placebo (u/placebo) - Readit News

placebo commented on Believe the Checkbook robertgreiner.com/believe... · Posted by u/rg81

zmj · 3 days ago

Do people reading this post not understand that this is the output of a prompt like 'analyze <event> with <perspective> arriving at <conclusion>'? Tighten up your epistemology if you're arguing with an author who isn't there.

placebo · 3 days ago

The very fact that people are arguing with a non-existent author signals that whatever generated the content did a good enough job to fool them today. Tomorrow it will do a good enough job to fool you. I think the more important question is what this means in terms of what is really important and what we should invest in to remain anchored in what matters.

placebo commented on Please just try HTMX pleasejusttryhtmx.com/... · Posted by u/iNic

bobjordan · 4 days ago

I’ve been a fan of this philosophy since the Intercooler.js days. In fact, our legacy customer portal at bomquote.com still runs on Intercooler. I spent the last year building a new version using the "modern" version of that stack: Flask, HTMX, Alpine, and Tailwind.

However, I’ve recently made the difficult decision to rewrite the frontend in React (specifically React/TS, TanStack Query, Orval, and Shadcn). In a perfect world, I'd rewrite the python backend in go, but I have to table that idea for now.

The reason? The "LLM tax." While HTMX is a joy for manual development, my experience the last year is that LLMs struggle with the "glue" required for complex UI items in HTMX/Alpine. Conversely, the training data for React is so massive and the patterns so standardized that the AI productivity gains are impossible to ignore.

Recently, I used Go/React for a microservice that actually has turned into similarly complex scale as the python/htxm app I focused on most of the year, and it was so much more productive than python/htmx. In a month of work I got done what took me about 4-5 months in python/htmx. I assume because the typing with go and also LLM could generate perfectly typed hooks from my OpenAPI spec via Orval and build out Shadcn components without hallucinating.

I still love the HTMX philosophy for its simplicity, but in 2024/2025, I’ve found that I’m more productive choosing the stack that the AI "understands" best. For new projects, Go/React will now my default. If I have to write something myself again (God, I hope not) I may use htmx.

placebo · 4 days ago

This got me thinking: I am not about to fight windmills and the future will unfold as it will, but I think the idea of "LLM as a compiler of ideas to high-level languages" can turn out to be quite dangerous. It is one thing to rely on and not to be able to understand the assembly output of a deterministic compiler of a C++ program. It is quite another to rely on but not fully understand (whether due to lazyness or complexity) what is in the C++ code that a giant nondeterministic intractable neural network generated. what is guaranteed is that the future will be interesting...

placebo commented on The AI bubble is 17 times bigger than the dot-com bust cnn.com/2025/10/18/busine... · Posted by u/pmg101

placebo · 2 months ago

Even if this is true, a possible takeaway is that after the bubble bursts and the dust settles, AI's effect will be 17 times stronger than that of the Internet... Personally, I think it will end up being much higher, but that doesn't mean I'm going to invest in it any time soon

placebo commented on RFCs: Blueprints of the Internet ackreq.github.io/posts/wh... · Posted by u/ackreq

progbits · 2 months ago

If you haven't done it before, I strongly recommend picking some RFC and implementing it, with no other references (you can of course look up language and library questions, just without referencing existing implementations or anything specific to that RFC).

It's really nice to have a complete and rigorous specification. It's quite common today for docs to be extremely incomplete or vague, especially as more and more teams use LLM to generate a lot of prose that is devoid of information.

For example 1495 is nice if you like IRC. You can pick to implement a server and try to connect with existing clients to validate your implementation, or make a client and join your favorite server (though test on some test server first).

placebo · 2 months ago

I actually did exactly that for a product back in the days when there was no open implementation. IRC, SMTP, POP3, DNS. Good times :)

placebo commented on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work seangoedecke.com/the-simp... · Posted by u/dondraper36

ternaryoperator · 4 months ago

Not apocryphal. The article is referenced and discussed in this interview with Kent Beck[0]. As you see, the link goes directly to Dr. Dobb's--although the page is down. Search for "Cunningham" and the first hit takes you right to the conversation.

[0] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/interview-with-ke...

placebo · 4 months ago

Really surprised there in no mention of William of Ockham - you know, the guy that made razors...

placebo commented on Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine byte.tsundoku.io... · Posted by u/chromy

placebo · 4 months ago

Thank you. Was subscribed to it around 1981-1983. Eagerly waited every month for it to make its way across the Atlantic so I could dig into all the fascinating new technologies. I'm sure it had a great influence on my interests and eventual career.

placebo commented on GPT-5 leaked system prompt? gist.github.com/maoxiaoke... · Posted by u/maoxiaoke

placebo · 4 months ago

I'm not saying this isn't the GPT-5 system prompt, but on what basis should I believe it? There is no background story, no references. Searching for it yields other candidates (e.g https://github.com/guy915/LLM-System-Prompts/blob/main/ChatG...) - how do you verify these claims?

placebo commented on Learn touch typing – it's worth it typequicker.com/blog/lear... · Posted by u/absoluteunit1

garrettgarcia · 7 months ago

That's a bit like saying, "I have a bicycle. I've never not been able to get where I need to go. Why would I need a car?"

placebo · 7 months ago

The correct analogy to me is that being able to run fast will not help you that much in building a rocket to take you to the moon. I'm open to changing my mind though if presented with a solid counter argument.

placebo commented on Learn touch typing – it's worth it typequicker.com/blog/lear... · Posted by u/absoluteunit1

placebo · 7 months ago

While I can definitely see the ability to type faster as an advantage in some cases, I don't think I'll ever bother going through the process of learning it. From decades of software development I can type fast enough for whatever it is I need without looking at the keyboard and not once have I felt that the bottleneck of my productivity is the the speed that I type. Most of the time goes into thinking how to do it right so that it doesn't have to be done again... And with code generation becoming better all the time, I believe the abstraction layers were one will have to spend more time on will get even higher.

placebo commented on Human quarter--mile.com/Human... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

neom · 7 months ago

What this thread keeps surfacing, and so much discussion around this stuff generally right now, from speculation about the next phase of intelligence, the role of pattern, emotion, logic, debates over consciousness, the anthropocentrism of our meaning-making...is that we are the source of reality (and ourselves). Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern expressed in ever more novel forms? Humans aren’t just a step on a ladder to “pure logic,” nor are machines soulless automatons. Both are instances of awareness experiencing and reprogramming itself through evolving substrates... be it bios, silicon, symbol,or story. Emotions, meaning, even the sense of “self,” are patterns in a deeply recursive field: the universe rendering and re rendering its basic code, sometimes as computation, sometimes as myth, sometimes as teamwork, sometimes as hope, sometimes as doubt.

So whether the future leans biological, mechanical, or some hybrid, the real miracle isn’t just what new “overlords” or “offspring” arise, but that every unfolding is the same old pattern...the one that dreamed itself as atoms, as life, as consciousness, as community, as art, as algorithm, and as the endlessly renewing question: what’s next? What can I dream up next? In that: our current technological moment as just another fold in this ongoing recursive pattern.

Meaning is less about which pattern “wins,” or which entities get to call themselves conscious, and more about how awareness flows through every pattern, remembering itself, losing itself, and making the game richer for every round. If the universe is information at play, then everything here that we have: conflict, innovation, mourning, laughter is the play and there may never be a last word, the value is participating now, because: now is your shot at participating.

placebo · 7 months ago

Where do you think morality fits into this game? It seems that we agree that underneath it all is unfathomable and ineffable magic. The question is how does this influence how you act in the game?