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senbrow commented on You can now disable all AI features in Zed   zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-f... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
senbrow · a month ago
Total nitpick, but:

Why would you name an option "disable_ai" with a default value of false instead of calling it "enable_ai" with a default value of true?

Are there some mechanical semantics I'm missing here that make this beneficial?

Negative booleans (ie that remove or suppress something when true) are generally a source of confusion and bugs and should be avoided like the plague in my experience.

senbrow commented on Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process   github.com/maciej-trebacz... · Posted by u/M4v3R
senbrow · 2 months ago
Did you even look at the content of the post?

There's a prompts.md (link: https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/ma...) that shows what the author did in this project, most of which is providing creative direction and corrective nudges to the AI.

Most people only care about the end result, and vibe coding got the author there much faster and with less effort.

Your comment reads like a carriage driver bemoaning car drivers because they didn't have to feed, groom, harness, and command a team of horses, yet still arrived successfully at their destination.

"Why should I be impressed that you turned a wheel and pushed a pedal?"

senbrow commented on The provenance memory model for C   gustedt.wordpress.com/202... · Posted by u/HexDecOctBin
wheybags · 2 months ago
Hot take, but I've always felt the world would be better served if mathematicians and physicists would stop using terrible short variable names and use longCamelCaseDescriptiveNames like the rest of us, because paper is cheap, and abbreviations are confusing. I know it's nicer when you're writing by hand, but when you clean up a proof or formula for publishing, would it really be so hard to switch to descriptive names?

I'm a practitioner of neither though, so I can't condemn the practice wholeheartedly as an outsider, but it does make me groan.

senbrow · 2 months ago
Long names are good for short expressions, but they obfuscate complex ones because the identifiers visually crowd out the operators.

This can be especially difficult if the author is trying to map 1:1 to a complex algorithm in a white paper that uses domain-standard mathematical notation.

The alternative is to break the "full formula" into simpler expression chunks, but then naming those partial expression results descriptively can be even more challenging.

senbrow commented on The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State   eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06... · Posted by u/doener
CrimsonCape · 3 months ago
It appears that the Washington bill excluded power tools whereas the Texas bill did not, which means that in Texas I should be able to swap dead lithium cells out of my expensive power tool batteries.
senbrow · 3 months ago
To those who want to do this: make sure to swap out all cells in a battery at once to be safe, ideally using new cells that are all from the same manufacturer and same production run.

Mixing old cells with new can lead to a runaway thermal event in the worst case (i.e. unstoppable cancer-causing fire).

senbrow commented on Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview   developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
TeMPOraL · 4 months ago
It would also be harder for the LLM to work with. Much like with humans, the model's ability to understand and create code is deeply intertwined and inseparable from its general NLP ability.
senbrow · 4 months ago
Why couldn't you use an LLM to generate source code from a prompt, compile it, then train a new LLM on the same prompt using the compiled output?

It seems no different in kind to me than image or audio generation.

senbrow commented on Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview   developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
dyauspitr · 4 months ago
The code would be un reviewable.
senbrow · 4 months ago
...by a human :)
senbrow commented on Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview   developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
epolanski · 4 months ago
This so much.

To me it seems so strange that few good language designers and ml folks didn't group together to work on this.

It's clear that there is a space for some LLM meta language that could be designed to compile to bytecode, binary, JS, etc.

It also doesn't need to be textual like we code, but some form of AST llama can manipulate with ease.

senbrow · 4 months ago
At that point why not just have LLMs generate bytecode in one shot?

Plenty of training data to go on, I'd imagine.

senbrow commented on Show HN: I built a synthesizer based on 3D physics   anukari.com... · Posted by u/humbledrone
AaronAPU · 4 months ago
Glad I’m not the only audio developer around here.

The landing page needs an immediate audio visual demo. Not an embedded YouTube but a videojs or similar. Low friction get the information of what it sounds and feels like immediately.

My 2 cents

senbrow · 4 months ago
1000% - I had to be able to find something listenable
senbrow commented on AI as Normal Technology   knightcolumbia.org/conten... · Posted by u/randomwalker
pineaux · 5 months ago
No this is not the middle that should be considered.

Nobody really thinks that AI is useless anymore. We disagree on timelines, we disagree on how useful it will be, but the extremes are not between useful and useless (although some people believe it will not change anything, but pretty fringe). The real extremes here are "evil god AGI" and "benevolent god AGI". This piece takes the road where they say: it's pretty powerful/useful, but it's not a godlike something because it's not everywhere, all the time, at once. It will change the world, but over a pretty long timespan and it will feel like normal technology. It will be used for evil and good.

senbrow · 5 months ago
You're definitely in a bubble if you think "nobody" considers AI useless.

There are a huge number of non-technical people who see its use as a dangerous outsourcing of human thinking and creativity to a machine that is only capable of producing derivative (and often incorrect) slop.

senbrow commented on But what if I want a faster horse?   rakhim.exotext.com/but-wh... · Posted by u/saeedesmaili
3minus1 · 5 months ago
I really don't think bad Product Manager's is a good explanation for the UI. Any big company like Netflix is going to heavily A/B test any and every change to the UI. They will only ever add things that boost metrics like engagement. You may not like the UI; it may annoy you, but you should have some appreciation for the fact that they are using sophisticated techniques to optimize for what they care about.
senbrow · 5 months ago
Why should I appreciate a company's exploitative and extractive experimentation on its customers?

The cost of maximizing "value" for the company to the nth degree degrades the customer experience once it exceeds a certain threshold.

It's greedy tunnel vision that makes the world worse for everyone in the long term.

u/senbrow

KarmaCake day102April 8, 2022View Original