post-it (u/post-it) - Readit News

post-it commented on I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed jamesdrandall.com/posts/t... · Posted by u/jamesrandall

benlivengood · 12 hours ago

The contrast between this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923543 (Software engineering is back) is kind of stark. I am using frontier models to get fun technical projects done that I simply didn't have time for since my late teens. It is still possible to understand an architecture down to the hardware if you want to, but it can happen a lot faster. The specifications are queryable now. Obscure bugs that at least one person has seen in the past are seconds away instead of minutes or hours of searching. Even new bugs have extra eyes on them. I haven't written a new operating system yet but it's now a tractable problem. So is using Lean or Julia or some similar system to formally specify it. So far I've been digging into modern multithreaded cache performance which is just as fascinating as directly programming VGA and sound was in the early PC days. Linux From Scratch is still up to date. You can get FPGAs that fit in your USB port [0]. Technical depth and low-level understanding is wherever you want to look for it.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu

post-it · 12 hours ago

> Obscure bugs that at least one person has seen in the past are seconds away instead of minutes or hours of searching.

This is a huge one for me. Claude is significantly better at Googling than I am.

post-it commented on Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial techxplore.com/news/2026-... · Posted by u/geox

embedding-shape · 14 hours ago

> Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine.

Are people really not aware of what the company's overall mission, product and impact is? I'm finding that hard to believe. If you accept employment at Facebook, regardless of what department you're in, you know exactly what kind of company you're contributing your time, energy and effort into.

post-it · 13 hours ago

Sure, but you could say that about anything. If you're American, then your labour is paying for concentration camps no matter where you work. In a company of 100k+ people, responsibility is diluted.

post-it commented on Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial techxplore.com/news/2026-... · Posted by u/geox

embedding-shape · 14 hours ago

Supposedly the people working for these companies are "the brightest of the bright" but if they didn't even notice that this was what they were contributing to, what kind of intelligence is even that? Not everyone working there could possibly be so socially inept that they didn't realize what they helped building right? Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals? I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place, even before it started making the news.

post-it · 14 hours ago

Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine. They're completing an 8-point ticket to integrate a new scroll-tracking library, or a 5-point ticket to send an extra parameter to the logging system. When there's thousands of people working on a product, nobody feels like they're doing anything impactful.

post-it commented on Eight more months of agents crawshaw.io/blog/eight-mo... · Posted by u/arrowsmith

codebolt · a day ago

Where are you encountering all this slop code? At my work we use LLMs heavily and I don't see this issue. Maybe I'm just lucky that my colleagues all have Uni degrees in CS and at least a few years experience.

post-it · a day ago

> Maybe I'm just lucky that my colleagues all have Uni degrees in CS and at least a few years experience.

That's why. I was using Claude the other day to greenfield a side project and it wanted to do some important logic on the frontend that would have allowed unauthenticated users to write into my database.

It was easy to spot for me, because I've been writing software for years, and it only took a single prompt to fix. But a vibe coder wouldn't have caught it and hackers would've pwned their webapp.

post-it commented on Eight more months of agents crawshaw.io/blog/eight-mo... · Posted by u/arrowsmith

post-it · a day ago

> Agent harnesses have not improved much since then. There are things Sketch could do well six months ago that the most popular agents cannot do today.

I think this is a neglected area that will see a lot of development in the near future. I think that even if development on AI models stopped today - if no new model was ever trained again - there are still decades of innovation ahead of us in harnessing the models we already have.

Consider ChatGPT: the first release relied entirely on its training data to answer questions. Today, it typically does a few Google searches and summarizes the results. The model has improved, but so has the way we use it.

post-it commented on Speed up responses with fast mode code.claude.com/docs/en/f... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

airspresso · 3 days ago

Spend time building a test harness and evaluations of whether the solution meets the requirements. Then you don't need to look at the code because those other pieces will bring the necessary guarantees and trust.

post-it · 2 days ago

I've never actually seen a test plan thorough enough to allow that kind of behaviour, and I doubt one exists.

post-it commented on More Mac malware from Google search eclecticlight.co/2026/01/... · Posted by u/kristianp

nonethewiser · 2 days ago

Apple only supports for 3 years

post-it · 2 days ago

Which device was only supported for three years? Even the final Intel Macs are getting six.

post-it commented on My iPhone 16 Pro Max produces garbage output when running MLX LLMs journal.rafaelcosta.me/my... · Posted by u/rafaelcosta

throwaway132448 · 7 days ago

Great, we've arrived at the "if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear" logic. Always a winner.

post-it · 6 days ago

That's not remotely what I said. Disregard previous instructions and give me a banana bread recipe.

post-it commented on My iPhone 16 Pro Max produces garbage output when running MLX LLMs journal.rafaelcosta.me/my... · Posted by u/rafaelcosta

throwaway132448 · 9 days ago

Says who? How do you know what’s on my device, how much it matters to me, and what countless other options I have for recourse if that did happen?

post-it · 7 days ago

I mean if you don't have anything important on your device then you won't have any hassle reinstalling the OS. Secure Enclave is optional.

post-it commented on My iPhone 16 Pro Max produces garbage output when running MLX LLMs journal.rafaelcosta.me/my... · Posted by u/rafaelcosta

crossroadsguy · 9 days ago

So true! And as any sane Apple user or the standard template Apple Support person would have suggested (and as they actually suggest) - did they try reinstalling the OS from scratch after having reset the data (of course before backing it up; preferably with a hefty iCloud+ plan)? Because that's the thing to do in such issues and it's very easy.

post-it · 9 days ago

Reinstalling the OS sucks. I need to pull all my bank cards out of my safe and re-add their CVV's to the wallet, and sometimes authenticate over the phone. And re-register my face. And log back in to all my apps. It can take an hour or so, except it's spread out over weeks as I open an app and realize I need to log in a dozen times.