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dkn

134 karma · joined November 14, 2012

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dkn··on LLM Voice
Assuming the author had to input good points for the LLM to expand it into a full length post, just give me the points. Give both formats if one must. Translate, spellcheck, fix mistakes with an LLM. Don’t inflate 3 bullet points to a 10 minute read.

I can’t distinguish between well meaning slop and blogspam slop. I might be able to if I’m well informed on the topic and can point out inaccuracies. Otherwise I just don’t know what is accurate and what is filler or outright wrong. LLM-isms are very distracting and exhausting to sort through. It just doesn’t make for a good reading experience.

dkn··on One Month Without AI
I have had a ton of success in exposing AST-based tools to agents when working in large, old codebases.

Without them, not only do agents get simple things like function call counts wrong, they tend to return different results. I use this as an example when showing people how the tooling works.

Grep is fine for simple use cases. A step up from that is ast-grep and I need to explore this tool more. But I had the most success building a small pipeline that reads the old code base, parses it file by file using tree sitter, and then loads it into a SQLite database for querying. For example, I have it capture construct definitions and usages and represent those as directed edges and nodes in a single table depending on the node type. The agent is instructed on how to query it and perform interesting queries like build call graphs, or determine dependencies between domains (modularity is not great in this codebase) which is helpful for us to extract around capability lines.

I also calculate fitness statistics, and have some code to capture specific details and knowledge about this very old framework that short circuits agent work in the future. We have some “interesting” magical libraries and functions that block static analyzers from going beyond the call site. This is mitigated, and means agents don’t have to “guess”.

Making all of this available to the different team members at my work has been pretty helpful. It’s faster (fewer tool calls), cheaper (fewer tokens), and accurate.

dkn··on A new era for software testing
Yep, and wasted token spend on an ongoing basis.

I instruct the LLM to follow TDD practices in certain areas, but otherwise prioritize integration style tests at the edges.

dkn··on A new era for software testing
I am curious in your experience how often the LLM must also update the tests. I find that if LLMs write tests after the implementation exists, they are either extremely brittle because they are coupled to the implementation, or they cover little of value because they mock everything to the point of testing nothing.
dkn··on The great AI delusion is falling apart
I question your assertion that more commits and releases per week is more productivity. There could be unexpected effects from your commits that create more work for you or for others and that could be hard to quantify.

Doing bad things faster might feel more productive to you, but it doesn’t mean that you are delivering more value. You might be, but the metrics you have shared to not prove that.

dkn··on Deno Queues
When deployed to Deno Deploy, KV is a wrapper around FoundationDB, selected for its use in the distributed/edge environments that Deno operates in. When used locally, it's a wrapper around SQLite.

The API is standardized for both.

dkn··on Deno Queues
Deno is not a programming language though. It's a JavaScript (TypeScript) runtime.

Deno is basically trying to be an infrastructure framework for JavaScript.

dkn··on TikTok’s algorithm keeps pushing suicide to vulnerable kids
I think the parent poster is pointing out that there are more ways of discriminating traffic than just a domain name. Such as geographic location, device IDs, etc. All of which are commonly used.

It's not proof of what is being claimed, but they are variables that would need to be controlled before being confident that Douyin is or is not adjusting content to foreign or domestic users.

dkn··on Fly fishing holds lessons about art and design (2014)
In Canadian provinces, bait fishing in streams is often illegal.
dkn··on MIT researchers propose Brazil-sized fleet of “space bubbles” to cool the Earth
From the perspective of users of solar energy on Earth, wouldn't an increase over billions of years appear constant? My intuition tells me that evolution is much faster than that, and any fluctuations due to solar cycle dynamics would already be mitigated as expected by the same process, if it is indeed so regular.
dkn··on Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending
Is this the same thing as... not pumping it?
dkn··on Actix – Actor Framework for Rust
I think this is a great summary, and also highlights much of what Joe Armstrong talked about when comparing Erlang to other OO languages, and his earlier decisions to design Erlang to work in the same way whether in a single-node or multi-node environment.
dkn··on Google's 'two-tier' workforce training document
How else do you suppose all those AI efforts are fulfilled?
dkn··on Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+
Sure but the real-life equivalent of that would be God telling Nike what kind of shoes you and your friend were talking about in secret.
dkn··on Against Facebook
They aren't forced to, they are trained to. The usage of a social network is innocuous at first.

Similarly, a person is not necessarily forced to start using narcotics to develop a dependency.

dkn··on After 37 years, Voyager has fired up its trajectory thrusters
It's a lot easier when it's literally impossible to change the functionality.
dkn··on Facebook's Aggressive Moves on Startups Threaten Innovation
I think money can be a more significant persuader than you are letting on, especially after months of startup stress pile up on a decision maker.
dkn··on Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
Are intersex or transgender considered to be viable sexes though?

What seems reasonable to me is M/F/N where N is not capable of reproduction due to some kind of outlying error, so they cannot be a part of sexed reproduction. Are they omitted?

Sex and reproduction seem binary to me and most people. We should ignore technological or medical assistance and sort those results through the gender buckets which are more important to how they are perceived semantically, as you said.

dkn··on AMD unveils its Vega 10 GPU architecture
Unlikely considering 275W+ TDP
dkn··on Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]
Which is easily remedied by using MIDI controllers.
dkn··on Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?
This is the file in question: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS
dkn··on Gender-neutral Chromium code
Yeah I envision this being something that is just fixed over time as people are exposed to new and different ideas.

Yet, it seems to me that a lot of these documents are written and intended to enforce overnight changes in people's unconscious biases.

From the document:

> Each of us has the right to enjoy our experience and participate without fear of harassment, discrimination, or condescension, whether blatant or subtle.

I don't know about you guys but I hardly enjoy reading technical documentation. It's not meant to be an enjoyable experience. It's meant to convey complex meaning in a (hopefully) short amount of time. I don't think gendered pronouns add to the effectiveness of this communication method, but I also don't think we need to formalize their usage (or non-usage).

I guess I'm asking why this can't be a natural progression that we all wish to undertake as cooperating organisms rather than enforced with competition and penalties? It seems like a wasted opportunity and unnecessarily polarizing.

dkn··on Gender-neutral Chromium code
I find it hard to believe that people find gendered language to be such a barrier to entry. More likely these are soapboxes for people to politicize from.

I think more harm and time-wasting has been caused as a result of these witch hunts than the original "problem" itself has. I tend to speak ungendered by default more often than not. Perhaps people use gendered pronouns because they're thinking of themselves in the situation they are writing about.

dkn··on Prettier 1.0
The option seems to put semicolons at the front of your code instead of at the end. Am I wrong? Why is this attractive?
dkn··on Prettier 1.0
I don't know that there is one. From the repository README:

> Prettier bans all custom styling by parsing it away and re-printing the parsed AST with its own rules that take the maximum line width into account, wrapping code when necessary.

dkn··on Losing a dog can be harder than losing a relative or friend
I'm with you.

With cats, I find it's different. They tell you when it's time by withdrawing and being very reclusive, nearly catatonic. When we had to put down our last family cat (this would be our third over the course of my life) I decided I wanted to face it head-on and offered to take the cat to the vet to be euthanized. I held her as it happened and it was very, very hard. But at least I knew it was the right thing to do, if not the right environment to do it in.

With dogs, they might be in terrific amounts of pain, but they still want to be with you no matter what. When I try to put myself in that situation, I still want to be with my family through to the bitter end. I don't think I want to be euthanized unless I'm a vegetable. But, a dog doesn't have that higher understanding of what is happening or what the options are.

A very difficult decision to make, but it's difficult because we love them. I think your dog would always appreciate you for that.

dkn··on Design Patterns – A comprehensible guide
> arcane toxic names

Oh come on. It's not "arcane" and I don't see how "toxic" has anything to do with the names of these patterns.

Just an inflammatory comment.

dkn··on Mark Zuckerberg: Building Global Community
As long as that global community is all in Facebook.
dkn··on Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective
R v Elliott is an interesting case. It contradicts what you are saying in general, but it also shows that the courts imposed strict conditions on a suspected harassment case which severely harmed the defendant's work life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Elliott

dkn··on SaaS Onboarding Metrics for Developers
Thanks! This is really cool.

I wonder if you could delve into some of the more long-tail SaaS tracking methods you have found to be successful. Additionally, if there were any pitfalls you found specific to the SaaS space, I would love to know about them.

We are embarking on a new (mostly) discrete segment of our existing SaaS product, and we know that we need to learn more about how users are using our site from the very beginning. Hoping for a big early win, as you said :)

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