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royal__

252 karma · joined July 27, 2023

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royal__··on How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going
I don't even know what Zig is but I've seen this topic come up so many times on this site that I'm starting to think the people who are actually doing this are unsure themselves whether it's a good idea or not.
royal__··on A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI
To be fair they do acknowledge this directly in the abstract. Kinda hard to have a good heuristic for this stuff, what would you propose?
royal__··on When I reject AI code even if it works
Thanks mate, I think you hit it on the head: the hardest problems in tech were never really tech problems. They're often people and market problems, and throwing more agents at the wall isn't going to magically solve them.
royal__··on I Still Live in the Terminal
> I prefer CLI over GUI but I also prefer to have a life over making my life harder.

I think this is actually a really profound statement. Many people seem to get caught up in trying to take the most efficient path when you could take a somewhat less efficient path that requires much less time. It can become a form of yak-shaving.

Now, don't get me wrong: there's absolutely a benefit in investing time to learn efficient methods. But life is also short, and you've gotta choose where you invest.

royal__··on When I reject AI code even if it works
The problem I have with this kind of approach is 1) it emphasizes scaling up a much as possible, which I don't believe is necessarily the most valuable thing, and 2) I really don't want my job to be band aiding agent problems, because it's like herding cats and there will never be an end to it. I'd rather just...get hands on and be involved in the code I am working to create.
royal__··on McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture? (2016)
A lot of folks are defending McMansions here, but let me provide one reason why they might be objectively bad architecture: they seek to cram all of the bullet points that home buyers want into one thing, without regard for good quality design. For example, high vaulted ceilings that throw off the proportions of everything else. And then what happens is they're built quickly and poorly with poor materials. McMansions are kind of a form of enshittification. Also, when you build them all over the place, like in Utah, you hurt a whole class of people who want live in a place but don't want to have to deal with living in houses like that.
royal__··on A robot is sprinting towards you. Do you want it running on Claude or Grok?
Since you asked...I've gone to the effort to pull out the parts of the article that I think show it:

"That’s the part most benchmarks can’t see, and it’s what this post is about." Classic "it's not x, it's x", shows up in various forms throughout the article.

"To me, this is the most fascinating finding from this entire experiment - we saw very clear alignment tax being paid by certain models, which directly impacted their performance in this zero-sum game." - Usage of em dash. Now, yes, there's nothing wrong with using em dashes. But this feels like a weird place to use one. Also I counted at least 6 other emdashes in this article. Most people do not use em dashes that often.

"and a memory system that kept doubling down on what worked without second-guessing or doubting itself." - Doubling down is a classic Claudism.

"I want to be careful here..." - "wanting to be careful here" is another classic Claudism.

"The same game world, completely different results when in a different “task”." - "same X, completely different X" is another common one from Claude, as proofed by the repeated pattern later down: "These models were all given the same rules, same game world, and same tools, but each of them approached the game on a personality-level that is completely different from each other."

"It begs the question" - author used this twice in the article.

I'm guessing the author wrote a draft and then had Claude spruce it up a lot. I could be wrong and I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.

royal__··on Even more batteries included with Emacs
That all makes sense. I wasn't trying to attack Emacs or defend Neovim, for the record. I liked Emacs and didn't have any problems with it (except some window jankiness). I was mostly just curious about the ecosystem.

The big reason I switched is because a lot of the big features of Emacs (org mode, magit, "living" in Emacs, advanced text manipulation, the extreme extensibility of the software) were things that sound really amazing on paper, but in practice I just don't really need/use/care about, and that's just my preferences. But once again, Emacs is cool and I totally respect what it can do.

royal__··on Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding
For the record, btw, id DID download your app and I am going to spend some time using it. Other commenters here are talking about how spaced repetition isn't what's important, which is true in the same sense that you can't just use Duolingo to learn a language. But that doesn't make it useless.
royal__··on Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding
Codecademy, Mimo, Enki. I'm not going to act like I know a lot about other options, and you do say that fata hits on more advanced topics which these may not.

I do think you have a cool niche here that isn't being covered, maybe your landing page should include more information about the Duolingo-esque features? I just know that pulls me in a lot.

royal__··on Show HN: Fata – Spaced repetition to fight skill rot from AI coding
I can understand that you want to make money from this, but hiding significant amounts of content behind 13 dollars a month feels a bit much. Especially when you acknowledge that most of that content is LLM generated. It's not just the advanced courses, it looks like it's pretty much all of them

Cool app though! I love the idea of coding Duolingo. But I think the price is going to turn most people off. Another problem I see is that it's not really clear how this is that much different from other similar apps out there.

royal__··on Even more batteries included with Emacs
Can you explain more what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem? I just switched from Doom Emacs to Neovim and my impression of Neovim has been much better. (I get that Emacs has a much more powerful backbone, I just realized that I didn't really need that power; I just want a good text editor)
royal__··on Abu Fanous
Reminds me of the Marfa Lights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights
royal__··on How liminalism became the defining aesthetic
Interesting article, but calling it THE defining aesthetic of our time feels a bit sensational.
royal__··on Do the Hardest Thing
To be a contrarian, you could possibly become very famous if you swam across the Pacific Ocean or even walked across Siberia. Not sure on the McDonald's though, might be harder to get sponsorship for that.
royal__··on Various LLM Smells
Yeah this one kinda hurts.
royal__··on Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public
Incredibly misleading title, practically click bait.
royal__··on My I3-Emacs Integration
Yeah this is what I do. This article feels like crazy overengineering for something that's not really a problem
royal__··on Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart
What specifically about this feels AI generated. It might be, IDK, but I'm not seeing any tells, so wondering if you could expand.
royal__··on Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart
Love it. The grid is cool but I think it needs to be more transparent.
royal__··on Mind-Blowing Growth Is About to Propel Anthropic into First Profitable Quarter
I'm not sure what you're saying here. You can use Claude Code on Linux.
royal__··on Mexican government breached by solo user with Claude, 150 GB exfiltrated
This is written by AI
royal__··on Googlebook
So...it's a Chromebook. With "ai".
royal__··on I'm going back to writing code by hand
The title is just flat out wrong. The author isn't going back to writing code by hand, they're plopping some new stuff into their CLAUDE.md to "fix" the issues they see AI is having.
royal__··on Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
Homegrown systems are expensive to maintain and usually still fail to match up to the commercial options available at this point. LMS's are also just really complicated pieces of software. I worked on my university's own version as an undergrad.
royal__··on LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction
I agree, but I think it's for a different reason than what the author says: LLMs are a very leaky abstraction compared to other levels, meaning it's much harder to convey the true intent of logic you are trying to encode through natural language, and often by doing so you are just relying on the LLM to "get it right", which is inherently messy business. Oftentimes, that leakiness just doesn't matter that much. Other times, it does.
royal__··on Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI
This is what I want. Unfortunately it's probably not going to happen
royal__··on Show HN: Built a daily game where you sort historical events chronologically
The "earlier" and "later" labels really confused me because I think they could be interpreted either way. Also the AI art is corny. But I'm guessing this is all just AI generated
royal__··on YouTube now lets you turn off Shorts
This is the way. The biggest issue is that it's easy to disable if you have no self control, but I guess an official setting would be the same way.
royal__··on People love to work hard
I don't necessarily disagree with the premise here, but the other makes the claim that people love to work hard based on their experience founding startups. People who gravitate towards that undoubtedly like to work hard, seems like sample bias.
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