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brumar

197 karma · joined December 13, 2020

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brumar··on Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models
So LLMs have their alpha go zero moment where training on human data is has-been? Sounds exciting? Terrifying?
brumar··on Peer Programming with LLMs, for Senior+ Engineers
Very important comment. My workflow changed dramatically with the increased capabilities of these tools.
brumar··on A critical look at MCP
Sampling is to my eyes a very promising aspect of the protocol. Maybe its implementation is lagging behind because it's too far from the previous mental model of tool use. I am also fine if the burden is on the client side if it enables a good DX on server side. In practice, there would be much more servers than clients.
brumar··on Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits
> that plaintiff shall not file any other documents with the cartoon dragon or other inappropriate content

Formal answers to goofiness (voluntary or not) will always amuse me.

brumar··on Claude Integrations
Hello fellow context owner. I like my modules with their context.sh at their root level. If crafted with care, magic happens. Reciprocally, when AI derails, it's most often due to bad context management and fixed by improving it.
brumar··on Tilt: dev environment as code
True. I learned this the hard way.
brumar··on Show HN: Dia, an open-weights TTS model for generating realistic dialogue
Impressive! Is it english only at the moment?
brumar··on Xonsh – A Python-powered shell
Interesting! I think I never tried to update xonsh in 7 years or so.
brumar··on Xonsh – A Python-Powered Shell
For me it shines when you need to write shell scripts but you prefer do some parts in python. As another commenter wrote os.system or calling the subprocess module works too, but I find it less satisfying.
brumar··on Xonsh – A Python-powered shell
I don't remember exactly why and how some shell scripts refused to run, but on top of my head I think 'alias' was not working and 'sudo !!' too.
brumar··on Xonsh – A Python-powered shell
I would not advise to replace your interactive shell with it as it's a pain when you stumble upon uncompatible commands, but writing shell scripts with xonsh is a wonderful experience.
brumar··on The Big TDD Misunderstanding (2022)
> Do not isolate code when you test it.

> Only isolate your code from truly external services

That makes tests more trustworthy but also sometimes harder to maintain I think. I have seen cases where small changes on the code base created strong ripple effects with many tests to update. Arguably, the tests were not very well written or organized and with too many high level tests. Still, this and the very large execution time of the test collection made me realized that for medium to large projects, I will be much more careful in the future before going all in with the no-mock approach.

brumar··on Show HN: Tetris in a PDF
I think I got your point but might have expressed myself badly. The pdf can run js and messes with the display right at opening time, without any warning or ask for permission.
brumar··on Show HN: Tetris in a PDF
You can manipulate form fields at anytime, and setInterval is provided so you can have things that run in an infinite loop. But yeah, as a first approximation, the only things js in pdf can do is mutate form fields and react to events related to form fields, unless your pdf reader is acrobat and that's something else entirely.
brumar··on Show HN: Tetris in a PDF
I made a game of life in pdf using this technique, but pdf.js is less open to chromium to respect the standard on letting the pdf designer defining the ON and OFF state.

One other way would be to use normal text fields and leveraging custom fonts. I think there are an enormous potential with fonts in the realm of pdf hacking. I think there is also a story of past vuln on pdf.js because fonts were evaluated outside the sandbox.

brumar··on Show HN: Tetris in a PDF
This is even in the ISO standard now
brumar··on Show HN: A playable game of Tetris inside a PDF
I was considering doing exactly that ahah. We should connect to share our hacks and pains. One could project would be to run wasm4 games because, yes, pdfium and pdf.js can run webassembly.
brumar··on Show HN: SmartHome – An Adventure Game
Thanks. I tried the AI assistant but ended up mindlessly mining crypto...
brumar··on Show HN: SmartHome – An Adventure Game
I regret there is not a merciful option like "wait for death in a corner".

Great job! I had fun and got bored to death at the same time.

brumar··on Ask HN: Local RAG with private knowledge base
Med student working on sophisticated RAG system... What kind of beast are you? Thanks for sharing anyway, I'll keep tab on it.
brumar··on Ask HN: Must-Read Books for Startups?
I second this recommendation for early startups. We learn from tons of lean books that customer discovery is crucial to not build the wrong thing, but this book gives very practical ways to do that well. Most recent useful read for me. Still in the lean canon, a great complementary read could be lean marketing, as validating your sales channel is of an equal importance of validating your PMF.
brumar··on Show HN: Dump entire Git repos into a single file for LLM prompts
I schemed the readme, but did not see support for prefixing each line with line numbers, this is an absolute must have for people like me who have a workflow centered around generating git patchs. In my experience that gives generated patchs much more chances to be incorrect.
brumar··on Show HN: Leaping – Debug Python tests instantly with an LLM debugger
On the reddit discussion, one user pointed out that email adresses were incidently collected. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/s/lBfxL7f2KM
brumar··on Xonsh: Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell
I use xonsh as a shell for few years but I think I will go back to another shell as I am too frustrated with incombatibilities. That's being said, my xonsh scripts are there to stay, I still think that's an excellent way to build scripts.
brumar··on Learning needs to be effortful to be effective
A related theory (and book with the same name) is 'Learning as a generative activity', which states that learning occurs when one uses informations / half-backed k owledge to produce new content.

It becomes more relevant these days since we tend more and more to outsource content creation to the machines. This theory would predict that we would learn less doing so.

brumar··on The Last Week in AI
On the same subject, a great sci-fi audio drama named LifeAfter gets increasingly relevant.
brumar··on Python Design Patterns (2018)
As others wrote, in depth practice is a sensible choice. Once it's done, I believe spaced repetition is a nice insurance against memory fading and can be as simple as a few big cards listing the concepts learned even if that's really not what spaced repetition proponent would suggest.
brumar··on Python Design Patterns (2018)
This is my favorite ressource on the subject. I recommend it as often as possible.
brumar··on Can GPT-3 AI write comedy?
This is a decent summary of stoicism which is quite popular these days.
brumar··on Metaphors we learn to program by
IMHO most of GOF design patterns can be seen through these lenses. Finding good names often result in finding the right metaphor/analogy.
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