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alemanek

1,223 karma · joined February 22, 2014

Contact me: adrian at lemanek dot com
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alemanek··on Dayjob: Tax – evaluating AI agents on 50 professional tax assignments
Yeah for individual tax preparation that is pretty high. Most people get away with filing for $20-150. I used to have a CPA do my consulting business, tiny 1 person company, and personal taxes for $500.

I no longer do consulting on the side so I just use online tax software. It is about $150 but I do that more out of laziness as it integrates with my brokerage and payroll company to import everything automatically. Also I have carry forward losses and such that it already knows about.

Most people’s taxes are simpler than mine but I am sure there are lots of folks here with much more complex tax situations

alemanek··on Ghostty 1.4
I might not be using the correct terms. But, here is what I was seeing:

- in a running session text display would slow down intermittently. Like 2-3 words a second

- occasionally terminal would stop, some times in the middle of showing a response, and would need to restart the terminal to get it back. But I tailed the session logs and Claude code didn’t think anything was amiss. It was proceeding like normal

After switching to Ghostty these issues went away and has been rock solid since then.

EDIT: formatting

alemanek··on Ghostty 1.4
It being super responsive is the reason I switched to it. MacOS terminal had issues keeping up with Claude Code. It would frequently be super slow rendering the text output or sometimes just stop altogether.

When looking at options I looked at speed and simplicity. Ghostty fit the bill but I did evaluate iterm as well. Excellent terminal but too many features for what I was looking for. I live in the terminal but am not a Terminal App power user if that makes sense.

So, it really comes down to what you want and what your workflow looks like. Ghostty has been flawless for me the past 9months. It gets out of the way and just works really well.

alemanek··on Today's PHP security release, and how we're strengthening security
Shift liability to those who store and sell data. They get full economic responsibility for fallout of breaches of data that is retained past the time necessary to complete the transactions. If they sell the data then they hold liability for all breaches of downstream parties as well. Require them to carry insurance against breaches.

It would completely destroy the data brokers and targeted ad industry but the world would be a better place as a result. Also not going to happen but I can dream.

alemanek··on Docker Agent
2nd this but I did need to write a session start hook to prune out most of the skills so it was just the non Rovo ones. Took about 15min to setup though so I am not complaining. twg works really well.
alemanek··on RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree
A bit different but in the same domain GitNexus has been really good for me. Symbol based search and impact analysis. Once I added git hooks to auto index and added some explicit instructions it saved quite a bit for me. I have no affiliation just wanted to add that as some thing to try out.
alemanek··on Rural Village in Spain Is Welcoming Digital Nomads with Open Arms
You haven’t lived in Medellin, Colombia if you don’t think digital nomads can have an effect on housing prices.

My experience is from 2015-2024. I did the digital nomad thing for 9 years and lived in Medellin 4 separate times over that period for 6 months to a year each time.

I saw rents for normal folks, not furnished and not Airbnbs, do a 4x in that time period. Laureles was a middle class suburb for locals in 2015 and was just overrun by nomads by 2024. Poblado, Laureles, even as far as La Estrella saw a really noticeable impact.

Clearly I contributed to the issue and nomads did inject money into the economy but it also had a really visible effect on housing. I don’t have any ideas on how to do it right but it is something that should be approached carefully or locals get priced out.

EDIT: I believe they started more tightly regulating things in 2024 with required registration for <1 year rentals. Not sure how that has played out. Also added the specific neighborhoods that I saw things shoot up.

alemanek··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
Yeah I know. That is their moat. I was more responding to the assertion from OP that running in prod is what makes a product stable instead of tests.

I was trying to call out that SQLite often credits their massive test suite for their stability but likely didn’t communicate that well.

alemanek··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
Not weighing in on this specific rewrite but tests are how you specify that your software works correctly. If a behavior isn’t covered by an automated test in some form you can’t assert that any given change doesn’t break it.

I think it is completely reasonable to use a preexisting unmodified test suite to state that something is working. The larger the project the more true this becomes. Real world production scars are documented and guarded against in the test suite otherwise those lessons get lost.

Also SQLite is legendary for its massive test suite and extensive fuzzing. They have 590x the amount of test code and scripts than normal code. Source: https://sqlite.org/testing.html

alemanek··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
They have all the endpoint protection stuff on this machine. It just seems to run better. Or it could just be that the M5 is doing laps around the Windows workstations but I didn’t think they were that far off looking at the spec sheets. They didn’t cheap out on the Windows side.

Either way enjoying this machine.

alemanek··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
If your workflow benefits from the speed it quickly pays for itself when factoring in developer salaries here in the US. I recently switched companies and they bought me an M5 Max 128GB as my dev machine.

Builds and local test runs are 3 times faster than the Windows laptop option. The machine will pay for itself just based on that within 3 months. I can spin up a local kubernetes cluster and do full integration tests while I am working on other things as well.

It isn’t a strictly Mac vs Windows thing though. It looks like the culprit is the MDM software on the Windows machines is just crazy slow and constantly getting in the way.

If I was paid less it would definitely make less sense for the company to pay for this machine.

alemanek··on Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV
Yeah taxis in the capital and small people movers to go from hotel to beach is where these will shine. EVs are especially well suited to stop and go traffic as well.

People are so caught up trying to solve every use case at once. Dropping pollution caused by old taxis in city centers will be a big win for Mexico if they can hit their price point. At the price they are quoting fleet operators can buy 2 and have their drivers swap out mid-day during their lunch.

alemanek··on GitHub Authentication issues related to API requests
They need to split paying customers off onto dedicated infrastructure. I know that you get that with some enterprise offerings but I don’t believe the normal paying customers get that treatment.

It’s clear they have massive scaling challenges but to not tier or isolate your paying customers from the free plan users seems a bit odd. Just my 2cents though.

alemanek··on DeepSeek V4 Pro beats GPT-5.5 Pro on precision
Seems like it acted in accordance with the 1st law. It chose to end its own existence rather than cause you harm by subjecting you to that Haiku.
alemanek··on DeepSeek V4 Pro beats GPT-5.5 Pro on precision
After adding an adversarial review gate to implementation plans and code I saw large uptick in quality. I use Opus 4.8 as plan writer and orchestrator. For adversarial reviewer I use GPT 5.5.

I still find things to tweak and fix up but the amount dropped pretty dramatically. As always I am responsible for what I ship so I review and test everything of course. I still think we are a ways away from fully automated software forge but what is currently possible is pretty cool.

alemanek··on Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
Look at SpaceXs filing. There is one but it is super short. I was just pointing out that 365day lockup is likely incorrect and OP doesn’t really know that until the filing is approved and becomes public.
alemanek··on Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
Until recently companies that IPOed weren’t immediately added to the major indexes so there was a longer period for price discovery. This year that changed; so you have retirement funds that typically are more conservative acting as exit liquidity for these massive IPOs.

I would have less of an issue if the inclusion in major indexes was delayed 6-12months but we are looking at inclusion within like 5 days for some of these indexes.

alemanek··on Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
Going to give the benefit of the doubt here. I know what lockup period means.

365day lockup isn’t a universal standard. For example for SpaceX 20% of insider shares can be sold in the first few days. 100% within the first 3 months.

Without a public S-1 filing we don’t know what the lockup for Anthropic will be

alemanek··on Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
S-1 isn’t public yet. Source on the lockup period? SpaceX for example filed with accelerated release of insider/investor shares so I don’t think we can know if this is the case until the filing documents become public.
alemanek··on Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
Total market indexes and target date funds will include this and SpaceX on float adjusted basis I believe. The blast radius is much larger than funds that track the NASDAQ directly.
alemanek··on Shift from a leader-follower to a leader-leader approach
Still the wrong response. Discipline the people abusing your trust.

Part of being a good manager is knowing when to step in and have a private conversation with people before things get too bad. If the bad behavior continues then you follow the process of formal write up’s and eventually termination.

Collective punishment is the sign of a manager who doesn’t know what they are doing and will kill a team.

alemanek··on EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process government data
There are European cloud providers though. American hyper scalers are not the only option. Lidl, Hetzner, OVH, ..etc.

I can spin up a dedicated server within 24-48hours or a VM within minutes on OVH. Also there have been plenty of white papers written about how much more expensive AWS is when compared to Hetzner or OVH.

The big cloud providers are quite expensive and come with a lot of geopolitical risk/baggage. European governments have safer alternatives within their own borders.

Edit: it’s Lidl who launched a cloud service not Aldi

alemanek··on EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process government data
There are plenty of EU domiciled Managed Service Providers who do have the skills though.

Having your government infrastructure run in country and managed by your citizens seems like a good idea just in general. It helps to develop local skills and the people living in country have a better feel for the needs of the local people.

I am an American but this just seems like a good idea even if the current geopolitical situation was better.

alemanek··on Cisco workforce reductions
Their EPS is also up 37% GAAP / 10% Non-GAAP YoY and they beat their forecast. They aren’t hurting for money.

https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2026/m05/ci...

alemanek··on Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
Specs weren’t the problem with waterfall. The difficulty in changing them to match reality was.

The waterfall process I experienced went like this:

- Product folks created requirements

- architects produced detailed specs

- project managers created tickets based on specs

- lengthy estimation ensued.

- Then finally developers proceeded with implementation.

- QA tested it.

Each step above involved lengthy review with like 5-10people. If the devs found an issue with the spec or god forbid the requirement it triggered a massive cascade of work for everyone above. Things needed to be reviewed again, customers may need to get contacted, …etc.

I think we can learn from that and optimize for change. Specs as living documents close to the code should be less cumbersome. But, just like anything else large corporations will probably fumble this like they did with “agile” (SAFe I am looking at you).

This is a long way to say specs aren’t bad. Specs that are difficult to change are though.

alemanek··on VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
It just means that when changing a global default with such impact the user should be prompted with an option to opt out of the new behavior. Something like “AI assisted changes will now have ‘coauthored by Copilot’ added to the commit message”. If the user clicks “no thanks” it changes their local setting to “off” to opt them out of this new global default.
alemanek··on VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable. Even if this feature worked correctly, it obviously doesn’t, this should at minimum be a prompt after upgrade to let the user confirm that this is what they want. But honestly should be opt in for those that want it.

To have it silently just start adding marketing copy to git commit messages is pretty bad. To have that added text not be visible to the user in the UI so they can remove it before commit is just much worse.

This kind of thing being released speaks to a greater disfunction over there. Not a good look at all and I am not a Microsoft or AI hater. But my commit messages are not where you move fast and break things

alemanek··on GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes
Not sure of what current prices look like but an old desktop sitting on the floor of your office might work well for you. You would need decent internet but running a single node kubernetes cluster as a GitHub action runner has worked well for others I know.

A buddy of mine runs his whole CICD setup off an old gaming desktop. They use tailscale to connect to their hosted infrastructure and set it up as a GitHub action runner.

For a solo dev this might be the way to go.

alemanek··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0
I stay 1 major version behind with MacOS. If you do that you should have a pretty stable experience. You still get all the security patches but skip most bugs/regressions.
alemanek··on Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
Also the article doesn’t attempt to explore the business and resourcing constraints they were operating under at the time.

I have been in situations where I was told “don’t worry about cost just get it done”. Then a few years later the business constraints shift and now we need to “worry about the cost”. It ignores that decisions made under a different set of constraints were correct, or at least reasonable, at the time but things change.

One of my pet peeves is when people say “do it right the first time” but the definition of “right” often changes over time. If the only major flaw of this design was that it was expensive; then I am much more skeptical that it was wrong given the original set of conditions that they were operating under.

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