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lordmauve

138 karma · joined December 14, 2013

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lordmauve··on MAI-Thinking-1
We need to see DeepSWE scores. SWE Bench Pro is junk.
lordmauve··on Claude Opus 4.8
Where did you get that idea? It uses mini-swe-agent, same as SWE-Bench.

https://github.com/datacurve-ai/deep-swe

lordmauve··on Claude Opus 4.8
I don't know if DeepSWE is genuinely a good benchmark. It's more important that their analysis demolished the validity of SWE-Bench Pro, objectively: it is being mismarked.

I think that buys enough credibility to propose an alternative.

I think there's a case to answer if Anthropic models underperform on a novel benchmark. I'd like to see more novel benchmarks to get a clearer picture.

lordmauve··on Claude Opus 4.8
Given DeepSWE just blew apart the SWE-Bench Pro benchmark and handed a 14-point lead to GPT-5.5, it looks pretty bad that they've listed SWE-Bench first in the model release and no DeepSWE. Like, this isn't obviously an answer.

Or maybe it is, but publish the DeepSWE numbers so we can see for ourselves.

lordmauve··on Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
From a lot of game jam games with custom engines, I have a pretty standard approach: I set the game clock to zero timestep, and push a pause gamestate onto the gamestate stack, where top gamestate gets all input. The trick is that you need many clocks, clocks for the gameplay/game animations, HUD animations, menu animations.
lordmauve··on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
Are you using Stop hooks to keep Claude running on a task until it completes, or is it doing that by itself?
lordmauve··on He Rewrote Everything in Rust – Then We Got Fired
It's written by AI. I have made LLMs adopt the same tone by prompting to be engaging. Short sentences. Every point intended to land with impact. Artificial gravitas. I consider that a failed experiment and rewrote it, rather than posting to Medium
lordmauve··on Show HN: Ask-human-mcp – zero-config human-in-loop hatch to stop hallucinations
Finally, the "AI" turns out to be 700 Indians. We now have the full loop of humans asking machines asking humans pretending to be machines. Civilisation collapses
lordmauve··on Show HN: Live-updating version of the 'What a week, huh?' meme
I'd argue this is the wrong design goal: correctness is more important.

I'm in the UK but my work PC's Internet exit node is in New York due to enforced use of corporate proxies, so the time shown to me is 5 hours out. Javascript would report the correct timezone.

It is not possible to correctly identify physical location from IP addresses. Not just because of proxies and VPNs and the accuracy of the data: you can go near a border and find your mobile phone connects to a cell tower in a neighbouring country, without even visiting! IP Geolocation is accurate enough for statistics and marketing but probably shouldn't be used for anything user-facing.

lordmauve··on Good engineers are right, a lot
I don't think that is incompatible at all. It's a restatement of the same thing:

If someone is right a lot they are likely not making assertions about things that they know nothing about.

If they are making assertions about a domain and those assertions are correct then that domain is one of their competencies.

"Utterly useless" is a bit extreme but it's a reasonable observation to say it doesn't have predictive power.

lordmauve··on Young Persons Guide to BCPL Programming on the Raspberry Pi [pdf]
> > Nobody in their right mind would want to learn programming in BCPL

> I agree, but that's not what the author thinks:

The author of this document is Martin Richards, the creator of BCPL. Of course he thinks you would want to learn it.

lordmauve··on Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce
What we call cornflour in British English, and cornstarch in US English, is flour heavily processed to remove everything except starch, giving a flavourless thickener.

If you use wheat flour you will change the flavour and also add a slight graininess as the flour grains don't completely homogenise.

lordmauve··on Pex: A tool for generating .pex (Python EXecutable) files, lock files and venvs
Also pipx isn't reproducible - it re-resolves dependencies so you may end up with different versions over time or in different places, eventually causing something to break.

If you have a shiv working it stays working, assuming you have a solution to distribute the required interpreter version.

lordmauve··on Bitten by Unicode
The finance industry mostly uses floats for currency, up until settlement etc.

"What would I get for this share?" can be answered with a float.

"What did I get for selling this share?" should probably be a fixed point value.

lordmauve··on Posix.1-2024 is published
> However the following is fine: > > case $a in > > No field splitting occurs here

This kind of bullshit is how I made a career rewriting people's buggy shell scripts in Python

lordmauve··on Volkswagen Group brings electric car for EUR 20k
In reality it will just be a petrol car but they'll cheat on the emissions test.
lordmauve··on OpenAI's Long-Term AI Risk Team Has Disbanded
Good. As someone who is a paid up OpenAI user I absolutely don't agree that there should be a role for a team screaming to put the brakes on because of some nebulous, imagined "existential risk" of hypothetical future AGI.

There are huge risks to AI today in terms of upheaval to economies and harms to individuals and minorities but they need to be tackled by carefully designed legislation, focused on real harms, like the EU AI legislation.

Then that imposes very specific obligations that every AI product must meet.

It's both better targeted, has wider impact across the industry, and probably allows moving faster in terms of tech.

lordmauve··on Why AWS, Google and Oracle Are Backing the Valkey Redis Fork
Or just keep options open for the time being.
lordmauve··on Pack: A new container format for compressed files
> Most popular solutions like Zip, gzip, tar, RAR, or 7-Zip are near or more than three decades old.

If I can't extract .pack archives 3 decades from now, the use of SQLite 3 will be the reason.

lordmauve··on Asynchronous clean-up
> I would be interested in examples of code that users believe require cancellation-specific async code, though.

This happens all the time. For example, cancellation in the middle of sending a HTTP request. The connection is now unusable and must be closed. Without cancellation the connection returns to a state where it can be used and is re-added to a pool.

lordmauve··on Swap_8_and_9: A simple import can modify the Python interpreter
Python imports are much more principled than sourcing bash though. They are executed in a new namespace, and subsequent imports reference that namespace directly instead of re-evaluating the code.

C extensions don't significantly change matters because the module is still constructed by procedural C code.

lordmauve··on Not everyone has an internal monologue
If you cannot do that you have Aphantasia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
lordmauve··on Construct-JS – A library for creating byte level data structures
Please don't use "word" to mean 16 bits. In an era when machine words are generally 64 bits, we're not talking about an anachronism from the previous generation, but the one before that - in a language that is completely insulated from the actual machine architecture.

One thing I love about Rust is that it uses u16, u32, u64 etc for unsigned and i16, i32, i64 etc for signed, which is about perfect - clear, concise and future-proof. That would be perfect for this library.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture)

lordmauve··on Code with Mu: a simple Python editor for beginner programmers
Mu uses the QScintilla editor from https://pypi.org/project/QScintilla/, which is GPLv3.
lordmauve··on MicroPython on the BBC micro:bit
I've heard that they will be available commercially next year through partners, but won't be distributed free to all students again.
lordmauve··on Major U.K. Real-Time Train Database Opens Up To More Developers
Don't make it a tuple. A tuple indicates heterogenous data (a record), while a list indicates a sequence of data.

If nothing else, use lists because the syntax means it stays as a list even if you someday remove all but one option and forget to leave a comma, eg.

  REASONS = [
    'leaves on the line'
  ]
vs

  REASONS = (
    'leaves on the line'
  )
lordmauve··on Major U.K. Real-Time Train Database Opens Up To More Developers
Code review:

default_reasons doesn't need to be a dict. Use a list.

You don't need random.randrange(). Use random.randint() to select a random integer and random.choice() to select a reason from default_reasons.