rdedev (u/rdedev) - Readit News

rdedev commented on We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright

nubg · 3 days ago

To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries?

This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher.

I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single justification that would not fit both scenarios.

rdedev · 3 days ago

Even if you are not coding in assembly you still need to think. Replace llm with a smart programmer. I don't like the other guy to do all the thinking for me. Much better if it's a collaborative process even if the other guy could have coded the perfect solution without my help. Like otherwise why am I even in the picture?

rdedev commented on We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright

iambateman · 3 days ago

I do not mourn.

For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.

When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic.

When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort.

When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences.

Then I learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software.

Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.

It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making something useful for myself and others. And that has never been easier.

rdedev · 3 days ago

Adam Neely has a video on GenAI and it's impact on the music industry. There is a section in the video about beauty and taste and it's pretty different from your conclusions. One example I remember is would an AI find beauty in a record scratch sound?

https://youtu.be/U8dcFhF0Dlk

rdedev commented on Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw github.com/HKUDS/nanobot... · Posted by u/ms7892

PlatoIsADisease · 5 days ago

Interesting.

I guess RAG is faster? But I'm realizing I'm outdated now.

rdedev · 5 days ago

I think it still has a place of your agent is part of a bigger application that you are running and you want to quickly get something in your models context for a quick turnaround

rdedev commented on xAI joins SpaceX spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork

rdedev · 8 days ago

I swear Prof G mentioned this exact same thing happening today

rdedev commented on Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app macrumors.com/2026/01/28/... · Posted by u/pier25

NewUser76312 · 12 days ago

I don't understand, doesn't the market solve these issues? Here's what I figure would happen:

1. App creators will pass the extra cost over to the iPhone users.

2. Android (and other platforms that can host smartphone apps) will be more competitive and start to look better for both app creators and consumers.

Sure, there's a bit of a context switching cost. Not everyone will just be able to automatically change over to an Android phone tomorrow. But it doesn't need to happen all at once. These phones get updated and replaced every 1-2 years. If iOS users see their app store prices rising too high, and they aren't OK with this, then they will switch to Android eventually, once it's worth it.

Otherwise, I don't see any problem with Apple reaping the benefit of their powerful and well-built walled garden ecosystem.

rdedev · 12 days ago

There is a lot of stickiness associated with apple products. Be it their walled gardens or having better hardware or brand recognition. This is especially true in the American market

rdedev commented on Pandas 3.0 pandas.pydata.org/communi... · Posted by u/jonbaer

edschofield · 14 days ago

The design of Pandas is inferior in every way to Polars: API, memory use, speed, expressiveness. Pandas has been strictly worse since late 2023 and will never close the gap. Polars is multithreaded by default, written in a low-level language, has a powerful query engine, supports lazy, out-of memory execution, and isn’t constrained by any compatibility concerns with a warty, eager-only API and pre-Arrow data types that aren’t nullable.

It’s probably not worth incurring the pain of a compatibility-breaking Pandas upgrade. Switch to Polars instead for new projects and you won’t look back.

rdedev · 13 days ago

While polars is better if you work with predefined data formats, pandas is imo still better as a general purpose table container.

I work with chemical datasets and this always involves converting SMILES string to Rdkit Molecule objects. Polars cannot do this as simply as calling .map on pandas.

Pandas is also much better to do EDA. So calling it worse in every instance is not true. If you are doing pure data manipulation then go ahead with polars

rdedev commented on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far burkeholland.github.io/po... · Posted by u/tbassetto

ryandrake · a month ago

This was me. I was a huge AI coding detractor on here for a while (you can check my comment history). But, in order to stay informed and not just be that grouchy curmudgeon all the time, I kept up with the models and regularly tried them out. Opus 4.5 is so much better than anything I've tried before, I'm ready to change my mind about AI assistance.

I even gave -True Vibe Coding- a whirl. Yesterday, from a blank directory and text file list of requirements, I had Opus 4.5 build an Android TV video player that could read a directory over NFS, show a grid view of movie poster thumbnails, and play the selected video file on the TV. The result wasn't exactly full-featured Kodi, but it works in the emulator and actual device, it has no memory leaks, crashes, ANRs, no performance problems, no network latency bugs or anything. It was pretty astounding.

Oh, and I did this all without ever opening a single source file or even looking at the proposed code changes while Opus was doing its thing. I don't even know Kotlin and still don't know it.

rdedev · a month ago

I decided to vibe code something myself last week at work. I've been wanting to create a poc that involves a coding agent create custom bokeh plots that a user can interact with and ask follow up questions. All this had to be served using a holoview panel library

At work I only have access to calude using the GitHub copilot integration so this could be the cause of my problems. Claude was able to get slthe first iteration up pretty quick. At that stage the app could create a plot and you could interact with it and ask follow up questions.

Then I asked it to extend the app so that it could generate multiple plots and the user could interact with all of them one at a time. It made a bunch of changes but the feature was never implemented. I asked it to do again but got the same outcome. I completely accept the fact that it could just be all because I am using vscode copilot or my promoting skills are not good but the LLM got 70% of the way there and then completely failed

rdedev commented on The Undermining of the CDC newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

SirensOfTitan · 2 months ago

This essay rubs me the wrong way in that it continues to invest in this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts. These people continue to miss the forest for the trees by avoiding the question: why have Americans lost faith in institutions?

I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.

Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:

1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):

> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.

Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.

2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:

> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."

> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."

The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.

rdedev · 2 months ago

> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."

> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."

These are nice sentiments to have but it does not work in the real world. At a certain point certain problems are too complex for a regular person to understand.

rdedev commented on Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research dwarkesh.com/p/ilya-sutsk... · Posted by u/piotrgrabowski

Herring · 3 months ago

https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...

He’s wrong we still scaling, boys.

rdedev · 3 months ago

The 3rd graph is interesting. Once the model performance reaches above human baseline, the growth seems to be logarithmic instead of exponential.

rdedev commented on Baby Shoggoth Is Listening theamericanscholar.org/ba... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

echelon · 3 months ago

This is something I hadn't considered.

Today's role play and doomer fantasy will result in future models that are impossible to introspect and that don't let on about nefarious intent.

The alarmists cried wolf, so we taught the next generation of wolves to look like sheep.

rdedev · 3 months ago

Would all AI be hell bent on world domination cause that's what it learnt over and over again in its training data?