ttd (u/ttd) - Readit News

ttd commented on Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native tonsky.me/blog/fall-of-na... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

usrnm · 14 days ago

> LLM-driven development could land on a safer language

Why does an LLM need to produce human readable code at all? Especially in a language optimized around preventing humans from making human mistakes. For now, sure, we're in the transitional period, but in the long run? Why?

ttd · 14 days ago

Well, IMO there's not much reason for an LLM to be trained to produce machine language, nor a functional binary blob appearing fully-formed from its head.

If you take your question and look into the future, you might consider the existence of an LLM specifically trained to take high-level language inputs and produce machine code. Well, we already have that technology: we call it a compiler. Compilers exist, are (frequently) deterministic, and are generally exceedingly good at their job. Leaving this behind in favor of a complete English -> binary blob black box doesn't make much sense to me, logically or economically.

I also think there is utility in humans being able to read the generated output. At the end of the day, we're the conscious ones here, we're the ones operating in meatspace, and we're driving the goals, outputs, etc. Reading and understanding the building blocks of what's driving our lives feels like a good thing to me. (I don't have many well-articulated thoughts about the concept of singularity, so I leave that to others to contemplate.)

ttd commented on Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native tonsky.me/blog/fall-of-na... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

ttd · 14 days ago

Some random thoughts, since I've had a similar train of thought for a while now.

On one hand I also lament the amount of hardware-potential wastage that occurs with deep stacks of abstractions. On the other hand, I've evolved my perspective into feeling that the medium doesn't really matter as much as the result... and most software is about achieving a result. I still take personal joy in writing what I think is well-crafted code, and I also accept that that may become more niche as time goes on.

To me this shift from software-as-craft to software-as-bulk-product has some similarities to the "pets vs cattle" mindset change when thinking about server / process orchestration and provisioning.

Then also on the dismay of JS becoming even more entrenched as the lingua franca. There's every possibility that in a software-as-bulk-product world, LLM-driven development could land on a safer language due to efficiency gains from e.g. static type checking. Economically I wonder if an adoption of a different lingua franca could manifest by way of increasing LLM development speed / throughput.

ttd commented on Boston's subway system replacing 1890s-era wooden catenary system mbta.com/news/2025-11-18/... · Posted by u/ilamont

ttd · 3 months ago

It's been a decade+ since I used to catch the Green line at Park St, but at that time it was the noisiest, squealiest station that I regularly used. Not surprising to learn that parts of that station are left over from the 1890s.

ttd commented on .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser avaloniaui.net/blog/net-m... · Posted by u/vyrotek

taftster · 4 months ago

That's not pedantic at all! Indeed, without these capabilities, it is by some definition not the real web.

This hits into that concept of what exactly the "web" is. Is it just a media transport system? Or is it something more than that. Of course, we could cite Tim Berners-Lee here or Roy Fielding in this discussion.

But at minimum, I think a lot of us are tired of the app-lification of the web and somewhat wish we could have a bit of the old.

ttd · 4 months ago

IMHO there's no gatekeeper of what the "real" web is or should be. It grew organically - regular people building things they liked or needed. It's certainly more of a life necessity than it used to be, but that happened organically too.

I know there are strongly held opinions about this, but I for one see no reason why the "application web" can't peacefully coexist, and interlink with, the document web. In my opinion it therefore makes sense to allow for different models for the application web, ones that do not revolve around a document.

On the other hand, if we're just bashing on javascript being the lingua franca of the web, that's a train I'll happily board!

ttd commented on Show HN: Flutter_compositions: Vue-inspired reactive building blocks for Flutter github.com/yoyo930021/flu... · Posted by u/yoyo930021

ttd · 4 months ago

I've got a pretty large flutter app in production, using just the flutter-provided building blocks like ValueNotifier, ListenableBuilder, InheritedWidget, etc. It has scaled quite well for me.

The main issue IMHO with many of these boilerplate-reducing packages is that they feel like one-way trips. Most of them require a change to widget inheritance, and they all have slightly different syntax and semantics for wiring things up to state changes. This means if you get a few years into a project, migrating away from the package you chose at the beginning will probably be very difficult.

So while the quick example in the readme of this package looks simple and understandable, locking in to a third-party library makes me nervous, especially if the main benefit is just fewer keystrokes. Does anyone have experience or informed opinion here that would be willing to chime in?

ttd commented on Offline Math: Converting LaTeX to SVG with MathJax sigwait.org/~alex/blog/20... · Posted by u/henry_flower

sathomasga · 4 months ago

Same use case (math-heavy, no-javascript blog), but I ended up with a _slightly_ different approach: instead of converting to SVG, convert to MathML. Browser support is pretty robust, and the output is much nicer (e.g. preserves fonts).

https://sathomas.me/blog/site/

ttd · 4 months ago

I still haven't found a way to coax MathML into looking the way I want it... Even using the same fonts (like Computer Modern or its descendants) there's still something not quite the same as LaTeX-drawn math. It's a nitpick but noticeable for me.

ttd commented on Tell HN: Posteo.de email provider is down · Posted by u/npteljes

ttd · 5 months ago

Been a happy customer of Fastmail for ~10 years now. Nice web and mobile interfaces. I've never been impacted by downtime in that time (to my knowledge).

ttd commented on Show HN: Create interactive diagrams with pop-up content vexlio.com/features/inter... · Posted by u/ttd

preommr · 5 months ago

>For your note on different states for screens. Can you elaborate or give an example? I'm quite interested in this mode that you're describing.

I meant the very obvious feature (you might already have it) of objects with properties and a unique id, then a state that indexes snapshots of those objects with different properties. With the ability to diff between states by id of the object. So State1:[Square{id:0, x:0, y:0}], State2:[Square{id:0, x:screen.width, y: screen.width}], where going from state1 to state2 would tween the square from top-left to bottom-right.

I am assuming you already have something like that (you already have the objects, the properties, and some states like undo/redo) and it's about exposing the ui around it with labeled states at the user-level.

> Also, were you in dark mode? It's definitely not intended that the whole screen should change color - a popup should dim the content behind. The whole screen changing color sounds like a bug and I'll investigate.

That's what it was! I tried with light mode in firefox and it worked much better.

ttd · 5 months ago

Ah, ok - thank you for elaborating on that. I don't actually have that type of interactivity at the moment, though you're right in saying all the information is there in order to make it happen. I also like your idea of changing between the states via some collapsible menu. In theory all of this could be achieved just by building on what's already here. Do you mind sharing what sorts of things you might use this for?

Glad to hear dark mode was the other issue :-). I'll investigate further, it's probably just a matter of a flag not being propagated properly during the scene change.

ttd commented on Show HN: Create interactive diagrams with pop-up content vexlio.com/features/inter... · Posted by u/ttd

preommr · 5 months ago

Unfortunate that this didn't get more traction because it's a pretty cool app!

I like the user interface and overall design. Also very nice onboarding of just logging in and trying the app.

Based on the title I thought that the pop-ups were the USP, but reading your post I am glad that you see it as just another feature because tbh I think it's kind of niche. I see the thinking, but in practice I think there's a few usability issues

It's kind of jarring to just move your mouse across the screen and accidentally hit a shape with pop-up and have the whole screen just blast a different color. And I only set it it for one shape, if I had multiple, I could easily see it getting very annoying. OTOH, I am not sure how you fit in buttons into a diagram when you're trying to keep it clean.

Speaking of jarring, probably a good idea to dim (or overlay to hue-shift, or filter like blur or texturize) instead of changing colors across the whole screen.

Honestly, I think I might need to see some better examples to be convinced because I would rather just click next slide for presentations I definitely don't think I'd hover over different elements through a mouse. And I'd probably prefer a labeled slideshow for user guides. Something that's low-tech, easy to embed, easy to understand. If I put time and effort into well designed popups, I don't want it to be suble and out of the way because then people might miss it.

I think I would much rather have different states for scenes, and have the option of switching to a state by hovering on a list of menu options (maybe organized into sections with a collapsable ui element). That would probably be pretty useful, and from there it's pretty trivial to add event triggers on shapes to active those state transitions instead. If through A/B testing, people like it then, great. If not, the ui controls are a pretty solid feature.

Also as a side note, I drew an ellipse and adjusting the upper left hand corner triggered what I first thought was a bug that caused the ellipse to become flattened (height of 0). I think what happened is that it snapped to something on screen in a way that wasn't obvious. I get that there's lines to show snapping, but it aligns with too many things (e.g. I had a polyline with a few nodes), and it's really bad if it's zoomed out where a normally large sized shape (400px) dissapears by moving the mouse a few pixels because it's zoomed out (so now it's 30px) and the snapping threshold is almost the size of the object, plus it's now aligning with things that were previously off screen.

Anyways, Good luck!

ttd · 5 months ago

Thank you very much for all this feedback! I really appreciate your consideration.

For your note on different states for screens. Can you elaborate or give an example? I'm quite interested in this mode that you're describing.

The ellipse issue sounds like snapping getting in the way. It's on my list to come up with a better heuristic of when to apply snapping or not. One example of an idea I have here is to incorporate some hysteresis effect - essentially examining the local history of mouse movements when deciding to apply snapping or not. Right now each mouse movement is treated independently.

Also, were you in dark mode? It's definitely not intended that the whole screen should change color - a popup should dim the content behind. The whole screen changing color sounds like a bug and I'll investigate.

ttd commented on Show HN: Create interactive diagrams with pop-up content vexlio.com/features/inter... · Posted by u/ttd

zkmon · 5 months ago

To be honest, I find any dynamic or interactive changes to technical diagrams as distracting. For me the benefit of pouring more info via dynamic popups or animations is lost due to lack of static info that can scanned back and forth while I try to understand the thing, just by looking at it. I need the diagram to stay static and not force my way of understanding to fit into the interactions or animations.

ttd · 5 months ago

This is a great point and not one that I had considered. I suspect I am the same way - scanning back and forth while studying a diagram.

It's possible this tool may be more appropriate for e.g. presentation of info to a mixed audience. Technical people may have questions that can be answered with detail that non-technical people would find distracting, if it were visible on the main diagram. And "presentation" here could be a literal presentation in a conference room, or documenting something on a site that people visit on their own.

You could make the argument in that example that you should create two diagrams, one for each audience. I think that is a valid argument - but I can also imagine maintaining two separate diagrams that present similar information could be irritating.