andybp85 (u/andybp85)

andybp85 commented on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features mastodon.social/@firefoxw... · Posted by u/twapi

wvenable · 3 months ago

That question completely misunderstands what AI is for. Why would I just do it when the AI did it for me in less time that I could myself and mechanically in a way that is arguably harder for a human to do? AI is surprisingly good at identifying all the edge cases.

andybp85 · 3 months ago

i probably don't understand. the main thought i have re: llm coding is, why i would want to talk to a insipid, pandering chatbot instead of having fun writing code?

but, as an engineer, i have to say if it works for you and you're getting quality output, then go for it. it's just not for me.

andybp85 commented on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features mastodon.social/@firefoxw... · Posted by u/twapi

wvenable · 3 months ago

I've been posting recently how I refactored a few different code bases with the help of AI. Faster code, higher quality code, overall smaller. AI is not a hammer, it's a Lathe: incredibly powerful but only if you understand exactly what you're doing otherwise it will happily make a big mess.

andybp85 · 3 months ago

if you have to understand exactly what you're doing, why not just... do it?

andybp85 commented on What you need to know about EMP weapons aardvark.co.nz/daily/2025... · Posted by u/flyingkiwi44

yabones · 9 months ago

Yeah, what I've learned from films like "Threads" and "The Day After" is that you very much want to die in the first 20ms of a nuclear war. Don't dig a hole to hide in, put your lawn chair on the roof and hope you're close enough to ground zero to get a peaceful and dignified end.

andybp85 · 9 months ago

yup. "the survivors are the lucky ones" is fantasy.

andybp85 commented on What you need to know about EMP weapons aardvark.co.nz/daily/2025... · Posted by u/flyingkiwi44

BryanLegend · 9 months ago

I read it and it's completely biased to a worst imaginable scenario. Not likely to reflect any real world at all.

andybp85 · 9 months ago

The book says that that's exactly what it's supposed to be, to inspire people to talk about it. But (also from the book) the war games the USA runs around these situations always end in a massive nuclear exchange. Sure, some specific situations, like the Devil's Scenario, I would imagine might not reflect a real war, but the case the book is making is that reality is far more likely to be closer to the worst case than to a "best case" (whatever that means here).

andybp85 commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry

calvinmorrison · 9 months ago

pretty much, the plugin is called Copilot. click a button and install it

andybp85 · 9 months ago

that's a whole different piece of software that it doesn't come with out of the box lol.

Copilot was what i was looking for, thank you. I have it installed in Webstorm already but I haven't messed with this side of it.

andybp85 commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry

calvinmorrison · 9 months ago

vscode?

andybp85 · 9 months ago

vscode comes with that out of the box?

andybp85 commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry

rerdavies · 9 months ago

The actual most time-consuming parts of creating software (I think) is reading documentation for the APIs and libraries you're using. Probably the biggest productivity boost I get from my coding assistant is attributable to that.

e.g: MUI, typescript:

   // make the checkbox label appear before the checkbox.

Tab. Done. Delete the comment.

vs. about 2 minutes wading through the perfectly excellent but very verbose online documentation to find that I need to set the "labelPlacement" attribute to "start".

Or the tedious minutia that I am perfectly capable of doing, but it's time consuming and error-prone:

    // execute a SQL update

Tab tab tab tab .... Done, with all bindings and fields done, based on the structure that's passed as a parameter to the method, and the tables and fieldnames that were created in source code above the current line. (love that one).

andybp85 · 9 months ago

what are you using for this? one thing I can't wrap my head around is how anyone's idea of fun is poking at an LLM until it generates something possibly passable and then figuring what the hell it did and why, but this sounds like something i'd actually use.

andybp85 commented on What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023) seeinglogic.com/posts/vis... · Posted by u/homarp

zwnow · a year ago

I consider code bad if it takes more then 5 seconds to read and understand the high level goal of a function.

Doesn't matter how it looks. If its not possible to understand what a function accomplishes within a reasonable amount of time (without requiring hours upon hours of development experience), it's simply bad.

andybp85 · a year ago

for the codebase i work on, i made a rule that "functions do what the name says and nothing else". this way if the function does too much, hopefully you feel dumb typing it and realize you should break it up.

andybp85 commented on The Ribbon Microphone khz.ac/sound/ribbon-mic/... · Posted by u/glittershark

andybp85 · a year ago

I built a ribbon mic from a kit a while ago, and only broke the ribbon once putting it together! https://www.bumblebeepro.com/

Of course, as soon as i tried to record my guitarist with it, he cranked his amp and broke it again. Guitarists, man...

andybp85 commented on Stimulation Clicker neal.fun/stimulation-clic... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

andybp85 · a year ago

whelp this is making this meeting go way faster