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baq commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU   blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve
bigstrat2003 · 13 hours ago
Not only are most developers (let alone other employees) making nowhere near that, why should spending $500k mean you waste $10k? Even saving small amounts matters when you add it up.
baq · 2 hours ago
Why waste? If you get more than 2% value increase out of your 10k it’s a net gain.
baq commented on Looking back at my transition from Windows to Linux   scottrlarson.com/publicat... · Posted by u/trinsic2
SoftTalker · 11 hours ago
Swap isn’t unlimited, it just delays the inevitable and makes everything slow while doing it. A 4GB swap partition isn’t going to save you if you run your 32GB computer out of memory.
baq · 10 hours ago
It does help. It gives time for the kernel in this situation and also helps in general by allowing to defragment memory. You want to keep a small amount of swap space at all times.
baq commented on Looking back at my transition from Windows to Linux   scottrlarson.com/publicat... · Posted by u/trinsic2
psyclobe · 11 hours ago
I made the switch a few years ago mostly because the only thing I do on computers is write software for the companies I work for; I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work.

Everything is mostly fine on Linux, minus things like display drivers (pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes), power management (honestly I just use a remote switch to turn off my displays), and random stuff like my gnome classic shell will nearly always crash the moment I try to resume working after a few hours (just kicks me back to the login screen).

But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.

Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.

Not going back anytime soon either way.

baq · 11 hours ago
Default vfs and vm swap related settings are good for I dunno, 1997.

You have to set swappiness to something like 1 or maybe 10, reduce cache pressure to like 50ish and set dirty ratios/bytes to something reasonable (say around 1GB, half of that for background).

If you keep defaults the system will have too much in caches and they may not be able to flush under memory and swap pressure => hang.

It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior. Other OSes do a much better job at good defaults.

baq commented on Claim: GPT-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics   twitter.com/SebastienBube... · Posted by u/marcuschong
timClicks · 12 hours ago
It's been a while since I've played in the area, but is PCA still the go to method for dimensionality reduction?
baq · 11 hours ago
PCA is nice if you know relationships are linear. You also want to be aware of TSNE and UMAP.
baq commented on We put a coding agent in a while loop   github.com/repomirrorhq/r... · Posted by u/sfarshid
kh_hk · 15 hours ago
I am honestly surprised how we went from almost OCD TDD and type purism, to a "it kinda works" attitude to software.
baq · 14 hours ago
always has been, the difference is now the 'it compiles, ship it' loop is 10x-100x faster than 2 years ago
baq commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU   blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve
userbinator · a day ago
I wish developers, and I'm saying this as one myself, were forced to work on a much slower machine, to flush out those who can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.
baq · 16 hours ago
it's absolutely the wrong approach.

software should be performance tested, but you don't want a situation when time of single iteration is dominated by duration of functional tests and build time. the faster software builds and tests, the quicker solutions get delivered. if giving your developers 64GB or RAM instead of 32GB halves test and build time, you should happily spend that money.

baq commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU   blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve
Aurornis · 17 hours ago
Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it.

Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the possibly. Then the controls come.

> There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs,

You would think, but in the age of $6,000 fully specced MacBook Pros, $2,000 monitors, $3,000 standing desks, $1500 iPads with $100 Apple pencils and $300 keyboard cases, $1,000 chairs, SaaS licenses that add up, and (if allowed) food delivery services for “special circumstances” that turns into a regular occurrence it was common to see individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range. It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.

Some people see a company policy as something meant to be exploited until a hidden limit is reached.

There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.

baq · 16 hours ago
> individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range

peanuts compared to their 500k TC

baq commented on Turning Claude Code into my best design partner   betweentheprompts.com/des... · Posted by u/scastiel
oblio · a day ago
I find it funny that we had to invent tools that will replace, say, 20%+ of developers out there to finally have developers to write docs :-))
baq · a day ago
The difference today is the docs are being read. In the before times, unless you were building a foundational library, docs would get updated when a presentation was needed to announce a great success, or maybe not even then. Nowadays if you want coding agents to be efficient, doc quality is paramount.

IOW there’s very clear ROI on docs today, it wasn’t so earlier.

baq commented on From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent   ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-ar... · Posted by u/articsputnik
makeitdouble · a day ago
I made the distinction because on occasions you'll close the lid, put the macbook in your backpack and an hour later it's a whole furnace in there.

It kinda matters.

baq · a day ago
> I made the distinction because on occasions you'll close the lid, put the macbook in your backpack and an hour later it's a whole furnace in there.

As a laptop user this just makes me depressed :(

baq commented on What makes Claude Code so damn good   minusx.ai/blog/decoding-c... · Posted by u/samuelstros
techwiz137 · a day ago
For code generation, nothing so far beats Opus. More likely than not it generated working code and fixed bugs that Gemini 2.5 pro couldn't solve or even Gemini Code Assist. Gemini Code Assist is better than 2.5 pro, but has way more limits per prompt and often truncates output.
baq · a day ago
I found Anthropic’s models untrustworthy with SQL (e.g. confused AND and OR operator precedence - or simply forgot to add parens, multiple times), Gemini 2.5 pro has no such issues and identified Claude’s mistakes correctly.

u/baq

KarmaCake day17608November 21, 2009View Original