shrumm (u/shrumm) - Readit News

shrumm commented on Announcing the Beta release of ty astral.sh/blog/ty... · Posted by u/gavide

gwking · 5 days ago

I appreciate the even tempered question. I’ve been using mypy since its early days, and when pyright was added to vs code I was forced to reckon with their differences. For the most part I found mypy was able to infer more accurately and flexibly. At various times I had to turn pyright off entirely because of false positives. But perhaps someone else would say that I’m leaning on weaknesses of mypy; I think I’m pretty strict but who knows. And like yourself, mine is a rather dated opinion. It used to be that every mypy release was an event, where I’d have a bunch of new errors to fix, but that lessened over the years.

I suspect pyright has caught up a lot but I turned it off again rather recently.

For what it’s worth I did give up on cursor mostly because basedpyright was very counterproductive for me.

I will say that I’ve seen a lot more vehement trash talking about mypy and gushing about pyright than vice versa for quite a few years. It doesn’t quite add up in my mind.

shrumm · 5 days ago

> I will say that I’ve seen a lot more vehement trash talking about mypy and gushing about pyright than vice versa for quite a few years. It doesn’t quite add up in my mind.

agreed! mypy's been good to us over the years.

The biggest problem we're looking to solve now is raw speed, type checking is by far the slowest part of our precommit stack which is what got us interested in Ty.

shrumm commented on Announcing the Beta release of ty astral.sh/blog/ty... · Posted by u/gavide

shrumm · 5 days ago

Thanks Astral team! We use Pydantic heavily, and it looks like first class support from Ty is slated for the stable release, we'd love to try it.

While we wait... what's everyone's type checking setup? We run both Pyright and Mypy... they catch different errors so we've kept both, but it feels redundant.

https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/python/typ... suggests that Pyright is a superset, which hasn't matched our experience.

Though our analysis was ~2 years ago. Anyone with a large Python codebase successfully consolidated to just Pyright?

shrumm commented on Building better AI tools hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-... · Posted by u/eternalreturn

tptacek · 5 months ago

This is a confusing piece. A lot of it would make sense if Weakly was talking about a coding agent (a particular flavor of agent that worked more like how antirez just said he prefers coding with AI in 2025 --- more manual, more advisory, less do-ing). But she's not: she's talking about agents that assist in investigating and resolving operations incidents.

The fulcrum of Weakly's argument is that agents should stay in their lane, offering helpful Clippy-like suggestions and letting humans drive. But what exactly is the value in having humans grovel through logs to isolate anomalies and create hypotheses for incidents? AI tools are fundamentally better at this task than humans are, for the same reason that computers are better at playing chess.

What Weakly seems to be doing is laying out a bright line between advising engineers and actually performing actions --- any kind of action, other than suggestions (and only those suggestions the human driver would want, and wouldn't prefer to learn and upskill on their own). That's not the right line. There are actions AI tools shouldn't perform autonomously (I certainly wouldn't let one run a Terraform apply), but there are plenty of actions where it doesn't make sense to stop them.

The purpose of incident resolution is to resolve incidents.

shrumm · 5 months ago

> But what exactly is the value in having humans grovel through logs to isolate anomalies and create hypotheses for incidents?

Agreed! I think about this using Weakly's own reference to "standing on the shoulders of giants."

To me, building abstractions to handle tedious work is how we do that. We moved from assembly to compilers, and from manual memory management to garbage collectors. That wasn't "deskilling" - it just freed us up to solve more interesting problems at a higher level.

Manually crawling through logs feels like the next thing we should happily give up. It's painful, and I don't know many engineers who enjoy it.

Disclaimer: I'm very biased - working on an agent for this exact use case.

shrumm commented on About AI Evals hamel.dev/blog/posts/eval... · Posted by u/TheIronYuppie

afro88 · 6 months ago

Some great info, but I have to disagree with this:

> Q: How much time should I spend on model selection?

> Many developers fixate on model selection as the primary way to improve their LLM applications. Start with error analysis to understand your failure modes before considering model switching. As Hamel noted in office hours, “I suggest not thinking of switching model as the main axes of how to improve your system off the bat without evidence. Does error analysis suggest that your model is the problem?”

If there's a clear jump in evals from one model to the next (ie Gemini 2 to 2.5, or Claude 3.7 to 4) that will level up your system pretty easily. Use the best models you can, if you can afford it.

shrumm · 6 months ago

The ‘with evidence’ part is key as simonw said. One anecdote from evals at Cleric - it’s rare to see a new model do better on our evals vs the current one. The reality is that you’ll optimize prompts etc for the current model.

Instead, if a new model only does marginally worse - that’s a strong signal that the new model is indeed better for our use case.

shrumm commented on APL at Volvo dyalog.com/case-studies/h... · Posted by u/tosh

shrumm · 2 years ago

This website is pure nostalgia <3, pretty much every corporate page in the 90s looked like this! I was half disappointed they're using <div>'s and CSS for layout and not a bunch of <table>'s.

shrumm commented on More Americans can now get insulin for $35 cnn.com/2024/01/01/politi... · Posted by u/MilnerRoute

shrumm · 2 years ago

“But drugmakers also faced changes to the Medicaid rebate program that would have likely cost them hundreds of millions of dollars each if they didn’t lower their list prices.“

This should have been the opening paragraph.

shrumm commented on Metric Time metric-time.com/... · Posted by u/rickcarlino

shrumm · 2 years ago

This was a fascinating read for a totally unexpected reason.

I’ve spent most of my life in countries where the metric system is used for distance, weight, temperature etc.

This year I’ve had to travel a lot to the US for work and found the constant mental conversions a PITA. I kept wondering why people keep holding out against such an obviously easier system.

Then I read this article about 8 hours of sleep would be 3.33 metric hours. How you wake up at 9:50 after sleeping at 2:75 and I notice real-time at the absolute recoil I feel reading this. Maybe I’m getting older , but I completely get how familiarity to numbers being represented a certain way is hard to let go of.

shrumm commented on Rebranding the Wise design system for everyone (part 1) wise.design/design-at-wis... · Posted by u/tagawa

ColonelBlimp · 3 years ago

The calculator is still in the new home page. You just need to scroll down a bit. Perhaps it was at the top of the home page before. I don't remember.

shrumm · 3 years ago

you're right, its a few scrolls down. It used to be right at the top, so it became a learned behaviour for me to go their site and quickly check the cost of a transfer versus what my bank offers me.