Ballas (u/Ballas) - Readit News

Ballas commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS

brushfoot · 2 days ago

I read AI coding negativity on Hacker News and Reddit with more and more astonishment every day. It's like we live in different worlds. I expect the breadth of tooling is partly responsible. What it means to you to "use the LLM code" could be very different from what it means to me. What LLM are we talking about? What context does it have? What IDE are you using?

Personally, I wrote 200K lines of my B2B SaaS before agentic coding came around. With Sonnet 4 in Agent mode, I'd say I now write maybe 20% of the ongoing code from day to day, perhaps less. Interactive Sonnet in VS Code and GitHub Copilot Agents (autonomous agents running on GitHub's servers) do the other 80%. The more I document in Markdown, the higher that percentage becomes. I then carefully review and test.

Ballas · 2 days ago

There is definitely a divide in users - those for which it works and those for which it doesn't. I suspect it comes down to what language and what tooling you use. People doing web-related or python work seem to be doing much better than people doing embedded C or C++. Similarly doing C++ in a popular framework like QT also yields better results. When the system design is not pre-defined or rigid like in QT, then you get completely unmaintainable code as a result.

If you are writing code that is/can be "heavily borrowed" - things that have complete examples on Github, then an LLM is perfect.

Ballas commented on A study of lights at night suggests dictators lie about economic growth (2022) economist.com/graphic-det... · Posted by u/mooreds

seszett · 20 days ago

Turning the lights on and closing the curtains to block it seems the really alien solution to me.

If you don't want the lights, why not just turn them off?

It's really common in many cities in France too, also in the countryside to reduce disruption for bats in particular.

Ballas · 20 days ago

Where I'm from moonlight on it's own will disrupt my sleep frequently enough that even if my neighbor did not forget his back light on, I would still sleep with my blockout curtains closed.

When it comes to driving, I would definitely prefer they keep the street lights on, for the increased visibility/safety.

Ballas commented on A study of lights at night suggests dictators lie about economic growth (2022) economist.com/graphic-det... · Posted by u/mooreds

rurban · 20 days ago

Counter fact: In our city district, which is the richest and biggest district of our 600k developed city, we decided to turn off the street lights at night on purpose to help with sleeping better. There is no street criminality, people feel safe without street lights. Our city is the richest in our country, which is at the top 5 in the world

Ballas · 20 days ago

> Counter fact: In our city district, which is the richest and biggest district of our 600k developed city, we decided to turn off the street lights at night on purpose to help with sleeping better.

To me that seems like a really alien solution. What about closing the curtains?

Ballas commented on C++26 Reflections adventures and compile-time UML reachablecode.com/2025/07... · Posted by u/ibobev

MathMonkeyMan · 20 days ago

I still have to learn C++20 concepts and now we have a full-fledged reflection system?

Good, but I think what happens is there are people on the bleeding edge of C++, usually writing libraries that ship with new code. Each new feature is a godsend for them -- it's the reason why the features are proposed in the first place. It allows you to write libraries more simply, more generally, more safely, and more efficiently.

The rest of us are dealing with old code that is a hodgepodge of older standards and toolchains, that has to run in multiple environments, mostly old ones. It's like yeah, this C++26 feature will come in handy for me someday, but if that day comes then it will be in 2036, and I might not be writing C++ by then.

Ballas · 20 days ago

>The rest of us are dealing with old code that is a hodgepodge of older standards and toolchains, that has to run in multiple environments, mostly old ones. It's like yeah, this C++26 feature will come in handy for me someday, but if that day comes then it will be in 2036, and I might not be writing C++ by then.

Things seem to be catching up. I had the same view up until recently, but now I'm able to use most of the C++23 features in an embedded platform (granted, some are still missing (limited to GCC 11.2).

Ballas commented on “No tax on tips” is an industry plant newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/littlexsparkee

ecb_penguin · 23 days ago

Yep. It's wonderful throwing a few extra bucks to some euro waiter and watching them treat you better than everyone else.

Ballas · 23 days ago

In my experience they are often confused and sometimes insulted. Generally I found tipping to add friction to the transaction.

Ballas commented on Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market denverite.com/2025/07/25/... · Posted by u/matthest

bee_rider · 23 days ago

But, the convention in the US is that people see their houses as a form of savings. Realistically, we should account for that.

Also, if continuing the building ends up requiring some policy change (supported by changing laws and regulations)… it seems reasonable to protect normal people, doing normal things, from massive financial chaos that is explicitly caused by the government changing policies on them. At least for people actually using the houses as intended, that is, living in them.

Ballas · 23 days ago

> But, the convention in the US is that people see their houses as a form of savings.

And that is a big part of the problem. You cannot have it both ways, if housing is an investment, it will eventually lead to poorer outcomes for anybody that needs a house and does not inherit one.

Ballas commented on Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default brave.com/privacy-updates... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

thombles · a month ago

At least on OneDrive for Android, a bizarre thing is that search is _not_ equivalent to find . -iname. It is able to find search terms in the _content_ of documents but not their filenames.

Ballas · a month ago

Well, you can have the same functionality with find if you want it:

find -type f -exec grep -Hn "_content_" {} \;

Ballas commented on Ancient X11 scaling technology flak.tedunangst.com/post/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

rwmj · 2 months ago

  $ ssh <remote> glxgears

runs fine!

Ballas · 2 months ago

Wow, when did that happen?

A couple of years ago I could not get anything OpenGL working over ssh, no matter how hard I tried. Ever since I just accepted that as fact. But I tested it now and it just works!

Ballas commented on KiCad and Wayland Support kicad.org/blog/2025/06/Ki... · Posted by u/xvilka

skykooler · 2 months ago

The only reason I use Wayland is display scaling - with a high DPI screen, many apps are blurry or inconsistently scaled under X11. Given the parade of other issues Wayland brings, I wish the development effort were instead spent on improving highDPI support in X11.

Ballas · 2 months ago

In xfce, setting DPI in Appearance works perfectly (in my experience). Just don't try to scale with display settings...

Ballas commented on KiCad and Wayland Support kicad.org/blog/2025/06/Ki... · Posted by u/xvilka

IshKebab · 2 months ago

It did die in the 90s! Apparently for everyone except Kicad (and DesignSpark PCB). I bet Eagle does it too; that's even more of a UX disaster than Kicad.

Ballas · 2 months ago

Eagle does not do cursor warping as far as I know.