greenie_beans (u/greenie_beans)

greenie_beans commented on See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments serjaimelannister.github.... · Posted by u/Imustaskforhelp

greenie_beans · 5 days ago

my comment was based on what i heard directly from a literary agent in november (also an anecdote). as a debut, my book needs to be 15k words longer in order for it to be worth the publicists time. because it needs to sell for enough so they get their time investment. which means, short novels don't sell enough for it to be worth an agent's time.

unless i found the right indie press or self-publish or already had a big platform.

greenie_beans · a day ago

*worth the agent's time

greenie_beans commented on Decentralizing my smartphone with single purpose devices ambertherambler.bearblog.... · Posted by u/speckx

Cthulhu_ · 5 days ago

And yet, there's a lot more deliberate-ness behind it. I can understand the appeal. But I don't do photography or writing so most of this would be wasted on me.

greenie_beans · 5 days ago

i encourage you to go out in the world with a notebook or camera with the express goal of writing/photoing observations. it might make you see the world in a slightly new way.

greenie_beans commented on See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments serjaimelannister.github.... · Posted by u/Imustaskforhelp

riskable · 5 days ago

Supposedly the latest trend deciding what novels get accepted by literary agents isn't the total number of words in the book, it's the total number of words in each chapter. They're getting much more strict about wanting chapters that are 1250-1500 words.

The reason is audiobooks: Having shorter chapters is a better user experience and audiobooks are really hot (money makers) right now.

This is just an anecdote though. I'm not an expert (only wrote one novel and my chapters were like ~2,500-3,500 words).

greenie_beans · 5 days ago

my comment was based on what i heard directly from a literary agent in november (also an anecdote). as a debut, my book needs to be 15k words longer in order for it to be worth the publicists time. because it needs to sell for enough so they get their time investment. which means, short novels don't sell enough for it to be worth an agent's time.

unless i found the right indie press or self-publish or already had a big platform.

greenie_beans commented on See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments serjaimelannister.github.... · Posted by u/Imustaskforhelp

greenie_beans · 5 days ago

i've written a novel's worth of words. yikes! ps, game of thrones is not a good comparison. a literary agent is more likely to take your novel seriously if you have more than 50k words

greenie_beans commented on Decentralizing my smartphone with single purpose devices ambertherambler.bearblog.... · Posted by u/speckx

greenie_beans · 5 days ago

i did this and it made for a horrible travel UX. leaving the house and you have to pack up an entire bag in case you might need to take a picture, write an observation, record an interesting noise, wayfind with a gps, etc

greenie_beans commented on How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills anthropic.com/research/AI... · Posted by u/vismit2000

LtWorf · 9 days ago

Don't rely solely on github actions?

greenie_beans · 9 days ago

it's only an example for a rhetorical question

greenie_beans commented on Water 'Bankruptcy' Era Has Begun for Billions, Scientists Say bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/ciconia

rayiner · 13 days ago

I'm curious. You complain about "profits," but do you know how much money private investors put into the water companies to begin with? Because the alternative to privatization was the government issuing bonds to get that money. Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?

Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/. It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.

Our subdivision had a community-owned water/sewer system built in the early 20th century that was failing. The county government came in and tore it all out and connected everyone to the public system back in 2014. The county imposed a charge of $32,000 per house, which was added to everyone's county tax bill to be paid over 20 years (with interest). That was just the cost of hooking one subdivision up to the existing water/sewer plants. The existing public system ended less than half a mile away.

greenie_beans · 9 days ago

dunno where you're located, but 32k for sewage and water doesn't seem that terribly expensive if you compare what it would cost for each house to dig a well and install a septic system.

greenie_beans commented on How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills anthropic.com/research/AI... · Posted by u/vismit2000

FitchApps · 9 days ago

This is all wonderful and all but what happens when these tools aren't available - you lose internet connection or the agent is misconfigured or you simply ran out of credits. How would someone support their business / software / livelihood? First, the agents would take our software writing tasks then they encroach on CI/CD and release process and take over from there...

Now, imagine a scenario of a typical SWE in todays or maybe not-so-distant future: the agents build your software, you simply a gate-keeper/prompt engineer, all tests pass, you're now doing a production deployment at 12am and something happens but your agents are down. At that point, what do you do if you haven't build or even deployed the system? You're like a L1 support at this point, pretty useless and clueless when it comes to fully understanding and supporting the application .

greenie_beans · 9 days ago

> This is all wonderful and all but what happens when these tools aren't available - you lose internet connection or the agent is misconfigured or you simply ran out of credits.

i would work on the hundreds of non-coding tasks that i need to do. or just not work?

what do you do when github actions goes down?