jim180 (u/jim180) - Readit News

jim180 commented on The History of Windows XP abortretry.fail/p/the-his... · Posted by u/achairapart

dijit · 16 days ago

Windows 98 (from my memory) was not very stable and horribly insecure.

I recall a handful of tools that anyone could use (I was 10-11 and could figure it out) to break and bluescreen Win 98 computers remotely.

10-11 year old me liked the XP theme, the icons were so “fresh”, nearly everything that came before was grey and boring (and the beige boxes didn’t make that better) so it was a welcome change to me at the time.

Now I’m old, I see the joy of grey high contrast consistent UI: what I am doing is more important than the shell around what I am doing.

jim180 · 16 days ago

it always depended on the hardware (being stable, security is another matter).

I've got friends who ran Windows ME and it was rock solid. My experience was very very different, same with Windows 98 SE.

With that being said my PC with Win95 OSR2 was super stable.

jim180 commented on Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video] youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmi... · Posted by u/sandslash

crmi · 2 months ago

I've got a working theory that models perform differently when used in different timezones... As in during US working hours they dont work as well due to high load. When used at 'offpeak' hours not only are they (obviously) snappier but the outputs appear to be a higher standard. Thought this for a while but now noticing with Claude4 [thinking] recently. Textbook case of anecdata of course though.

jim180 · 2 months ago

Same! I did notice, a couples of months ago, that same prompt in the morning failed and then, later that day, when starting from scratch with identical prompts, the results were much better.

jim180 commented on GCP Outage status.cloud.google.com/... · Posted by u/thanhhaimai

jim180 · 2 months ago

Claude Code is down :( too lazy to do manual conversion from Cocoapods dependency to SwiftPM

jim180 commented on GitHub Copilot Coding Agent github.blog/changelog/202... · Posted by u/net01

Scene_Cast2 · 3 months ago

I tried doing some vibe coding on a greenfield project (using gemini 2.5 pro + cline). On one hand - super impressive, a major productivity booster (even compared to using a non-integrated LLM chat interface).

I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions (putting things where they don't belong). Unfortunately, there's not that much self-retrospection on these aspects if you ask about the quality of the code or if there are any better ways of doing it. Of course, if you pick up that something is in the wrong spot and prompt better, they'll pick up on it immediately.

I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening. (Previously, as a heavy LLM user including coding tasks, I was averaging maybe $20 a month.)

jim180 · 3 months ago

I've vibe coded small project as well using Claude Code. It's about visitors registration at the company. Simple project, one form, a couple of checkboxes, everything is stored in sqlite + has endpoint for getting .xlsx.

Initial cost was around $20 USD, which later grew to (mostly polishing) $40 with some manual work.

I've intentionally picked up simple stack: html+js+php.

A couple of things:

* I'd say I'm happy about the result from product's perspective * Codebase could be better, but I could not care less about in this case * By default, AI does not care about security unless I specifically tell it * Claude insisted on using old libs. When I've specifically told it to use the latest and greatest, it upgraded them but left code that works just with an old version. Also it mixed latest DaisyUI with some old version of tailwindcss :)

On one hand it was super easy and fun to do, on the other hand if I was a junior engineer, I bet it would have cost more.

jim180 commented on The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack... · Posted by u/turrini

voidUpdate · 3 months ago

I mean, if you put win 95 on a period appropriate machine, you can do office work easily. All that is really driving computing power is the web and gaming. If we weren't doing either of those things as much, I bet we could all quite happily use machines from the 2000s era

jim180 · 3 months ago

I do have Windows 2000 installed with IIS (and some office stuff) in a ESXi for fun and nostalgia. It serves some static html pages within my local network. The host machine is some kind of i7 machine that is about 7-10 years old.

That machine is SOOOOOO FAST. I love it. To be honest, that tasks that I was doing back in the day are identical to today

jim180 commented on Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war insideevs.com/features/75... · Posted by u/rntn

ta1243 · 4 months ago

My car randomly braked today because it thought a car on a side road was pulling out. Not just sound the alarm but actually apply the brakes. Fortunately I didn't have a tailgater behind me.

I disable the "land assist" every time (which often tries to steer me into wildlife or other cars and was clearly not built for use on a single track country roads with hedges and random verges), but this was the first time in 3 years that the "front assist" caused problems.

If that's "high quality", I dread to think what low quality would be.

jim180 · 4 months ago

Same thing happened to my wife, while driving at about 110km/h…luckily no one was behind her.

jim180 commented on Qwen3: Think deeper, act faster qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwe... · Posted by u/synthwave

ggregoryarms · 4 months ago

Building a basic static html landing page is ridiculously easy though. What js is even needed? If it's just an html file and maybe a stylesheet of course it's easy to host. You can apply 20 lines of css and have a decent looking page.

These aren't hard problems.

jim180 · 4 months ago

Laziness mostly - no need to think about design, icons and layout (responsiveness and all that stuff).

These are not hard problems obviously, but getting to 80%-90% is faster than doing it by hand and in my cases that was more than enough.

With that being said, AI failed for the rest 10%-20% with various small visual issues.

jim180 commented on Qwen3: Think deeper, act faster qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwe... · Posted by u/synthwave

kaoD · 4 months ago

Personally (anecdata) I haven't experienced any practical progress in my day-to-day tasks for a long time, no matter how good they became at gaming the benchmarks.

They keep being impressive at what they're good at (aggregating sources to solve a very well known problem) and terrible at what they're bad at (actually thinking through novel problems or old problems with few sources).

E.g. all ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini were absolutely terrible at generating Liquidsoap[0] scripts. It's not even that complex, but there's very little information to ingest about the problem space, so you can actually tell they are not "thinking".

[0] https://www.liquidsoap.info/

jim180 · 4 months ago

Absolutely. All models ar terrible with Objective-C and Swift, compared to let's say JS/HTML/Python.

However, I've realized that Claude Code is extremely useful for generating somewhat simple landing pages for some of my projects. It spits out static html+js which is easy to host, with somewhat good looking design.

The code isn't the best and to some extent isn't maintainable by a human at all, but it gets the job done.

jim180 commented on Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan goughlui.com/2025/03/23/o... · Posted by u/csdvrx

Teever · 5 months ago

Could you recommend a usb CD drive for ripping audio CDs? A local library that I frequent has an extensive jazz collection and I'd like to rip it before they remove it, as I think it's just a matter of time before they do so.

jim180 · 5 months ago

I do have this[1] one (product code: 43888 not 43889). Ripped a bunch of CDs perfectly.

AFAIK, 43888 is preferred by makemkv forums as it's internal drive can be flashed to support ripping blu-rays as well.

[1] https://www.verbatim.com/prod/accessories/disc-drives--burne...

jim180 commented on Microsoft is killing Skype windowscentral.com/micros... · Posted by u/thund

dzhiurgis · 6 months ago

Do you know how providers detect your country when using wifi calling? Mine says it's only valid while you are within the country, wonder if VPN would work around it.

jim180 · 6 months ago

No idea, but Tello always worked outside of the U.S - Lithuania in my case.

I guess, provider will always consider your country where the phone number is located. Funny thing, while I'm roaming, my IP address will always be Lithuanian. It does not matter where the world I'm currently staying.