Out of sight.

There really is comparatively little reward for shooting for the moon though – the fragmented stock markets don't provide great exit opportunities, so less money goes into funding ambitious companies. Then, scaling throughout all of Europe is notably hard, with dozens of languages, cultures, and legal frameworks to navigate. Some of these cultures are more risk-averse, and that's not easy to change. Not to mention English being the _lingua franca_ of business and tech.

I would love Europe to reach the States' level of tech strength, but these are all really hard problems.

Look, this is exactly why Musk needs his $55B stock bonus. The wealth just can't trickle down otherwise!

Well, the accused basically owns a nation state with nuclear weapons – but gl;hf to the bureaucrats. We need to supply Ukraine with ammunition and hardware now, Europe especially.

That's cool, but now for REAL bare-metal performance someone should rewrite Python in an even lower-level language. That's right, Python written in C is gonna be hella fast! Oh, wait…

Optimistically (and ostensibly), almost all the energy for the kilns would be free of direct emissions (e.g solar). In that case the plan sounds effective. Let's see if that actually works out.

Hmm, might be the way Russia is effectively a dictatorship, the heavily enforced political censorship, or perhaps the major war they started against another independent European nation.

The impact of your high-end or large laptop on other people's lives is nil. Nobody cares, even the energy grid. The impact of your large SUV on other people's live is significant – be that when they find themselves anywhere near you, or when they just live in the same city and don't enjoy infrastructure for cars getting ever larger at the expense of humans.

Flying Ryanair isn't what one would call a pleasure, but I've gotta say their safety record is stellar. I suppose the business jets make sense as an optimization at the scale they've reached.

Sounds like a great metric to game though. Undercounting crime is not far fetched at all. Such a metric needs to be maintained independently from the local government (or independently verifiable).

Without paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20230628204040/https://www.nytim...

This is interesting, but in practice the quality of results is paramount, and how does something like searx compare against DDG… or Google? I wonder what kind of metric could be defined to even plot that.

I'm always impressed how direct the relationship between profit and mathematics/physics/electronics is in HFT. It feels like a marker of civilizational advancement – it's not enough abstraction to just have fungible means of payment and slices of enterprises, not enough to have instruments derived from these, not even enough to have the ability to trade from afar using electricity. At this point there's value even in making the trades as close to instant as possible. Is it _good_? That's what I don't know – in some way it seems more divorced from reality than the engineering of F1, in another it seems more grounded

Fascinating how such a simple solution is so timelessly effective. A "framework" going two centuries strong.

The US is one case, I wonder what about Europe or China? It seems part of the problem was that the mandates were loosely followed at a societal level — masks clearly do reduce the spread of diseases when used reliably (see: doctors). It seems likely that in societies who followed the guidance strictly, there must have been _some_ reduction in infections. I suppose the question then is: are there any places where we can compare a community loose on masking, and one strict on it – all other things being equal?