TheRealDunkirk (u/TheRealDunkirk)

TheRealDunkirk commented on Why LLMs can't really build software zed.dev/blog/why-llms-can... · Posted by u/srid

toenail · 4 months ago

I simply had claude write me a linting tool that catches its repeated bad stuff..

I was converting all the views in my Rails app from HAML to ERB. It was doing each one perfectly, so I told it to do the rest. It went through a few, then asked me if it could write a program, and run that. I thought, hey, cool, sure. I get it; it was trying to save tokens. Clever! However -- you know where this is going -- despite knowing all the rules, and demonstrating it could apply them, the program it wrote made a total dog's breakfast out of the rest of the files. Thankfully, I've learned to commit my working copy before big "AI" changes, and I just revert when it barfs. I forced Claude to do the rest "manually" at great token expense, but it did it correctly. I've asked it to write other scripts, which it has also mangled. So I haven't been impressed at Claude's "tool writing" capability yet, and I'm jealous of people who seem to have good luck.

TheRealDunkirk commented on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation theverge.com/news/757461/... · Posted by u/Handy-Man

immibis · 4 months ago

Like it or not, mergers/acquisitions are matters of money, not whether you like the product or not. In fact, all corporations are beholden to make the most money, not the best products. Frequently the product that makes the most money is the one that constantly nags you to give it more money, which everyone hates.

Today I watched the WHY2025 talk about what happened to XS4ALL (a Dutch hacker-ethic ISP). Here's the summary: "we sold our profitable smallish independent startup with anti-corporate culture to a big corporation for lots of money, because we thought they'd continue it being awesomely anti-corporate, but all they did was squeeze our customers for more money, lay off all our staff and then move the customers to the corporation's own brand. We fought them in the courts, but the courts decisively ruled they were allowed to do all that because they own us, and it turns out they'd got expensive lawyers who did all the paperwork and pulled the right strings to make us look like the bad guys." Like, no shit? What were you expecting to happen? Does this story sound familiar to you?

Everyone needs to realize "the scorpion and the frog" is about corporations. Anyway, there's nothing illegal about selling your soul for money. It's almost mandatory in fact.

TheRealDunkirk · 4 months ago

At some point, doesn't humankind rise up and demand that our governments stop... you know... actually fucking us like this? After all the trust-busting at the turn of the century, we're right back in another golden age of robber barons, almost as if we learned nothing about this as a civilization. Being paid in company scrip that can only be used in the company's store with products from their global monolith doesn't sound far-fetched at this point. We seem to be heading straight for the cyberpunk version of our inevitable dystopian future.

TheRealDunkirk commented on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation theverge.com/news/757461/... · Posted by u/Handy-Man

TheRealDunkirk · 4 months ago

Just more proof that the merger/acquisition should never have been allowed in the first place.

TheRealDunkirk commented on The Framework Desktop is a beast world.hey.com/dhh/the-fra... · Posted by u/lemonberry

TheRealDunkirk · 5 months ago

Sorry, but what's "bogus" about benchmarking your specific workloads? What benchmark do you think he should have run?

TheRealDunkirk commented on Gumroad’s source is available github.com/antiwork/gumro... · Posted by u/philipjoubert

teekert · 9 months ago

The Readme goes right to how to install it, and other than the logo saying "sell your stuff, see what sticks" there is 0 information about what it does. Sure I can Google, but I think it should be right there, at the top of the Readme.

TheRealDunkirk · 9 months ago

I had no idea, and I've been a "Rails guy" for 15 years, and keenly interested in high-profile successful Ruby projects for a long time. Even clicking through to their actual site from the source repo page, I had to surmise what it was.

TheRealDunkirk commented on A few words about FiveThirtyEight natesilver.net/p/a-few-wo... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

laweijfmvo · 10 months ago

it must be a wild experience to have a megacorp buy out your brain child, burn it to ashes and throw it away, and chase after the next shiny thing to slap ads on...

TheRealDunkirk · 10 months ago

TheRealDunkirk commented on No One Lives Forever (NOLF) Revival Edition nolfrevival.tk/... · Posted by u/Lammy

magicalhippo · 10 months ago

Monolith[1] made some of my favorite games growing up.

It started with Shogo, but also No One Lives Forever, Tron 2.0 and F.E.A.R. left deep impressions.

What stood out was the combination of their well-done 3D engine with world building and art direction.

It wasn't the same from game to game, each game had their very distinct feel, and always interesting.

And I think few shooters have as good enemy AI as the goal-oriented[1] ones in F.E.A.R. (sadly not used in the sequels)

Good times, good times...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_Productions

[2]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/building-the-ai-of-f-e-...

TheRealDunkirk · 10 months ago

Tron 2.0 was great, and another game that has been lost to time. I got the Steam version working with a hack many years ago, but I doubt it would still work. That's another one that could use the same treatment as this version of NOLF!

TheRealDunkirk commented on Microsoft Is Dead (2007) paulgraham.com/microsoft.... · Posted by u/aamederen

scarface_74 · a year ago

Microsoft Office enterprise is $12 per seat.

TheRealDunkirk · a year ago

Per?... month?

TheRealDunkirk commented on Microsoft Is Dead (2007) paulgraham.com/microsoft.... · Posted by u/aamederen

ghc · a year ago

It's interesting to read comments about this today, written through the lens of the present. I suspect many commenters were too young to really understand the level of dominance Microsoft had in the market circa from 1995-2005. Just look at this chart:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...

In 2004, outside of education and desktop publishing it was extremely rare to see an Apple computer at all. Apple was the iPod company by that point. Almost all software of note ran only on Windows, and Office was required for all documents.

That Microsoft is dead, killed off by antitrust remedies and the web. That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...it's not the same company at all. In fact, there is no company today even fractionally as dominant. Google's search monopoly or Apple's App Store monopoly just don't compare.

It appears all the critical commenters think PG was unaware of these facts, but they critically misunderstand the truth on the ground. There was no way for PG to not know that Microsoft was dominant everywhere because Windows ran everything (even digital signage) and Word documents were a more accepted interchange format than even PDFs. He was invoking Gibson's observation that the future is unevenly distributed, and he was right: The movement of almost all applications to the web absolutely annihilated Microsft's ability to dictate what software smaller companies could or could not publish.

Edit: Also, it seems unthinkable today, but back then we all had a large number of devices like printers and digital cameras that only shipped with Windows drivers. Microsoft essentially dictated what hardware you could buy too.

TheRealDunkirk · a year ago

For years I've said that if you could take corporate purchases out of the Gartner numbers, you'd see that Apple was better than 50/50 when it came to personal use. I sure would like to see an updated version of that dataset.

TheRealDunkirk commented on Microsoft Is Dead (2007) paulgraham.com/microsoft.... · Posted by u/aamederen

bkfunk · a year ago

“That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...”

I am not too young to remember the old Microsoft. To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic. Despite Tesla, GM is still relevant. Despite AWS, DB2 mainframes are still relevant. Heck, I have to work with EBCDIC data, a format designed to not produce holes in punchcards that are too close together. Even when we eventually move to a modern db, decades of archival data is not going to be converted from EBCDIC.

Windows might be irrelevant to FAANG or MANGA or GAMMA or whatever, but how many Fortune 500 companies don’t have a significant Microsoft presence?

Apple computers are pretty nice, but they’re expensive, and the vast majority of employees do fine with a cheap PC and Microsoft 365—why would a company pay more for unnecessary hardware that also requires rebuilding a bunch of IT systems, not to mention retraining thousands of employees.

TheRealDunkirk · a year ago

The amount of effort apparently required to satisfy all the checkboxes around "a cheap PC and Microsoft 365" is astounding. My Fortune 250 laptop runs 3 different security "endpoint" products, and literally dozens of scripts fire each day/hour to make sure that things are "correct" according to every suggestion any consultant ever made towards our senior IT staff. And they replace the entire fleet every 3 years. I believe that starting with longer lived hardware with an inherently more secure environment that didn't need to be groomed like this would be a net savings, but I don't have the numbers to prove it.