Honestly, this is a reasonable itemization of experience with individual tools, but this reads like a recipe for Company Cake instead of a case-by-case statement of need, selection, and then evaluation. Cargo culting continues to wrap its tendrils around the industry and try to drag it into the depths of mediocrity, and this largely reads to me like a primer for how to saddle yourself with endless SaaS bills. I recognize that every situation has its nuances, but I think approaching running a company from "what tools do you use" is pretty much the biggest possible example of ignoring that maxim.
Readit Newsesoterae commented on Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024) cep.dev/posts/every-infra... · Posted by u/Meetvelde
Yes, this is very true and it speaks strongly to this wayward notion of 'models' - it depends so much on the tuning, the harness, the tools.
I think it speaks to the broader notion of AGI as well.
Claude is definitively trained on the process of coding not just the code, that much is clear.
Codex has the same limitation but not quite as bad.
This may be a result of Anthropic using 'user cues' with respect to what are good completions and not, and feeding that into the tuning, among other things.
Anthropic is winning coding and related tasks because they're focused on that, Google is probably oriented towards a more general solution, and so, it's stuck in 'jack of all trades master of none' mode.
The full aphorism is:
Jack of all trades, master of none, is oftentimes better than master of one.
esoterae commented on The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists lewiscampbell.tech/blog/2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
It's weird how some people seem to treat using an LLM as part of their personality in a borderline cult like way. So someone saying they don't use it or don't find it useful triggers an anger response in them.
If a vegan LLM evangelist crossfitter comes up to you at party, which one do they talk about first?
What a remarkable stalking horse to try and kneecap right-to-repair by arguing "Please, think of the chil^H^H^H^Hhackers!"
You wouldn't download a CAR, would you? You wouldn't hack your own INSULIN pump, would you?
Face it: If it's GPL and vulnerable to interference, responsibility is squarely on the manufacturer and the fastest death-free way to prove it. If it's GPL and modified by the owner, fuck off.
esoterae commented on Show HN: Does Information Density Cause Time Dilation? · Posted by u/Jonghwa_Lee
Landauer demonstrated that erasing a bit releases heat. If information is fiction, implies that energy is fiction too?
I think their point was that there is no empirical definition of information as it relates to the observer. The expurimint you cite worked upon a physical system that already had a state prior to the expurimint.
If everything is information, then nothing is.
A disordered system still has state. You just don't know what it is.
My background is philosophy of language. I studied formal/mathematical logic in grad school. I was always embarrassed that I couldn't code, but the computer sciences classes were teaching languages that were inscrutable for someone even with my background, with syntax heavily focused on jargony math and technical concepts like object orientation (likely java at the time).
Around 2010, I was talking about this with friend about this failing of mine, and he said "you should try python, I've heard it is popular with non-math folks." So I bought a book, and as soon as I opened it, I could just read it. It took me a couple days of reading to wrap my head around object orientation, but on the functional side, I could have written fizz buzz like, maybe half an hour after opening the book.
Humans have logic pre-built into our brains, it's just that we use natural language as our syntax. Python cleverly used as much of the natural language syntax as was practicable to remove the barriers to entry for non-math majors. Whitespace is perfect example of a natural language syntax feature.
The whitespace thing is actually one of python's major flaws. That feature attaches syntactic meaning to non-printing characters. From a human standpoint, there're many examples of silence having some kind of meaning. From an engineering standpoint, that entire methodology is insane. Communication needs to be positive and deliberate.
Remember that Apple SSL bug "goto fail"? That was a whitespace bug, because even if the C feature predated python, everyone's eyes had been trained to slide right off that particularly crass shortcut as python was widespread by that point.
esoterae commented on Everyone in Seattle hates AI jonready.com/blog/posts/e... · Posted by u/mips_avatar
Where does one begin with this kind of fallacy-ridden mud slinging? Appeals to both authority and majority, and guilt by location just to name the first three.
So what if "everyone in Seattle hates AI"? What gives The Author the right to simultaneously invalidate Seattle's comparatively immeasurably larger advantage in experience, qualification, and education? If even the ludicrously biased title had even the barest hint of truth to it, they've stacked the deck against themselves in credibility unless they've already mentally biased themselves to blindly dismiss anyone that doesn't mirror their own now blatant fanaticism. Which we've already established now includes all of Seattle.
So put this out on the curb with the rest of the garbage meant to inflame and divide, because on it's face it is neither reasonable nor factual.
esoterae commented on Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley (1962) lettersofnote.com/2016/02... · Posted by u/giraffe_lady
A tangent..
> Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy
That title is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (in particular his 1884 book "Grundlagen der Arithmetik", and his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung") who directly influenced Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who all later became large influences on analytic philosophy themselves. Frege is most known for the invention of modern predicate logic.
Where do any of us stand but on the shoulders of giants?
esoterae commented on Why do we keep gravitating toward complexity? kyrylo.org/software/2025/... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
-- C. A. R. Hoareesoterae commented on Dangerous advice for software engineers seangoedecke.com/dangerou... · Posted by u/gxhao
Reading this as a pilot, this thing reads like a primer for How Not To Think.
The author might think they're being a meta-pirate by saying "oh these are all possible actions proscribed by most organizations" implying that the proscription itself is a sign of ossified incompetence, instead of identifying the underlying one-true-savior fallacy that underpins it all.
The general danger here is human error. The point of leveraging a collaborative environment is to design process to detect and remediate human error before it radiates outward into more cost. The farther it goes, generally, the higher the cost, non-linearly. It shouldn't be "never do this", but instead "if you're going to do this use every tool at your disposal to make sure it's done correctly." Siloing the entire decision tree to yourself is exactly how not to do it.