gommm (u/gommm) - Readit News

gommm commented on Returning to Rails in 2026 markround.com/blog/2026/0... · Posted by u/stanislavb

fy20 · 5 days ago

There was a post last week about the best programming language for LLMs, and in the comments people loved Go, with the claim being it's very opinionated and there's really only one way of doing things. I'd say the same is mostly true for Rails apps as well.

However having worked with Typescript for 8 years now... I'm not sure I could go back to Ruby without types. For LLMs thats important as well, the more guard rails you can give them the better. What's the state of type checkers today?

gommm · 5 days ago

Personally I love rust for agents because of types. In the ruby world there's sorbet and rbs so would be interesting to try that.

gommm commented on We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/rajeshrajappan

fcatalan · 3 months ago

Not as hugely generous as this story, but during his whole college professor career since the 70s, my father always took care that none of his students spent any major holidays alone and away from home, so we always ended up having 2 or 3 of them around for Christmas, the New Year, Easter... They were from everywhere around the country and the world, and it was so very enriching for me and my siblings. I had a huge postage stamp collection from the ever increasing well wishing mail that arrived. It's also kind of comforting to think that anywhere in the world you are not that far from someone that remembers you fondly.

gommm · 3 months ago

When I was an exchange student at RIT and had just arrived from France a month before, one of the admin staff invited me and a friend in the same situation for thanksgiving because she didn't want to leave us by ourselves for a major holiday. I have fond memories of that kindness.

gommm commented on You can't cURL a Border drobinin.com/posts/you-ca... · Posted by u/valzevul

embedding-shape · 4 months ago

I do the opposite, set up everything myself in terms of architecture/design of the software, so the AI can do the boring boilerplate like "math heavy rules". Always interesting to see how differently we all use LLMs.

gommm · 4 months ago

I've usually not been impressed in AI's implementation of math heavy rules so I wouldn't trust it much and I tend to find it easier for me to write them myself and then verify :) Yup, it's always interesting to see the different usages.

gommm commented on You can't cURL a Border drobinin.com/posts/you-ca... · Posted by u/valzevul

zahlman · 4 months ago

> create a DSL (or create easily readable function calls, etc)

These aren't really that different. Consider the history of the earliest (non-assembly) programming languages, particularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedcoding , as well as the ideas expressed by Lisp.

gommm · 4 months ago

Oh yeah, that's why I added the parenthesis. I consider lisp macros to be a dsl and that's exactly what I tend to like using. Similarly with ruby and some meta programming tricks.

gommm commented on You can't cURL a Border drobinin.com/posts/you-ca... · Posted by u/valzevul

oarsinsync · 4 months ago

Huge respect to the author for the details that have gone into this. I'd spent a week hammering at a Claude max 20x plan to try and build schengen 90/180 rolling window + tax residency in a couple of countries tracker... and that was hard work. I can only imagine how much effort has gone into this, to get all the details right.

It's unclear whether the author wrote all of this themselves, or if they outsourced a bunch of it to Claude. My experience with Claude was that it was terrible at writing code to do the math, even when I explained what the calculation needed to be, what the input was, and what the expected result was. It ultimately took starting a whole new project just to do the rolling window calculation, and then have that fed back in.

My biggest question for the author, if they happen to see this, is: how much manual testing validation did you do of the outputs the app produces? IE: Did you do the inputs + transformations = output calculations yourself as well, counting days on calendars, etc, to validate that the app is actually accurate? (That was the only way I developed any faith in solution I made for myself, which is way less impressive than your app). Regardless of whether you wrote the code yourself or not, a thorough test harness feels vitally important for an app like this.

gommm · 4 months ago

I tend to find that for things like this that are really math heavy, it's usually better to create a DSL (or create easily readable function calls, etc) that you can easily write yourself instead of relying on AI to understand math heavy rules. Bonus points, if the rules are in an easily editable format, you can change them easily when they need to. It seems that was the path the author took...

And yes this kind of use-case is exactly where unit tests shine...

gommm commented on China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show bbc.com/news/articles/cq5... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

dan-robertson · 4 months ago

Without knowing anything about your situation, this sounds like a bad idea. I think roughly you want a university that is well-regarded[1] and hard to get into so that one’s attendance carries some signal.

[1] by well-regarded, I mean well-regarded by eg people at competently run well-paying firms who do hiring, rather than eg people who are really into politics and who have idiosyncratic opinions about particular universities

gommm · 4 months ago

Oh I mean alternative would be a well regarded university/school in Germany or France... I'm French but we live in HK and most kids here (even the ones who go to the French International School or the German Swiss School) end up trying to go to UK or US universities. French and German international schools tend to not be that well ranked in the most well known rankings despite being very good technically (which is annoying when trying to get a visa to certain countries).

Part of my bias is that I was an exchange student at RIT and while I appreciated the experience, I was not impressed by the CS courses or the level of maths of the students going there.

gommm commented on China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show bbc.com/news/articles/cq5... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

ekjhgkejhgk · 4 months ago

That only doesnt look crazy if youre used to American numbers. Anywhere else in the world thats crazy expensive.

gommm · 4 months ago

That's what the French government paid per year per student at my engineering school in the early 2000s. Tuition fees paid by the student were 540 euros a year, but the cost to the government was quite high.

gommm commented on China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show bbc.com/news/articles/cq5... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

ekjhgkejhgk · 4 months ago

> he said he's basically not allowed to fail them even if they don't turn anything in, the funding they get is far too important.

In my country of origin, the prestigious universities were all public and (almost) free. The most sough after degrees are difficult to get in and difficult to finish.

There, the mentality is that the only reason why would you pay for a private university is if youre not smart enough to finish the degrees on your own. I always found it intriguing that the logic is reversed in the US - the good ones are the expensive ones and the only reason you wouldnt go there is if you cant afford it. But Im glad to see that the logic in my home country does have some merit, as evidenced by the quote from your professor.

gommm · 4 months ago

France is the same, the better universities are all public. But I know that the government spent an average of 35,000 euros per students at top public engineering schools in the early 2000s, not sure nowadays, so they do have funds it's just that the way of bringing money depends on actually being great academically.

gommm commented on China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show bbc.com/news/articles/cq5... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

gambiting · 4 months ago

It's an open secret that UK universities are propped up by international students paying crazy fees(as much as £35k/year) to come and study here, and most of them are from China. Even when I did my CS Masters degree at a Russel group university I'd say half of the course was international students paying full fees, I was repeatedly told by professors that they are vital to funding of the Computer Science school and university as a whole(which is insane considering how much home students are paying, but I digress).

Anecdotally - some of them(definitely not all, not even a majority) - clearly didn't care about actually learning anything, they just spent the entire day in the lab playing LoL or didn't actually turn up. In a private conversation with our professor he said he's basically not allowed to fail them even if they don't turn anything in, the funding they get is far too important. And they still have to somehow produce an MSc thesis at the end to get their degree, so in the eyes of the university they are still passing correctly to get their degree.

Either way - UK universities are too dependent on that funding to risk angering China which can easily make it a pain to go to UK to study.

gommm · 4 months ago

This is why when my son is old enough to choose a university, I'd probably try to advise him against doing undergrad in a UK or US university if he's studying STEM. Based on interviewing CS graduates, it doesn't seem that the level is that high in most UK/US universities compared to other countries (of course with the exclusion of the very top) and that seems partly due to a culture of pushing for profits over education and making it very hard to fail.

gommm commented on JetKVM – Control any computer remotely jetkvm.com/... · Posted by u/elashri

gommm · 5 months ago

I've been using it since I got it. It's been working great with one small issue that I haven't been able to solve. For some reason when I use plasma on Arch linux (but not ubuntu), the display outputs garbage. I'm guessing it's not detecting the EDID correctly and setting a weird resolution or refresh rate. It's not a major issue since other desktop work well so I haven't spent much time looking into it.