babarock (u/babarock)

babarock commented on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

simonw · 3 days ago

100%. There's no difference at all in my mind between an AI-assisted PR and a regular PR: in both cases they should include proof that the change works and that the author has put the work in to test it.

babarock · 3 days ago

You're not wrong, however the issue is that it's not always easy to detect if a PR includes proof that the change works. It requires that the reviewer interrupts what they're doing, switch context completely and look at the PR.

If you consider that reviewer bandwidth is very limited in most projects AND that the volume of low-effort-AI-assisted PR has grown incredibly over the past year, now we have a spam problem.

Some of my engineers refuse to review a patch if they detect that it's AI-assisted. They're wrong, but I understand their pain.

babarock commented on Getting forked by Microsoft philiplaine.com/posts/get... · Posted by u/phillebaba

diggan · 8 months ago

> As a sole maintainer of an open source project, I was enthused when Microsoft reached out to set up a meeting to talk about Spegel. The meeting went well, and I felt there was going to be a path forward ripe with cooperation and hopefully a place where I could onboard new maintainers.

Seems it isn't the first time Microsoft leads open source maintainers on, trying to extract information about their projects so they can re-implement it themselves while also breaking the licenses that the authors use. Not sure how people fell so hard for "Microsoft <3 Open Source" but it's never been true, and seems it still isn't, just like "Security is the #1 priority" also never been true for them.

Here is the previous time I can remember that they did something similar:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287 - The Day AppGet Died (keivan.io) 1930 points | May 27, 2020 | 550 comments

The best advice for open source maintainers who are being approached by large tech companies is to be very wary, and let them contribute/engage like everyone else if they're interested, instead of setting up private meetings and eventually get "forked-but-not-really" without attribution.

babarock · 8 months ago

"breaking the licenses"?

"without attribution"?

Did we read the same article?

babarock commented on Speedrunners are vulnerability researchers, they just don't know it yet zetier.com/speedrunners-a... · Posted by u/chc4

cryptoegorophy · 10 months ago

TAS, GDQ, OoT, ACE WDTAM?

babarock · 10 months ago

TAS: Tool-Assisted-Speedrun. A kind of speedrunning, where control inputs aren't given by humans, but are carefully pre-programmed into a bot that will replay them. This allows to do things that would otherwise be veeeeery difficult (and sometimes impossible) for humans.

GDQ: Games Done Quick, the name of the Youtube channel.

OoT: Ocarina of Time, a beloved Zelda game from the 90s.

ACE: Arbitrary Code Execution. A vulnerability that lets you run whatever you want. You can use it to skip huge parts of the game, therefore achieving the fast speedrun

babarock commented on The right way to sauce pasta (2016) seriouseats.com/the-right... · Posted by u/kqr

bradleyjg · 2 years ago

I like good food, so I’ve started to follow recipes on sites like this one.

However the thing that no one talks about is that cooking “properly” takes a huge amount of time cumulatively for a single person or even a small nuclear family.

A blogger will talk about a quick little dish. First of all it is going to take you longer because you haven’t spent the last decade chopping onions. Second, even as written this “quick dish” is 15 to make, 15 minutes to eat, and another 10 minutes of cleanup. That’s 40 minutes per meal for a total of 2 hours a day.

Uber eats is just 5 minutes to order and clean up plus 15 minutes to eat, for a total of 1 hour a day. That doesn’t even get into the extra time shopping for high quality and sometimes obscure ingredients, learning these recipes in the first place, and so on. And again that’s assuming only quick little dishes.

So best case scenario net one hour a day every day to eat high quality home cooked meals. That’s 6% of your waking life that’s not available for work, exercise, dating, playing with your kids, calling your parents, reading a book, etc, etc, etc.

Like so many things in our atomized world, the math has gotten worse as we’ve discarded large, extended families. If that cooking time is divided among several people, feeds even more, and is often taken as an opportunity to teach and bond, then things start to look a lot different.

babarock · 2 years ago

You get better at it the more you do it, and naturally with experience you'll notice it takes less and less time.

That being said, I agree with you, it does take a lot of time. To me, the switch occurred when I stopped considering this time "wasted" and instead consider it fulfilling. I actively look for the time I'll spend cooking each day, I believe it's a good use of my time and I don't try to rush through it.

babarock commented on The right way to sauce pasta (2016) seriouseats.com/the-right... · Posted by u/kqr

Niksko · 2 years ago

The degree to which you undercook is really about how scared you are of overcooking. The phrase I've heard used is that removing pasta from boiling water and putting it in the sauce is like "pasta bullet time". It slows the cooking enough that you now have lots of extra time to play with.

So it's not that you need to pull the pasta very early. You just can, for greater insurance. But pulling it just shy of al dente and then finishing it in the sauce over a few minutes will result in an al dente pasta. If your sauce needs lots of reducing, you're making a huge batch with an undersized burner, or anything else that would greatly prolong the cooking time, then yes, you'll need to pull the pasta earlier.

babarock · 2 years ago

Agreed.

I pull it out undercooked so I have time to add enough pasta water in the pan and let it reduce. If it's already al dente by the time it's added to the pan, then I find I have to rush through the mixing.

babarock commented on The right way to sauce pasta (2016) seriouseats.com/the-right... · Posted by u/kqr

brunooliv · 2 years ago

This is awesome! A question for Italians in the audience though: is using butter as a fat something that’s commonly done? Being Portuguese and fond of Mediterranean cuisine, I always saw butter as a fat as being a more American thing but maybe that’s just the wrong perception and it’s totally fine if you use a dab of butter? PS: I do it myself, reason being that usually I’ll use extra virgin olive oil while preparing a sauce and I like to add butter to save on the oil, which can be quite expensive.

babarock · 2 years ago

The answer is... complicated:

- Using butter for pasta is something that is typically reserved for people with upset stomach (understand diarrhea). It's not scientific at all, but just something that is commonly done.

- Fettucine Alfredo[1] is a real italian dish invented in Rome. It's made with butter and cheese. It was originally popular in the touristy areas, targeting foreigners, but over time I notice it slowly appearing in "real" restaurants.

- "Pasta Fresca" (tagliatelle, raviolis, tortellinis, etc) is often served with butter-based sauces (like a lot of the traditional northern cuisine).

A simplistic way to think about it is that butter is a rich luxurious ingredient used in the North, whereas the South is more likely to use Olive oil.

Note that other fats can be used, it's not just olive oil: - Carbonara / Alla Gricia will use the animal fat from the _guanciale_ (the cured pig meat) and avoid using any oil or butter - Cacio e pepe will use neither and use the cheese itself as fat for the sauce. It's a simple pasta, but it's difficult to get right, since parmesan/pecorino are diffcult to emulsify. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettuccine_Alfredo

babarock commented on The right way to sauce pasta (2016) seriouseats.com/the-right... · Posted by u/kqr

jillesvangurp · 2 years ago

Not bad advice. Another good tip is to use the right pasta for the right sauce.

As any Italian would explain, Spaghetti Bolognese is not actually a thing at least not what you think it is. You wouldn't use spaghetti for a meat sauce but a bit more chunky kind of pasta like tagliatelle or papardelle. You'd use spaghetti for a fish pasta; which is what you risk getting in Bologna if you are ordering a spaghetti bolognese. Basically, they'd serve you a tuna & tomato sauce. Nothing wrong with that of course. But if you want their famous meat sauce, order pasta alla ragu. Very different experience.

Italian food done right is pretty yummy and not that hard to master for a home cook. Half the success is using good ingredients. The other half is mastering some simple techniques. Pasta especially is not that hard and doing it right makes a huge difference.

babarock · 2 years ago

The main reason for tagliatelle/pappardelle is to get "fresh" pasta. "Pasta Fresca" or "Pasta all'uovo" is made of different ingredients than spaghetti. It's usually soft wheat and eggs versus hard wheat (durum wheat, semolina) and water.

I agree that finding the right pairing of pasta and sauce does make a difference, but I would also say not to overthink it. Most italians will use whatever's available in the pantry, even if it's sub-optimal.

babarock commented on The right way to sauce pasta (2016) seriouseats.com/the-right... · Posted by u/kqr

benterix · 2 years ago

This is almost a religious matter among my Italian colleagues and I see a few blasphemies on this video already. The recipe I was taught on the hills of Tuscany 30 year ago is so perfect and simple I'll never prepare pasta in a different way.

* First slice garlic and put it a pot together with excellent quality olive oil

* Fry it until garlic becomes slightly yellow but nor brown, and in the meantime in a separate pot boil pasta

* Add tomato sauce to oil/garlic and boil them together

* When the pasta is ready, add it to the mix

It's absolutely delicious in spite of its simplicity.

babarock · 2 years ago

Some suggestions, take it or leave it: - delay the boiling of the pasta until after you added the tomato sauce to the pan. Tomatoes enjoy spending a bit more time on the stove, it makes a difference. - when adding the pasta to the mix, add a bit of the pasta-water (the water in which the pasta cooked). It acts as a very powerful emulsifier and will make the sauce stick better.

babarock commented on The right way to sauce pasta (2016) seriouseats.com/the-right... · Posted by u/kqr

babarock · 2 years ago

> Your other option is to purposely undercook the pasta by a few minutes before adding it to the sauce to let it finish.

This is super important. I don't know why the article presents it as optional. It is a vital step for success in my experience.

babarock commented on Mod_blog: A Blogging Engine in C github.com/spc476/mod_blo... · Posted by u/ingve

James_K · 2 years ago

Thanks for the insult, but I'm very adept at reading code. You know how I got that way? Not by aimlessly trawling through random projects, but by actually interacting with the source code. Picking a random bug on some open source project and solving it will yield ten times the benefit of just reading that project's source, with the added bonus that you achieve something productive at the end. Reading source code is a fantasy. Something that sounds good but falls flat in practice. Hence my almost certain claim that no one actually does it. I don't, do you?

babarock · 2 years ago

Didn't mean to insult you. It's really meant as a friendly advice. I'm sharing experience.

I do read code. A lot. I'm not the only one. I know many people who do. I know people who print source code on paper to read on their bus ride back home.

Hell, I know people who read some of the most complicated source code you can imagine, annotate it, criticize it, and then blog about it[1].

It's very weird that you doubt it. Why would we lie? For karma and upvotes? I'm not sure I understand your point. We're literally in the comment thread of a post aimed at reading code and you're here arguing that we're not?

[1]: https://kotaku.com/the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-source-...