locknitpicker (u/locknitpicker)

locknitpicker commented on Why E cores make Apple silicon fast eclecticlight.co/2026/02/... · Posted by u/ingve

eviks · 10 hours ago

But it is, he's talking about real systems with real processes in a generic way, not a singular hypothetical where suddenly all that work must be done, so you can also apply you general knowledge that some of those background processes aren't useful (but can't even be disabled due to system lockdown)

locknitpicker · 9 hours ago

> (...) a singular hypothetical where suddenly all that work must be done (...)

This is far from being a hypothesis. This is an accurate description of your average workstation. I recommend you casually check the list of processes running at any given moment in any random desktop or laptop you find in a 5 meter radius.

locknitpicker commented on Why E cores make Apple silicon fast eclecticlight.co/2026/02/... · Posted by u/ingve

eviks · 13 hours ago

> The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in over 600 processes is good news, and the more of those that are run on the E cores, the faster our apps will be

This doesn't make sense in a rather fundamental way - there is no way to design a real computer where doing some useless work is better than doing no work, just think about energy consumption and battery life since this is laptops. Or that's just resources your current app can't use

Besides, they aren't that well engineered, bugs exist and last and come back, etc, so even when on average the impact isn't big, you can get a few photo analysis indexing going haywire for awhile and get stuck

locknitpicker · 9 hours ago

> (...) where doing some useless work is better than doing no work (...)

This take expresses a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole problem domain. There is a workload comprised of hundreds of processes, some of which multithreaded, that need to be processed. That does not change nor go away. You have absolutely no suggestion that any of those hundreds of processes is "useless". What you will certainly have are processes that will be waiting for IO, but waiting for a request to return a response is not useless.

locknitpicker commented on GPT-5.3-Codex openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

locknitpicker · 3 days ago

> All anonymous as well. Who are making these claims? script kiddies? sr devs? Altman?

You can take off your tinfoil hat. The same models can perform differently depending on the programming language, frameworks and libraries employed, and even project. Also, context does matter, and a model's output greatly varies depending on your prompt history.

locknitpicker commented on Exploring Different Keyboard Sensing Technologies lttlabs.com/articles/2026... · Posted by u/viraptor

orbital-decay · 5 days ago

Utilitarian device to type on became an object of obsessive consumption, collection, customization, showing off, fashion (RGB lighting, forced mechanical over scissor distinction even though many people prefer the latter, etc). Yeah of course it's a craze, without scare quotes.

The same gear obsession happened to the gaming mice world, but it was much tamer by comparison.

locknitpicker · 5 days ago

> Yeah of course it's a craze, without scare quotes.

This is a simplistic opinion to hold. You'd be better complaining that some people enjoy things. Form factor is important, also tactile response and sound. Features like embedding USB hubs or touchpads are essentially a given in laptops. Not being forced to throw a keyboard to the trashbin just because a key failed.

Is this a craze?

Ask yourself this: why are there people paying good money for gaming keyboards? Or Apple's magic keyboard. Is it a craze?

Or are you just complaining that other people enjoy things?

Think about it.

locknitpicker commented on Exploring Different Keyboard Sensing Technologies lttlabs.com/articles/2026... · Posted by u/viraptor

eknkc · 5 days ago

Is the mechanical keyboard craze still going on?

At some point everyone was talking about / showing off their mech keyboard in developer scene. I don’t think I’ve seen much in recent years.

I myself went deep into that for a while. Got a couple of keyboards and now I have two Apple Magic Keyboards. Don’t even know where I stashed my mechanicals.

locknitpicker · 5 days ago

> Is the mechanical keyboard craze still going on?

It depends on your definition of "craze".

Mechanical keyboards are more popular than ever, and became mainstream to the point where nowadays they are just considered keyboards. Even Logitech sells whole product lines of mechanical keyboards, and even has specialized lines of mechanical keyboards.

Also, multiple companies sell ergonomic keyboards that fall within the "craze" classification. Even if they don't ship with noisy switches, they are still in line with what mechanical keyboards were known for.

Nowadays even the pure mechanical keyboards have non-mechanical switches. Optical, magnetic, hall effect, etc. they ship in the standard cherry MX form factor. But aren't mechanical.

A few years ago you had blue switches, red switches, brown switches... You could count the types of switches with your fingers. Nowadays the offer is so vast that you can't keep track. Some companies even sell sample kits with an array of different types of switches for customers to try out. That's a relatively new development.

And do I need to mention the massive inflow of mechanical keyboards on offer from cheap Chinese manufacturers? We're not looking at 400€ mechanical keyboards, but 20€ mechanical keyboards.

The truth of the matter is that in the past you barely had any choice in keyboards. You could choose brand and color, but it was always the same keyboard. Anyone who wanted something beyond this pattern was drawn to mechanical keyboarss. Not today.

So, knowing this, do you think it is a "craze"?

locknitpicker commented on Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem bicameral-ai.com/blog/int... · Posted by u/jinhkuan

coffeefirst · 6 days ago

That’s not how this goes.

Because the entire codebase is crap, each user encounters a different bug. So now all your customers are mad, but they’re all mad for different reasons, and support is powerless to do anything about it. The problems pile up but they’re can’t be solved without a competent rewrite. This is a bad place to be.

And at some level of sloppiness you can get load bearing bugs, where there’s an unknown amount of behavior that’s dependent on core logic being dead wrong. Yes, I’ve encountered that one…

locknitpicker · 6 days ago

> That’s not how this goes.

Once you gain some professional experience working with software development, you'll understand that that's exactly how it goes.

I think you are failing to understand the "soft" in "software". Changing software is trivial. All software has bugs, but the only ones being worked on are those which are a) deemed worthy of being worked on, b) have customer impact.

> So now all your customers are mad, but they’re all mad for different reasons, and support is powerless to do anything about it.

That's not how it works. You are somehow assuming software isn't maintained. What do you think software developers do for a living?

locknitpicker commented on Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem bicameral-ai.com/blog/int... · Posted by u/jinhkuan

friendzis · 6 days ago

You not only stumble upon a weird bug in your hacky solution that takes engineering weeks to debug, but your interfaces are fragile so feature velocity drops (bugs reproduce and unless you address reproduction rate you end up fixing bugs only) and things are so tightly coupled that every two line change is now multi-week rewrite.

Look at e.g. facebook. That site has not shipped a feature in years and every time they ship something it takes years to make it stable again. A year or so ago facebook recognized that decades of fighting abuse led them nowhere and instead of fixing the technical side they just modified policies to openly allow fake accounts :D Facebook is 99% moltbook bot-to-bot trafic at this point and they cannot do anything about it. Ironically, this is a good argument against code quality: if you manage to become large enough to become a monopoly, you can afford to fix tech debt later. In reality, there is one unicorn for every ten thousand of startups that crumbled under their own technical debt.

locknitpicker · 6 days ago

> You not only stumble upon a weird bug in your hacky solution that takes engineering weeks to debug, but your interfaces are fragile so feature velocity drops (bugs reproduce and unless you address reproduction rate you end up fixing bugs only) and things are so tightly coupled that every two line change is now multi-week rewrite.

I don't think you fully grasp the issue you're discussing. Things don't happen in a vacuum, and your hypothetical "fragile interfaces" that you frame as being a problem are more often than not a lauded solution to quickly deliver a major feature.

The calling card of junior developers is looking at a project and complaining it's shit. Competent engineers understand tradeoffs and the importance of creating and managing technical debt.

locknitpicker commented on Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem bicameral-ai.com/blog/int... · Posted by u/jinhkuan

WD-42 · 6 days ago

I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value. You won’t see it right away which is probably where this sentiment is coming from, but it will absolutely catch up to you.

Elegant code isn’t just for looks. It’s code that can still adapt weeks, months, years after it has shipped and created “business value”.

locknitpicker · 6 days ago

> I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value.

That's a rather short-sighted opinion. Ask yourself how "inelegant code" find it's way into a codebase, even with working code review processes.

The answer more often than not is what's typically referred to as tech debt driven development. Meaning, sometimes a hacky solution with glaring failure modes left unaddressed is all it takes to deliver a major feature in a short development cycle. Once the feature is out, it becomes less pressing to pay off that tech debt because the risk was already assumed and the business value was already created.

Later you stumble upon a weird bug in your hacky solution. Is that bug negative business value?

locknitpicker commented on Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem bicameral-ai.com/blog/int... · Posted by u/jinhkuan

verdverm · 6 days ago

meh piece, don't feel like I learned anything from it. Mainly words around old stats in a rapidly evolving field, and then trying to pitch their product

tl;dr content marketing

There is this super interesting post in new about agent swarms and how the field is evolving towards formal verification like airlines, or how there are ideas we can draw on. Any, imo it should be on the front over this piece

"Why AI Swarms Cannot Build Architecture"

An analysis of the structural limitations preventing AI agent swarms from producing coherent software architecture

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866184

locknitpicker · 6 days ago

> meh piece, don't feel like I learned anything from it.

That's fine. I found the leading stats interesting. If coding assistants slowed down experienced developers while creating a false sense of development speed then that should be thought-provoking. Also, nearly half of code churned by coding assistants having security issues. That he's tough.

Perhaps it's just me, but that's in line with my personal experience, and I rarely see those points being raised.

> There is this super interesting post in new about agent swarms and how (...)

That's fine. Feel free to submit the link. I find it far more interesting to discuss the post-rose tinted glasses view of coding agents. I don't think it makes any sense at all to laud promises of formal verification when the same technology right now is unable to introduce security vulnerabilities.

locknitpicker commented on Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

jFriedensreich · 7 days ago

No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again". I feel about 100% less stressed and happier using a waymo or riding motorbike or bicycle next to a waymo than with human drivers. I hope this next phase will bring availability and prices down. We need this in europe.

locknitpicker · 7 days ago

> No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again".

I still recall when taxi services were the only offering, and Uber et al were marketed as ride sharing services instead of ride hailing services. It's hard to put into words the transformative effect that ride hailing services had throughout the world. Overall rides are now far safer and more reliable, to the point where the old days feel like the dark ages.