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xutopia

4,681 karma · joined August 6, 2007

Programmer and manager, father, amateur cook and volleyball player.
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xutopia··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
I remember Steve Jobs saying something about how silly it would be.
xutopia··on Rust off Rails: The opinionated web stack for the AI era
The HTTP layer is very much Axum. The Loco documentation doesn't explain Axum for that reason but really it takes a day or two to familiarize yourself with it.
xutopia··on Rust off Rails: The opinionated web stack for the AI era
I have an and absolutely love it. Rails dev for 20+ years. The conventions are drop-in replacements for a Rails app. Aside from using different commands in a day-to-day it's pretty much the same thing but so much more performant.

One Rails app used ~700MB of RAM at peak (live speed dating events with emails and heavy Hotwire/Turbo Streams use). I converted it to Loco with HTMX and the app now uses about 60MB at peak and benchmarks show 30x the traffic possible on the same hardware.

What more my CI/CD pipeline runs about 5 times faster including my entire test suite (TDD with hundreds of tests and BDD setup with about 60 scenarios running headless chrome). On a day to day while doing development my unit tests feel nearly instant.

Also Rust isn't as pretty on the eyes as Ruby but me downgrading my VPS server from 4GB to 2GB is something I benefit from when I'm away from my computer.

If you're a Rails developer nowadays I don't see the benefit of the framework anymore.

xutopia··on Rust off Rails: The opinionated web stack for the AI era
Josh is right. ActiveRecord, MVC, Front Controller(router + ActionDispatch), Template View(ERB) as well as a lot of what works under the hood in ActiveRecord comes from that book.

Though when I mean conventions I also mean where files are placed, how tables and fields are named, how migrations work and how DRY is part of the framework through and through.

A Loco app doesn't require fiddling with the database at all to replace its Rails counterpart. Hence why this naming of project confused me.

xutopia··on Rust off Rails: The opinionated web stack for the AI era
Loco is a Rust framework that adopted all Ruby on Rails conventions and they're applied through and through. The naming of this project confused me.
xutopia··on Does Ruby on Rails still make sense?
This has been less and less true for a while now. The jump from 5-6 and forward have been pretty smooth for big projects I maintained. From 2-5 was quite painful... especially from 2 to 3.
xutopia··on Does Ruby on Rails still make sense?
Rails developer for 20+ years.

I converted 3 of 4 apps running on a 4GB VPS to Loco (short for Locomotive: a Rust framework using the Rails conventions).

I am really happy with the switch.

Heaviest app went from 700MB of RAM usage at peak to 60MB and can handle 30x traffic before it hits an I/O wall.

I save 20$ a month because I downgraded my VPS to 2GB and am now able to fit new projects that sat underplayed on my personal machine because I couldn't fathom paying for a larger VPS. I could easily run 4x the amount of projects on half the system I used before.

As a Rails developer for 20 years this is a bittersweet moment. Rails was truly wonderful in its heyday and I could run circles around larger teams and do in a day what could take months for them. This advantage was eroded as people opted for Javascript frontends and then accelerated with graphql.

The advantages were then nullified with LLMs taking over code generation. With RAM prices tripling in 18 months I think the web framework that is hungriest just won't make any financial sense over other systems. The only reason I stayed with Rails was because of the conventions and my love for Ruby. I'm sad to being reading Rust instead of Ruby now but it's a drop in the bucket of my considerations.

xutopia··on Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model
What kind of machine does one need to run this model? What's the usual setup someone would have for running this?
xutopia··on How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
Wow those are some nice applications! Thanks for sharing this!
xutopia··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
You're right that some are way too acidic and astringent. Usually the kind that you'd age for longer and have more complexity would make poor juice but excellent wines.

There are plenty of varieties of grapes that do well as juice and wine. It's just the type of wine that you'd age very little because it would lose the acidity and temperament too quickly if aged.

xutopia··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
What's wrong with mentioning it?
xutopia··on Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
I find it ironic that I am attempting to read an article that says what it says while 80% of the screen is ads and asking me to register to their notifications.
xutopia··on Grok 4.7
As stated by another comment Elon Musk's mother posted an AI-edited photo marked as such. It got edited right away to remove that label.

There are ample reasons to believe that Elon Musk is running his mother's account and that the photos weren't even real putting in question that he even had a birthday party.

If you ask Grok about what this means it will always take Elon's defence. It will vehemently deny that Elon would be capable or willing participant of such a thing even if you point out that he faked being a world class gamer, buying accounts that had done all the work and showing none of the skills when live-streaming.

xutopia··on Grok 4.7
Ask it to be critical of the birthday photos and see where that gets you.
xutopia··on AI Protest in Montreal
Some of their arguments are more than just naive ones.

They argue that LLMs are stealing our culture to feed it back to us. Can we really argue that they didn't make use of everything we wrote and said online to train their data?

xutopia··on Qwen 3.8 Omni Flash
The different names have different meanings and help make decisions on which to use.

Omni means you can use multiple types of input and have multiple types of outputs like audio, video, images and text. Flash means that it is built for speed and smaller than the more complete ones.

xutopia··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
I have no recollection of ever hearing about this problem before. It doesn't sound like it had an army of people attempting it but cool nonetheless that we found the solution.
xutopia··on Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time
And because driving is slower and less convenient than public transit there. Seriously in Berlin, Paris or London I would prefer the public transit options in nearly all of my trips.
xutopia··on Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time
Diesel increased in price because truck drivers couldn't afford not to drive their truck. The cartel as well as the distributors are extracting all the value they can at every step. That is why diesel has increased so much.
xutopia··on Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?
I can't help but feel that every 1% improvement over a benchmark from new releases of flagship LLMs isn't really that impressive anymore. To some extent it feels like LLM improvements is slowing down significantly despite increasing resources being spent on them.

The people promising AGI just 6 months ago are now more and more quiet about the possibility and rightfully so. LLMs alone are most likely not the path to AGI.

xutopia··on iPhone Duo
I get excited about this but that's because I want this... not because I need it.

What I actually need might be less of an iPhone and more of a nano than a duo. Something small and portable that doesn't make me spend every spare second on the phone.

xutopia··on Rails 8 Guide: Features, Requirements and Upgrade Path (2026)
It has become easier and easier to upgrade Rails over time. 2 of my apps were running 2 versions back and the most difficult thing was finding the time to update it. There was one gem that was deprecated but the replacement was 10 lines of code. Overall I'd say that Rails is such a robust choice nowadays.
xutopia··on One woman's Tesla was remotely controlled by an abusive ex-partner
I would not buy a Tesla because the owner of the company does Nazi salutes but I feel like this is more or less like someone forgetting their ex is on their Spotify family account.
xutopia··on The two Christian saints who are the Buddha
This reminds me so much of the Raglan hero archetype rank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank–Raglan_hero_archetype

So many stories, many people believe are true and build whole religions around, are really just repeated stories with many details changed to fit the local culture and traditions.

It's crazy so many of the world's politics and problems stem from what might actually just be the same story said in a different way... or even of a fan fiction on top of existing fiction.

xutopia··on Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
If that's the boundary then I must have been a really neglectful and abusive parent.
xutopia··on Trade (and Tariffs)
Your framing is ridiculous. Canada sends raw materials to the USA and purchases it back once transformed. If anyone has been bleeding it is Canada.
xutopia··on The Tariff Cost: analysis of the costs to Americans from new tariffs on Canada
How do figure Canada will suffer more?
xutopia··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
I feel much the same. I feel like the next time I upgrade I could splurge a bit more and get a really bigger CPU and storage to be even more productive with.

However the main reason I would upgrade is to run LLMs locally and RAM prices are making this a no-go. One day if RAM comes down to earth I'll upgrade. If not I'll stick to this old machine for a long time.

xutopia··on Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded
The benchmark done in a lab is different than one done on a production phone. In a lab you can cool the room or even drop the CPU inside cold oil. Run the benchmark there and it means you have a good freezer.

I'd love to see what it looks like inside a production phone. I really hope for this to be true because we need more competition on the CPU front.

xutopia··on Grok 4.6
My experience as well.

I asked Grok if the family birthday image posted by Maye Musk could have been generated by AI and Grok refused to say that it was a possibility.

Multiple news outlets independently verified that the label "Made with AI" was on the original image before being edited.

In Grok's latest incarnation it admits the label "Made with AI" existed in the original but refuses to say that this means that it was made with AI.

Whatever Elon or his ghost accounts (his mom's account being one of them) is taken as gospel by Grok.

I can't stand that and I don't want to use a product from someone who does nazi salutes, flashed white power symbols on SNL and funds far right political parties around the world.

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