Get a grip physicists, the triple lock won't pay for itself.
We can't be spending our hard taxed money for science and other redundant vanity projects.
We have motability cars to fund and house visits at 2m mansions to arrange.
Readit Newslaylower commented on U.K. physics community braces for deep funding cuts science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/sega_sai
I am sorry, but what did you expect? Since before Snowden we knew this was coming and this dystopian future is here only because we didn't care enough to do something about it.
Now, where are all these 'I don't have anything to hide people?' I don't see them anywhere...
laylower commented on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? · Posted by u/terabytest
The only approach I've tried that seems to work reasonably well, and consistently, was the following:
Make a commit.
Give Claude a task that's not particularly open ended, the closer to pure "monkey work" boilerplate nonsense the task is, the better (which is also the sort of code I don't want do deal with myself).
Preferably it should be something that only touches a file or two in the codebase unless it is a trivial refactor (like changing the same method call all over the place)
Make sure it is set to planning mode and let it come up with a plan.
Review the plan.
Let it implement the plan.
If it works, great, move on to review. I've seen it one-shot some pretty annoying tasks like porting code from one platform to another.
If there are obvious mistakes (program doesn't build, tests don't pass, etc.) then a few more iterations usually fix the issue.
If there are subtle mistakes, make a branch and have it try again. If it fails, then this is beyond what it can do, abort the branch and solve the issue myself.
Review and cleanup the code it wrote, it's usually a lot messier than it needs to be. This also allows me to take ownership of the code. I now know what it does and how it works.
I don't bother giving it guidelines or guardrails or anything of the sort, it can't follow them reliably. Even something as simple as "This project uses CMake, build it like this" was repeatedly ignored as it kept trying to invoke the makefile directly and in the wrong folder.
This doesn't save me all that much time since the review and cleanup can take long, but it serves a great unblocker.
I also use it as a rubber duck that can talk back and documentation source. It's pretty good for that.
This idea of having an army of agents all working together on the codebase is hilarious to me. Replace "agents" with "juniors I hired on fiverr with anterograde amnesia" and it's about how well it goes.
That's the way.
laylower commented on Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper davekiss.com/blog/ideas-a... · Posted by u/grncdr
Ideas are cheap for a very narrow vision of "ideas". Sure, you can build your recipe site, TODO list or whatever it is cheaply and quickly without a single thought, but LLMs are still just assembling lots of open-source libraries _mostly_ written by humans into giant piles of spaghetti.
There's a hilarious thread on Twitter where someone "built a browser" using an LLM feedback loop and it just pasted together a bunch of Servo components, some random other libraries and tens of thousands of spaghetti glue to make something that can render a webpage in a few seconds to a minute.
This will eventually get better once they learn how to _actually_ think and reason like us - and I don't believe by any means that they do - but I still think that's a few years out. We're still at what is clearly a strongly-directed random search stage.
The industry is going through a mass psychosis event right now thinking that things are ready for AI loops to just write everything, when the only real way for them to accomplish anything is by just burning tokens over and over until they finally stumble across something that works.
I'm not arguing that it won't ever happen. I think the true endgame of this work is that we'll have personal agents that just do stuff for us, and the vast majority of the value of the entire software industry will collapse as we all return to writing code as a fun little hobby, like those folks who spend hours making bespoke furniture. I, for one, look forward to this.
I agree with your vision of endgame. We wouldn't even need a screen, we will communicate verbally or with signs with our agents with some device that will have a long battery life and will always be on.
I just hope that we retain some version of autonomy and privacy because no one wants the tech giants listening in every single word you utter because your agent heard it. No-one wants it but some, not many, care.
Agents deployed locally should be the goal.
laylower commented on Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app github.com/cjpais/Handy... · Posted by u/tin7in
Is it deployed locally or does it send data to your servers?
laylower commented on Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/... · Posted by u/nickcotter
Anything is better than nothing but the fact of the matter is that it's still Amazon. It's the same amazon than gives ring cameras unfettered warrantless access to people's home, literally pays homage to kings and is a US company through and through.
Go European if you can - there was an article not too long ago that described how it was actually cheaper to use a EU cloud provider than AWS.
Also I read the article and the term 'digital sovereignty' is used. I don't think it means what the author thinks it means...
I've been experimenting with using LLMs for a content recommender system. Specifically I've built a news reader app that fetches news articles from multiple RSS feeds, uses an LLM to first deduplicate and then score them. The user can then rate the articles and those ratings are used as few-shot examples in the LLM scoring prompt. Any resulting low score articles (uninteresting to the user) are hidden by default and visible ones scaled by their score on a dynamic CSS grid like on a traditional newspaper front page. Looking good so far, but still testing and tweaking.
https://www.newsminimalist.com/ has been doing this for a couple of years with reasonable success. I think yours is a fresh take, I like it.
laylower commented on Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC tuxedocomputers.com/en/Di... · Posted by u/Venn1
laylower commented on Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC tuxedocomputers.com/en/Di... · Posted by u/Venn1
It's a shame that this didn't end up going anywhere. When Qualcomm was doing their press stuff prior to the Snapdragon X launch, they said that they'd be putting equal effort into supporting both Windows and Linux. If anyone here is running Linux on a Snapdragon X laptop, I'd be curious to know what the experience is like today.
I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips. They have similar performance/battery life, and run cool (so you can use the laptop on your lap or in bed without it overheating), but have full Linux support today and you don't have to deal with x86 emulation. If anyone needs a thin & light Linux laptop today, they're probably your best option. Personally, I get 10-14 hours of real usage (not manufacturer "offline video playback with the brightness turned all the way down" numbers) on my Vivobook S14 running Fedora KDE. In the future, it'll be interesting to see how Intel's upcoming Panther Lake chips compare to Snapdragon X2.
I'm typing this from a snapdragon x elite HP. It's fine really but my use is fairly basic. I only use it to watch movies, read, browse, and draft word and excel, some light coding.
No gaming - and I came in knowing full well that a lot of the mainstream programs don't play well with snapdragon.
What has amazed me the most is the battery life and the seemingly no real lag or micro-stuttering that you get in some other laptops.
So, in all, fine for light use. For anything serious, use a desktop.
Cory talked about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs