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bfung

1,866 karma · joined June 10, 2009

https://bfung.github.io/

https://benson-guides.blogspot.com/

fung [dot] benson [at] gmail [dot] com

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bfung··on Every Frame Perfect
> waiting for an animation to complete before the app will start acknowledging my keystrokes.

Or you find out you can input as the animation happens, but when the animation finishes, you’ve lost where your input ended up and don’t know if you can backspace/delete and retype.

(Yes, I’m expressing multiple issues here w/ui & animation & input)

bfung··on How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
Meta: so many words to say - save local first & sync in background.

Feels like AI slop.

Doesn’t address the concurrent update problem except for “optimistic”. At least provide some data why that’s ok.

bfung··on They’re made out of weights
How does one choose what sequence of bytes constitutes a token?
bfung··on They’re made out of weights
And you know what the tokenizer is made of?

Weights.

bfung··on Backpressure is all you need
Test Driven Development. There's more than several /tdd skills that are popular.
bfung··on YAML? That's Norway Problem
Really? Putting quotes around strings is called escaping now?

    One workaround is to escape the string, like this:
    
    countries:
      - DE
      - FR
      - "NO"
      - PL
      - RO
Comon, it’s 2026, yeah yaml’s design can lead to odd type casts, but a whole essay on this? Keep it under 140 chars pls.
bfung··on ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
Just follow the man, not the brand. He’s still doing his thing: https://www.natesilver.net/
bfung··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
Just reporting what I’ve experienced. No need to go with the ad hominem attack. I happen to lead a team with a major Rust infra project and I stand by the experience with usage across all the LLM models.
bfung··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
1. Amount of Rust training data isn’t as much as Go.

2. Golang syntax and style is very verbose yet simple. There’s not as many options nor programming language to domain mapping needed as in Rust. Leads to needing less sophisticated LLM to spit out Golang than Rust successfully and efficiently.

bfung··on How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer
One simply does not [“provision” more hardware|(reboot systems)|(redeploy software)] in space.
bfung··on Costco sued for seeking refunds on tariffs customers paid
As a Costco member and customer, I’d actually trust the leadership more than most companies. Use the tariff money and keep that $1.50 hotdog ~ enough avg Americans can use that break for lunch, even if not the healthiest.
bfung··on GitHub Is Degraded
Not purely an advertisement, it’s a real app! https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/updog-ai/

But it does help with marketing and showing off our tech.

bfung··on Where things stand with the Department of War
I don’t feel that old, but I guess being 45 is ancient in tech.

The Silicon Valley tech jobs we have now has a history rooted in World War 2 and funding of it by the US gov.

https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?si=gGza5eIv485xEKLS

I’m not saying war is good or anything, but also don't ride a high horse cause none of it would be here w/o WW2.

bfung··on Where things stand with the Department of War
I’d argue it’s come full circle and it hasn’t changed a bit.

There wouldn’t be a Silicon Valley without World War 2 and US gov. funding of Stanford to develop radar basically.

The initial investment from then gave critical capital mass for Stanford, the VCs, and the tech companies of today.

https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?si=gGza5eIv485xEKLS

bfung··on When AI writes the software, who verifies it?
When humans write the software, who verifies it?

half sarcasm, half real-talk.

TDD is nice, but human coders barely do it. At least AI can do it more!

bfung··on Sizing chaos
Hot take (?):

The random sizing today is great:

* If you want a better fit, go physically to a store instead of shopping online and try them on.

* the vanity part is also fine, no need to cause outrage at raising the number and making people depressed cause they think they're even more "fat". It doesn't need to be "optimized"

* Only serves online retail to "standardize", but guess what, 15th standard also sucks... <cue xkcd comic about standards>.

Enjoyed the presentation of the site. :)

bfung··on Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
In the spirit of Winter Olympics, I vote “Lion on a bobsled” next bench . :)
bfung··on Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents
`/init` is good enough.

Model improvements will take care of the rest.

bfung··on Experts Have World Models. LLMs Have Word Models
Or the opposite, that humans are somehow super special and not as simple as a prediction feedback loop with randomizations.
bfung··on The silent death of good code
If it’s easy to read and understand but doesn’t work, or is slow to execute, or costs a lot to run, is it good code?

If the function is a black box, but you’re sure the inputs produces a certain output without side effects and is fast, do you NEED “good code” inside?

After about 10yrs of coding, the next 10 of coding is pretty brainless. Better to try and solve people/tech interaction problems than plumbing up yet-another-social/mobile/gaming/crypto thing.

bfung··on The Great Unwind
Dunno about the website or corp, but the occupy wall st movement was/is true. Happened right after 2008 stock market crash and people camped out on Wall Street in protest of bailing out the banks.
bfung··on AI code and software craft
> If you're fine with software which gets a little bit harder to work on every time you make a change and which might blow up in unexpected ways,

human written code is similarly fine. Save for very few human individuals.

bfung··on AI code and software craft
Is clothes today really worse?

We have clothes and materials like gortex now that blocks rain and snow no handmade jacket could ever hope to perform at the same level to be lightweight AND dry.

bfung··on I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0
use both ~ Claude Code as main driver, hook it up to Cursor with /ide in Claude code to review or make other manual adjustments.

Have OpenAI Codex do code reviews, it’s the best one so far at code reviews. Yes, it’s ironic (or not) that the code writer is not the best reviewer.

bfung··on Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
Totally agree.

The uncomfortable truth is that the skill of _writing_ code is becoming commoditized.

Reading, understanding, designing efficient systems, and planning changes based on that, at least for now, will still be for human experts (and AI already a great assist here).

But churn out yet another webpage/website? People doing this will need to move on from this as their primary job.

bfung··on 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?
Article meta comment: show me, don’t tell me.

No show —> not easy enough —> too lazy to look it up, already got python/go/ruby quick cli methods. LLM generated even easier.

bfung··on Things that aren't doing the thing
Doing the thing that nobody wants is doing the thing.
bfung··on Google to merge Android and ChromeOS in 2026
Sooooo ChromeOS 26 with Liquid -Glass- Material Design? :trollface:
bfung··on LLM Observability in the Wild – Why OpenTelemetry Should Be the Standard
TL;DR - follow https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/semconv/gen-ai/
bfung··on Stop writing CLI validation. Parse it right the first time
Looked human-ish to me, what signs did you see?
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