weavejester (u/weavejester)

weavejester commented on Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB tomshardware.com/video-ga... · Posted by u/doener

afavour · 17 days ago

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost

They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it.

If they were on the hook for 150GB of cloud storage per player this would have been solved immediately.

weavejester · 17 days ago

> They’re not the ones bearing the cost.

I'm not sure that's necessarily true... Customers have limited space for games; it's a lot easier to justify keeping a 23GB game around for occasional play than it is for a 154GB game, so they likely lost some small fraction of their playerbase they could have retained.

weavejester commented on Clojure Land – Discover open-source Clojure libraries and frameworks clojure.land/... · Posted by u/TheWiggles

johnfn · 2 months ago

I’m not sure if you can draw that conclusion. The clojure survey asks where users went to interact with other people who use Clojure. Who interacts with people on SO? I’m sure a vast majority just read the answer and move on. It makes sense that a Slack server would be the #1 result.

The Python question is more broad: “Where do you typically learn about [python]?”

weavejester · 2 months ago

Posting a question on SO and having it answered is interacting with people. I'm unsure how you could interpret that any other way. And given that podcasts and YouTube were part of the answers, I think it's clear that passively listening to people counts as an interaction as well within the context of the question.

The Python question I'd say is more narrow, as it asks specifically about "new tools and technologies". What if I have a question about an tool I've been using for a while?

In any case, my point is not what market share Clojure actually has, but that there's reasonable doubt in using SO's developer survey as a basis for that answer. If a far smaller percentage of the Clojure community uses SO than is average for a language, then it's going to skew the results.

weavejester commented on We're in the wrong moment ezrichards.github.io/post... · Posted by u/chilipepperhott

nl · 2 months ago

The OP was working on a "a small JavaScript/HTML web application"

This is a particular sweetspot for LLMs at the moment. I'll regularly one-shot entire NextJS codebases with custom styling in both Codex and Claude.

But it turns out the OP is using Copilot. That just isn't competitive anymore.

weavejester · 2 months ago

I'll see if I can run the experiment again with Codex, if not on the exact same project then a similar one. The advice I'm getting in the other comments is that Codex is more state of the art.

As a quick check I asked Codex to look over the existing source code, generated via Copilot using the GPT-5 agent. I asked it to consider ways of refactoring, and then to implement them. Obviously a fairer test would be to start from scratch, but that would require more effort on my part.

The refactor didn't break anything, which is actually pretty impressive, and there are some improvements. However if a human suggested this refactor I'd have a lot of notes. There's functions that are badly named or placed, a number of odd decisions, and it increases the code size by 40%. It certainly falls far short of what I'd consider a capable coder should be doing.

weavejester commented on We're in the wrong moment ezrichards.github.io/post... · Posted by u/chilipepperhott

nl · 2 months ago

Try OpenAI Codex with GPT5-codex medium

The technology is progressing very fast, and that includes both the models and the tooling around it.

For example, Gemini 2.5 was considered a great model for coding when it launched. Now it is far inferior to Codex and Claude code.

The Githib Copilot tooling is (currently) mediocre. It's ok as a better autocomplete but can't really compete with Codex or Claude or even Jules (Gemini) when using it as an agent.

weavejester · 2 months ago

I'll try out Codex and see how that performs. Presumably I can just use OpenAI's Codex extension in VS Code?

weavejester commented on We're in the wrong moment ezrichards.github.io/post... · Posted by u/chilipepperhott

CamperBob2 · 2 months ago

I experimented with GPT-5 recently

GPT-5 what? The GPT-5 models range from goofily stupid to brilliant. If you let it select the model automatically, which is the case by default, it will tend to lean towards the former.

weavejester · 2 months ago

I was using GitHub Copilot Pro with VS Code, and the agent was labelled "GPT-5". Is this a particularly poor version of the model?

I also briefly tried out some of the other paid-for models, but mostly worked with GPT-5.

weavejester commented on We're in the wrong moment ezrichards.github.io/post... · Posted by u/chilipepperhott

weavejester · 2 months ago

"I’m not sure if anyone else feels this way, but with the introduction of generative AI, I don’t find coding fun anymore. It’s hard to motivate myself to code knowing that a model can do it much quicker. The joy of coding for me was literally the process of coding."

I experimented with GPT-5 recently and found its capabilities to be significantly inferior to that of a human, at least when it came to coding.

I was trying to give it an optimal environment, so I set it to work on a small JavaScript/HTML web application, and I divided the task into small steps, as I'd heard it did best under those circumstances.

I was impressed overall by how far the technology has come, but it produced a number of elementary errors, such as putting JavaScript outside the script tags. As the code grew, there was also no sense that it had a good idea of how to structure the codebase, even when I suggested it analyze and refactor.

So unless there are far more capable models out there, we're not at the stage where generative AI can match a human.

In general I find current model to have broad but shallow thinking. They can draw on many sources, which is extremely useful, but seem to have problems reasoning things through in depth.

All this is to say that I don't find the joy of coding to have gone at all. In fact, there's been a number of really thorny problems I've had to deal with recently that I'd love to have side-stepped, but due to the currently limitations of LLMs I had to solve them the old-fashioned way.

weavejester commented on Clojure Land – Discover open-source Clojure libraries and frameworks clojure.land/... · Posted by u/TheWiggles

johnfn · 2 months ago

> Clojure is clearly a niche language, but Stack Overflow is also not a place that Clojure developers typically go, so Clojure usage there is going to be under reported.

It seems unclear to me why Clojure developers would not go to Stack Overflow, and especially unclear why they would avoid SO more than developers in other niche languages. When I learned Clojure, I spent a very long time on SO.

I suppose I’m just a little skeptical. I often hear similar sounding rationales - “oh don’t worry, <my favorite language/technology> is under-represented by the data”. Somehow every niche technology is underreported by the data! But to an outside observer, Clojure to me seems to be used very rarely in the types of engineering work I come in contact with, and 1% doesn’t seem that wrong to me.

weavejester · 2 months ago

Stack Overflow is one of those sites that benefit from a network effect. If there are few users of a particular technology on it, people are less likely to get questions answered and therefore less likely to interact with it again.

That said, it's always worth checking the numbers, so I took a look at the 2024 State of Clojure Survey. Around 18% of those surveyed used Stack Overflow, while the 2024 Python Developers Survey had at least 43% of respondents using Stack Overflow.

Now, you might well say that even so Clojure is still a niche language - and I agree. But it may be the case that instead of a 1.3% share, Clojure has a 3% share - if we assume that the Python community's usage numbers are more typical.

weavejester commented on Clojure Land – Discover open-source Clojure libraries and frameworks clojure.land/... · Posted by u/TheWiggles

wlkr · 2 months ago

It would be helpful to see some additional stats, like the number of issues and the last update. Of course, these are only heuristics, but they are still helpful to see. It's often pointed out that one of the great things about Clojure is that the libraries generally don't need updating that often because the language is pretty stable. However, quite often I do find that libraries have a number of long open issues or depend on outdated, sometimes insecure, versions of Java libraries. I realise that I'm complaining about free code, so 'fork it and contribute' is a valid response, but at the risk of further fragmentation and yet another library that exists for just a short period.

Separately, I do wish Clojure would adopt a bit more of an opinionated way of doing things and coalesce around some solid core/common libraries that the official docs could point to. This year, Clojure didn't make it into the named languages list on the Stack Overflow developer survey (1.2% in 2024). It's clear that it's not all that popular, even though there's some commercial backing and a friendly community, and there just aren't enough developers to support a myriad of different ways of doing things. I do feel there needs to be a focus on getting beginners in, and that means helping them to do things easily.

weavejester · 2 months ago

> This year, Clojure didn't make it into the named languages list on the Stack Overflow developer survey (1.2% in 2024).

Clojure is clearly a niche language, but Stack Overflow is also not a place that Clojure developers typically go, so Clojure usage there is going to be under reported.

> I do wish Clojure would adopt a bit more of an opinionated way of doing things and coalesce around some solid core/common libraries that the official docs could point to.

Solid core/common libraries to do what?

weavejester commented on What Dynamic Typing Is For unplannedobsolescence.com... · Posted by u/hit8run

alexpetros · 2 months ago

I have typically understood the "Sufficiently Smart Compiler" to be one that can arrive at the platonic performance ideal of some procedure, regardless of how the steps in that procedure are actually expressed (as long as they are technically correct). This is probably impossible.

What I'm proposing is quite a bit more reasonable—so reasonable that versions of it exist in various ecosystems. I just think they can be better and am essentially thinking out loud about how I'd like that to work.

weavejester · 2 months ago

I'm fully on board with improving compilers. My issue is that you compare the current state of (some) dynamically-typed languages with a hypothetical future state of statically-typed languages.

You use `req.cookies['token']` as an example of a subtle bug in JavaScript, but this isn't necessarily an inherent bug to dynamic typing in general. You could, for example, have a key lookup function that requires you to pass in a default value, or callback to handle what occurs if the value is missing.

    req.cookies.get('token', () => {
      throw new AuthFailure("Missing token")
    })

weavejester commented on What Dynamic Typing Is For unplannedobsolescence.com... · Posted by u/hit8run

vlovich123 · 2 months ago

> we want code that's expressive enough to do what we want, while being constrained enough to not do what we don't.

Have you somehow solved the halting problem? AFAIK, all Turing complete languages are perfectly capable of expressing the exact same programs.

weavejester · 2 months ago

There's a difference 'theoretically possible' and 'practically feasible'. Assume I'm talking about the latter.