RevEng (u/RevEng) - Readit News

RevEng commented on It's 2026, Just Use Postgres tigerdata.com/blog/its-20... · Posted by u/turtles3

storus · 6 days ago

Pinecone allows hybrid search, merging dense and sparse vector embeddings that Postgres can't do AFAIK. That results in ~10% worse retrieval scores which might be the difference between making it in the business or not.

RevEng · 6 days ago

The article shows an example of hybrid search using RRF.

RevEng commented on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers blog.adafruit.com/2026/02... · Posted by u/ptorrone

kart23 · 8 days ago

it’s illegal to make a gun for personal use without a serial number in ny and ca.

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/consu...

RevEng · 8 days ago

So it's okay to 3D print a gun as long as you have a serial number? That seems to reinforce that 3D printing shouldn't be banned, especially by blanket technical means.

RevEng commented on AI generated music barred from Bandcamp old.reddit.com/r/BandCamp... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

frakt0x90 · a month ago

Whenever I see defences of AI "art" people very often reduce the arguments to these analogies of using tools, but it's ineffective. Whether you use MS Paint, Photoshop, pencil, watercolor etc. That all requires skill, practice, and is this great intersection of intent and ability. It's authentic. Generating media with AI requires no skill, no intent, and very minimal labor. It is an approximation of the words you typed in and reduces you to a commissioner. You created nothing. You commissioned a work from a machine and are claiming creative authorship.

RevEng · a month ago

You are assuming a very specific form of generation. There are plenty of levels in between. Simply saying "AI" isn't sufficient to make an argument.

RevEng commented on AI generated music barred from Bandcamp old.reddit.com/r/BandCamp... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

sheeh · a month ago

Auto tune is not what makes a song a hit. What make a song a hit is the fact that the person who injected the use of auto tune has taste.

This seems to fly over the heads of many. art is about taste.

RevEng · a month ago

The same argument applies to AI generated or assisted music. Anyone can write a prompt and get a song. It takes judgement and taste to pick a good song and choose to publish it.

RevEng commented on YouTube has removed the ability to search by upload date twitter.com/TeamYouTube/s... · Posted by u/sergiotapia

RevEng · a month ago

Why remove this? Who made a ticket saying "Remove sort by upload date"? This isn't something that happens on a whim. What is the benefit to YouTube?

RevEng commented on Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs pcgamer.com/hardware/dell... · Posted by u/mossTechnician

neilsimp1 · a month ago

I agree with you, and I don't want anything related to the current AI craze in my life, at all.

But when I come on HN and see people posting about AI IDEs and vibe coding and everything, I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this sort of thing.

I cannot explain this.

RevEng · a month ago

Even as a principal software developer and someone who is skeptical and exhausted with the AI hype, AI IDEs can be useful. The rule I give to my coworkers is: use it where you know what to write but want to save time doing it. Unit tests are great for this. Quick demos and test benches are great. Boilerplate and glue are great for this. There are lots of places where trivial, mind-numbing work can be done quickly and effortlessly with an AI. These are cases where it's actually making life better for the developer, not replacing their expertise.

I've also had luck with it helping with debugging. It has the knowledge of the entire Internet and it can quickly add tracing and run debugging. It has helped me find some nasty interactions that I had no idea were a thing.

AI certainly has some advantages in certain use cases, that's why we have been using AI/ML for decades. The latest wave of models bring even more possibilities. But of course, it also brings a lot of potential for abuse and a lot of hype. I, too, all quite sick of it all and can't wait for the bubble to burst so we can get back to building effective tools instead of making wild claims for investors.

RevEng commented on A New Year's letter to a young person siliconcontinent.com/p/a-... · Posted by u/jger15

RevEng · a month ago

While the Twitter recommendation is strange, the assertion that we will suddenly have leisure time is demonstrably false. For decades each new technological advance was supposed to make it so we could work half as long because we could get twice as much done. That never happens. The cost of a person was never in how much they could produce but in how much they would demand to do so. If you can do twice as much, then your work product becomes half as valuable. Many of the throw away things we buy everyday are cheap only because their production is so heavily automated. If we still had to cook food in a conventional kitchen instead of warming up precooked food, or use a hammer and hand plane to build furniture, we would be paying far more than we do today. If anything, the people working those jobs are paid comparatively less now than before automation because it used to take skill to work those jobs but now anyone can do it. This is why the main advice of the article - do something that can't be automated and learn how to build the automation - is good advice.

RevEng commented on Attention Is Bayesian Inference medium.com/@vishalmisra/a... · Posted by u/samwillis

danielscrubs · a month ago

Found it interesting and engaging, but having a CS professor at Colombia putting their name to AI “slop” is a bit unnerving. If they are writing papers for work you would hope they would enjoy the process of thinking and writing (journaling) instead of using ChatGPT.

RevEng · a month ago

Writing the paper is a very small part of the research. It's entirely likely that - like many of their students - they love the research but hate writing papers. They are very different skill sets.

RevEng commented on Tally – A tool to help agents classify your bank transactions tallyai.money/... · Posted by u/ahmedatia

jansan · a month ago

I recently found out that my teenage son has about 20 Google accounts. Needed them for his homework he said.

RevEng · a month ago

That sounds very suspicious.

RevEng commented on Tally – A tool to help agents classify your bank transactions tallyai.money/... · Posted by u/ahmedatia

andy99 · a month ago

No idea if this is true but very sad if it is. This is a great argument for the concept of tenure, so experts can work on what they as experts deem important instead of being subject to the whims of leadership. I, probably naively pictured Distinguished Engineer to be closer to that, but maybe not.

RevEng · a month ago

Sadly, yes, it's true. New AI projects are getting funded and existing non-AI projects are getting mothballed. It's very disruptive and yet another sign of the hype being a bubble. Companies are pivoting entirely to it and neglecting their core competencies.