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Loic commented on Claude for Chrome   anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/davidbarker
falcor84 · 9 hours ago
> it's slightly annoying to have to write your own emails.

I find that to be a massive understatement. The amount of time, effort and emotional anguish that people expend on handling emails is astronomical. According to various estimates, email-handling takes somewhere around 25% of the work time of an average knowledge worker, going up to over 50% for some roles, and that most people check and reply to emails on evenings and over weekends at least occasionally.

I'm not sure it's possible, but it is my dream that I'd have a capable AI "secretary" that would process my email and respond in my tone based on my daily agenda, only interrupting for exceptional situations where I actually need to make a choice, or to pen a new idea to further my agenda.

Loic · 8 hours ago
I am French living in Germany, the amount of time Claude saves me every week by reviewing the emails I send to contractors, customers is incredible. It is very hard to write good idiomatic German while ensuring no grammar and spelling mistakes.

I second you, just for that, I would continue paying for a subscription, that I can also use it for coding, toying with ideas, quickly look for information, extract information out of documents, everything out of a simple chat interface is incredible. I am old, but I live in the future now :-)

Loic commented on Google's Liquid Cooling   chipsandcheese.com/p/goog... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
jeffbee · a day ago
And yet their claimed PUE is 1.26 which is pretty bad. One way to characterize that overall PUE figure is they waste 3x as much on overhead as Google (claimed 1.09 global PUE) or Meta (1.08).
Loic · a day ago
10 years ago, OVH datacenter SBG1 was below 1.1 with a mixture of natural convection + liquid cooling. But I have not been following in the latest years.
Loic commented on The Ski Rental Problem   lesves.github.io/articles... · Posted by u/skywalqer
rkomorn · 24 days ago
I always suspected my rental skis had dicker bases! (Sorry for typo-sniping for cheap laughs.)
Loic · 24 days ago
French living in Germany, sometimes I am mixing up things. What is interesting is that the Swiss person (probably German speaking) did not notice. Thank you for allowing to laugh after the fact :-D
Loic commented on The Ski Rental Problem   lesves.github.io/articles... · Posted by u/skywalqer
tempay · 24 days ago
In Switzerland it varies. Many places will also offer expert hire where you get brand-new skis and at the end of the season you can choose to buy them for cost.
Loic · 24 days ago
FYI, the rental skis, even if they look the same as the same skis you could buy retail are not the same. They have bigger edges and a dicker base. The bindings are not the same.

This is because they are built to go through the machine after each rental. Good retails skis have less "robust" but faster, thinner base, they would be dead after 3 months of rental.

Source: I spend way too many hours each season in a ski shop taking care of a mix of rental and competitive hardware.

Loic commented on Two narratives about AI   calnewport.com/no-one-kno... · Posted by u/RickJWagner
gausswho · a month ago
If you'd read the article, you'd know that's not what he's purporting.
Loic · a month ago
The full advice:

My advice, for the moment:

- Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric.

- Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI—read widely and ask people you trust about what they’re seeing.

- Beyond that, however, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All of this is too new for anyone to really understand what they’re saying.

AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why.

With that, it shows that he is not really using the AI tools, he would be using them he would have given this advice :

- try the tools and look where they can improve your life.

Loic commented on Two narratives about AI   calnewport.com/no-one-kno... · Posted by u/RickJWagner
Loic · a month ago
Take everything Cal Newport is talking about with a large grain of salt.

I don't know a single person with a bit of seniority, using Claude Code, who wants to go back to any IDE from 5 years ago.

Loic commented on Nobody knows how to build with AI yet   worksonmymachine.substack... · Posted by u/Stwerner
theferret · a month ago
I feel like we've been here before, and there was a time when if you're going to be an engineer, you needed to know core equations, take a lot of derivatives, perform mathematical analysis on paper, get results in an understandable form, and come up with solutions. That process may be analogous to what we used to think of as beginning with core data structures and algorithms, design patterns, architecture and infrastructure patterns, and analyzing them all together to create something nice. Yet today, much of the lower-level mathematics that were previously required no longer are. And although people are trained in their availability and where they are used, they form the backbone of systems that automate the vast majority of the engineering process.

It might be as simple as creating awareness about how everything works underneath and creating graduates that understand how these things should work in a similar vein.

Loic · a month ago
Exactly right now, I am helping a big oil and gas company have a process simulation software to correctly converge on a big simulation. Full access to the source code, need to improve the Newton method in use with the right line search, validate the derivatives, etc.

I do think that for most of the people, you are right, you do not need to know a lot, but my philosophy was to always understand how the tool you use work (one level deeper), but now the tool is creating a new tool. How do you understand the tool which has been created by your Agent/AI tool?

I find this problem interesting, this is new to me and I will happily look at how our society and the engineering community evolve with these new capacities.

Loic commented on Nobody knows how to build with AI yet   worksonmymachine.substack... · Posted by u/Stwerner
lordnacho · a month ago
I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now.

I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding.

It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to change a bunch of things to test my new idea. I can skim my code and see a bunch of things that would normally take me ages to fiddle. The fiddling is frustrating, because I feel like I know what the end result should be, but there's some minor BS in the way, which takes a few minutes each time. It used to take a whole stackoverflow search + think, recently it became a copilot hint, and now... Claude simply does it.

For instance, I wrote a mock stock exchange. It's the kind of thing you always want to have, but because the pressure is on to connect to the actual exchange, it is often a leftover task that nobody has done. Now, Claude has done it while I've been reading HN.

Now that I have that, I can implement a strategy against it. This is super tedious. I know how it works, but when I implement it, it takes me a lot of time that isn't really fulfilling. Stuff like making a typo, or forgetting to add the dependency. Not big brain stuff, but it takes time.

Now I know what you're all thinking. How does it not end up with spaghetti all over the place? Well. I actually do critique the changes. I actually do have discussions with Claude about what to do. The benefit here is he's a dev who knows where all the relevant code is. If I ask him whether there's a lock in a bad place, he finds it super fast. I guess you need experience, but I can smell when he's gone off track.

So for me, career-wise, it has come at the exact right time. A few years after I reached a level where the little things were getting tedious, a time when all the architectural elements had come together and been investigated manually.

What junior devs will do, I'm not so sure. They somehow have to jump to the top of the mountain, but the stairs are gone.

Loic · a month ago
> What junior devs will do, I'm not so sure. They somehow have to jump to the top of the mountain, but the stairs are gone.

Exactly my thinking, nearly 50, more than 30 years of experience in early every kind of programming, like you do, I can easily architect/control/adjust the agent to help me produce great code with a very robust architecture. By I do that out of my experience, both in modelling (science) and programming, I wonder how the junior devs will be able to build experience if everything comes cooked by the agent. Time will tell us.

Loic commented on EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm   nytimes.com/2025/07/18/cl... · Posted by u/anigbrowl
jleyank · a month ago
It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper.

As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.

Loic · a month ago
It is more than depressing. During my PhD/Postdoc, we had excellent collaboration with the EPA on stuff which then really improved the life of people in the US. These agencies need to do research to stay ahead of/keep up with the development.

Context: we developed chemicals toxicity prediction models. This was 20 years ago, this allowed the EPA to quality check applications made by chemical companies.

Loic commented on Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' written in Emacs Org Mode   tendollaradventure.com/sa... · Posted by u/dskhatri
Loic · a month ago
Sorry to hijack a bit the thread. I have been using Emacs for the past 20+ years. Before I could live in Emacs, now, I find it harder (software forced on me by external customers, AI tools, ...).

I try everywhere I can to install an Emacs mode for code/text navigation. But they tend to be inconsistent and for some software, it is simply not possible.

Do you have good resources to help there (running Linux/Gnome)? Do you keep the faith or switched "out"?

Loic · a month ago
Thank you for the pointers, I will explore them!

u/Loic

KarmaCake day5719July 22, 2009
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Chemical engineer having fun here and there.

https://www.chemeo.com https://www.ceondo.com

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