2,024 karma · joined January 4, 2020
I want to live a life that makes the people I love happy, makes me feel healthy and happy, and hopefully learn some cool things and skills along the way.
Bending the universe sounds predatory, like exerting what you want onto other people without thinking about what they want
That was still after the RAMpocolypse had started but hadn’t hit Apple yet, I remember thinking Apple was immune
Kitty is about instant, same with the default macOS Terminal.app. But kitty supports a few more features that I use heavily like nerd fonts, and just has better text rendering overall.
Yeah it’s not like I couldn’t work in another terminal, but my goodness it’s nice to have a tool that I use all day be as snappy and responsive as kitty
But before LLMs, it didn’t matter because on a good team you’d have a balance where maybe some PRs added complexity and some simplified it. Sometimes people would include a small related cleanup or refactor in a PR for code around what they were doing if they noticed complexity. That has become far less common, I think.
I know it’s not your point, but a 1% decrease 100 times is 0.99^100 = 0.366 which is a 63.4% decrease in understandability. Just throwing that out there
If you want to plan out features then use agents to implement them in small chunks, deepseek has been comparable to Sonnet 5.5.
But this is just early stages for me, I was fully using Claude models for a while and decided to switch after getting annoyed buying extra credits for personal projects.. I was like “eh I’ll just throw a few bucks in openrouter and see how it is this time” and it’s been so much cheaper than buying Claude api credits when my subscription is out
It uses tools in my custom harness about as well as Claude models and makes edits to files doing specific things about as well as I’d want.
You don’t have to ban a thing for 100% of cases, there will always be outliers. My wife and I love driving deep into the wilderness. But still the vast majority of our travel is routes with heavy traffic, let’s replace those trips
But if the pop culture lore has insane depth then it’s probably valuable enough to keep, yeah? If it has a few limited snippets and very few people writing about it as sources, then it’s a lot more questionable
It’s just a rough way to say “mostly this with a decent bit of that” because 20% seems like a medium-small percent that could or could not matter depending on the context
That’s all anyone means when they say 80/20
To your second point, the 80% could be lots of basic things and the 20% could be the important facts, so it’s not always meant as a dismissal that the 20 doesn’t matter
Like sure it’s true that you’re more necessary now, but when you took the job you weren’t expecting to need to be elbow deep in shit every day, and you’d probably prefer to go back to the days of changing lightbulbs and vacuuming hallways
That things which are good for an individual but bad for everyone else deserve scrutiny?
Haha, I don’t doubt it! Pretty damning overall for long-term maintainability of vibe-coded projects, even as the models are great at a lot of individual tasks
With a few thousand lines of code over the course of a week or so of my limited evening energy, I have agentic loops, ide integration, and a limited selection of custom tools which are all very safe (no unintended changes), along with session management and awareness of git.
It works great, is customizable, and allows integration with any provider.
If they need 30k changes per day, it’s not due to the nature of the problem!
Then all of my dotfiles are backed up, with any important other config, in a big gig repo. And all of my documents/photos/etc live on a separate hard drive which gets backed up to the cloud.
All of that to say, with the right setup nix is mostly unnecessary, and honestly the benefit of not using it is that I can wipe my system anytime and restart it with just my usual important programs ready to go. Any mess made along the way gets purged automatically in every fresh install
There is research for a lot of additives, but many have limited evidence or small studies that aren’t replicated. Usually the result is either “it doesn’t affect health either way” or “it is negative to health”. Very rarely is there an ultra processed ingredient with a large body of science that says “we should eat more of this specific thing, it has a positive effect on longevity!”. And if we do, it’s usually medicine rather than a food additive, which due to being heavily researched and tailored to individuals, prescription medications are healthy (obviously). But these aren’t that…
So I think you have to stretch your reasoning that the practice as a whole is probably negative, but I feel like I’ve personally seen enough negatives of certain UPF that I limit my intake whenever reasonably possible.
Obviously having small amounts isn’t going to be horrible but they’re in everything now
I don’t apply the same criteria to things that are intended as non-realistic art, you can have non-slop AI graphics, as it doesn’t matter there. But in photography there’s an expectation that the subject is a real moment in time at a real place.
And at least in America, most commonly-bought peanut butter has additives, and most store-bought bread has 40 different UPF ingredients. Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
It’s possible to have a non-UPF peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I might have one today! It’s just that the default options for most Americans contain a ton of crazy ingredients.
Depending on the cheese you buy, many are very simple, and rarely have weird additives. But if you buy a block of cheese or even usually the sandwich-sized slices, it’s not ultra-processed.
But the scale really is completely different. I think the US is still overall good, and we do still have real elections, limits on government power, and genuine turnover in government where power can shift.
And even as the US govt is trying to scare people away from protesting and they’re building a corporate-government surveillance state, personal freedoms are still very high compared to China and Russia.
Their misunderstanding of not being able to hover their cursor over something and interact using the keyboard honestly has me wondering why I thought the real way was intuitive, their logic there makes sense
I feel like I’m going crazy, using all of the best models, spending time to have excellent prompts, configuring tools and skills… and still getting overly complex solutions with mediocre results.
Like it’s still impressive how far we’ve come, and undoubtably cool technology. It’s made a bunch of personal projects possible that I never would’ve started.
But for a business I’m struggling to see the ROI. Sometimes there’s a big benefit and sometimes it’s net negative. Not saying we won’t get there but I’m trying to stay grounded in the reality of today rather than the hopes of where the technology could get to
I had Opus trying to simplify a query for me which was slow - it ran for maybe 30 minutes, including writing and running tests, and came up with a refactor across 9 files with a couple hundred lines changed. I was looking through the output before moving onto the next step, and noticed something a little fishy- I said “why does it do x, isn’t that a more complex y?”
Opus thought for another 20-30 seconds then output “Actually that would make the majority of the diff irrelevant, if we do that change it is just these 4 lines in this single file instead.
So then I had it do that. 5-10 minutes of writing and testing and that was done.
So my company spent $25 in tokens and I spent probably an hour in total for a 4 line change that, in the days before Claude, I probably could have found the correct file and thought through the problem, understood the solution, and written the 4 lines of code myself. Probably in the same amount of time.
So basically there was no benefit at all for my time, an extra cost to the company of $25, and now I understand our codebase a little bit less instead of more if I had done all the work.
As good as Claude is at building greenfield projects it still struggles a lot at complex ones