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bhaak

4,496 karma · joined October 29, 2012

Programmer of Roguelikes and E-Book readers

https://bhaak.net/

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bhaak··on How the Claude Code team does code review
I vibecoded a project without looking at the code as an experiment, and I had the same experience as you. It really drives home the point that, left to their own devices, LLMs produce abysmal code.

If you give them no constraints, they’ll produce code that just works, and it’ll look exactly like that.

We already know the solution to this problem. Software engineering. Put the LLM through the same grinder as any software dev and out constraints into place. Tell the LLM that the code design is bad and that it should improve it.

In my case, I had to go through several rounds of refactoring before the code at least resembled a good codebase.

A fun fact is that the refactorings didn’t break any functionality. Only adding new features broke preexisting behavior.

bhaak··on Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher
What’s wrong with something like Qt or wxWidgets for native crossplattform GUI frameworks?
bhaak··on Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default
Time doesn't solve bad designs. We still have lots of buffer overflows in C.

We don't see any indication that the LLM companies are slowing down and go for better code.

Instead it just looks like a cash grab until the AI bubble bursts.

bhaak··on Discover vibe-coded alternatives to popular software
Alternate title: a graveyard of one-shot vibe-coded projects left to rot without maintenance.
bhaak··on Mold Linker Version 3.0.0 Release – Rewritten in Rust
You make it sound as if all bugs could be catched in development builds.
bhaak··on Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU
Schengen doesn't have anything to do with currency. You might have been mistaken it with the European Economic Area?
bhaak··on Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU
You understand this. I understand this.

But MAGA people are going the full emotional breakdown "why don't you love us anymore?!?".

bhaak··on Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU
You forgot Turkey as well. Yes, the EU is open in general for specific treaties. If possible they want to do broad treaties (see the EEA). But Switzerland is almost as big a partner as the UK. If it is big enough, they'll do custom deal.

There is not much trade with Canada at the moment but with some special treaties this might change.

Then there's the political edge to this "associate member" status and if it can work as a blueprint for more countries, they'll certainly will be open to do it.

bhaak··on Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU
That's a brilliant move by von der Leyen and Mark Carney (I guess he's in on it as well).

There is currently no such status as "associate member" defined in the EU treates although the idea of special status for not being a complete member was floating around for a while now.

Just calling it a "unique alliance" or "deepening of their relationship" wouldn't have had such a public effect.

Half of the right wing influencers on X is going bananas because when the US was "offering" Canada to join them, they said a firm "NO" but for the EU they are opening the door.

Trump even said when the Canada joins the EU as associate member, it could be considered a hostile act.

All that for a status nobody knows yet what it will entail. More than a simple trade deal, for sure, but also a lot less than a proper membership.

bhaak··on Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
I expected people here to recommend several dual-pane file manager (aka orthodox file manager) as a replacement for Finder.

But I see not a single comment recommending one? No good UI ones on macOS?

bhaak··on “I just chose words carefully”

    I am somewhat surprised not seeing any mentioning of hanging punctuation
    when doing the full alignment to the right side. As everybody can see in
    the article, punctutation marks on the right side results in uneven text.
    Putting non letter symbols one space further to the right than the other
    letters, it looks much better. Of course for monospaced text it is still
    just a gimmick. But a visually pleasing gimmick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_punctuation
bhaak··on Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV
> If I receive a low effort single-pass obviously-Clauded PR (many people (agents) don’t even bother using the AGENTS.md file I provide right in the repo?!)

Claude doesn't read AGENTS.md automatically, it only looks for CLAUDE.md.

bhaak··on Stop Making TUIs
Emacs does that.

If you run an emacs server you can connect to it with an emacs in TTY and one in GUI mode.

bhaak··on Moderna reports first positive Phase 3 for mRNA neoantigen therapy in melanoma
Ah, one of those "everybody knows" argument that is on the level of "everybody knows that Napoleon was short".

It's not completely wrong but it ignores important context. The part you are leaving unsaid is that the vaccine reduced transmission even if it didn't prevent it completely. 80% reduction is a significant amount.

Wearing masks on top of that was the sensible thing to do.

bhaak··on Moderna reports first positive Phase 3 for mRNA neoantigen therapy in melanoma
What are the reasons for the hate of the COVID vaccine?
bhaak··on AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
I’m disagreeing that I am just parroting things. Parroting is mindlessly repeating something. I don’t claim that all my thoughts are original but some are at least independent and self derived.

We have 2500 years of epistemology. Individual humans can reach knowledge to various degrees. It’s not a binary state of knowing or not knowing.

bhaak··on AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
Disproving flat Earth doesn't logically prove round Earth, sure. But that's not how empirical reasoning works. If one model explains a bunch of observations naturally while another needs increasingly elaborate patches, that's evidence in favor of the first model.

There's a difference between "I haven't verified this myself" and "there is no good reason to believe this." You're conflating the two.

But then I've given you a few examples of thought and actual experiments that are very easy to do. That's the opposite of parroting as you can use your own mind to ponder those. But you seem to want to be ignorant, claiming that two theoretical models are equally bad just because you don't want to consider their properties for a second.

bhaak··on AI Isn't Outthinking Mathematicians. It's Out-Remembering Them
With good source code they output good code that mimics existing code.

If they don't have good code to mimic, anything goes. They might use libraries or they might start to write their own implementation of a PNG encoder.

bhaak··on AI Isn't Outthinking Mathematicians. It's Out-Remembering Them
Then it's pretty bad that LLMs don't understand anything.

They don't know and can't know. Without an external source of input that corrects them, their output can never be verified.

bhaak··on AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
Your drive to verify must be very low then. There are hundreds of small logic reasonings or even experiments with which you can easily prove that a flat earth model is at least very complicated or even impossible.

Explaining Moon phases gets very complicated in any flat earth model. With binoculars you can see the shadows of craters on the moon's terminator. Or the phases of Venus whereas Mars doesn't have any.

Timezones are ridiculously hard to explain on a flat earth.

A proper theory must explain all of them and no flat earth model can do that. A round Earth OTOH easily does.

bhaak··on Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug
> Multiple processes can have the same database open at the same time. Multiple processes can be doing a SELECT at the same time. But only one process can be making changes to the database at any moment in time, however.

https://sqlite.org/faq.html#q5

One writer, multiple readers is a specifically supported way of using SQLite.

Why should you be worried if it is used as designed?

bhaak··on Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb
The default AI text output reads like a LinkedIn post.

Marketing material probably outweighs concise literature by several orders of magnitude.

Maybe it’s as simple as that.

bhaak··on Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse
A partial eclipse is still cool. I witnessed a 70% partial eclipse once and it was still impressing. The colors changed, the sun was visibly dimmer.

A total eclipse is just on a whole different level.

BTW, you can't photograph a partial eclipse with your phone directly but you can snap a picture of the reflection in the lenses. https://imgur.com/a/partial-solar-eclipse-europe-march-2015-...

Just be careful while looking towards the sun even if you're concentrating on the screen. Even though it's not as strong as normal it's still strong enough to potentially damage your eyes. Some kind of shade is advised.

bhaak··on Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2
> Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.

Isn't it a bit different with Return to Monkey Island? The story is told to kids by Guybrush and Guybrush being an unreliable narrator, it's uncertain how much of the story was real or an imagination by him.

The last scene though shows that something real somewhat similar to what Guybrush told did happen.

Also it completely retcons the ending of Monkey Island 2.

bhaak··on Kill The Cookie Banner
The EU law already allowed technically necessary cookies without any banner.

Every time you get a cookie banner with options, the website wants to know more about you than the law permits by default.

bhaak··on Stolen Buttons
For me the 2001 OSX looks wishy washy and does not have a professional look.
bhaak··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
Arch is bleeding edge. Breakage is expected there. It breaks so others can be stable.

Thank you for your service.

bhaak··on Codeberg: ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions
I wonder if anyone has already written a git over fax extension.
bhaak··on The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era
> the cost of adding features is basically zero

Adding features was always the easy part. Maintaining the code OTOH is not going to be easier.

I see this with an experimental project I’m consciously vibecoding. The code base tends towards a spaghetti coded mess.

Of course you can put in some refactoring prompts and the AI will reorganize the code. But that makes it worse actually.

You have no mental model of the code and after a large refactoring even less.

bhaak··on Prefer strict tables in SQLite
But why aren't you pissed at a database where the columns have types that aren't enforced?
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