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rmsaksida

1,548 karma · joined October 6, 2014

Rômulo Saksida - romulo at rsaksida.com
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rmsaksida··on GPT-6 Astra
I'm not sure. To be more specific, my car has a Delphi MIB2 Standard head unit (which uses NDS.Classic maps). I think the keys are likely to work with all MIB2 Standard head units, as that's how VW categorizes the updates, but I don't know about other MIB versions.
rmsaksida··on GPT-6 Astra
It does, but someone leaked valid encryption keys on GitHub a few years ago (Codex found them).
rmsaksida··on GPT-6 Astra
My car has offline maps and navigation. I don't really care for navigation, but I find the maps pretty handy. VW releases updates very infrequently, and I don't know for how long they'll keep doing that. Recently I wondered whether I could convert OpenStreetMaps into the format used by the car. Codex took around a week to do that for me, with some light steering. That project would no doubt have taken me months - maybe a whole year to do on my own, and I'm not fully confident I could pull it off as well as Codex did. I can pull the most up to date maps from OSM, edit them as much as I want, and they look great on the car. It's mind boggling to me that we have this tech.
rmsaksida··on Orbs
Reminds me of fly.io's sprites (https://sprites.dev), but with a custom-built layer of UI, harness, and features.
rmsaksida··on Code mode yields a 99.2% cost reduction in our systems
I'm sure there is some valuable information in the article, but the LLM-generated prose is unreadable.
rmsaksida··on Ape Coding [fiction]
That looks great. I want to read it! The techno caste system reminds me of Lord of Light.
rmsaksida··on Ape Coding [fiction]
Yes, I understand what you're saying perfectly. And I had similar thoughts while I was writing this. I do not want to talk too much about the process of writing it, or the content itself, because I feel it's not right for me (the author) to talk about it. But I'd like to make it clear that I wrote this myself, and that many of the questions and points people have raised here have also been in my mind, and it was my intention to elicit this type of thinking. Thank you and all others for the comments - I really appreciate it, even the very negative ones. This is the first time I published something online and I'm very happy that it resonated with people.
rmsaksida··on Ape Coding [fiction]
That is not what this is meant as.
rmsaksida··on Ape Coding [fiction]
It's fiction. I did not use AI to write it. On whether it's worthy of people's time... well, I'm not presumptuous enough to say. :)
rmsaksida··on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
> Claude helped write the article. It is 2026.

If that's the case, why do we have to suffer through an AI-generated article? Just give us the prompt.

This topic interests me but I stopped reading as soon as I noticed the slop. I'd much rather read a couple of human-written paragraphs with your personal experience.

rmsaksida··on Sub-Millisecond RAG on Apple Silicon. No Server. No API. One File
The generated post is even in the repo: https://github.com/christopherkarani/Wax/blob/main/SHOW_HN_P...
rmsaksida··on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?
Unrelated - it looks like your blog's RSS feed isn't up to date. :-)
rmsaksida··on Managing context on the Claude Developer Platform
> I like how Google AI Studio allows one to delete sections and they are then no longer part of the context. Not possible in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, I think there one can only delete the last response.

I have the same peeve. My assumption is the ability to freely edit context is seen as not intuitive for most users - LLM products want to keep the illusion of a classic chat UI where that kind of editing doesn't make sense. I do wish ChatGPT & co had a pro or advanced mode that was more similar to Google AI Studio.

rmsaksida··on Redis is open source again
I've been using Valkey simply because after I updated to the latest Fedora version, it dropped redis and pointed me to Valkey instead. I assume as more distros do this and more people update their systems, the Valkey user base will grow. But perhaps with the AGPL redis that will no longer be the case.
rmsaksida··on Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant
Yeah Pix lets you choose limits. There's decent granularity for those, you can pick max $ per day, per transfer, per period, and per device. There's a caveat that when you increase a limit it takes a day or two to come into effect (basically to avoid people being forced to increase their limits by criminals).
rmsaksida··on Bluesky now has 30 million users
It was a few months ago, but when X was banned in my country I tried Bluesky for a while. It took a lot of effort (adding blocklists, muting words and blocking individual accounts) to cleanse the timeline of k-pop and furry content. I am not interested in either type of content and didn't follow any such accounts, but still, the "Discover" feed kept showing that stuff to me. It was the strangest onboarding experience I've ever had in social media.
rmsaksida··on IAC confirms existence of a Super-earth in the habitable zone of a Sun-like Star
Life in that planet evolved to essentially hibernate during their long winter. Presumably the processes that resulted in the very earliest life forms happened countless times until some surfaced that had that feature.
rmsaksida··on GIMP 3.0 is on the way
Affinity is good but it's a shame they don't have a Linux version.
rmsaksida··on Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative
> All of the code is OOP-based, and they mount DOM nodes the old-school way (which is what React was supposed to solve..)

I don't know about VS Code, but I remember Atom was refactored to use manual DOM updates because the performance penalty of using React wasn't worth it.[1] By the way, isn't OOP by far the most popular paradigm for building desktop UIs? I imagine VS Code is a difficult codebase to work with that has a lot of intricate code (as is usually the case with large software projects), but that's a strange piece of criticism :-)

1. https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/5624

rmsaksida··on D&D is Anti-Medieval
I think at a time Vampire: The Masquerade was the most popular title in Brazil, but D&D eventually won.

Tormenta and Old Dragon are pretty popular as well.

rmsaksida··on Inertia.js – Build React, Vue, or Svelte apps with server-side routing
How good is the Rails integration? I know Inertia is very popular in the Laravel community, but I rarely see it being mentioned among rubyists.
rmsaksida··on Just use Postgres
IMO a downside of SQLite that isn't discussed as often as it should be is the poor support for some table operations like ALTER COLUMN. Need to change a column to null / not null? Drop a foreign key constraint? Tough luck, in some cases the only way to implement a change is recreating the table.
rmsaksida··on 80% of developers are unhappy. The problem is not AI, nor is coding
Another problem, I think, is that there is something inherently unsatisfying about activities like programming where the result of your labor is usually abstract and not a thing you can physically touch and admire in the real world.

Fixing things in my home, painting walls, assembling furniture often gives me more satisfaction and the feeling of a finished job than deploying an update for a web app. This wasn't an issue for me for most of my career, but it's something I feel intensely in the long term (10+ yrs) and as I get older.

I think it's the reason why every now and then you see programmers switching careers to farming or carpentry.

rmsaksida··on Ask HN: Outstanding Programmers
Writers are the most common counter-example I can think of for this. There were many prolific, successful writers who had multiple children.
rmsaksida··on Show HN: Open-source Rule-based PDF parser for RAG
Last time I tried Langchain (admittedly, that was ~6 months ago) the implementations for content extraction from PDFs and HTML files were very basic. Enough to get a prototype RAG solution going, but not enough to build anything reliable. This looks like a much more battle-tested implementation.
rmsaksida··on Adélie Linux
> That's handy, because I am looking for a fast Linux with small memory footprint, but reliable.

You might want to look into MX Linux. It's a Debian-based distro that offers a good balance of performance, package selection, administration tools etc. I'm running it on my 10yo Thinkpad right now and it's very speedy without relying on ancient software versions.

rmsaksida··on Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
Same! You are probably thinking about the murals by Hugues Desmaziéres (and Douglas Melo) [1][2]. Seeing those murals in the 90s really excited my imagination as a kid.

[1] https://repositorio.ufmg.br/handle/1843/35311

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQTui7ZdbJQ

rmsaksida··on Astrud Gilberto has died
I totally get it, but the song is also very famous in Brazil and not because of her.
rmsaksida··on Astrud Gilberto has died
Girl from Ipanema (Garota de Ipanema) was composed by Tom Jobim, one of the greatest Brazilian composers, and written by Vinícius de Moraes, one of the greatest Brazilian poets. João Gilberto, another one of our greatest musicians, also contributed to the song. It was recorded by different singers before the English version with Astrud was ever recorded, and the most famous version in Brazil by far is sung by Tom Jobim himself.

Astrud is actually not that well known in Brazil - she's much more famous abroad. I'm not sure who the "guys who took credit" are supposed to be but I never thought of Garota de Ipanema as being Astrud's song or anything like that. Not to say whatever happened to her wasn't unfair, of course, but her interpretation of the song is one among many. The song is Vinícius and Tom's.

rmsaksida··on The Windows 11 Trash Party
Apple products (Macbooks especially) are prohibitively expensive in most of the world. The US market is very important, of course, but Microsoft has very little competition elsewhere.
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