foo42

Thanks, TIL!

Apparently the RMS prefix on the RMS Titanic stands for "royal mail steamer" as it was authorised to carry the post.

Ultimately the "speed" that matters, is the speed of delivering _useful_ improvements over time. The speed of delivering that today, is bottlenecked by the speed users can accept and form opinions on new functionality, and the speed of doing it tomorrow is also bottlenecked by compounded technical debt.

For now at least, I'd say churning code faster and faster cannot widen either of these bottlenecks much.

Today, I use Claude heavily, but review all the code. I'm faster, but not by the multiples people speak of. And that seems ok to me.

I'm not American, so this is a guess, but I'd suspect people resisting "progress" are not as irrational as you perhaps suppose.

More likely, they feel they would disproportionately bear the costs, while the benefits either trickle down diffusely from the wider societal good, or worse, accrue to some private company.

For example you may feel AI is progress, they may feel the loss of the countryside near their house to a data centre, which they may believe will primarily benefit the owners of OpenAI et al. In such a case, their opposition would be aligned with their beliefs and values.

Internet Archive feels like an important... well, archive, yet I often worry about the load, financial and potentially political, which is put on it when people use it as a workaround for pay-walls, as is often advocated on HN

Great video.

Other trebuchet fans who dream of building one some day may be interested in googling "walking trebuchet" for a surprisingly high complexity/results ratio.

Perhaps tangential to your point, but I often write blog posts (although finish and publish far fewer than I start) where I write about something as it has occurred to me, informed by things I've absorbed no doubt, but without specific research. In such cases I explicitly avoid searching out prior work as a) seeing that something is well discussed and explored can take away the motivation to explore (in the same way reading puzzle solutions before starting might), and b) to avoid having green shoots of ideas shaped by the current of existing consensus. Now that doesn't mean I don't come back after doing my own thinking to see what the more well developed literature of people cleverer than me, who've thought far longer than me think; I just don't want to snuff out my own exploration at the start.

As I say most of these I never publish as I'm mainly using writing as a vehicle for thought, but when I do I'm never sure how to flag them. I don't want (imaginary, lets be honest) readers thinking I'm deluded into thinking I've found something new. I want to come up with a tag I can put on them which adds a pithy disclaimer card at the top or something so I feel more comfortable publishing them.

Side note: The linotype, which Paige's machine is compared to, was one of my favourite machines to discover existed. Such a clever design.

But what are the questions nobody is asking?

I've recently been running yolo mode, but in docker container with the codebase I'm working on a as regular mount with other reference code mounted as read only.

I've been experimenting with dedicated Linux users for various external tools with access to the relevant credentials limited to them and the Claude user only able to invoke the relevant clis by going through a pair of wrapper scripts: the first to change user to call the second via a su call as the appropriate user, the second wrapper to invoke a guard script which allows me to implement my own in-code permissions checks against the cli arguments. In _theory_ there's no way for Claude to work around it, as the sudoers file only permits the described manner to change to the user with credentials, and the user with permissions for each credential only ever runs deterministic code.

It's too early days to say how well this second part works out, but so far so good.

I've been using them by reading some docs/wiki/tutorial, then when I think I understand something trying to do a rough explanation to the LLM and ask if I'm right. I'm usually making some analogy to something I already understand a little. I'm usually partially right but missing some key bits at the first pass. I go back and forward asking for explanations of various bits or asking for resources around the area I'm not understanding. Often times just discovering the relevant name for the area of study opens lots of doors. I basically use it like I would talk to a knowledgeable and patient teacher.

As for how useful it is to understand thins, I believe it's still useful and hope it will continue to be.

An overlapping technique (covering some but not all of the circumstances you'd use assert) is to take a parse-dont-validate approach, and essentially encode the fact that an assertion has been applied to a value in its type.

How ergonomic this is will vary by language, but the general idea would be to apply the assertion logic in some sort of constructor, then prevent any operations which would break the invariant going forward. The simplest way to protect this being by making the value immutable where possible.

Users of the value who care about the invariant being true can then specify in their types that they want a non-empty-collection or a foo-id or whatever it may be, rather than asking for the wider type, then asserting.

I agree, although I think the real goal the model providers are going for (both commercial _and_ open weight) is probably power. Just think of the control available to the organisation training the models politicians, business leaders, and citizens are increasingly delegating their thinking to.

or netcasts even

On point 4, is the general flow that an "update" would read the current latest, check whatever conditions, then rather than updating, insert a new record (all in a transaction), or is your append only sot more an ordered "log" of update requests with the result of any conditional operations requiring a replay (from at least a check point). Or something else entirely.

I'm generally an immutable first, type developer but ive not had to do much schema design for a while and looking back to previous attempts we never hit scale to stress test my approaches.

Perhaps political candidate Count Binface here in the UK should add to his "I'll lower _your_ taxes and raise _everyone elses_" policy with "I'll protect _your_ job and automate _everyone elses_"

I wonder if some sort of member owned cooperative would be the way forward if we the people want to retain any control.

I'll take this as an uninvited opportunity to plug nushell. Ive never got on with bash, it feels like too much of the friction is incidental to the problem, whereas with nushell I find I get to the fun intrinsic difficulty of a problem. YMMV but give it a try if you haven't before

You might be surprised how "little" engineers make outside the US too

I've used postgres on a few projects (via AWS rds) but I've always used it as a pretty vanilla SQL database. Probably the most "fancy" feature I've used being bson columns.

Can anyone recommend good resources for going deeper? (Obviously I could Google, but I appreciate HN recommendations)

People already know a lot of things.

But which "know"?

There's seeing something and recognising it as something you've seen before.

There's being able to recite it without seeing it.

There's being able to explain it.

There's _knowing_ it. Where your life is an active demonstration of having made it _part_ of you.

To the extent we obtain wisdom with life, it's usually a progression of things progressing deeper down the layers, years, perhaps decades after they attained level 1.

The fact that someone makes a simple observation is probably suggestive that despite its simplicity, it doesn't stick fully, maybe it's even anti-memetic.

Perhaps repeating such simple truths is like a spaced repetition system for society

When you say "it", I suspect it will pan out to American Elites, as opposed to America the nation, or Americans the people.

Makes me think of [shepherd tones](Shepard tone - Wikipedia https://share.google/xooRbF7wIIhcsTt2J) which sounds like they're rising in pitch indefinitely

good timing, I just started learning Typst this weekend!

I think there are multiple aspects at play.

People have reasonable concerns about the ethical, political, economic dimensions before we even get to the technical capabilities.

Even within the narrower question of the technical utility, I think there are a lot of factors which differentiate people's different experiences which are largely unacknowledged and lead to people talking past each other and failing to understand how others have such different experiences and opinions.

The sentiment that "users only care if it works" for example implies that all considerations beyond "does the feature work today" are developers self serving their aesthetics, but overlooks many other concerns which _do_ impact users at a later point.

I wrote about just this division of experience and the polarisation which manifests on hacker news just last week as it happens https://www.julianhaeger.com/posts/Disparate-Results-with-AI...

Interesting. Could you elaborate. As a pro Europe Brit I'm interested to understand this viewpoint. Is it a widely held perspective do you know?

It feels like the virtual actors are the primitive the author is reaching for. As an erstwhile Elixir hobbyist I've often found myself wishing for the simplicity of actors when solving problems in my day job. I tend to work in an AWS environment, but I believe over in Azure they have something like it. I think it was called Orleans when I read about it but I think it's got a more corporate name now.

This is somewhat off topic, but a question to Americans: Why do none of you seem to pronounce the "l" in soldering? Every US video seems to say "soddering"

Seems like a decent place to point out that there are good savings to be had on heat pump running costs with a smart controller designed for heat pumps which can learn the dynamics of your building then preheat when tariffs are low or outdoor conditions are favourable.

I work for homely energy which has such an offering, but fwiw I genuinely think it's a good product. It's been studied by Salford uni in their energy house lab, so if anyone's interested maybe dig into that for a more neutral verdict.

apparently it is a British thing. https://editorsmanual.com/articles/collective-nouns-singular...