wenc

7 ms·

31.
by wenc 5mo ago
Right now Alexa+ and Gemini are objectively better. The best is ChatGPT voice mode. It understands non English words and accents amazingly well, and even though the LLM model isn’t the full fledged one, I can have deep conversations with it
32.
by wenc 5mo ago
I read this article 10 years ago by a guy named Ricky Yean who went to Stanford as an economically disadvantaged admit and couldn’t shake his poverty mindset and it cost him when he was running a startup. Why “few successful startup founder
33.
by wenc 6mo ago
I feel like 1 is a self correcting problem. If this goes nowhere it will soon be forgotten. I can think of one example that did go somewhere: Linux.
34.
by wenc 6mo ago
I feel Gastown is an attempt at answering: what if i push the multi-agent paradigm to its chaotic end? But I think the point that Yegge doesn't address and that I had to discover for myself is: getting many agents working in parallel d
35.
by wenc 6mo ago
You're thinking a tax break which is an unconditional subsidy. That relies on the business passing savings through which folks are right to be skeptical about. But that's not all subsidy mechanisms. The best ones are where pass-t
36.
by wenc 6mo ago
I use DuckDB daily. In short — It doesn’t crash often at all. What you may be remembering were reports of exceptional cases where it didn’t handle out of memory errors well. I was one of the people affected. I was running complex analytic q
37.
by wenc 6mo ago
Try DuckLake. They just released a prod version. You can do read/write of a parquet folder on your local drive, but managed by DuckLake. Supports schema evolution and versioning too. Basically SQLite for parquet.
38.
by wenc 6mo ago
Maybe the OP is thinking of reading/writing to DuckDB native format files. Those require filesystem semantics for writing. Unfortunately, even NFS or SMB are not sufficiently FS-like for DuckDB. Parquet is static append only, so DuckDB
39.
by wenc 6mo ago
I recommend visiting Detroit to update your priors. I first visited in 2000 and it was blighted. I visited again in 2025 and it’s actually nice (downtown Detroit and surroundings). There’s even a Microsoft office there.
40.
by wenc 6mo ago
We need to match the tool to the uncertainty we're facing. The "just prototype it" thinking addresses "feasibility uncertainty". It surfaces blind spots and helps people tangibly reason about what the product looks
41.
by wenc 6mo ago
Polars is Ritchie Vink. Pandas is Wes McKinney.
42.
by wenc 7mo ago
It depends on the use case. Go seems like a dream... until you have to work with dataframes or do any kind of ML work. Then it's a nightmare. Go's ecosystem is especially weak in ML, stats, and any kind of scientific computation.
43.
by wenc 7mo ago
Great, but I like my Apple Watch for its one killer features: not tell time, but tap to pay. I gave up wearing my Tissot watch for this. This genuinely saves me time and adds fluidity to my day. Tap for subway. Tap to for vending machine. T
44.
by wenc 7mo ago
The disposable wooden chopsticks in Japan don’t splinter (they’re higher quality and cost more than the ones we have in the US). That’s why you don’t need to rub to get rid of splinters.
45.
by wenc 7mo ago
I wonder if it's more like "qualitative gradient descent" on a very non-linear non-convex surface. You can try this yourself in a simple fashion -- let's say you have piece of code that you want to speed up. Point your a
46.
by wenc 7mo ago
Rehashing my comment from before: I use Kiro IDE (≠ Kiro CLI) primarily as a spec generator. In my experience, it's high-quality for creating and iterating on specs. Tools like Cursor are optimized for human-driven vibing -- they have
47.
by wenc 7mo ago
I use Kiro IDE (≠ Kiro CLI) primarily as a spec generator. In my experience, it's high-quality for creating and iterating on specs. Tools like Cursor are optimized for human-driven vibing -- they have great autocomplete, etc. Kiro, by
48.
by wenc 7mo ago
I think that can solved using a city dropdown there’s ambiguity. This is not new. Some checkouts do start with zip code and they feel much more efficient. (US only delivery, so country already assumed)
49.
by wenc 7mo ago
I used to work for the US side of a German multinational (one of the largest in the world) and discovered the same thing when it came to software. The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and im
50.
by wenc 7mo ago
I used to solve differential algebraic equations using Lagrange polynomials. Essentially you convert the differential equations into an algebraic system by discretizing the solution. The method is called Orthogonal Collocation on Finite Ele
51.
by wenc 8mo ago
> RE: duckdb. I have a wonderful time with ChatGPT talking to duckdb but I have kept it to inmemory db only. Do you set up some system prompt that tell it to keep a duckdb database locally on disk in the current folder? No, I don't
52.
by wenc 8mo ago
MCPs (especially remote MCPs) are like a black box API -- you don't have to install anything, provision any resources, etc. You just call it and get an answer. There's a place for that, but an MCP is ultimately a blunt instrument.
53.
by wenc 8mo ago
I have two Alexas but never get ads. How is it that you’re getting ads?
54.
by wenc 8mo ago
If you vector index your code base, agents can explore it without loading it into context. This is what Cursor and Roo and Kiro and probably others do. Claude Code uses string searches. What helps is also getting it to generate a docs of yo
55.
by wenc 8mo ago
> For this reason, programming languages, at least how we understand them today, have reached a terminal state. I could easily make a new language now, especially with the help of Claude Code et al, but there would never be any reason fo
56.
by wenc 8mo ago
The key is generating a task list from the spec. Kiro IDE (not cli) generates tasks.md automatically. This is a checklist that Opus has to check off. Try Kiro. It's just an all-round excellent spec-driven IDE. You can still use Claude
57.
by wenc 8mo ago
This could be a language specific failure mode. C++ is hard for humans too, and the training code out there is very uneven (most of it pre-C++11, much of it written by non-craftspeople to do very specific things). On the other hand, LLMs ar
58.
by wenc 8mo ago
I've been doing spec-driven development for the past 2 months, and it's been a game changer (especially with Opus 4.5). Writing a spec is akin to "working backwards" (or future backwards thinking, if you like) -- this is
59.
by wenc 9mo ago
Rust, Go and TypeScript are good bets. Python too -- hear me out. With spec-driven development to anchor things, coupled with property-based tests (PBT) using Hypothesis, it's great for prototyping problems. You wouldn't write mis
60.
by wenc 9mo ago
For analytic queries, yes, a single SQL query often beats many small ones. The query optimizer is allowed to see more opportunities to optimize and avoid unnecessary work. Most SQLite queries however, are not analytic queries. They're

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