“There are only two hard things in computer science. Cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.”
My favorite form is when someone shouts "concurrency" in the middle of the sentence.
Readit NewsThat's what happening at our company.
The owner lives in London and rarely visits but he has arranged for AI consultants to come in and workshop with us to see how "AI can help the business". Our operations mainly consist of data entry.
Isn't data entry a really good usecase for the LLM technologies? Of course depending on the exact usecase. But most "data entry" jobs are data transformation jobs and they get automated using ML techniques all the time. Current LLMs are really good at data transformation too.
newswasboring commented on IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023) blogsystem5.substack.com/... · Posted by u/AlexeyBrin
I grew up on the borland Turbo series. Learned C then C++ on it. Such nostalgia.
I was wondering, is there a way to get VS code to look like this? Maybe neoVim?
newswasboring commented on A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code sanity.io/blog/first-atte... · Posted by u/kmelve
I’m happy for it to be on OSS, so long as that software is reasonably well known (ie user base is not a handful of people) and is used in production.
What difference does it make how many people use it? Complex software exists all over the world for handful of users. I personally work in an industry where anything we create will be used by at max 100 people worldwide. Does it diminish the complexity of code? I think not.
newswasboring commented on A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code sanity.io/blog/first-atte... · Posted by u/kmelve
Great video! Even more, shows a few things - how good it is with such a niche language but also exposes some direct flaws.
First off, Rust represents quite a small part of the training dataset (last I checked it was under 1% of code dataset) in most public sets, so it's got waaay less training then other languages like TS or Java. You added 2 solid features, backed with tests and documentation and nice commit messages. 80% of devs would not deliver this in 2.5 hours.
Second, there was a lot of time/token waste messing around with git and git messages. Few tips I noticed that could help you in the workflow:
#1: Add a subagent for git that knows your style, so you don't poison direct claude context and spend less tokens/time fighting it.
#2: Claude has hooks, if your favorite language has a formatter like rust fmt, just use hooks to run rust fmt and similar.
#3: Limit what they test, as most LLM models tend to write overeager tests, including testing if "the field you set as null is null", wasting tokens.
#5: Saying "max 50 characters title" doesn't really mean anything to the LLM. They have no inherent ability to count, so you are relying on probability, which is quite low since your context is quite filled at this point. If they want to count the line length, they also have to use external tools. This is an inherent LLM design issue and discussing it with an LLM doesn't get you anywhere really.
> #3: Limit what they test, as most LLM models tend to write overeager tests, including testing if "the field you set as null is null", wasting tokens.
Heh, I write this for some production code too (python). I guess because python is not typed, I'm testing if my pydantic implementation works.
Steve Jobs is the reason Wozniak could give away tens of millions and still have $10M and multiple houses. Otherwise he would have been a good engineer and lived a nice quiet life, but nothing like the world-touring adventure he got.
Steve Jobs needed Wozniak at the time and it was fortunate for him, but his personality and ambition were so strong it's very likely he would have been a big deal in any scenario.
The way you have discounted Wozniak's talent, one can also discount Steve's ambition. There are thousands of people same or more ambitious than Jobs. Being ambitious doesn't guarantee anything, neither does being as good as wozniak only work when combined with ambition.
> when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for
What's that? It's not obvious to me, anyway.
My guess would be local AI. Apple Silicon is uniquely suitable with its shared memory.
newswasboring commented on OpenAI's new GPT-5 models announced early by GitHub theverge.com/news/752091/... · Posted by u/bkolobara
idk man, I'm still working the same hours as 10 years ago, and my retirement age went up since then, if anything I'm working way more, certainly more than my parents and grandparents
Yes precisely what I am trying to say. This is not an outcome of technology, its an outcome of how our socio-economic system is set up. The company owners could have easily given you the benefit of technology improvement, made a 3 day work week or made a 4 hour work day and hired more people or reduced their own ambitions. Instead they chose to squeeze everything out of you.
newswasboring commented on OpenAI's new GPT-5 models announced early by GitHub theverge.com/news/752091/... · Posted by u/bkolobara
> It took something which reduces work and made it a bad thing.
It doesn't reduce work, it improves productivity, and virtually none of the productivity boost of the last 50 years benefited the worker. So you end up working the same hours, producing more and not being paid for the difference
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
Improved productivity is reduced work. We dont have to work the same hours. Labor doesn't always have to relent.
1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.
2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good.
3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.
At that point why even have a journal, let's just put everything as a Reddit post and be done with it. We will get comment abilities for free.
Maintaining quality standards is a good service, the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.