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michaelchisari

8,396 karma · joined October 13, 2010

Full-Stack Software Engineer

https://michael.chisari.us

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michaelchisari··on Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
And quality is the new differentiator when everyone can generate slop.
michaelchisari··on AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules
Obviously. Yet on balance, the ones that can't be kept secret may not be significant.

I'm not making a judgement on what the ideal situation is, more so explaining why the referenced study could have come to its conclusion.

michaelchisari··on AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules
The study could have revealed that industries without patent protection evolve to have better trade secret security, effectively leveling the benefits of patents.
michaelchisari··on What to learn to be a graphics programmer
The question I answered was:

Which fields would you say are the best to just be mediocre in

> I actually can't stand you people.

Unnecessary. People who want a basic middle class existence are not greedy and should not receive disdain. Many have responsibilities to their elders or others, have kids or want them, etc. so avowed poverty is not realistic.

Especially when bohemian poverty is an increasingly vanishing option on a practical level.

michaelchisari··on What to learn to be a graphics programmer
Nepo baby.

Joking (sort of).

I can't say I know of any in the fields I'm familiar with. I've watched tech get increasingly top-heavy since the covid hiring boom and bust, although it was already trending that way.

There are a lot of fields dominated by boomers on the verge of retirement that are the safest bet for people who want to be good and make a good living but don't care to be extraordinary.

I've heard that from arborists, water treatment specialists, actuaries, a few others.

michaelchisari··on What to learn to be a graphics programmer
Seems like a great field to get into if you can make it to the top 5-10% skillset.

The rapid advances, in a trend replicating throughout society, push out the middle in favor of the top.

michaelchisari··on Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions
Moving fast was a huge moat for a long time, but now moving fast is easy. Quality might be the new moat.

Important to note that fast never meant much to open source and for good reason.

michaelchisari··on Reflections on software engineering in the age of AI
It's a common enough experience that it shouldn't be dismissed.
michaelchisari··on Reflections on software engineering in the age of AI
| type errors, scope issues, import resolution, dependencies.

I write code myself and use the LLM to find mistakes then fix them manually. I recommend inverting the conventional wisdom on LLMs:

  1. Don't use it to write code. It's a terrible
     programmer. But it's an intelligent rubber duck
     and a solid analysis tool.

  2. Write the code yourself. It'll go faster than
     figuring it out as you go along. It's just typing
     if you have a plan.

  3. Use an LLM to sanity check what you wrote.
     It can find potential design issues or future
     problems or breaks from convention. Decide based on
     your experience how much you want to address these
     issues before moving on.
Is this as fast as AI writing the code? Not at first but possibly over time. Maybe faster. Certainly better quality.

Plus you don't lose any of your skills in the process.

You're still doing the gruntwork necessary to keep your skillset.

And the token cost is a small fraction of what it takes to get LLMs to write good code.

michaelchisari··on AI's Affordability Crisis
I'm set up to use Qwen 3.6 locally if needed. It's solid, it does what I need, it runs on my laptop and it's free.

But that's because I never got on the "run three dozen agents in a ralph loop" trend or other high-token usage methods. The way I use AI is discrete and targeted and it seems that's how it will be for everyone once the economics settle.

michaelchisari··on Zen and the Art of Machine Learning Research
It was about controlling actions not emotions.

The stoics cried, they laughed, they expressed joy, they were by all accounts emotionally expressive.

The control was about what actions were to be taken in the face of those emotions and other considerations, not suppressing or controlling the emotions themselves.

It's not a small distinction.

michaelchisari··on Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
In 1970, median rent was $108 a month, utilities included.

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/08/archives/108-a-month-rent...

michaelchisari··on How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
The complexity required of a basic CRUD app versus a client-side optimistic update are worlds apart.

Exhaust all other optimizations before lying to your users about what just happened.

michaelchisari··on The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
Anyone worth their salt looked down on copy/paste from Stackoverflow, let alone blindly doing so.

Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?

michaelchisari··on Domain expertise has always been the real moat
My comment was more "all things being equal."

Though the market so far has had a lower limit on "worse". We're finding out how low we can go before consumers start valuing quality again.

michaelchisari··on Domain expertise has always been the real moat
I disagree. At some point of complexity, building it yourself is faster, better and (as we're finding out) cheaper. And more fun, although that varies person to person.

Wrestling with a code generator also creates a sunk cost fallacy where progress grinds to a halt but you still try and use the tools to fix the problems the tools created. Or you go in and fix things yourself, in a codebase you don't truly understand. A single developer can recreate the contextual nightmare miasma of a large corporation all by themselves.

There's also an emerging market consideration: MVP are easy to build so time to market is no longer hard to achieve. It's not a differentiator.

X was built in 3 days but is slow and riddled with bugs and security errors. There are also A, B, C, D and E which are effectively the same thing built just as fast.

Z was built over six months and is rock solid and performant.

Who wins the market share?

michaelchisari··on Dusklight – GC Twilight Princess Decompiled
Delighted to see a "brew install dusklight" option.

Curious how this is different from a generalized emulator. Wouldn't this be able to run any GC game that used the same registers as Twilight Princess?

michaelchisari··on Please Use AI
You underestimate how easy it is to get someone who's into fly fishing to talk about fly fishing. You don't need to have known them for more than thirty seconds.

Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.

michaelchisari··on Claude Opus 4.8
Interesting. Where have they stated that?
michaelchisari··on Claude Opus 4.8
| a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA

My conspiracy theory is that Apple recognizes this.

michaelchisari··on Magnifica Humanitas
| Everything we do matters. Always.

Yeah you get it.

michaelchisari··on Magnifica Humanitas
Most certainly but after two thousand years the Magisterium have mastered the art of universalizing the moment. A direct call out would age poorly. A hundred years from now, nobody will remember Thiel or Palantir (inshallah) but the sentiment will still most certainly ring true.
michaelchisari··on Magnifica Humanitas
I'm not Muslim (an agnostic Catholic if anything) but I love the Hadith

| If the final hour comes while one of you has a seed in his hand, if he can plant it before it takes place, let him do so.

I take it to mean it is never too late to do something good, even (or especially) something you will never benefit from.

michaelchisari··on AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
Without proper training, what looks good may be trash. I always thought pixel art generated by diffusion models looked damn good. Then I started watching and reading reviews by actual pixel artists, and all they saw was flaws. And it wasn't just nitpicking, it was things that were fundamentally wrong, difficult to fix and would look awful and amateurish and distracting to the player in production.
michaelchisari··on Technofascism
Posadism specifically. It's not mere historical determinism.
michaelchisari··on Technofascism
TESCREAL reads like a right-wing Posadism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_International–Posadist

Like Posadism, the future refusing to cooperate will burn them out along the way.

michaelchisari··on Making the news available at no cost is a victory
Acquiring and managing crypto is its own form of friction though.
michaelchisari··on Making the news available at no cost is a victory
An approach that might work is low cost yearly subscriptions. So $6 a year instead of per month. Cost to the consumer becomes $0.50 a month for services that scale well (like news), but avoids the service fee and money laundering problems of micropayments.
michaelchisari··on Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
I agree with the prediction but not the timing. We won't enter a more hardened era of software until after a long period of security vulnerabilities.

Rivers caught on fire for a hundred years before the EPA was formed.

michaelchisari··on SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format
The single writer is less of an issue in practice than it's made out to be. Modern nvme drives are incredible and it's trivial to get 5k writes per second in an optimized WAL setup. Way more than most apps could ever dream.

And even then, I've used a batch writer pattern to get 180k writes per second on a commodity vps.

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