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alankarmisra commented on What makes Claude Code so damn good   minusx.ai/blog/decoding-c... · Posted by u/samuelstros
fragmede · 4 months ago
LLMs write python and typescript well, because of all the examples in their training data. But what if we made a new programming language whos goal was to be optimal for an LLM to generate it? Would it be closer to assembly? If we project that the future is vibe coded, and we scarcely look at the outputted code, testing, instead, that the output matches the input correctly, not looking at the code, what would that language look like?
alankarmisra · 4 months ago
They’d presumably do worse. LLMs have no intrinsic sense of programming logic. They are merely pattern matching against a large training set. If you invent a new language that doesn’t have sufficient training examples for a variety of coding tasks, and is syntactically very different from all the existing languages, the LLMs wouldn’t have enough training data and would do very badly.
alankarmisra commented on I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file   al3rez.com/todo-txt-journ... · Posted by u/al3rez
alankarmisra · 4 months ago
Same. I use Apple Notes. I have a few notes pinned (regular work, creative work, self-education, travel, chores). I write tasks. Break them up into small tasks with indents. Pick a task from the pool and execute. "Regular Work" tasks get priority. But if I'm not feeling it, I move to the other ones. Once I finish a task, I delete it/replace it with next steps. Nothing fancy. No formatting except for indentation. Been crushing it.

But I will add, there is no right way to do things in life in general. Experiment, and do what works for you.

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alankarmisra commented on Python performance myths and fairy tales   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
_aavaa_ · 4 months ago
Mojo NOT being open-source is a complete non-starter.
alankarmisra · 4 months ago
Genuinely curious; while I understand why we would want a language to be open-source (there's plenty of good reasons), do you have anecdotes where the open-sourceness helped you solve a problem?
alankarmisra commented on Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering   poetsandquants.com/2025/0... · Posted by u/curioustock
lisper · 5 months ago
This particular clickbait title formula -- The X No One Has Heard About -- drives me nuts because it is so manifestly self-defeating. Obviously someone has heard about it. At the very least, the author of the piece has heard about it, and now all of their readers have heard about it too.
alankarmisra · 5 months ago
It's like the secret beaches in every south-east asian nook and crany. They're so secret there's signs pointing to them every where and they are overrun with tourists.
alankarmisra commented on My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)   simonwillison.net/2025/Ju... · Posted by u/simonw
alankarmisra · 5 months ago
I see the value in showcasing that LLMs can run locally on laptops — it’s an important milestone, especially given how difficult that was before smaller models became viable.

That said, for something like this, I’d probably get more out of simply finding an existing implementation on github or the like and downloading that.

When it comes to specialized and narrow domains like Space Invaders, the training set is likely to be extremely small and the model's vector space will have limited room to generalize. You'll get code that is more or less identical to the original source and you also have to wait for it to 'type' the code and the value add seems very low. I would rather ask it to point me to known Space Invaders implementations in language X on github (or search there).

Note that ChatGPT gets very nervous if I put this into GPT to clean up the grammar. It wants very badly for me to stress that LLMs don't memorize and overfitting is very unlikely (I believe neither).

alankarmisra commented on Stepping Back   rjp.io/blog/2025-05-31-st... · Posted by u/rjpower9000
alankarmisra · 7 months ago
My thinking is threaded. I maintain lists (in a simple txt file and more recently, in Notes on the Mac) and add the tasks to it. Subtasks go into an indent. I have different notes for regular work/pet project/blog/learning/travel. priority-must-do-now/daily chores is separate one. Every morning I open my priority/daily chores stuff and try and wind that up. And then I just scuttle around the other lists and do whatever my brain tells me I can. I find that some days I do more from the blog notes and some days more from the regular work notes. The notes serve as goals for my brain and it invents/discoveres solutions in no particular order. This makes me more productive because I can switch when I'm bored (which to me is an indication that my brain needs more time to find solutions in this space). And if nothing is hitting the right note, I'll take a nap or read or watch a show for a bit or go for a long walk or hike - anything that's not in the to-do just to give myself the creative space. I find that giving myself problems to solve, and allowing my subconcious brain to invent solutions for it while I do other things actually works quite well for me and allows me to make steady progress.
alankarmisra commented on The One-Person Framework in Practice   link.mail.beehiiv.com/ss/... · Posted by u/frans
alankarmisra · 8 months ago
I would argue that framework isn't the winning component, the people are. A lot of people can say similar things for framework <<X>> and they'd be right given their own experience but I think they give themseleves too little credit. I've written my own frameworks for smaller projects because I didn't want the needless learning curve / cruft of a generalized framework and I can tell you they saved me so much time / effort / cost over the long term and they were tuned to my development style. All built with python and some off-the-shelf libraries. I'm not saying there's no place for generalized frameworks. They do help streamline development efforts and set a standardized model for building out your app/service which would be great with a team of people all tuned in to a specific framework but I would argue that in a single developer environment it doesn't matter much what you use, so long as you have fun with it. Productivity analyses are at best personal opinions in a forum like this.

Edit: basic grammar.

alankarmisra commented on Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"   cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transc... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40
card_zero · 9 months ago
So is more compact better? Does K&R's *d++ = *s++; get a pass now?
alankarmisra · 9 months ago
I would guard against "arguing from the extremes". I would think "on average" compact is more helpful. There are definitely situations where compactness can lead to obfuscation but where the line is depends on the literacy and astuteness of the reader in the specific subject as already pointed out by another comment. There are ways to be obtuse even in the other direction where written prose can be made sufficiently complicated to describe even the simplest things.

u/alankarmisra

KarmaCake day67August 7, 2024View Original