moregrist

6 ms·

31.
by moregrist 4mo ago
Regardless of how you think about LLMs (I do find them useful), there’s something really odd to think that you can select for “proven experience” in a young technology where current experience appears to have little to do with experience 15
32.
by moregrist 4mo ago
I love that we’re already talking about “proven experience” for a technology that’s essentially 15 months old, arguably only broke into the mainstream 3-6 months ago, has an unclear RoI for many companies, and seems to be changing quickly i
33.
by moregrist 4mo ago
> For any practical application, you are only interested in finite set of concrete identities I do a lot of numerical work in settings where computational efficiency is useful. In my work, most cases you can do numerically using integrat
34.
by moregrist 4mo ago
The tcl syntax is fine. And modern tcl is fine. But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on production code. Fun, painful times. The flip side: the interpre
35.
by moregrist 4mo ago
Why the negativity? If someone wants to have fun in COBOL, let them have fun in COBOL. If it’s agentic fun, that’s cool. If it’s an interest in the language, that’s cool. It’s not like you have to have an ROI for a fun side project.
36.
by moregrist 4mo ago
You bring in contractors. Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility. Even better if you get some management consultant to sugg
37.
by moregrist 4mo ago
Sometimes you get lucky and it both looks up the documentation and then ignores it and makes stuff up.
38.
by moregrist 4mo ago
This more or less agrees with my assessment of recent changes in Claude Code where a lot of new features are either: - A lot of half-baked features or half-done features. - Or have significant overlap with existing features, and aren’t clea
39.
by moregrist 4mo ago
Marc Andreessen has a strong financial incentive to feel this way and to convince others to feel this way. I also think it’s easy to think that AI gives good answers if you don’t know the field well. In fields where I know the material, the
40.
by moregrist 5mo ago
Seems like there should be a market for a no-Elon/OpenAI/Anthropic ETF out there. Or one that just imposes a reasonable waiting period on adding newly-IPO’d listings.
41.
by moregrist 5mo ago
The price of SSDs is similarly depressing.
42.
by moregrist 5mo ago
I didn’t see anything about LLMs here. If you’ve never written or worked in a Forth-like language, it’s not a hard system to bootstrap up. If you’ve done it before and know assembly, you can even get something that compiles to (stack-heavy
43.
by moregrist 5mo ago
It’s not about that. It’s the constant drumbeat of “AI will take your job.” It’s the constant news of “layoffs because AI makes us more productive.” It’s the constant background discussion of UBI because no one will have jobs anymore. It’s
44.
by moregrist 5mo ago
The number of businesses and business departments that run on spreadsheets and earn money is almost mind-boggling. It works until it doesn’t. The failure mode can be that the spreadsheet wizard leaves and no one understands their macros, th
45.
by moregrist 5mo ago
Non-cynically: the frontier providers have a projection for demand. Cynically: it’s become an executive-level gpu measuring contest. If you’re not making huge commitments on data centers, you can’t be a serious player. Realistically: It’s a
46.
by moregrist 5mo ago
> Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. This is not disconnected. It is also not new. P
47.
by moregrist 5mo ago
Why do people rebuild classic cars or remodel old houses by themselves? Because they enjoy the work itself and the learning process. You don’t have to. It’s perfectly okay to take your modern car to a mechanic and hire a contractor for your
48.
by moregrist 5mo ago
Have you ever done blacksmithing? It’s tremendously satisfying. Sure, if you want 300,000 spoons, it’s far better to use a factory process and get essentially identical results. But if you only want a few spoons and accept (or even value) t
49.
by moregrist 5mo ago
While you can't really ask "will I be layed off next year," it's pretty common to ask some version of "why is the role open," usually split among a few questions (that you'd tailor based on the role): - &q
50.
by moregrist 5mo ago
> The number of bugs tends to be linear to lines of code written meaning fewer lines of code for the same functionality will have fewer bugs. It depends on the code. If you’re comparing code of the same complexity then, sure, 2000 lines
51.
by moregrist 5mo ago
It’s still a bad metric. I have worked with code where 1000s of lines are very straightforward and linear. I’ve worked on code where 100 lines is crucial and very domain specific. It can be exceptionally clean and well-commented and it stil
52.
by moregrist 5mo ago
A recent episode of Matt Levine’s podcast (Money Stuff) covered this: apparently investment bankers spend a huge amount of time preparing pitch decks for companies that don’t want them. Apparently Claude is quite good at making a pitch deck
53.
by moregrist 5mo ago
If you can define the spec up front, this is probably true. For anything large, the spec becomes increasingly more complicated. Look at software schedules in the old waterfall days of the 80s/90s: the spec / planning period was ma
54.
by moregrist 6mo ago
What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism. Technology was going to make our lives better and unlock opportunity, not take all our jobs and render us irrelevant. To me, the weirdest thing about the AI hype cycle is th
55.
by moregrist 6mo ago
They shouldn’t make it into the product/build, but if you think about them as documentation, it makes sense to version control them. They often describe: - Overall architecture - Repository layout - Processes to use - Things not to do:
56.
by moregrist 6mo ago
> I don’t see how it could be that bad (incorrect, specifically), considering bun is probably the most widely-used production use case of zig. The PR is probably fine for bun’s purposes. That doesn’t make it a good PR for Zig’s purposes,
57.
by moregrist 6mo ago
I understand the schadenfreude people are feeling here. It certainly feels like a fitting outcome for people who work for a company with the morals of Meta. But I hope they successfully push back against it. I don’t want this kind of behavi
58.
by moregrist 6mo ago
The $20/mo plan never supported 24/7 autonomous agents. With Opus 4.5 and 4.6 I would hit resource limits after a reasonable amount of work, which corresponded to a variable amount of wall clock time. This makes me think either th
59.
by moregrist 6mo ago
It’s not the $10/mo that bothers me. It’s the nature of essentially leasing the software. Before it was a subscription, you bought a version and could use _that version_ in perpetuity, possibly with some number of well-defined upgrades
60.
by moregrist 6mo ago
> Come back the next day, work on something else This is a tried and true way of working on puzzles and other hard problems. I generally have 2-4 important things in flight, so I find myself doing this a lot when I get stuck.

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