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juancn

2,377 karma · joined February 12, 2017

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juancn··on Building an AI-native engineering org
I'm sorry you had to work at (or with) a crappy engineering org. Good ones really do care about the business.
juancn··on French digital tax may kill VideoLan non-profit
France is desperate.

They have a deficit problem, they cannot print money and people really don't want to give up their pensions.

Unless the curb public spending they are heading to a hard crash (and will probably take a couple other economies for the ride).

juancn··on Building an AI-native engineering org
Not a single mention of value or revenue.

Only three metrics went up: LOC, token spend and presumably release speed/frequency.

What's the markup (profit/COGS)? is it up?

Customer satisfaction? Is NPS moving one way or another?

juancn··on Just Noting That Your Candy Corn Is Made of Bug Secretions
Milk is mammal secretion.

Honey is bee secretion

There are many tasty secretions

juancn··on Pharo 14
It's like a protestant Smalltalk!

(Smalltalk is a religion, I will die on this hill!)

juancn··on Dungeon generation in the Gnomish mines of NetHack
I don't get the neighboring tile numbering. Is it like this?

    0 1 2
    3 4 5
    6 7 8
What's the current cell?

A diagram would help

juancn··on Calling a function in C without naming it
If the check was syntactical I would have checked if the tokenpasting operator was handled correctly.

Like:

    #define JOIN(a,b) a##b
    ...
    JOIN(exe,cve)(... call params...)
juancn··on Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers authored with Claude
If the guy knows his shit, Claude acts as a cadre of cheap, fast, undergrads.
juancn··on Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
A large chunk of the world doesn't have near enough infrastructure to support EVs. In many places they don't yet make sense.
juancn··on What makes Lisp difficult to read?
It is too uniform, which makes it hard.

Everything is a list or an atom. There's no variety and it doesn't take advantage of pre-existing knowledge.

For example, in most curly braced languages a block is very different from an argument list, not so in Lisp.

There's not many visual cues of what function something does, anything can be anything.

Even math expressions are weird (because there aren't any), you cannot leverage years of training reading simple math notation to make sense of stuff.

juancn··on A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
I use the "what's going to kill us next" philosophy. Figure out what that is and do something to avoid it.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

juancn··on Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
Isn't this kind of obvious?

Parties (any kind) are entertainment and they compete with other forms of entertainment.

We have way more options to amuse ourselves now than a few decades ago.

juancn··on Enjoy Every Sandwich
Here's the full interview referred in the article in case you're interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giTi8KWSZl4

juancn··on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
It's not odd, it's a for profit company that's using it for marketing.
juancn··on Why is Hacker News like that?
If you're far left the center is right, if you're far right, the center is left.
juancn··on I don't want the details
It's rarely a single cause, there's no root, it's a forest.

It's usually a combination of things that are not quite right, specially in mature orgs where all the simple fixes have already been applied.

It's semantic, if you do RCA right you don't stop at a single cause, but that's what usually ends up happening.

juancn··on I don't want the details
One thing that's often left out that tends to grind organizations to a halt is that continuous improvement processes tend to be additive.

You always add rules, and alerts, and so on. You need to revisit existing processes to and see what can be removed or replaced.

My other nit with these is a term that's abused a lot "Root Cause", most complex issues have many contributing factors, not a single root cause, and if you force the teams to find one, they will.

I dislike RCA (Root Cause Analysis) it puts you in the wrong mindset, CFA would be better (Contributing Factor Analysis).

juancn··on The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern
That could be easily be corrected by relaxing merge gates for changes only to the `docs` folder (or some suitable naming pattern).

You can even do live edits on the web if you don't want to use a command line.

juancn··on Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac
It's the price you pay for privacy
juancn··on In September, AI generated code has made up 17.25% of all Linux Kernel patches
I still don't get how are they dealing with copyright here. Looks like the ostrich algorithm (hide your head in the sand and pretend nothing happens).

Those patches are not copyrightable unless human made. There's a reason why Oracle doesn't accept AI contributions to Java.

juancn··on Raspberry Pi blocks changing RAM chips
It would be much more user friendly if there was a way to check the serial of a particular PI and see it's original hardware config, manufacture date, and so on.
juancn··on If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious
How do they define consciousness precisely?

That's where all these discussions tend to break down, if you get accurate enough with your definition you end up saying that a thermostat is conscious in a sense or reach a point where you cannot define it well enough.

juancn··on I don't like passkeys
Account lockout as the author mentions is the biggest risk on personal accounts.

Passkeys just make it harder/riskier.

juancn··on Subnormal floating-point numbers are expensive on Intel processors
Apparently it only happens on P-cores, recent E-cores have a fast path for subnormals.
juancn··on Towards Self-Driving Codebases
I think the only way for now it through distillation of your own models, which can get expensive fast.
juancn··on T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97°F
Wow! Close to boiling! /s
juancn··on Infinite-Parameter LLMs: Generating and Adapting Weights from Live Data
I wonder how (and if) continuous learning models will achieve stability.

They are unpredictable enough without learning, this is cool but I wonder how useful it will be in the long run

juancn··on Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
I like it conceptually, but the main issue for me with reduce is that it's hard to know exactly how the reduction will actually be executed.

The FUBAR potential with map and filter is much smaller, with reduce it depends on deep knowledge of the internals of the reduction itself, which makes it not as useful as a safe abstraction.

juancn··on Compressing a flag to 11 bits
It would be interesting to have a LUT to exclude existing country flags and turn this into a random flag generator.
juancn··on Giving up on smart rings
There aren't many places where a wearable doesn't get in the way, even an Apple watch it's unusable if you do kettlebell training (I severely scratched one doing a kb snatch).

I also stopped wearing my wedding ring because of lifting, it mangled beyond all recognition and had to cut it off with pliers and send it for repair.

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