BeefySwain (u/BeefySwain)

BeefySwain commented on Returning to Rails in 2026 markround.com/blog/2026/0... · Posted by u/stanislavb

f311a · 2 days ago

I love the batteries that RoR or Django gives you, but then I also remember how much time it takes to maintain old projects. Updating a project that was started 5-6 years ago takes a lot of time. Part of that is managing dependencies. For Django, they can easily go above 100. Some of them have to be compiled with specific versions of system libraries. Even Docker does not save you from a lot of problems.

Right now, I would rather use Go with a simple framework, or even without one. With Go, it's so easy just to copy the binary over.

BeefySwain · 2 days ago

Does batteries included somehow result in upgrading years old projects being a larger lift? I would think the opposite.

BeefySwain commented on WebMCP is available for early preview developer.chrome.com/blog... · Posted by u/andsoitis

BeefySwain · 13 days ago

Can someone explain what the hell is going on here?

Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever, or do websites want you to be able to automate things? Because I don't see how you can have both.

If I'm using Selenium it's a problem, but if I'm using Claude it's fine??

BeefySwain · 13 days ago

Also, as someone who has tried to build tools that automate finding flights, The existing players in the space have made it nearly impossible to do. But now Google is just going to open the door for it?

BeefySwain commented on WebMCP is available for early preview developer.chrome.com/blog... · Posted by u/andsoitis

BeefySwain · 13 days ago

Can someone explain what the hell is going on here?

Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever, or do websites want you to be able to automate things? Because I don't see how you can have both.

If I'm using Selenium it's a problem, but if I'm using Claude it's fine??

BeefySwain commented on Garage – An S3 object store so reliable you can run it outside datacenters garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/... · Posted by u/ibobev

lxpz · 3 months ago

If you know of an embedded key-value store that supports transactions, is fast, has good Rust bindings, and does checksumming/integrity verification by default such that it almost never corrupts upon power loss (or at least, is always able to recover to a valid state), please tell me, and we will integrate it into Garage immediately.

BeefySwain · 3 months ago

(genuinely asking) why not SQLite by default?

BeefySwain commented on History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts github.com/DGoettlich/his... · Posted by u/iamwil

tejohnso · 3 months ago

I remember reading a children's book when I was young and the fact that people used the phrase "World War One" rather than "The Great War" was a clue to the reader that events were taking place in a certain time period. Never forgot that for some reason.

I failed to catch the clue, btw.

BeefySwain · 3 months ago

Pendragon?

BeefySwain commented on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

WhyOhWhyQ · 3 months ago

Isn't this in contradiction to your blog post from yesterday though? It's impossible to prove a complex project made in 4.5 hours works. It might have passed 9000 tests, but surely there are always going to be edge cases. I personally wouldn't be comfortable claiming I've proved it works and saying the job is done even, if the LLM did the whole thing and all existing tests passed, until I played with it for several months. And even then I would assume I would need to rely on bug reports coming in because it's running on lots of different systems. I honestly don't know if software is ever really finished.

My takeaway from your blog post yesterday was that with a robust enough testing system the LLM can do the entire thing while I do Christmas with the family.

(Before all the AI fans come in here. I'm not criticizing AI.)

BeefySwain · 3 months ago

Consider that this isn't just a random AI slopped assortment of 9,000 tests, but instead is a robust suite of tests that cover 100% of the HTML5 spec.

Does this guarantee that it functions completely with no errors whatsoever? Certainly not. You need formal verification for that. I don't think that contradicts what Simon was advocating for though in this post.

BeefySwain commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui

COAGULOPATH · 3 months ago

> In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines.

But would you rather be a horse in 1920 or 2020? Wouldn't you rather have modern medicine, better animal welfare laws, less exposure to accidents, and so on?

The only way horses conceivably have it worse is that there are fewer of them (a kind of "repugnant conclusion")...but what does that matter to an individual horse? No human regards it as a tragedy that there are only 9 billion of us instead of 90 billion. We care more about the welfare of the 9 billion.

BeefySwain · 3 months ago

The equivalency here is not 9 billion versus 90 billion, it's 9 billion versus 90 million, and the question is how does the decline look? Does it look like the standard of living for everyone increasing so high that the replacement rate is in the single digit percentage range, or does it look like some version of Elysium where millions have immense wealth and billions have nothing and die off?

BeefySwain commented on Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers reuters.com/world/uk/brit... · Posted by u/alex77456

asah · 6 months ago

??? do not rely on incompetence for privacy.

anyway, privacy is dead - longer conversation, but even if you don't carry your cell, there's cameras everywhere with face/gate recognition.

BeefySwain · 6 months ago

Do you mean gait recognition?

BeefySwain commented on Python on the Edge: Fast, sandboxed, and powered by WebAssembly wasmer.io/posts/python-on... · Posted by u/baalimago

simonw · 6 months ago

I want to be able to run code from untrusted sources (other people, users of my SaaS application, LLMs) in an environment, where I can control the blast radius if something goes wrong.

BeefySwain · 6 months ago

What's wrong with Docker for this?

BeefySwain commented on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year mahadk.com/posts/slack... · Posted by u/JustSkyfall

realityfactchex · 6 months ago

Since you're a nonprofit that teaches coding, it could be a great time to consider self-hosting a FOSS chat tool.

Suggestions: Campfire [0] or Zulip [1].

Also, if the data in chat is being held hostage, the org might be using chat wrong. Right tool for right purpose. If starting over, perhaps consider if it would make sense to put that documentation or whatever it is that will get "lost" from Slack into a wiki or repo or other appropriate tool?

Big empathy, though. It must be pretty crushing. But that is why serious geeks have long been for FOSS.

  [0] https://once.com/campfire (recently became FOSS) 
  [1] https://zulip.com

BeefySwain · 6 months ago

Campfire is definitely not FOSS: https://once.com/license