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derealized

157 karma · joined July 29, 2023

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derealized··on Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
Because I don't want to hear about personal stories? How is that related? I do very much want to know how code works. It's the very core of my argument.
derealized··on Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
It's full of "fix" or "fix typo" or "update blah.c"... tiny commits straight to the master branch without CI.

Anyway, I really don't care about the past in this way. A simple "accounting needs this for that" is enough for me. No need to explain that Adam was getting divorced at the time, so he was grumpy, and, and, and...

derealized··on Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
> They're hard not to love.

I often search for a clearcut answer to a technical question and I'm met with a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects.

Yeah, thanks for telling me why John from accounting was a dick 10 years ago and you had to code this module in a certain way. I really don't care. I'm new to the codebase and I just want to know how it (the codebase) works.

I'm currently in this situation and a colleage never gives straight answers to anything. It's always some little rant about something and when it's done, I still haven't got my answer.

derealized··on Reflex – Web apps in pure Python
By switching to a proprietary license for your proprietary product.

If we call things by their names, it's not surprising at all and actually makes solving the situation much easier.

derealized··on Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
> I found out that just being better than yourself takes you a long long way.

That resonates with me.

There is a saying where I'm from that says "most people are just kicking dirt" that basically means people are doing the bare minimum or don't care at all, and if you just do your thing and really care about your stuff, you're already ahead of the majority.

Being anxious all the time, I use that saying in the opposite way though: just relax and do your thing... you don't need to worry about not having a job, all those other people are barely doing anything and you can't be the best at everytime. Just do your thing are relax.

derealized··on Ask HN: Gmail alternative for the lazy activist?
I personally care about how it looks. The facism mention is a huge leap, isn't it?
derealized··on Reflex – Web apps in pure Python
How about tracking licenses or subscriptions sold and show that to investors?
derealized··on Ask HN: Is Prompt Engineering a Thing?
Riley gave an hour-long presentation on his prompt engineering work at Scale AI and the company's CEO said it didn't seem useful?
derealized··on Ask HN: Who is using small OS LLMs in production?
To me, the simple models might not cross the boundary where LLMs start to be useful versus, say, a fixed menu with choices in a helpdesk app.

It's a paradox because, to really feel human like and not make huge mistakes, we need these huge LLMs and they are expensive... and the alternative is not-so-smart traditional code.

So what I'm trying to say is that I think the small LLMs might not be that useful before they cross some arbitrary quality threshold (which they may never do.. considering more parameters => better model, in general).

derealized··on Uber posts first quarterly net profit
Airports and taxis here have agreements where the airport gives them a fixed location in front of the exit. Just makes my point about the taxi mafia.

But then, does that happen anywhere else but airports and maybe some places downtown where the taxi mafia colluded with city officials as well?

derealized··on Uber posts first quarterly net profit
Not here. A ride that costs me 18-20 with Uber will be a 40-50 taxi ride.
derealized··on Nvidia H100 GPUs: Supply and Demand
You're comparing apples to oranges.

Should I complain that to drill oil I need hundreds of millions of dollars to even start?

Your VPS example was doing barely any computation. You're conflating web 1.0 and web 2.0 with neural networks and they are nothing alike in terms of FLOPS.

derealized··on Uber posts first quarterly net profit
> many of us will revert back to traditional taxis.

When hell freezes maybe?

Why would I do business with the local taxi mafia when these are the same cars, same drivers, poor or nonexistent app and terrible customer service?

Sorry, they screwed this too much.

derealized··on Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought
Copy and paste of a previous article discussed here a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36500448

EDIT: And copied and pasted here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36956799

derealized··on Jujutsu: A Git-compatible DVCS that is both simple and powerful
It's nice to have alternatives and maybe I have Stockholm Syndrome about this topic, but isn't git's complexity inherent to the area?
derealized··on How to get ChatGPT to stop apologizing?
That's me! https://imgur.com/a/Zbv5da8
derealized··on How to get ChatGPT to stop apologizing?
Automattic does this.

https://automattic.com/how-we-hire/

derealized··on The most prolific packager for Alpine Linux is stepping away
I have intrisic motivation, I just like what I work with and like to do a good job. I often have high standards for my work.

What changed? It's very tiresome to swim against the current. You can only care about so many things that your team doesn't until you get tired of barking at the tree.

At my new job it's the same, as usual, but I'm not forcing things and just getting with the flow. If I can, I'll suggest some ocasional improvements but if it falls on deaf ears, I'll let it go.

derealized··on Conduit: Simple, fast and reliable chat server powered by Matrix
Supposedly it needs some name (any name) for the userID so I don't think so. You can add a domain that points to your internal IPs though.
derealized··on The most prolific packager for Alpine Linux is stepping away
I've been in this situation at a couple of companies. Very prolific in the first year, only to burn out.

At my new job, I'm taking it easy.

derealized··on Happy 30th FreeBSD: Why FreeBSD open source project has endured
I've met people running ZFS on Linux quite reliably this days, bar Oracle.
derealized··on Happy 30th FreeBSD: Why FreeBSD open source project has endured
Article seems to be dead now (HN hug of death).

I think one big reason is the BSD license. With fewer contributors, the ability for companies to create closed source products really helps to justify using it.

derealized··on We found a genius way to revive a poisoned river [video]
Some countris have mandated >30 meters of green area on each border of rivers. That also helps a lot from what I've seen. Before that, especially with plantations, the crops would go up to the border and that killed the rivers (plus all the agrotoxics would feed more easily into the water).
derealized··on The future of the web is VNC
Got it, that makes sense. With monitors now in 60-120Hz being common, that might be doable.
derealized··on Show HN: LearnLingo – Converse with an AI-powered language tutor
> What we do is fairly easy, the whole "value" is in some fairly simple prompt on top of openAI APIs.

We are seem a lot of these apps nowadays. People come up with a prompt, send to OpenAI with the user data, hide it behind a certain web interface and it's an app they can charge for.

I've thought about this a million times for scratching my own itches but I just talk to ChatGPT and it's fine.

derealized··on The future of the web is VNC
Well, a camera wouldn't care about that.. only if you're capturing from HDMI.
derealized··on The future of the web is VNC
Does it really need Google-sized investments though? I know it's a lot but if Google is willing to give it for free(tm), then it's a error mark in their budget which tells me other more focused entitities would have no trouble continuing development (e.g. Brave is a fork, right)?
derealized··on The future of the web is VNC
Google will release a neural net that's convenient to deploy locally and inserts the ads back.
derealized··on We found a genius way to revive a poisoned river [video]
Staff firings (probably for unrelated political disputes) and no one accountable for the real cause. A classic of government work.