doix

Can I repeatedly press the button? Because then I'm pressing it, seeing what's up. Trying whatever low evidence/low risk method there is to "fix" it and then pressing it again.

Assuming there's no side effects to pressing the button of course.

> It’s all just physics and chemistry, and those are well understood.

Not really. We cannot model physics and chemistry to a level which allows us to accurately predict a humans action (even a tiny time-step into the future)

This is vastly different to an LLM, where the model is the model (for a lack of better phrasing).

There's definitely trade-offs. I actually prefer a proper SPA to pure HTML when on a slow connection and interacting with a site a lot.

Especially when trying to buy something. I much prefer to have a longer initial load and then have everything just work instead of waiting as I navigate between pages, the multi stage checkout, confirmation etc.

But yeah, if I'm just trying read a single article on a blog, preloading everything is pointless. A hybrid site with the initial page being server side rendered + progressive enhancement afterwards is theoretically optimal in my opinion.

I use it for all my non-professional work and I find it works well enough for me.

Mostly for things that I know are possible and have a vague idea of how I would do it, but it would take me longer. Some examples in no particular order:

* Made my wife's travel blog/site

* Chrome extension for Crunchyroll to allow multisubs + local translation for unsupported languages (so my wife and I can watch and she doesn't need to focus extra hard reading English)

* Same as above for Netflix

* Setup multi subs with mpv (some Lua plugin shenanigans)

* Setup proton for warcraft 3 + wc3 champions (unofficial ladder) on Linux

* Setup a bunch of xrandr aliases for my different monitor uses (I'm still on x11)

If you need a custom chrome/firefox extension or to create some bespoke Linux QoL stuff, it works great. This was all Gemini Flash 3.5-3.7 (been using it for a while). I suspect pretty much anything would succeed at these tasks, but I just stick with antigravity because it works for me(and I'm on some discounted plan).

I hate that I have to change the way I write to avoid AI-isms. I loved using "load bearing" to describe weird code that you think you can delete but is actually holding everything together.

Now people think I'm just parroting what Claude said. It sucks. I want my catch phrases back, I guess this is how em dash users felt

You are not wrong, Jenkins had many problems. But I would argue that the solutions were always grounded in the Linux userland.

And I also agree that you could use GitHub actions in a similar way to how I talk about Jenkins. I also think you could use Jenkins in a way that is similar to GitHub actions with an extremely convoluted Jenkins file that relies on Jenkins plugins etc.

But nowhere I worked did that with Jenkins, whereas everywhere I worked with GitHub actions does create extremely complex pipelines relying on 3rd party actions (with many being vendor supplied). I'm sure(hope?) the DevOps folks looked at what each action actually does by going to wherever it's pulled from and read it (and the actions it pulls in).

I'm not necessarily arguing that things are worse now. Just that you don't get a "free" understanding anymore by just having a good familiarity of the Linux userland. When there's a problem, I stick my head in the sand and let the DevOps people handle it.

I also haven't worked anywhere that uses Jenkins in 10+ years, so maybe if I went back, it would be the same as Github.

Yeah, the YAMLification of everything kinda killed my ability to understand "everything". Previously, if you knew the Linux userland well, I felt like you could figure anything out with enough digging.

Take CI for example, it was Jenkins and it ran a csh/bash/zsh whatever script and captured the output. Nice and simple (even if the scripts sometimes got insane).

GitHub actions is nothing like that. Weird home grown extensions to YAML with their own idiosyncrasies and dynamically pulling in plugins from god knows where. You can't just take a workflow and execute it locally like you could with a bash script.

Surely it ends with alternative clients? Seems much easier and more efficient. Facebook UI is crap anyway, just have something scrape the data and present it in a format that's not optimized for whatever KPI FB cares about and without ads.

Or with just not using these services.

> I was told I'm not supposed to read pull requests at my job anymore (we all do agentic coding now), I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs because for some stupid reason it still requires several humans to approve the PR.

That sucks, may as well auto approve with a script.

> Sure it is, but it may not cost what you think it should cost.

You can go on open router and see what 3rd parties are hosting open models for. There are some pretty capable models (not frontier, but probably opus 4.5 level) for pretty cheap.

Those companies have no incentive to lose money. They are nameless, they are making a profit just providing the service, and it's cheaper than the frontier models of today.

So I think we have a pretty good idea about what the price can be, even without VC subsidizing.

I guess it depends, but what are you doing with all your time if you aren't reviewing the code and trying to make it maintainable?

The time I previously spent writing code is now spent reviewing code and giving feedback so that it gets written differently if don't like it.

The skills required have changed completely imo. You need to be able to context switch efficiently and review "better". Also identify which tasks require lots of supervision of what the AI generates and which don't.

I think AI is here to stay. Open models keep the costs at a certain level. If hosted solutions get too expensive, people will selfhost. Even if models never improve beyond today, the open ones are good enough at this point to provide immense value.

Just my opinion of course.

Yeah, I was very skeptical and now I've drank the kool-aid. Got multiple parallel cloud agents with independent loops making PRs and me reviewing them. AI is also reviewing PRs and sometimes even catches useful things.

LLMs in 2023, from what I remember, were slightly better auto complete. It's pretty different now.

This matches what Gwern wrote years ago [0]. It does unequivocally make you stronger though. So if you're training anyway, may as well take it and hope it makes you smarter as well (just believing might be enough for that sweet placebo effect).

[0] https://gwern.net/creatine

Today I learned about the Bortle scale. I was completely ignorant about it.

> If you've never seen truly dark skies, do yourself a favour and go see what they look like during true night

I think I went from only ever experiencing Bortle 5-6 to Bortle 1 when I visited Merzouga and Erg Chebbi. Blew my mind, made me really appreciate the extent of light pollution almost everywhere else I've been.

> The worst part IMO for both is that they prioritize mobile apps over their PC software so if you want to edit on a computer like a normal reasonable person you lose features compared to idiotically doing things on a phone.

This is my biggest issue as well. It's actually the one "real" thing I use the iPad for. It still gets the mobile app interface whilst being on a bigger screen and being almost usable.

This is the complete opposite of those discussions. It's taking a specific quantifiable thing and measuring it, with enough information for anyone to try and reproduce the results.

It's the epitome of science, comparing it to a generic vim vs emacs flamewar which is pure subjective opinion is pretty baseless.

I mostly travel around Africa & Asia (east, south east, central). Yeah, I used esim.dog with the HK break out IP and it was fine.

I guess my usage falls into two categories:

1. I have reliable wifi, and don't need to use mobile data for work

2. I don't have reliable wifi and I have to use mobile data for work.

If I'm in situation 1, then I don't really care too much. The cheapest junk esim works. If I'm in situation 2, I need a large amount of data and need a local plan.

I've saved your site though, never know what situation might come up. I don't know how esimdb chooses who to index, but I would try to get on there (I'm assuming it's free?).

I've spoken to quite a few travelers and they mostly fall into two groups. Those that use airlo or some other big provider or they use esim comparison sites to get the cheapest offer.

How do you judge "the best" network? It normally depends on if you're in the city, countryside, island etc.

I travel fulltime and constantly buy new esims. Normally I just go on esimdb and buy the cheapest one. Then when I get to the location I'm staying at, I chat with folks to figure which network works best there. Normally it's cheaper to get a local plan as well.

You are quite a bit more expensive than the no-name folks I buy from.

[0] https://esimdb.com

Yeah, I remember some ad by an LLM security company hitting HN a year or so with a "challenge" to do prompt injection.

The final level was their product and it was impossible. But it was also impossible to get the LLm to do _anything_.

May as well just echo "prompt injection attempt detected" at that point and never send anything to an LLM.

> Do you want to iterate using for loop or using .iter().step(2).map()?

This isn't really a good example, assuming both can be used to represent the same thing.

The problem with the wrong abstraction is when your abstraction doesn't let you represent something. Then, because of you've already invested so heavily into it, you start contorting the problem to fit your abstraction and it becomes a shit show.

It's too hard to define what "works" even means in this case. Look at the example savings output. A lot of it is kubectl output.

Your suggestion to using coding benchmarks doesn't really capture the whole picture. I haven't seen a benchmark using kubectl.

> AFAIK, none of the major players do. That's a sign to me these don't work in general.

It's a lose/lose for major players. If it works well, it will lower their revenue. Also there's a high risk it'll significantly worsen results for some people, even if it improves results for others.

> In which country can you emigrate to and be allowed votes in government representation just because you pay taxes?

There are a few, with varying degrees of residency time (and possibly other conditions) required. New Zealand requires being a resident for a year.

The UK is particularly interesting, if you're a citizen of a common wealth nation you can vote in national UK elections if you're a resident.

Personally, I agree with you though. I didn't vote in the UK despite being able too. Let the citizens decide the future of their nation, I have the privilege to leave (and have done so already). Feels wrong for me to influence the nation when I'm not fully invested in the outcome.

> Kids don't produce capital for the elites.

Kids eventually grow up and "start producing capital". It's definitely beneficial for the "elite" in the long term for people to have kids.

I had to deal with the Japanese for the first time last week. My girlfriends bag was stolen with her passport.

It happened in a Round1 (near Umeda in Osaka), we knew exactly when since we sat down to play Mario Kart and after one race it was gone. First the police tried to convince us that we just forgot it somewhere. Eventually we convinced them to check cameras, and they said it was a blind spot. They refused to check entrance and exit cameras.

She had her airpods in there, and we could track the location, they refused to look at any cameras in the area (we tried searching the area ourselves but couldn't locate them, we figure the thief chucked it somewhere hard to find). We had the serial numbers of USD that was in the bag, they wouldn't even write it down.

Currently still waiting for an official report so that we can try and deal with their immigration to move her visa to another passport.

Having spoken to her embassy, it's the second time they've heard the story (same exact Round1, same Mario kart section). And if it's happened twice to citizens from her country, it probably happens more.

The whole thing made me completely disillusioned with Japan. Yes, statistically it's extremely safe, but if something does happen, don't expect any help. Reading this story just makes me think I should avoid any interactions with police if at all possible, and I've stopped carrying my passport with me. I rather get fined than having it stolen.

> Scattering the implementation in various files all over the source tree does not help much building the mental model.

Yeah, that happens where I work and I hate it. A combination of lint rules and AI reviewer prompts complain about long files and long functions. This means something that could be a 300 line self contained function that could be read linearly, gets split up into 6 functions across 6 files.

It's the illusion of "clean code". If you're casually skimming the code, you feel good. But as soon as you go beyond the surface level it becomes annoying.

What laptop has that much VRAM and RAM for $3500 with good/okay-ish Linux support? I was looking to upgrade my asus zephyrus g14 from 2021 and things were looking very expensive. Decided to just keep it chugging along for another year.

Then again, I was looking in the UK, maybe prices are extra inflated there.

Who decides what a "win" is in these cases? I get everything apart from that part. Because I would take that bet, but I'm worried what the definition of "Jesus christ" is.

You're not wrong that it does that, but that's kinda what I'd expect. Maybe because I'm used to it, but if there's a potential turn it'll say "keep right" or "keep left". So it makes sense to me that it says "second exit".

"Straight" can be ambiguous, second exit isn't. Maybe it's because I'm terrible with directions and hate driving, but I like the constant feedback that I'm going the right way.

I suspect the real issue is that they just change stuff "randomly" and the experience gets worse/better cheaper/more expensive.

Since you have no way of knowing when they change stuff, you can't really know if they did change something or it's just bias.

I've experienced that so many times in the last month that I switched to codex. The worst part is, it could be entirely in my head. It's so hard to quantify these changes, and the effort it takes isn't worth it to me. I just go by "feeling".

I bet if you could make it interesting, YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/Whatever could make it possible to get paid to dig holes in your backyard.

You could argue that the value is in the entertaining filming/acting/story telling etc, but if the videos are about digging holes then I think it's valid to say someone is paying you to dig holes.

FWIW I have an Asus Zephyrus G14 and the dual graphics cards works pretty well in Linux in hybrid mode. It's pretty cool, certain things (games) run on the dedicated Nvidia GPU. Everything else runs on the built in AMD GPU.

I'm guessing it's because the laptops are popular enough that there's a dedicated group of people that make it work [0].

I'm still on X11, dunno what the story is like with Wayland though.

[0] https://asus-linux.org/