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maxverse

644 karma · joined October 9, 2013

Software dev, runner, writer. Currently doing Voice AI stuff at Greenhouse. Always building something on the side. Latest are typerfast.com (a touch typing trainer that knows what you need to practice), and tinylogger.com, (a minimal blog for focused writers).

Say hello! pekarsky.maxim@gmail.com

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maxverse··on Dessa: Conversation Model trained only on speech
Right -- it's trained on speech, not vast amounts of knowledge.
maxverse··on What I learned from six months of being stupid on purpose
This takes me back to the weirdness of my post-college years: so much pressure to show that I know what I'm doing but no actual work or life experience to draw from. The transition thinking success is good grade to realizing that real success is figuring out what the questions are and how much effort I should put into answering them.

I definitely relate to the crux of the article though:

> I realized getting to a point where you reap the benefits from what you’re hoping to learn requires you to do it yourself and fail. A lot.

I also had to work hard to shift from the fixed mindset: "I'm smart therefore I need to be good at this. If I'm not good at this, then I'm dumb" to "I'm going to put the effort it and give myself the grace that learning takes a long time". Almost nobody is smart enough to get it right away, and truly, nobody starts out knowing everything.

I learned this most clearly from running, where I had no expectations to live up to, no "I should". I put in the work for years, and ran faster and further than I ever thought I would. I'm never ashamed to say "today was a crappy run" or "I didn't do very well, better sleep it off". Then why was I afraid to say "I don't get this complex idea yet, I better spend some time reading it 12 more times until it starts making sense"?

maxverse··on Show HN: How random are you?
I absolutely said 100101
maxverse··on Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits
Disney has a wide-ranging, vast library of content. All the classic Disney stuff, Disney Channel movies, Marvel, Star Wars... Not saying it's worth it, but it's a wide appeal. I can only thing of 5-10 great Hulu shows; I don't really know what to watch on there.
maxverse··on Enjoy Every Sandwich
Oooh, I love this. A few years ago, I started keeping track of my favorite coffeeshops. They're not "the best ever" by some objective metric; I'm not Zagat. But they're special to me!

- Tradition Coffee Roasters, Kailua, HI

- Offset Coffee, LA, CA

- Igam Coffee, Brooklyn, NY

- City League, Brooklyn, NY

- Ozo Coffee, Boulder, CO

- Odyssey Coffee, Ocean Grove, NJ

maxverse··on Codex Is Down
What tasks were you doing?
maxverse··on Don't Paste the AI, please
I think a lot about a mismatch of effort these days. Here's an extreme example: I spend an hour drafting a doc outlining our engineering strategy for the next few quarters (or if we're in a startup, maybe writing up my product vision.) I share it with you to get feedback and comments. If you plug it into Claude and send me back an AI-formatted list, with sections like "the real insight (read this first)", we have very different ideas about where our value comes from and what deserves our effort, even though on paper I drafted a doc and you reviewed/expanded it.

I think it's fine to provide AI input if you disclose it, in which case you could encourage me to just plug it into Claude myself next time.

And I agree there's gray area: the AI output might be the result of a long conversation, shaped by careful prompting and context and guidance. The writing is AI generated, but the thinking is human.

maxverse··on French musician Kavinsky found dead
Would throw Air in there, though it's more chillout/triphop than techno:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBVK7Z9AyNM&list=RDZBVK7Z9Ay...

maxverse··on Show HN: 18 Words
Same
maxverse··on Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For
Related discussions:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346

maxverse··on In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough
I feel like both the point you quote and your response are valid, and not mutually exclusive. It's great that you were able to avoid lifestyle creep and that $200K felt like a lot of money that "had a huge impact on my later financial condition, and enabled me to do many things". And I think Katrine (from the article) feels like that should be a lot of money. I don't see lifestyle creep playing a role in her life. Instead, another person they quote says:

> [Ms. Gan]she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in.

maxverse··on Click (2016)
I enjoyed playing with this. Wild how much it knows.
maxverse··on Minimal Structures
That resonates with me, too. I've tried building beautiful, does-one-thing well projects. I like the way you phrase it:

> I try to be the best, in the list of “that specific feature” providers, not one of them, or one of the good ones.

What have you made, OP?

maxverse··on They See Your Photos
> His agnostic leanings and heterosexual orientation align with a more liberal political stance.

That's a very safe guess

> He is susceptible to confirmation bias, in-group bias, the availability heuristic and out-group homogeneity... he may also be prone to excessive phone use, binge-watching TV shows, and impulse buying.

That's literally everyone

maxverse··on OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
Are you suggesting this was written by AI?
maxverse··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
I use an M1 for personal development an an M4 for work. I'm a typical dev. I don't feel any difference.
maxverse··on Show HN: Strava for Claude Code
I am genuinely curious what you're hoping to get out of your goal to use claude code daily!
maxverse··on Show HN: Strava for Claude Code
Thank you for putting my feelings into words. "Really weird" is exactly how I feel. AI output in our work should be measured in engineering progress, not in use metrics, right?
maxverse··on Privilege is bad grammar
100%. "Needs more attention to detail."
maxverse··on Age of Empires: 25 years of pathfinding problems with C++ [video]
It's kind of crazy how nice people in multiplayer are. Nobody says anything about my mother or what kind of content I'm downloading to cause lag. Everyone's got the personality of, like, a chill dad now. People are more interested in a good game than just winning. It's really nice.

The other day, I was playing a noob game where one opponent on the other team was way better than the rest of us and rushed. His own team came down on him after.

maxverse··on Native Instruments enters into insolvency proceedings
The Gentleman is my go-to piano library to mess around! I have Noire and a few others, but have always loved its sound.

But also, yeah, NI is to music what... VS Code is to devs, right? Everyone uses/makes Kontakt libraries at some point.

maxverse··on There is an AI code review bubble
Maybe I'm buying into the cool-aid, but I actually really liked the self-aware tone of this post.

> Based on our benchmarks, we are uniquely good at catching bugs. However, if all company blogs are to be trusted, this is something we have in common with every other AI code review product. One just has to try a few, and pick the one that feels the best.

maxverse··on There is an AI code review bubble
> Today's agents are better than the median human code reviewer

"...at catching issues and enforcing standards, and they're only getting better".

I took this to mean what good code review is is subjective. But if you clearly define standards and patterns for your code, your linter/automated tools/ AI code reviewer will always catch more than humans.

maxverse··on Training my smartwatch to track intelligence
Absolutely love this kind of project, combining different data sources to predict/model how you're doing. I also use chess as a proxy for my brain is working!
maxverse··on Indifference is a power (2015)
If anyone Googles it and is wondering about Feeling Good (1999) and Feeling Great (2020) by the same author, it seems like Feeling Great is just an updated version of the original book, based on more experience and new insights. Here's the author discussing the difference:

https://feelinggood.com/2020/10/26/213-from-feeling-good-to-...

maxverse··on Show HN: A simulator for engineers transitioning from IC to management
It's crazy that it set off our alarms at the same time. One agreement -- oh, nice human. Two -- what is this!?
maxverse··on Lessons from 14 years at Google
I love Addy's work, and enjoyed this article -- and I completely agree that it felt very LLM-y. I'm not sure what's scarier; that we know some of this didn't come from the author (and maybe that's okay?) or that one day soon, we'll get to a point where we won't be able to tell anymore.
maxverse··on Don't Become the Machine
This feels like a good second draft. There's definitely a message in here, but it shifts through the piece. To me, the most poignant sentence was " If I can just keep chugging forward, I will end up somewhere that is not here." I think the message is "Why are you working this hard? What do you hope to get out of participating in hustle culture; to what end?
maxverse··on Response to "Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language"
So glad someone already spoke up about this -- I love Wired, and I think that piece is really poor (not because I love Ruby or think it's without fault, but because the argument it makes is essentially "it's not Ruby or Python, which have static typing tools.")
maxverse··on Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised
AI is helpful for this, but I also built https://www.hackterms.com eight years ago for this exact reason.
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