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oxidant

172 karma · joined February 18, 2024

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oxidant··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
What would you call insulin?
oxidant··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
I saw someone handing out samples of creatine at Costco the other day, spouting all sorts of stuff like it's a wonder drug.

It's definitely becoming mainstream.

I've taken it off and on for the past 15 years, the most noticeable effect is about 5lbs of weight gain. I do think it helps gym performance and the increased water retention mames for better muscle definition.

oxidant··on Grok 4.7
Ask for output to the user in "simple technical English", let it think how it wants. It is hard to believe all the flowery prose is actually helpful to the model.
oxidant··on GitHub is having trouble counting things
Experienced this using the API. Got told it's a "wontfix"
oxidant··on Show HN: Toast, a beautiful by default in terminal IDE
I like capslock bound to esc.
oxidant··on RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches
Stopped after

> Headline. The crash is real and reproducible.

oxidant··on The coolest use for the Vision Pro
Old reddit still works, images and videos are usually forced to go to new reddit. You can sometimes get around it by clicking on the comments link.

I started getting a blocking overlay telling me to download the app on new reddit and I just leave.

oxidant··on Kimi K3 Now Available via Telnyx Inference API
10DLC in North America
oxidant··on Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos
Interesting question. From the Wikipedia article,

> ISO 8601 allows Gregorian dates from the introduction of the calendar on 15 October 1582.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Dates

oxidant··on Keeping a Postgres Queue Healthy
This works well for jobs that are long-ish. You need another process to sweep for orphaned jobs and requeue or fail them. Add a timestamp of when it got picked up to keep track
oxidant··on RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
Exactly the point I was going to make. Shipping something requires knowing how to ship it, monitor it, and fix it.

Writing code is the "easy" part and kind of always has been. No one triggers incidents from a PR that's been in review for too long.

oxidant··on Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
Electron ships a version of Chrome. Other frameworks like Tauri use the device's webview.
oxidant··on Gleam OTP – Fault Tolerant Multicore Programs with Actors
receive takes a timeout. A would crash/hit the timeout and deal with the problem.
oxidant··on Elixir 1.19
What do you mean, "creates a Conn variable out of whole cloth"?

Conn is just a pipeline of functions, the initial Conn struct is created at request time and passed through to each function in the pipeline.

oxidant··on A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code
I've never seen it write a file in plan mode either.
oxidant··on Booting 5000 Erlangs on Ampere One 192-core
The behavior is configurable and the default is unbound.

https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_cmd.html#%2Bsbt

oxidant··on URL-Driven State in HTMX
Not if the items change relative position over time.
oxidant··on Jujutsu for busy devs
Schroedingers branching
oxidant··on Jujutsu for busy devs
Counterpoint: Why should my println debugging get committed? They're not "important" for the final product but important for development.
oxidant··on Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
Agreed, but people sell "vibe coding" without acknowledging you need more than vibes.

LLMs can help answer the questions. However, they're not going to necessarily make the correct choices or implementation without significant input from the user.

oxidant··on Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
Of course that's what the industry is selling because they want to make money. Yes, it's easy to create a proof of concept but once you get out of greenfield into 50-100k tokens needed in the context (reading multiple 500 line files, thinking, etc) the quality drops and you need to know how to focus the models to maintain the quality.

"Write me a server in Go" only gets you so far. What is the auth strategy, what endpoints do you need, do you need to integrate with a library or API, are there any security issues, how easy is the code to extend, how do you get it to follow existing patterns?

I find I need to think AND write more than I would if I was doing it myself because the feedback loop is longer. Like the article says, you have to review the code instead of having implicit knowledge of what was written.

That being said, it is faster for some tasks, like writing tests (if you have good examples) and doing basic scaffolding. It needs quite a bit of hand holding which is why I believe those with more experience get more value from AI code because they have a better bullshit meter.

oxidant··on Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
I do not agree it is something you can pick up in an hour. You have to learn what AI is good at, how different models code, how to prompt to get the results you want.

If anything, prompting well is akin to learning a new programming language. What words do you use to explain what you want to achieve? How do you reference files/sections so you don't waste context on meaningless things?

I've been using AI tools to code for the past year and a half (Github Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, OpenAI APIs) and they all need slightly different things to be successful and they're all better at different things.

AI isn't a panacea, but it can be the right tool for the job.

oxidant··on Snorting the AGI with Claude Code
Not OP but probably just cost.
oxidant··on Go is a good fit for agents
Elixir has a better developer experience, or at least it's more approachable. Better code splitting with modules, easier to use variables (no var, var1, var2), loops that look like loops but easy enough to fall back to recursion, and an easier to read syntax.

gen_stage is just a library. One could write it in Erlang. It's like asking why Broadway is only for Elixir and not Erlang.

It was hard to approach the Erlang docs when I started in Elixir. However, they've moved to an ex_doc format (is it ex_docs?) as a standard and it's so much easier to grok.

oxidant··on Writing A Job Runner (In Elixir) (Again) (10 years later)
FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED is great, but it needs to be in a transaction. In the example code it won't "do" anything because it selects for update then immediately loses the lock.

Claude says you can use a CTE to select and the run your update with the locked rows, but I have only ever used transactions.

oxidant··on Zod 4
Better to use something like OpenApi and generate your zod schema using it.
oxidant··on A critical look at MCP
It's JSON-RCP 2 with a specific life cycle and events. https://www.jsonrpc.org/specification

I found an explanation on a site once but haven't found any official docs. I suppose you could reverse enegiener the SDKs.

oxidant··on A critical look at MCP
I wish there was a clear spec on the site but there isn't https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26

It seems like half of it is Sonnet output and it doesn't describe how the protocol actually works.

For all its warts, the GraphQL spec is very well written https://spec.graphql.org/October2021/

oxidant··on Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart
I think Bill Nye has something similar, too.
oxidant··on Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
The grandparent is talking about how to control cost by focusing the tool. My response was to a comment about how that takes too much thinking.

If you give a junior an overly broad prompt, they are going to have to do a ton of searching and reading to find out what they need to do. If you give them specific instructions, including files, they are more likely to get it right.

I never said they were replacements. At best, they're tools that are incredibly effective when used on the correct type of problem with the right type of prompt.

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