tombert

18 ms·

331.
by tombert 5mo ago
Yeah, if you're doing something asynchronous, exploit that fact! When I message someone on Slack, I usually do something like "Hey! I was wondering if you could help me with..." There's no need to add an extra blocking f
332.
by tombert 5mo ago
I know. But this is a forum filled with technical professionals and I would like to get actual opinions from actual humans. AI is cool but it's not going to have all the good and bad experiences that humans have had with different mot
333.
by tombert 5mo ago
I have four old 24gb Nvidia cards. They're not great but they're not useless either. The problem is that I haven't really figured out a good way to actually use them. Genuine question; would anyone here recommend any specif
334.
by tombert 5mo ago
I feel like especially when someone is asking something from me, they sort of have an obligation to make it clear, early on, what they're actually asking for. Tangential but related; when I used to work for BigCo, I would get old acqua
335.
by tombert 5mo ago
Yeah, that's actually how I discovered Leslie Lamport like ten years ago. I was looking for papers on distributed consensus, and it's hard not to come across Paxos when doing that. It turns out that he has oodles of really great
336.
by tombert 5mo ago
I'm not a scientist but I like to LARP as one in my free time, and I have found ChatGPT/Claude extremely useful for research, and I'd go as far as to say it supercharged it for me. When I'm learning about a new subject,
337.
by tombert 5mo ago
A dice roll has a 16.6% chance of landing on any given side, meaning an 83% chance of not landing on that side. If you guessed a "two", and it landed on "two, I wouldn't really be that impressed, even though there was
338.
by tombert 5mo ago
Even with those companies, the stock prices are stupidly inflated, but even granting them being profitable that’s still only like six companies. Thats like 1% of the s&p 500. A ton of SV companies, and I think maybe the majority, especi
339.
by tombert 5mo ago
Yeah, I always think of it as Gustafson’s Law but Jevon’s is probably more appropriate. Tangential, but related. When I first started my career, it was working for a company that used SVN as its version control (Git hadn’t quite won yet).
340.
by tombert 5mo ago
I wasn’t going to be curing cancer regardless so I am not sure I fully understand your point. Like most people reading this forum I am a relatively normal person who has a comfortable life but will be doomed to obscurity with no notable ac
341.
by tombert 5mo ago
It just seems like people are asserting that AI will enslave humanity without any reason to actually think that outside of speculative fiction.
342.
by tombert 5mo ago
Are people really basing their world view off The Terminator? Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.
343.
by tombert 5mo ago
I am arguing, and I thought this was obvious but I guess not, that that scope of work in general increases. My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”,
344.
by tombert 5mo ago
Sample size of one, so take this for what it is, but I was initially kind of depressed when I started using Codex and Claude Code, because it did kind of feel like I was being automated away. However, more recently I have been having fun by
345.
by tombert 5mo ago
The entire tech industry has morphed into ponzinomics, and it’s been like that for at least my entire career. It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy app
346.
by tombert 5mo ago
You still would have to deal with the fact that you would almost certainly need to budget at least 2x the regular amount of hardware to deal with the fact that you can’t do stuff like “replace failed power supply” or “replace failed hard dr
347.
by tombert 5mo ago
I'm not even sure I'm willing to concede he's smart by any definition of the word. I guess he's good at making shit up and making his investors forget his failed promises? I guess that requires some level of intelligence
348.
by tombert 5mo ago
If it's something that could even realistically be done, which again I don't actually concede based on what I said before, then maybe it would have slightly less regulation. Or, and hear me out, Elon is just a drug addict who ma
349.
by tombert 5mo ago
> It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that. No, it's still dumb. No matter how cheap they
350.
by tombert 5mo ago
I mean, it's a sad story but I'm not entirely sure I have much to say about it. I doubt I'm unique.
351.
by tombert 5mo ago
I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
352.
by tombert 5mo ago
I don't really mind Obsidian being non-FOSS, since it doesn't lock you in to any kind of propriety bullshit. All my files are just vanilla text files. All the folders are just vanilla folders. All the attachments are just vanilla
353.
by tombert 5mo ago
Very few things scare me much more than cold, unfeeling bureaucracy. I guess I'm a victim of The Cold Equations story, but almost by definition firm bureaucratic rules are sociopathic. This isn't inherently "bad", but m
354.
by tombert 5mo ago
I've had good luck having it translate TLA+ specs to programming languages. The specs are written by me and my fingers, and I've done most of the interesting concurrency reasoning beforehand. I'm pretty sure it still saves m
355.
by tombert 5mo ago
I think there are plenty of projects where "good enough" really is "good enough"...maybe most apps? If you're just making a shitty simple app, I don't really care about code quality. Example: I got Claude to ge
356.
by tombert 5mo ago
> Apple doesn’t have a social network business. They don't have a social network business because they tried that and failed. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
357.
by tombert 5mo ago
I'm not going to suggest anyone break the law since I don't think it's worth risking jail time for this, and I'm certainly too much of a coward to do it myself, but it's also hard for me to condemn this. ICE sort of
358.
by tombert 5mo ago
Agreed. I have a shitty laptop I bought at Micro Center a couple years ago for like $80. I bought it mostly out of curiosity since I wanted to see what an $80 laptop would be capable of. I installed NixOS minimal on there and a few apps t
359.
by tombert 5mo ago
I've noticed even more than the "hallucinations", just the code is generally quite bad. At least with concurrent and distributed systems stuff (which is really all I know nowadays), it is great at getting a prototype, but the
360.
by tombert 5mo ago
Just an update, fixed this by using the Comic Relief font and placing that in there.

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