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zendist

117 karma · joined January 31, 2021

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zendist··on Using AI to write better code more slowly
> models write much better code than humans can

What? I think this is either over exaggerating model capabilities or you haven't seen much good code from humans?

My experience is that my colleagues which have bought into model-first development have regressed in quality of the PRs they send out. LLMs are not better coders, in my experience. They lack holistic understanding and often need course correction for that reason. At least in medium to highly complicated systems.

zendist··on Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
Ahead of their time ;-D
zendist··on Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal
The goal post keeps moving because LLM hypeists keep saying LLMs are "close" to AGI (or even are, already). Any reasonably intelligent individual that knows anything about LLMs obviously rejects those claims, but the rest of the world doesn't.

An AGI would not have problems reading an analog clock. Or rather, it would not have a problem realizing it had a problem reading it, and would try to learn how to do it.

An AGI is not whatever (sophisticated) statistical model is hot this week.

Just my take.

zendist··on GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
Talking about doing it is virtue signaling.

Don't just say, do! If you have a popular repository, share news of your migration to drive others to do the same.

VOTE WITH YOUR FEET, PEOPLE!

zendist··on Show HN: Robust LLM Extractor for Websites in TypeScript
Regardless. You should still respect robots.txt..
zendist··on Show HN: Robust LLM Extractor for Websites in TypeScript
Regardless. You should still respect robots.txt..
zendist··on Men in their 50s may be aging faster due to toxic 'forever chemicals'
Source?
zendist··on I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978
At age ~11, I sent a MSPaint design of a phone with two SIM cards that you could switch between physically on a phone.

I sent it to Nokia over email :-D. They didn't respond.

Dual SIM phones apparently became a thing that same year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_SIM#:~:text=The%20first%2... Not originally by Nokia, though.

zendist··on Show HN: BreakerMachines – Modern Circuit Breaker for Rails with Async Support
Weird.
zendist··on Mermaid: Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text
The main benefit for me to just know and primarily use mermaid is that it integrates with markdown in Azure DevOps and GitHub seamlessly. No need for a text to image build step or similar.
zendist··on Show HN: Aberdeen – An elegant approach to reactive UIs
There are many overlaps with SolidJS. How is this project different, ignoring the obvious; that you don't support JSX.
zendist··on SQL pipe syntax available in public preview in BigQuery
This reminds me a bit of MSFTs Kusto language. Such an immensely useful way to slice and dice large amounts of structured data.
zendist··on Dumb TVs deserve a comeback
This is false. GDPR is not ignored, I can tell you that much.
zendist··on Show HN: Rill – Composable concurrency toolkit for Go
If you were to build a library like `rill` in the Go-way, what would your Batch API usage look like?
zendist··on IOCCC Flight Simulator (2010)
How in the world did they come up with the obfuscated code for this? Surely they must be using a tool?
zendist··on Ask HN: Why is there not more concern about the physical security of Cloudflare?
That's definitely a thing. Additionally, humans are surprisingly friendly in all the wrong ways when it comes to physical security (tailgating, "forgotten ID/credentials", etc.).
zendist··on A rare disorder makes people see monsters
Sorry to anyone having this, that sounds awful.

Would we easily know if the inverse phenomenon is happening in the rest of us? We're seeing people "better looking" than "they are"?

zendist··on OpenAI starts rolling out new voice mode
Same as https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/30/24209650/openai-chatgpt-a... ? I don't have Twitter, so I'm not 100p sure.
zendist··on Parse, Don't Validate (2019)
It seems that CloudStrike only parsed and didn't validate, to great effect :-) /s

Not saying that this advice isn't solid, just thought it's funny given the news of this week.

zendist··on Don't DRY Your Code Prematurely
The rule of three[1] also comes to mind and is a hard learned lesson.

My brain has a tendency to desire refactoring when I see two similar functions, I want to refactor--it's almost always a bad idea. More often than not, I later find out that the premature refactoring would've forced me to split the functions again.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_prog...

zendist··on Autonomous subs use AI to wayfind without GPS
If you were alive in the 80's, it's not the first time ;-) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_al...
zendist··on Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust
This one? https://www.lua.org/doc/cacm2018.pdf
zendist··on Major standard library changes in Go 1.20
.NET is a strong contender, I would say. The standard library is immensely useful, and many things you may wonder if you need are available as Nuget packages, coming from the same devs who build the std lib.
zendist··on From zero to 10M lines of Kotlin
I don't know about that comparison. CoffeeScript transpiled to JavaScript- Kotlin doesn't transpile to Java, it compiles to JVM bytecode.

So in a sense, from a tooling and compiler perspective, they're orthogonal products, similar (I guess) to C# and F# on the .NET CLR VM.

zendist··on Go: Redefining For Loop Variable Semantics
Thrilled to see Jared Parsons of the C# team pitch in and provide some perspective on how things were done for C#5 when a similar change was made. Kudos Jared!
zendist··on Docker, Django, Traefik, and IntercoolerJS: My go-to stack for building a SaaS
I had great use of Docker even in my personal RPI projects, as Python modules can be difficult to get compiled and in a usable state on raw Raspbian. In projects at work I personally only recommend Docker when we need Hyper-V isolation or K8s is hosting the product (these are .NET projects, which work really well when published as self-contained binaries).