pedrozieg (u/pedrozieg)

pedrozieg commented on I'm a developer for a major food delivery app old.reddit.com/r/confessi... · Posted by u/apayan

joduplessis · a month ago

> put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.

I smell some bullshit.

pedrozieg · a month ago

“In a library on a burner laptop” - but I’ll narrow it down to people who have handed in their notice on a specific day.

pedrozieg commented on Going immutable on macOS, using Nix-Darwin carette.xyz/posts/going_i... · Posted by u/weird_trousers

pedrozieg · a month ago

A useful way to frame this isn’t “is it worth tens of hours to avoid a future reinstall” but “where do I want my entropy to live”. You’re going to invest time somewhere: either in a slowly-accumulating pile of invisible state (brew, manual configs, random installers) or in a config that you can diff, review and roll back. The former feels free until you hit some cursed PATH/SSL/toolchain issue at 11pm and realize you’ve been paying that tax all along, just in tiny, forgotten increments.

I think where Nix shines isn’t “one laptop every 6 years” but when your environment needs to be shared or recreated: multiple machines, a team, or a project with nasty native deps. At that point, nix-darwin + dev shells becomes infrastructure, not a hobby. You don’t have to go all-in on “my whole Mac is Nix” either: keep GUI apps and casual tools imperative, and treat Nix as the source of truth for the stuff that actually blocks you from doing work. That hybrid model matches what the article hints at and tends to give you most of the upside without turning your personal laptop into a second job.

pedrozieg commented on Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris kywch.github.io/blog/2025... · Posted by u/a1k0n

pedrozieg · a month ago

What I like about this writeup is that it quietly demolishes the idea that you need DeepMind-scale resources to get “superhuman” RL. The headline result is less about 2048 and Tetris and more about treating the data pipeline as the main product: careful observation design, reward shaping, and then a curriculum that drops the agent straight into high-value endgame states so it ever sees them in the first place. Once your env runs at millions of steps per second on a single 4090, the bottleneck is human iteration on those choices, not FLOPs.

The happy Tetris bug is also a neat example of how “bad” inputs can act like curriculum or data augmentation. Corrupted observations forced the policy to be robust to chaos early, which then paid off when the game actually got hard. That feels very similar to tricks in other domains where we deliberately randomize or mask parts of the input. It makes me wonder how many surprisingly strong RL systems in the wild are really powered by accidental curricula that nobody has fully noticed or formalized yet.

pedrozieg commented on Robots.txt Tester alertsleep.com/tools/robo... · Posted by u/thepatrykooo

pedrozieg · a month ago

Nice tool. Some of the text boxes, such as sitemap text, are not legible in dark mode - the text is light grey on a white background.

pedrozieg commented on How I protect my Forgejo instance from AI web crawlers her.esy.fun/posts/0031-ho... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

pedrozieg · 2 months ago

What I like about this approach is that it quietly reframes the problem from “detect AI” to “make abusive access patterns uneconomical”. A simple JS+cookie gate is basically saying: if you want to hammer my instance, you now have to spin up a headless browser and execute JS at scale. That’s cheap for humans, expensive for generic crawlers that are tuned for raw HTTP throughput.

The deeper issue is that git forges are pathological for naive crawlers: every commit/file combo is a unique URL, so one medium repo explodes into Wikipedia-scale surface area if you just follow links blindly. A more robust pattern for small instances is to explicitly rate limit the expensive paths (/raw, per-commit views, “download as zip”), and treat “AI” as an implementation detail. Good bots that behave like polite users will still work; the ones that try to BFS your entire history at line rate hit a wall long before they can take your box down.

pedrozieg commented on Biscuit is a specialized PostgreSQL index for fast pattern matching LIKE queries github.com/CrystallineCor... · Posted by u/eatonphil

pedrozieg · 2 months ago

Postgres’s extensible index AM story doesn’t get enough love, so it’s nice to see someone really lean into it for LIKE. Biscuit is basically saying: “what if we precompute an aggressive amount of bitmap structure (forward/backward char positions, case-insensitive variants, length buckets) so most wildcard patterns become a handful of bitmap ops instead of a heap scan or bitmap heap recheck?” That’s a very different design point from pg_trgm, which optimizes more for fuzzy-ish matching and general text search than for “I run a ton of LIKE '%foo%bar%' on the same columns”.

The interesting question in prod is always the other side of that trade: write amplification and index bloat. The docs are pretty up-front that write performance and concurrency haven’t been deeply characterized yet, and they even have a section on when you should stick with pg_trgm or plain B-trees instead. If they can show that Biscuit stays sane under a steady stream of updates on moderately long text fields, it’ll be a really compelling option for the common “poor man’s search” use case where you don’t want to drag in an external search engine but ILIKE '%foo%' is killing your box.

pedrozieg commented on Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works? · Posted by u/jannesblobel

pedrozieg · 2 months ago

Investors talk about HN like it’s a growth lever, but the site mostly behaves like a long-running reading habit with spam defenses. A tiny slice of users on /new decide whether you even get a shot, gravity slowly pushes old stuff down, there’s a “second chance” queue for posts that looked promising but died early, and moderators occasionally hand-tune obvious mistakes. Beyond that, it’s just a bunch of curious people clicking what looks interesting.

The only repeatable “strategy” I’ve seen work is: write things that would be interesting even if HN didn’t exist, and let other people submit them. Trying to treat HN as a distribution channel (carefully timed posts, optimized titles, orchestrated upvotes) reliably backfires because the software + mods are explicitly optimized against that. If you treat it as a weird little newspaper run by nerds for their own curiosity, the dynamics suddenly make a lot more sense.