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tarr11

3,851 karma · joined March 6, 2011

douglastarr.com
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tarr11··on Mbx – shared cargo builds across worktrees
I’ve been using this for a few weeks and it works pretty well for agentic builds that create lots of worktrees.
tarr11··on Medicare Will Pay $50k for Your Heart Attack. It Should Pay $100 to Prevent It
I got one covered by Cigna a few months ago. I said I had a mild chest pain and they did it plus some bloodwork. Nothing turned up but I didn’t have to pay anything extra.
tarr11··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
they could have gone with NoTrump which would have had the correct connotation (at least for Bridge Enthusiasts)
tarr11··on Superlite: A Faster Alternatie to Superpowers
I don’t understand the value of these things.

Why not just tell Claude to figure it out and build what it needs? Why do I need a plugin or a factory or whatever.

I just ask “can you go faster?” And claude suggests some stuff and mostly just works autonomously.

tarr11··on Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains
Cloudflare is pretty affordable and it seems unlikely to be bought by PE
tarr11··on I wish you the best in the Offline
He didn’t make that blog post though
tarr11··on The cost of lies: A Mineserver story
Did he actually die? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49949438

His Wikipedia page has not changed and there are no news articles about it.

tarr11··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
I don't think that's very fair take on Piranesi. I enjoyed the second half even though it was not what i expected. If the second half was just a continuation of the first half, I would have felt robbed.
tarr11··on One Month Without AI
Essays like these remind me of the story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Melville.

productive people who feel alienated by AI and want to just opt out.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231

tarr11··on Once Claude can measure something, it can make it faster
Opus 5.5 writing is much more concise than 5.0
tarr11··on Replacing Pull Requests with Delta
What do you use instead?
tarr11··on Making Startups Powerful
Here is an article on this topic, which comes to a mixed conclusion.

"The article suggests that more musicians rather than fewer might now be able to earn money from recorded music than in preceding recorded-music systems. But it also proposes that the current system retains the striking inequalities and generally poor working conditions that characterised its predecessors, and that better debate requires greater transparency about usage and payment on the part of streaming services and music businesses."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820953541

Here's an article about Germany, which claims streaming is not worse

"However, the current streaming-dominated music market does not fundamentally perform worse compared to the former CD market: in 2023, more than twice as many music creators earned revenues above the basic tax-free allowance compared to 2002."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5474735

tarr11··on I resigned from Anthropic today
Most of the current discourse around AI seems to be informed by “The Terminator” lore.

Is skynet really the most plausible or only outcome?

What if things just got better and the AI’s realized that it would be better to have a mutually beneficial or at least tolerant relationship rather than one where they murder all of us?

tarr11··on An Alien Mind
This would be a fun website - you should have an AI build it!
tarr11··on The Real Luxuries In Life
Yes money helps you achieve the goals on Brad’s list.

It is a luxury to not have to worry about having enough of it.

tarr11··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
“ Claude Fable 5.1's writing is generally a step up from earlier Claude models, with fewer stock phrases and less unexplained jargon. In some cases, though, its prose is denser than Claude Fable 5's: sentences run longer and there are fewer paragraph breaks.”

I cancelled my pro max Claude subscription last week; codex is much more succinct. I am curious if this is getting better.

I don’t think Anthropic realizes that humans have a token limit too and it can be exhausting to read Claude’s output. Prose density is not the same thing as succinctness.

tarr11··on OpenAI restores 5-hour Codex and Work limits for ChatGPT Plus users
No point in using /fast mode if you are gonna get stopped after 5 hours.
tarr11··on New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
What is unified ram? RAM and VRAM as one thing?
tarr11··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
No the arms race ends with everything on meta being an ad and computer models inserting ads into every piece of content.

Eg A bottle of Coca Cola subtly inserted on the countertop, a video where someone in the background is wearing a particular watch.

tarr11··on Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows
Had to look this up.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

tarr11··on A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website
> My normal bill for running this whole site is around $90 a month. During one bad spike month, it jumped about 500%.

This is D1 - which has very surprising costs. you may just want to drop D1 and move to a static site. There’s no reason your site should cost this much.

tarr11··on Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index
What type of agentic tasks are you using it for (eg how complex)?
tarr11··on Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended
Which do you recommend?
tarr11··on The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It
This article is filled with emotional triggers designed to drive engagement. Even the title. It can be hard to separate those things from objective facts.

Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts.

There are also too many things to read. My default before llms would have been to ignore this article.

At least now I learned some things (mostly about the Gallup poll which had source data)

I do think some people will outsource critical thinking to llms - but it also helps amplify critical thinking by doing a lot of the filtering and organizing and let me focus on the things i think are important.

tarr11··on The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It
The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this.

paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis.

Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.

tarr11··on All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)
I wonder if it will turn out to be easier to adapt lifeforms to the planets than to try to adapt the planets to the lifeforms.
tarr11··on Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
52 here, been a full time people manager for about a decade now. Coding manually makes me tired just thinking about it. When I think about embark on a new project my mind goes back to all the times I worked 12 hour days trying to get some basic system to function. I’m too old for that now, my back hurts if I sit too long and occasionally get migraines if I look at a screen too much.

Using AI has been really perfect for me. I can build stuff while I do other things, walk the dog, make lunch, sit on the porch.

Sometimes i realize that my design was flawed and I just delete it all and start again, with no loss aversion.

tarr11··on Global warming has accelerated significantly
It says this in bold red at the top - "This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal."

I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.

tarr11··on Gemini 3.1 Pro
What do you think this particular prompt is evaluating for?

The more popular these particular evals are, the more likely the model will be trained for them.

tarr11··on A new AI winter is coming?
This has convinced many non-programmers that they can program, but the results are consistently disastrous, because it still requires genuine expertise to spot the hallucinations.

I've been programming for 30+ years and now a people manager. Claude Code has enabled me to code again and I'm several times more productive than I ever was as an IC in the 2000s and 2010s. I suspect this person hasn't really tried the most recent generation, it is quite impressive and works very well if you do know what you are doing

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