Was genuinely hoping to find there was some interesting research going on, but it’s all just AI stuff.
"Was genuinely hoping to find there was some interesting research going on, but it’s all just this "calculus"" -- everyone, in 1670
Readit Newsdarkstarsys commented on Google's year in review: areas with research breakthroughs in 2025 blog.google/technology/ai... · Posted by u/Anon84
If you installed Claude Code and put all your statements into a local folder and asked it to process them it could do literally anything you could come up with all the way up to setting up an AWS instance with a website that gives nifty visualizations of your spending. Or anything else you are thinking of.
This is the right answer. Don't just feed the data to a chatbot; have it write code to do what you want, repeatably and testably. You can probably have working python (and a docker container for it) in under 30 min.
darkstarsys commented on The Junior Hiring Crisis people-work.io/blog/junio... · Posted by u/mooreds
Anyone reccomend an analysis, article or book or video, of this effect on the blue collar industry decades ago?
It's happening again now with robotics, self-driving vehicles and RL. Factory workers, truck drivers, construction work, order fulfillment, machinists, farm work, medical technicians and more are all very much at risk (same thing as OP: mostly junior roles getting automated). Some info at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25137
Why would you need webapps when you could just talk out loud to your computer ?
Why would I need programs with colors, buttons, actual UI ?
I am trying to imagine a future where file navigators don't even exist : "I want to see the photos I took while I was in vacations last year. Yes, can you remove that cloud ? Perfect, now send it to XXXX's computer and say something nice."
"Can you set some timers for my sport session, can you plan a pure body weight session ? Yes, that's perfect. Wait, actually, remove the jumping jacks."
"Can you produce a detroit style techno beat I feel like I want to dance."
"I feel life is pointless without a work, can you give me some tasks to achieve that would give me a feeling of fulfillment ?"
"Can you play an arcade style video game for me ?"
"Can you find me a mate for tonight ? Yes, I prefer black haired persons."
I just this week vibe-coded a personal knowledge management app that reads all my org-mode and logseq files and answers questions, and can update them, with WebSpeech voice input. Now it's my todo manager, grocery list, "what do I need to do today?", "when did I get the leaves done the last few years?" and so on, even on mobile (bye bye Android-Emacs). It's just a basic chatbot with a few tools and access to my files, 100% customized for my personal needs, and it's great.
As a mostly-retired dev, I have a few interesting side projects to keep me busy:
- 3D visualization of sea surface temps over time, very much a work in progress: https://globe-viz.oberbrunner.com
- Also a Deep Time log-scaled timeline of the history of the universe at https://deep-timeline.org
Cool! It would benefit from better physics though, maybe supersampling the position in time especially when moving fast. Each ball can't push to its edge fully, for instance.
darkstarsys commented on Cognitive load is what matters github.com/zakirullin/cog... · Posted by u/nromiun
Clearly they were missing Amanda, the engineer who's had to review others' terrible code (and her own) for 20 years, and has learned the hard way to keep it simple. She knows she's writing code mostly for people to read, not computers. Give me a small team of Amandas any day.
And as a manager/CTO, the way to do this is to give the devs time to think about what they're doing, and reward implementation clarity (though it's its own reward for Amandas).
darkstarsys commented on Cognitive load is what matters github.com/zakirullin/cog... · Posted by u/nromiun
This article reminds me of my early days at Microsoft. I spent 8 years in the Developer Division (DevDiv).
Microsoft had three personas for software engineers that were eventually retired for a much more complex persona framework called people in context (the irony in relation to this article isn’t lost on me).
But those original personas still stick with me and have been incredibly valuable in my career to understand and work effectively with other engineers.
Mort - the pragmatic engineer who cares most about the business outcome. If a “pile of if statements” gets the job done quickly and meets the requirements - Mort became a pejorative term at Microsoft unfortunately. VB developers were often Morts, Access developers were often Morts.
Elvis - the rockstar engineer who cares most about doing something new and exciting. Being the first to use the latest framework or technology. Getting visibility and accolades for innovation. The code might be a little unstable - but move fast and break things right? Elvis also cares a lot about the perceived brilliance of their code - 4 layers of abstraction? That must take a genius to understand and Elvis understands it because they wrote it, now everyone will know they are a genius. For many engineers at Microsoft (especially early in career) the assumption was (and still is largely) that Elvis gets promoted because Elvis gets visibility and is always innovating.
Einstein - the engineer who cares about the algorithm. Einstein wants to write the most performant, the most elegant, the most technically correct code possible. Einstein cares more if they are writing “pythonic” code than if the output actually solves the business problem. Einstein will refactor 200 lines of code to add a single new conditional to keep the codebase consistent. Einsteins love love love functional languages.
None of these personas represent a real engineer - every engineer is a mix, and a human with complex motivations and perspectives - but I can usually pin one of these 3 as the primary within a few days of PRs and a single design review.
Clearly they were missing Amanda, the engineer who's had to review others' terrible code (and her own) for 20 years, and has learned the hard way to keep it simple. She knows she's writing code mostly for people to read, not computers. Give me a small team of Amandas any day.
darkstarsys commented on Why agents are bad pair programmers justin.searls.co/posts/wh... · Posted by u/sh_tomer
Aider does everything right. Stop using Cursor or any other agentic environments. Try Aider, it works exactly as suggested here.
I prefer Claude Code (the `claude` cmd line version, with Sonnet 4) because it's more like an actual pair-programming session. It uses my claude acct rather than costing extra per token. It also hooks into all my MCP tools (shell (restricted), filesystem, ripgrep, test runners, etc. etc.) which makes it pretty amazing.
After turning off its annoying auto-commit-for-everything behavior, aider does work OK but it's harder to really get it to understand what I want during planning. Its new `--watch-files` thing is pretty darn cool though.