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nicodjimenez commented on Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer   spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-he... · Posted by u/tintinnabula
nicodjimenez · 15 days ago
Part of what makes Hendrix's live performances so great is how completely unreproducible they are. Even Jimi himself could never recreate that one note sustain when he begins the solo on Machine Gun. To re-create it, you'd have to set the room up exactly the same, tune the guitar exactly the same, position the guitar relative to amps exactly the same, etc. So Hendrix being very sensitive and connected to the room was able to harness that energy into something unique that stands the test of time. Machine Gun is well known, but his Red House performance at Randall's Island also stands out to me as exceptional, those are the 2 key Hendrix performances. I read somewhere that Miles Davis was really impressed by Machine Gun and you can see why.

One thing I learned after buying some gear at home to try to record electric guitar at low volume is how important the physics of the speakers are. You can plug a tube amp into a cabinet simulator and you'll lose a lot more than using solid state electronics on a good but not great Fender amp, especially if you use fuzz / distortion pedals.

I'm not sure Hendrix was a systems engineer, but he was a transcendent blues artist, that's for sure.

nicodjimenez commented on A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks   twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/bigwheels
nsainsbury · a month ago
Touching on the atrophy point, I actually wrote a few thoughts about this yesterday: https://www.neilwithdata.com/outsourced-thinking

I actually disagree with Andrej here re: "Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain." and I would argue that the only reason he can read code fluently, find issues, etc. is because he has spent year in a non-AI assisted world writing code. As time goes on, he will become substantially worse.

This also bodes incredibly poorly for the next generation, who will mostly in their formative years now avoid writing code and thus fail to even develop a idea of what good code is, how it works/why it works, why you make certain decisions, and not others, etc. and ultimately you will see them become utterly dependent on AI, unable to make progress without it.

IMO outsourcing thinking is going to have incredibly negative consequences for the world at large.

nicodjimenez · a month ago
great article and many great points here
nicodjimenez commented on Welcome to Gas Town   steve-yegge.medium.com/we... · Posted by u/gmays
nicodjimenez · 2 months ago
What I dislike about Claude code and vibe coding in general is that I haven’t seen Claude code users learn a whole lot about how to do their jobs better. A terminal pane is just too small to be a good place to learn.

With vibe coding you just give the code some constraints and then system will try to work within those constraints, but what if those constraints are wrong? What if you’re asking the wrong question? Then you’ll end up with over complicated slop.

It’s a shame that vibe coded slop seems to be a new standard, when in fact you can use AI tools to produce much higher quality code if you actually care to engage in thoughtful conversations with the AIs and take a growth mindset.

nicodjimenez commented on Microservices should form a polytree   bytesauna.com/post/micros... · Posted by u/mapehe
nicodjimenez · 3 months ago
This seems completely wrong. In an RPC call you have a trivial loop, for example.

It would make more sense to say that the event tree should not have any cycles, but anyway this seems like a silly point to make.

nicodjimenez · 3 months ago
My main take on microservices at this point is that you only want microservices to isolate failure modes and for independent scaling. Most IO bound logic can live in a single monolith.
nicodjimenez commented on Microservices should form a polytree   bytesauna.com/post/micros... · Posted by u/mapehe
nicodjimenez · 3 months ago
This seems completely wrong. In an RPC call you have a trivial loop, for example.

It would make more sense to say that the event tree should not have any cycles, but anyway this seems like a silly point to make.

nicodjimenez commented on Go's Sweet 16   go.dev/blog/16years... · Posted by u/0xedb
grey-area · 4 months ago
Microservices are entirely unrelated to classes and in no way endemic to go.

Go’s lack of inheritance is one of its bolder decisions and I think has been proven entirely correct in use.

Instead of the incidental complexity encouraged by pointless inheritance hierarchies we go back to structure which bundle data and behaviour and can compose them instead.

Favouring composition over inheritance is not a new idea nor did it come from the authors of Go.

Also the author of Java (Gosling) disagrees with you.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2160788/why-extends-is-evi...

nicodjimenez · 4 months ago
Microservices in Golang are definitely related to classes due to the ergonomic aspects of a language. It takes a lot of discipline in Golang not to end up with huge flat functions. Golang services are easier to reason about when they are small due to the lack of abstractions, also Golang is very quick to compile, so its natural to just add services to extend functionality. Code re-use is just a lot of work in Golang. Golang is not monolith friendly IMO.
nicodjimenez commented on Go's Sweet 16   go.dev/blog/16years... · Posted by u/0xedb
wanderlust123 · 4 months ago
I think lack of classes is highly desirable. So much enterprise code is poorly put together abstractions.

I think go needs some more functional aspects, like iterators and result type/pattern matching.

nicodjimenez · 4 months ago
The solution to bad abstractions it not to make it very difficult to create abstractions at all. For systems code I think it's fine but for application code you probably want some abstractions or else it's very hard to scale a codebase.
nicodjimenez commented on Go's Sweet 16   go.dev/blog/16years... · Posted by u/0xedb
nicodjimenez · 4 months ago
Golang to me is a great runtime and very poor language. I could maybe get used to the C pointer-like syntax and to half of my code checking if err != nil, but the lack of classes is a step too far. The Golang idiomatic approach is to have a sprawling set of microservices talking to each other over the network, to manage complexity instead of having classes. This makes sense for things like systems agents (eg K8) but doesn't make sense for most applications because it complicates the development experience unnecessarily and monoliths are also easier to debug.

I would not use Golang for a big codebase with lots of business logic. Golang has not made a dent in Java usage at big companies, no large company is going to try replacing their Java codebases with Golang because there's no benefit, Java is almost as fast as Golang and has classes and actually has a richer set of concurrency primitives.

nicodjimenez commented on I hate screenshots of text   parkscomputing.com/page/i... · Posted by u/paulmooreparks
nicodjimenez · 4 months ago
Note that Mathpix Snip can quickly convert such screen shots to markdown code via keyboard shortcut. Disclaimer: I’m the founder.
nicodjimenez commented on Populism Fast and Slow   josephheath.substack.com/... · Posted by u/colonCapitalDee
nicodjimenez · 5 months ago
There are only two political systems at the end of the day: authoritarianism (everyone knows who is in charge) and oligarchy. Populism, in a liberal democracy, is basically authoritarianism-lite representing the interests of a particular faction of oligarchs. There's no "populism" in China, that's an American & European invention. Populism is ugly but it's a useful tool that can get things done in an oligarchy.

u/nicodjimenez

KarmaCake day638October 15, 2015View Original