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wjholden commented on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy   theguardian.com/film/2025... · Posted by u/nemoniac
presentation · 16 days ago
I have another problem, which is that my wife is Japanese and I’m American, and if we watch a French movie then I want the English subs and she wants the Japanese subs. Making that work with streaming services is very painful.
wjholden · 16 days ago
I had never thought of this before. What is the solution? Can any video software show two subtitles at once?
wjholden commented on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files   anuraag2601.github.io/gem... · Posted by u/anuraag2601
TheDong · a month ago
I think most of the failures of vibe-coding can be fixed by running the agent inside a sandbox (a container or VM) that doesn't have access to any important credentials.

I think the failures like this one, deleting files, etc, are mostly unrelated to the programming language, but rather the llm has a bunch of bash scripting in its training data, and it'll use that bash scripting when it runs into errors that commonly are near to bash scripting online... which is to say, basically all errors in all languages.

I think the other really dangerous failure of vibe coding is if the llm does something like:

    cargo add hallucinated-name-crate
    cargo build
In rust, doing that is enough to own you. If someone is squatting on that name, they now have arbitrary access to your machine since 'build.rs' runs arbitrary code during 'build'. Ditto for 'npm install'.

I don't really think rust's memory safety or lifetimes are going to make any difference in terms of LLM safety.

wjholden · a month ago
That's insightful. So where Rust might help you to program safely (write code free from certain classes of bugs), cargo has much/all the same supply-chain risks we would see in development ecosystems like pip and npm. And your point about operating in the shell is also well-taken.

So yeah, I must narrow my Rust shilling to just the programming piece. I concede that it doesn't protect in other operations of development.

wjholden commented on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files   anuraag2601.github.io/gem... · Posted by u/anuraag2601
daxfohl · a month ago
It seems like SWE is going to turn into something more akin to nuclear engineering over the next few years. "How can we extract the most value out of this unpredictable thing without having it blow up in our faces?", where the guardrails we write will be more akin to analog feedback control mechanisms than they will be to modern-day business logic, but where the maximum extractable value has no well-defined limit.
wjholden · a month ago
I've thought about this, although perhaps not framed the same way, and one of my suggestions is to vibe code in Rust. I don't know how well these models handle Rust's peculariarities, but I believe that one should take all the safety they can get in case the AI assistant makes a mistake.
wjholden commented on Facts don't change minds, structure does   vasily.cc/blog/facts-dont... · Posted by u/staph
wjholden · a month ago
To the author: I love this idea, but your blog has two problems that made it less enjoyable for me to read. The first is the pull quotes. I find them confusing and unnecessary, especially when they repeat sentences in the preceding paragraph. The second is that I got stuck on the moving graphs while scrolling on my phone. I suggest making them smaller with a different background color or simply make them static images.
wjholden commented on Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized   nodaysoff.run... · Posted by u/friggeri
wjholden · 2 months ago
I feel very inspired by this, thanks for sharing! Didn't know this Run Streak Association existed but now I want to join. Congratulations on your immense achievement.
wjholden commented on Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks   github.com/jackjackbits/b... · Posted by u/ananddtyagi
wjholden · 2 months ago
Very cool, I've often thought that such a short-range chat would be fun on an airplane. Not practical, but it could be neat to chat with the group in the air.
wjholden commented on Cracovians: The Twisted Twins of Matrices   marcinciura.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/mci
gus_massa · 2 months ago
> It turns out that multiplying cracovians by computers is not faster than multiplying matrices.

That's very specific of Python. A few years ago we were multiplying a lot of matrices in Fortran and we tried to transpose one of the matrices before the multiplication. With -o0 it was a huge difference because the calculation used contiguous numbers and was more chache friendly. Anyway, with -o3 the compiler made some trick that made the difference disappear, but I never tried to understand what the compiler was doing.

wjholden · 2 months ago
I would expect that Julia could similarly show performance boosts here because of its column-major memory layout.
wjholden commented on Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?    · Posted by u/akktor
wjholden · 3 months ago
Cellular networks.

I specialize in computer networking in my day job. Most of what I do is Cisco routers, Cisco switches, and Cisco firewalls. I would be interested in learning more about cellular networks. I haven't put any effort into exploring this for myself. If there is a track similar to CCNA → CCNP → CCIE then it isn't well-known (well, not known to me).

wjholden commented on Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails   htxt.co.za/2025/05/duolin... · Posted by u/Improvement
charcircuit · 3 months ago
If Duolingo doesn't disrupt themselves with AI someone else will. The strength of LLMs makes them now rival usefulness of SRS for language learning.

>human curation will be a selling point

Look at the success of TikTok. Automated recommendations enabled it to become one of the top apps in existence. There is not evidence that consumers care who curated the content. The quality of the recommendation is experimentally proven to be much much more important.

wjholden · 3 months ago
Price point matters here. I keep getting ads for a competitor called Jumpspeak. They're very explicit that you're chatting with a bot, but their price is many times higher than Duolingo's subscription.
wjholden commented on Thoughts on thinking   dcurt.is/thinking... · Posted by u/bradgessler
wjholden · 3 months ago
I just wrote a paper a few days ago arguing that "manual thinking" is going to become a rare and valuable skill in the future. When you look around you, everyone is finding ways to be better using AI, and they're all finding amazing successes – but we're also unsure about the downsides. I hedge that my advantage in ten years will be that I chose not to do what everyone else did. I might regret it, we will see.

u/wjholden

KarmaCake day233January 18, 2020View Original