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roblh

472 karma · joined May 26, 2022

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roblh··on What Adobe v ArtCraft teaches us
Nobody uses it. It’s completely broken and was dead on arrival. It can’t even reliably save files. Maybe eventually it’ll get to a sort of working state, but I doubt it.

I think that’s one of the things that’s jumped out at me in this latest slop wave from the last few weeks. Part of releasing meaningful software is the time investment by the creator is at least the barest of assurances that it’ll get some kind of support going forwards. Obviously not always, but the bigger the scope the more likely that is I think. If somebody spends 6 months on a project then it means it was worth at least 6 months to them and I believe there’s a higher chance they will continue to support it.

With stuff like this, it’s unusable and unmaintainable, and it got crapped out so fast that the creator has absolutely no emotional or personal investment in it beyond the token costs. I’m not suggesting every project needs a minimum amount of time spent on it, but it’s certainly a factor in how I judge software now, and choose what I want to interact with.

roblh··on The Future of CSS
Things incoming when this goes live

- “I made doom run with only css functions!”

- “CSS function vulnerability exposes api keys in NextJs server side rendering”

- “css function used for fingerprinting violates EU laws”

- “Facebook/Meta caught tracking users using CSS function exploit”

I’m being facetious, mostly.

roblh··on Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits
I strongly feel that pattern matching is the most useful language feature that there is for writing code that's correct and easy to understand. Once you've used a language that has it, you never really want to go without it again.
roblh··on 'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us
Confessing to liking generated music is wild and legitimately embarrassing. Somehow, even compared to ripoff visual art, fake music is even more obviously plagiaristic. The stuff that it's ripping off already exists and isn't even hard to find since ALL of it is billed exactly as the style/genre that it's stealing from. That's the equivalent of framing and hanging a "ghibli style" generated print in your living room.
roblh··on Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
I think I've written this before and generally people are horrified, but a neat trick I like to do for a little bit of concurrency is making the first argument an async function.

That means you have to await the accumulator at some point before you return it, but anything you do before that call all gets fired off immediately. Then each invidivual iteration waits for the one before it to finish before finishing itself.

It's a pretty niche pattern, but it's a good way to make your coworkers do a double take while giving you quite a bit of control over exactly how it behaves. Similar to Promise.all, but more expressive I feel.

roblh··on An update on Wayback Machine access
Shouldn’t it follow that it’s illegal for the AI labs to profit off of all of that stolen copyrighted data too?
roblh··on Ending my elixir exploratory writing
It's probably the language that punches the furthest above it's weight in community size vs. what you can do with it (and what is being done with it professionally), and I don't think it's even close really. The quality and capability and breadth of libraries people publish is really incredible, from web all the way down to embedded.
roblh··on OpenShot 4.0 – Open-source video editor
Dunno if it’s just me, but I tried to download it the other day and couldn’t. The windows download link just punts you right back to their own site.
roblh··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
Maybe I’m naive, or misguided, or something else, but I decided almost 2 years ago that I’m going to bank on not using LLMs to do my job. I still write code by hand everyday. I don’t use AI to write code or lookup docs, or anything else. I just figure that if we really, truly, indisputably hit the point of AI assisted coding being mandatory, I can learn it and get up to speed in a few weeks (or at worst a couple months), whereas uncooking my brain is way way more expensive and time consuming and difficult. We’ll see how it plays out, but so far I don’t feel left behind at all really.
roblh··on Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results
Me too. The longer I use it, the more I like it. Initially I found myself going back to google fairly often, but unless I'm specifically trying to find a product for sale in my region, Kagi is almost always better now. Maybe Kagi got better, or google got worse, or probably both.
roblh··on Los Puesteros, solitary men who look after ranches and livestock in Patagonia
For real. Amazing work. And also, there’s a reason people refuse to give up shooting on film. Especially medium format film.
roblh··on The Color of White Light
Consider looking at TM-30 as well as CRI, it's a more useful metric that better takes R9 into account. I've gotten a little bit obsessed with colour in the last few months, and have been buying different bulbs for the purpose of making DCP profiles and doing film scanning. What you want, specifically, is violet pumped LEDs. They're expensive and it seems like there are only a handful of them on the market, but they're a lot more balanced spectrally and tend to have low flicker (probably just because they're a premium product).
roblh··on Darktable
You’re right, it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one. Like if your oven and sink were on different floors. I want to like darktable, but I need useful organizing built into the program otherwise I just get annoyed. Also the choices of where they put different editing panels are baffling to me. I can never find anything.

Also, an aside. I would love an image editor that would let you build your own chain of editing modules in an arbitrary order. Like audio plugins, with the ability to have more than one instance of each one.

roblh··on Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore
Putting on my tinfoil hat. Did Anthropic even buy Bun because they actually use it or was it just an excuse to lob ridiculous PRs at things with at least a little bit of credibility behind them. Their way of trying to set a precedent for accepting AI code into bigger open source projects.
roblh··on Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
Great find, grabbed that. Thanks!
roblh··on Bun support is now limited and deprecated
Seriously, “just review 5k lines a day for a month” is the most out of touch manager suggestion I’ve seen in a hot minute. As though you only need to read each line one single time in a review before magically committing its exact purpose, content, and overall implications to memory. The absurdity of which is multiplied for AI generated code which, based on what I see from my coworkers, is clunkier and weirder and less focused even than regular human code, on average.
roblh··on Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
pm2 has been buggy every time I’ve used it, no matter the OS. Incredibly convenient to begin with but simultaneously unpleasant to use software. Updating environment variables with a deployment has not once ever worked as intended.
roblh··on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
Yeah, no. I installed a browser, I expect it to install the required components for it to work _as a browser_. I do not need a local AI model for it to do that. If there are features that need that, fine, but I expect it to at the very least ask permission since those are absolutely not required functions. It’s like if Word installed a bunch CAD modeling software in the background. There’s just no way it needs that to function for it’s primary purpose.
roblh··on Incident with multple GitHub services
GitHub is going for “eight 8’s” at this rate.
roblh··on Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games
And Void Stranger. I’m surprised not to see it mentioned anywhere in the comments.
roblh··on Why are we still using Markdown?
For the love of god, yes. Slack is the worst for this with backticks. Editing the start/end points is a giant pain.
roblh··on My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary
I feel like the stars are probably pretty easy to mask out since they’re very bright relative to the rest of the image. Once you have the mask, each one is small enough that you could probably fill it with the values from adjacent pixels. Kinda like sensor mapping to hide dead pixels. That’s just a guess though, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.
roblh··on Six ingenious ways how Canon DSLRs used to illuminate their autofocus points
I haven't used all of them, but I have used both the 9 point and the 45 point types, and the difference is massive. The 45 point was far, far more tactile and responsive. I don't mean speed of autofocus, but the actual way that the points sit over top of the viewfinder and light up, it's hard to explain. I'm sure part of that is software, but owning an older model and then trying out a newer one in the camera store in like 2013 really was eye opening, it blew my mind. The 9 point feels like a toy.
roblh··on Nobody ever got fired for using a struct
I kinda love this. That sounds like an incredibly entertaining place to work for between 1 and 2 years in your late 20s and not a second longer.
roblh··on MacBook Neo
Yeah, not even having an upgrade to 16gb or more makes this dead on arrival for anyone doing real work. Bummer, since otherwise it looks great. I guess it'd be the same price as a macbook air after that upgrade anyways though, so it doesn't really matter.
roblh··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
Kinda funny that the top image is capture one when Apple literally owns Photomator and gives you the option of bundling it when you buy.
roblh··on "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
It's a not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. There are many elements of uncertainty in every action imaginable. I'm inclined to agree with the other commenter though, the LLM slot machine is absolutely closer on that spectrum to gambling than your example is.

Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. It's to produce an answer plausible enough but incomplete enough that you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. That's about as close to a slot machine as I can imagine. Slot rewards are designed to keep you interested as long as possible, on the premise that you _might_ get what you want, the jackpot, if you play long enough.

Anthropic's game isn't limited to a single spin either. The small wins (small prompts with well defined answers) are support for the big losses (trying to one shot a whole production grade program).

roblh··on What functional programmers get wrong about systems
My experience with elixir, as a scrub who spends every day at work writing javascript, is pretty in line with that. The language forces you to work that way, and you spend half your time just architecting your supervision tree. But the language itself is so easy to write business logic in that it takes half as long as it would in another language. So it works out to the same total time investment but the return is so much higher cause your program is better and more predictable and has scaling for free.
roblh··on HTTP Cats
I unironically use this website everytime I forget a status code at work. The name is instantly memorable, it loads immediately, and I can ctrl-f it. It's basically muscle memory at this point.
roblh··on A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
Seriously, that’s a completely nonsense line.
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