WhatIsDukkha

Social media is a Dunning Krueger support network.

The term absurdist pro-wrestling term "kayfabe" appears to be an attempt to pretend there are adults in the room in these situations.

We've seen from the last years that's itself a deception to allow the right wing intelligentsia to excuse the erratic choices and profound damage to US international power.

Its an extension of the old Soviet propaganda tool "if everything is a lie, anything can be true".

Sagan comes in with a great quote -

The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees some­thing he can’t understand, he attri­butes it to extraterrestrial intelli­gence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151).

Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.

Its completely trivial to export orgmode to markdown either as a process or just whenever you copy to the clipboard.

Completely trivial isn't a big barrier to interoperation.

So this seems like a bit of a half measure in the sense that it doesn't provide client side build?

With guix I can bit for bit reproduce with my client machine the upstream binaries.

This seems flawed to assume that google's servers are uncompromised, its vastly better to have distributed ability to reproduce.

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-chall...

There is no real code here, its all a stub.

No prompts, no functions, nothing in the github repos.

https://github.com/pranav-deshmukh/blender-mcp/blob/main/add...

For context this is the original keybase guy coming back to make a workalike opensource version -

https://blog.foks.pub/posts/introducing/

Sprouted potatoes is a sing its time to get some new ones... you want to eat horded 6 month old potatoes glhf

I don't eat fumigated strawberries so replacing fumigated strawberries with irradiated strawberries is... not useful?

You proved my point actually.

Neither of those things is actually useful as an eater of food?

You want less fresh food and from sketchier sources yet you think those are virtues?

As an EATER of food what is the benefit of CRISPR/GMO?

There answer after a good 40 minutes of searching is... nothing.

It's a technology 100% in service of being lazier/sloppier for industrial scale food production and in service of IP restricting the food supply in favor of shareholder X or Y.

"but we can make tasteless US tomatoes on even more inappropriate cropland!"

...

Great for my stock portfolio to screw over developing countries but useless for me as a first world eater of food.

No proof of existence of a benefit.

I simply wouldn't use this as is but I would like it if it was a uv plugin, poetry seems like a dead end in 2025 to me.

The alternative to radiation is mixing less poop into your meat etc.?

You understand that the majority of "food science" is designed to allow increasingly lazier and sloppier food handling and allowing it to still be palatable/not kill too many people right?

Don't fall into the "lower cost" idea either, being lazier and sloppier means higher corporate profits and not lower consumer prices (for worse food).

Compare the grass fed/ranged (produced on farms 1/10th the size of the US equivalent) BigMac in Germany versus the one you get anywhere in the US, which do you think is healthier and tastier? They are basically the same price to the consumer mysteriously...

European consumers seem to not want factory farms that produce such low quality food that it needs to be CRISPRed (as is the case with this story) just to be kept alive long enough.

I also am in that camp, I don't want to eat pork raised in unsanitary conditions and then sold to me at top dollar (because lying/obscuring about sourcing).

I think its much better to help people learn that an LLM is "not" a computer (even if it technically is).

Thinking its a computer makes you do dumb things with them that they simply have never done a good job with.

Build intuitions about what they do well and intuitions about what they don't do well and help others learn the same things.

Don't encourage people to have poor ideas about how they work, it makes things worse.

Would you ask an LLM a phone number? If it doesn't use a function call the answer is simply not worth having.

I would never ask any of these questions of an LLM (and I use and rely on LLMs multiple times a day), this is a job for a computer.

I would also never ask a coworker for this precise number either.

I have about 140 Emacs plugins running.

I've never had to declare Emacs bankruptcy.

10 years of good times with Emacs+evil and 35 years of vim.

Fwiw.

Here is a bug with some back and forth between millenniumdb and qlever in starting a benchmarking attempt but I don't see results, though they managed to build and import.

https://github.com/MillenniumDB/MillenniumDB/issues/10

https://github.com/ad-freiburg/qlever

I would accept the point that stress triggers schizophrenic behaviors.

When we look at magical thinking as one of those light schizotypical behaviors large portions of the population exhibit these symptoms.

They drink from the cup of nonsense to excess.

There should always be room for drinking from the cup of nonsense but too much and its difficult to be useful to yourself and your family.

Well being loopy isn't too good for economic success so that's a factor? Though for sure I've met some incredibly loopy people that had some great dice roll streaks.

But there are a lot of other factors in the problem and making it an economic issue really obscures some of the more important factors.

Intellectual laziness, idle brains, idle hands, toxic memes and bad actors making bad use of them.

I don't understand the value of this abstraction.

I can see the value of something like DSPy where there is some higher level abstractions in wiring together a system of llms.

But this seems like an abstraction that doesn't really offer much besides "function calling but you use our python code".

I see the value of language server protocol but I don't see the mapping to this piece of code.

That's actually negative value if you are integrating into an existing software system or just you know... exposing functions that you've defined vs remapping functions you've defined into this intermediate abstraction.

I use -

Rust, aider.chat and

I thoughtfully limit the context of what I'm coding (on 2 of 15 files).

I ./ask a few times to get the context setup. I let it speculate on the path ahead but rein it in with more conservative goals.

I then say "let's carefully and conservatively implement this" (this is really important with sonnet as its way too eager).

I get to compile by doing ./test a few times, there is sometimes a doom loop though so -

I reset the context with a better footing if things are going off track or I just think "its time".

I do not commit until I have a plausible building set of functions (it can probably handle touching 2-3 functions of configs or one complete function but don't get too much more elaborate without care and experience).

I either reset or use the remaining context to create some tests and validate.

I think saying 1.3x more productive is fair with only this loop BUT you have to keep a few things in perspective.

I wrote specs for everything I did, in other words I wrote out in english my goals and expectations of the code, that was highly valuable and something I probably wouldn't have done.

Automatic literate programming!

Sheep shearing is crazy fast with an LLM. Those tasks that would take you off in the weeds do feel 5x faster (with caveats).

I think the 2x-5x faster is true within certain bounds -

What are the things that you were psychologically avoiding /dragging or just skipping because they were too tedious to even think of?

Some people don't have that problem or maybe don't notice, to me its a real crazy benefit I love!

That's were the real speedups happens and its amazing.

I'm not frustrated with you but I'll explain why you might be getting get the vibes here.

Its like people are learning about these new things called skis.

They fall on their face a few times but then they find "wow much better than good old snowshoes!"

Of course some people are falling every 2 feet while trying skis and then go to the top of the mountain and claim skis are fake and we should all go back to snowshoes because we don't know about snow or mountains.

They are insulting about it because its important to the ragers that, despite failing at skiing, they are senior programmers and everyone else doesn't know how to compile, test and review code and they must be hallucinating their ski journeys!

Meanwhile a bunch of us took the falls and learned to ski and are laughing at the ragers.

The frustrating thing though is that for all the skiiers we can't seem to get good conversations about how to ski because there is so much raging... oh well.

This seems like a weird use of Rust.

There is no mention of how much of the codebase is even in safe Rust after all this work so no clear value to the migration?

Frequently when people get their code ported they then begin a process of reducing the unsafe surface area but not here.

The author seems to have little or no value on safe Rust? It doesn't seem evident from reading/skimming his 4 articles on the process.

Interesting mechanical bits to read for sure though so it' still a useful read more broadly.

It's unsurprising that the author would go use Zig next time since they didn't seem to have any value alignment with Rust's core safety guarantees.

One of the things thats held me back from being super interested in this field is that my understanding is that there is likely to be some kind of mesh backing needed for this to progress.

IIRC some researchers had started to back the gaussians with a mesh to provide an editable artifact that would allow the gaussians to be moved and manipulated.

Is this anywhere near being a standard feature yet?

edit - ie https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04796

I agree cubicles are highly underrated to what came after.

I've leased a small office in a coworking space to alleviate the workfromhomeitis.

Its nice enough but wow... the people having to work at tables in an open room, mini fake living room, and open kitchen.

It's social but totally unsuitable for concentration.

The book here actually encited a bit of nostalgia in me and I bought a copy.

I can actually show people what life was like for us since I don't really have my own pictures of office life of the era.

I entirely agree about their utility.

HN, and the internet in general, have become just an ocean of reactionary sandbagging and blather about how "useless" LLMs are.

Meanwhile, in the real world, I've found that I haven't written a line of code in weeks. Just paragraphs of text that specify what I want and then guidance through and around pitfalls in a simple iterative loop of useful working code.

It's entirely a learned skill, the models (and very importantly the tooling around them) have arrived at the base line they needed.

Much Much more productive world by just knuckling down and learning how to do the work.

edit: https://aider.chat/ + paid 3.5 sonnet

Tmux allows you to start multiple windows and send commands to them.

An example from man tmux -

"

refresh-client -t/dev/ttyp2

rename-session -tfirst newname

set-option -wt:0 monitor-activity on

new-window ; split-window -d

bind-key R source-file ~/.tmux.conf \; \ display-message "source-file done"

"

Screen has no equivalent besides manually using the keybinds.

I believe tmux has some better mechanics around the attach/detach but it eludes me atm what was better.

Basically what made me switch in the first place from screen to tmux was wanting a split window watch compile and a logfile to run automatically with one command.

Hard with screen and easy with tmux.

I wish the openssh folks would implement a UDP based "whole auth key or no talk at all" protocol.

ie Single Packet Authorization

Wrapping your ssh with wireguard (because wireguard doesn't respond without a full key) doesn't feel too good.

This seems like a bad fix to the problem of insisting that ssh continue to only use TCP.

Wireguard only responds to a complete useful key from incoming UDP (as I understand). Probe resistant.

I get the legacy argument here but it seems like almost two decades of "this tcp thing has some downsides for this job"?