relistan (u/relistan)

relistan commented on Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists reuters.com/world/ireland... · Posted by u/abe94

reliabilityguy · 3 days ago

> Cynicism with governance not unjustified in Ireland

What do you mean?

relistan · 3 days ago

While some things are doing great, there's a not insignificant amount of inertia in government for the last decade. This is actively being discussed in the Irish press. And Ireland has a long history of cronyism. I suspected (author clarified below) that is what was leading to the cynicism in the original post.

relistan commented on Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists reuters.com/world/ireland... · Posted by u/abe94

throwaway74628 · 3 days ago

A novel treatment for the proverbial dying man. I understand that this program is currently assigned at random but it’s prudent to assume that they’ll shift to a “merit based” system before long i.e. sweetheart deals for members of the right clique, nepotism, and the occasional worthwhile project. For concrete examples, look no further than the content funded and produced by the national broadcaster, RTE. Aside from a few decent documentary shows, the dramas and comedies produced are extremely low quality, often with the same familiar faces who are well established in the clique. The occasional exception proves the rule.

relistan · 3 days ago

Alternatively, it's successful and is expanded to support more artists in the future. Cynicism with governance not unjustified in Ireland, but here we are looking at some actual progress.

relistan commented on I doubt that anything resembling genuine AGI is within reach of current AI tools mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11572... · Posted by u/gmays

relistan · 2 months ago

These things work well on the extremely limited task impetus that we give them. Even if we sidestep the question of whether or not LLMs are actually on the path to AGI, Imagine instead the amount of computing and electrical power required with current computing methods and hardware in order to respond to and process all the input handled by a person at every moment of the day. Somewhere in between current inputs and handling the full load of inputs the brain handles may lie “AGI” but it’s not clear there is anything like that on the near horizon, if only because of computing power constraints.

relistan commented on Perl's decline was cultural beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

relistan · 2 months ago

Way back, Perl got off the ground really because, in contrast to the C compilers of the era, code written on one Unix ran on the others, usually unmodified. In my first jobs, where we had heterogeneous mixes of commercial Unixes, this was unbeatable. It also wrote like higher level shell, which made it easy to learn for systems people, who really were the only ones that cared about running things on multiple platforms most of the time anyway.

As things became more homogeneous, and furthermore as other languages also could do that “one weird trick” of cross platform support, the shortcomings of both Perl and its community came to the fore.

relistan commented on I know when you're vibe coding alexkondov.com/i-know-whe... · Posted by u/thunderbong

pulse7 · 6 months ago

The difference between LLM and a very junior programmer: junior programmer will learn and change, LLM won't change! The more instructions you put in the prompt, the more will be forgotten and the more it will bounce back to the "general world-wide average". And on next prompt you must start all over again... Not so with junior programmers ...

relistan · 6 months ago

My guess is that you're letting the context get polluted with all the stuff it's reading in your repo. Try using subagents to keep the top level context clean. It only starts to forget rules (mostly) when the context is too full of other stuff and the amount taken up by the rules is small.

relistan commented on I know when you're vibe coding alexkondov.com/i-know-whe... · Posted by u/thunderbong

buserror · 6 months ago

Interesting, I actually do have a coding-guidelines.md file for that purpose, but I hadn't thought of having the LLM either generate it, or maintain it; good idea! :-)

relistan · 6 months ago

I actually had Claude and Gemini both do it and revise each other's work to get to the final doc. Worked surprisingly well.

relistan commented on I know when you're vibe coding alexkondov.com/i-know-whe... · Posted by u/thunderbong

buserror · 6 months ago

I personally treat the LLM as a very junior programmer. He's willing to work, will take instructions, but his knowledge of the codebase, and patterns we use is lacking strongly. So it needs a LOT of handholding, very clear instructions, description of potential pitfalls, and smaller, scoped tasks, and reviewed carefully to catch any straying off pattern.

Also, I make it work the same way I do: I first come up with the data model until it "works" in my head, before writing any "code" to deal with it. Again, clear instructions.

Oh another thing, one of my "golden rule" is that it needs to keep a block comment at the top of the file to describe what's going on in that file. It acts as a second "prompt" when I restart a session.

It works pretty well, it doesn't appear as "magic" as the "make it so!" approach people think they can get away with, but it works for me.

But yes, I still also spend maybe 30% of the time cleaning up, renaming stuff and do more general rework of the code before it comes "presentable" but it still allows to work pretty quickly, a lot quicker than if I were to do it all by hand.

relistan · 6 months ago

To a certain extent you are probably still not using it optimally if you are still doing that much work to clean it up. We, for example, asked the LLM to analyze the codebase for the common patterns we use and to write a document for AI agents to do better work on the codebase. I edited it and had it take a couple of passes. We then provide that doc as part of the requirements we feed to it. That made a big difference. We wrote specific instructions on how to structure tests, where to find common utilities, etc. We wrote pre-commit hooks to help double check its work. Every time we see something it’s doing that it shouldn’t, it goes in the instructions. Now it mostly does 85-90% quality work. Yes it requires human review and some small changes. Not sure how the thing works that it built? Before reviewing the code, have it draw a Mermaid sequence diagram.

We found it mostly starts to abandon instructions when the context gets too polluted. Subagents really help address that by not loading the top context with the content of all your files.

Another tip: give it feedback as PR comments and have it read them with the gh CLI. This is faster than hand editing the code yourself a lot of times. While it cleans up its own work you can be doing something else.

relistan commented on LibreOffice slams Microsoft for locking in Office users w/ complex file formats neowin.net/news/libreoffi... · Posted by u/bundie

eikenberry · 7 months ago

> The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.

Only if Word formats remain dominant. There might be hope with the EU moving off Word that an alternative, real standard might take root.

relistan · 7 months ago

As AI tools become more dominant, businesses are going to want their documents to be fully read by their AI in whatever format they are in. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fight over all of this brewing in the next couple of years.

relistan commented on DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI krebsonsecurity.com/2025/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

quantified · 7 months ago

> “If a developer can’t keep an API key private, it raises questions about how they’re handling far more sensitive government information behind closed doors,”

It raises additional questions. Plenty of questions already unanswered. Seems likely it's been a shitshow.

relistan · 7 months ago

All of this is a mess. But it should never even have been possible for it to fall to a single developer to screw up and commit a key like that.

If there were anything like proper processes in place, controls would have made that very difficult.

Then there are the weird issues about why obvious close ties to xAI here....

relistan commented on Calling Go from Elixir with a CNode in Crystal relistan.com/calling-go-f... · Posted by u/mmcclure

pjmlp · 8 months ago

Two backend microservices that could talk over regular OS IPC, or eventually something like gRPC, while making DevOps life easy, instead it became "how many languages can we place into a single executable" kind of exercise.

relistan · 8 months ago

Try googling for the solution you would have used here and report back ;)