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Merad

2,795 karma · joined March 14, 2015

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Merad··on NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart
The A-12 was built in an era when the aerospace industry was flush with knowledge and active R&D into mach 3+ flight - everyone was convinced that it was the future. Today's industry is heavily optimized for subsonic airliners and fighter jets that have top speeds of "only" mach 1.5-2. No one in the west has built a mach 3 aircraft since the 60s and not in Russia since the early 80s. The knowledge isn't _lost_ (well, we hope) but there is a lot that will need to be relearned, and we all know how even the best documentation is usually missing a lot of details.
Merad··on macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage
Is it able to work with non default apps like Gmail?
Merad··on Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md
I don't think this will work reliably. Pretty sure it's not the LLM deciding to read the files, it's the harness in Claude Code itself injecting the instructions files based on the paths the model accesses.

Edit: sometimes if Claude lists files in a directory or does a search that shows it an AGENTS.md exists it will decide to read it. But it's not a reliable behavior.

Merad··on The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities
I used to work at a company that was the industry leader in business management software for storage facility owners. I don't remember exact numbers but a lot of facilities are mom & pop type operations where people basically invested in the business as a retirement plan. It's a surprisingly stable and profitable industry. Economy good? People buy too much crap and want to store it. Economy bad? People have to move and downsize their housing and need to store stuff. Large incentive for tenants to avoid delinquency because they risk their stuff being auctioned off.
Merad··on US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons
"Space weapons" here most likely means some combination of anti-satellite weapons and electronic warfare such as GPS jammers. AFAIK it's been widely believed that the USSR/Russia has had these capabilities in orbit since the 80s. I'd be willing to bet that the US has had them for decades as well, it just hasn't been publicly acknowledged.
Merad··on Show HN: Graphify C# – Compiler-accurate Find Usages for coding agents
Interesting! Have you tried it on any large code bases? I have to wonder if json is going do become unwieldy at the scale of millions of LOC - a SQLite db might be a better choice.
Merad··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
My three year old 15 Pro is already down to 85% capacity.
Merad··on iPhone Duo
I definitely didn't want one 30 minutes ago, but now that I've seen it the idea of a phone that can be smaller in the pocket but unfold to give a large screen is pretty darn appealing. Appealing enough to pay 50% more for it? Eh... probably not.
Merad··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
> eSIM-only models deliver up to 36 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro and up to 45 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro Max.

That might convince me to upgrade. Not because I care about watching video for two days straight, but hopefully it means the battery is large enough that it'll last 5+ years before battery degradation becomes annoying.

Merad··on How Universities Should Prepare Founders
And both of them rely on government welfare to keep their employees from starving so that they can pass more wealth on to shareholders. A study earlier this year (below) estimated that more than a million Walmart and Amazon employees nationwide depend on Medicaid.

https://www.ips-dc.org/report-americas-20-largest-low-wage-e...

Merad··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
I'm not sure how old you are, but shortly after Obama took office in 2009 there was quite a bit of reporting claiming that the Bush administration had been so disastrous and young people had been so thoroughly poisoned by Republican policies, that it would likely be a generation before the Republicans had the chance to win the presidency again. Remember, Bush left office in the depths of the Great Recession. Instead, it took less than 8 years for us to get MAGA.
Merad··on AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
The real value of a junior engineer is that they will become a senior. That's really always been the case IME. Juniors in the first year or two of their career are routinely a net negative, maybe break even. But the thing is, unless you're making the bet that LLMs are going to _entirely_ replace human SWE, we as an industry have to maintain a pipeline to take in juniors and level them up. If we don't, we're going to be in real trouble in about 10 years.
Merad··on PostgreSQL for Everything
That's kind of risky considering the radical differences between types in SQLite and Postgres. There are plenty of situations where EF will need to be configured differently in order to map your .Net types correctly to each DB. Or subtle differences in behavior due to storage differences (particularly SQLite's predilection for storing things as strings). It's so trivially easy to run Postgres in Docker that I don't really see the advantage of using SQLite for local dev.
Merad··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
That's not at all unusual in the US. My dad saw a neurologist for chronic severe headaches. It was very common for us to go to an appointment, have the doctor request a follow up appointment in 3 months, then be told during checkout that the earliest available time was in 5-6 months.
Merad··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
I don't get it either. Earlier this week I had Claude build a POC for a tool we're evaluating. I spent a few hours building out a requirements doc in a chat with Fable. Then Claude Code built it with Fable as the manager and the code being written by about 80% Opus/20% Sonnet subagents (this was using superpowers). It ran continuously for 15 hours on the implementation and didn't hit any limits.
Merad··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
Oh yes, the 1990s was the height of massive fast food drinks. Wendy's had 32 oz "biggie" drinks and a 40+ oz "great biggie". McDonalds had "super size" tho I don't recall its volume. Most of those got renamed by the mid 00's and eventually downsized.
Merad··on All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
Flock data can be accessed by cops nationwide who have different (or no) restrictions on data retention or privacy compared to local police.
Merad··on Claude Is Not a Compiler
> It's some permutation of all the bits of available memory. It's in there somewhere.

True, but the number of possible permutations is so large it's incomprehensible. Let's limit ourselves to say a 50 MiB program, meaning the size of the compiled binary. If I'm remembering the math correctly, that amount of memory can hold 2^(2^20 * 50 * 8) different states. That's 2^419430400 or roughly 10^126000000. For comparison, the heat death of the universe is predicted to occur in about 10^100 years, or 10^107 seconds. You'd need to be able to look at more than a million programs per second to examine them all before the end of the universe.

Merad··on CarPlay Is Additive
The average car in the US is about 13 years old. Just like with phones, some people upgrade every few years even though it's a poor financial decision. Many frugal or less wealthy people only buy used cars and drive them until they die.
Merad··on Why jet engines aren't made in China
Serious electric aircraft are really gated behind major advancements in battery technology or some alternative power storage tech. The energy density of batteries is an order of magnitude less than fossil fuels, and you have to carry the heavy batteries with you the entire trip (vs burning off fuel as you fly).
Merad··on A record 242 US cities now have starter homes that cost $1M
It was built in 1898, for starters.
Merad··on Firewood Splitting Simulator
Are you trying to split it with an axe? You need a sledgehammer and a few splitting wedges. The sledge lets you apply a lot more force than an axe and striking the wedge focuses that force onto a small area. The first wedge will open a crack, then you use additional wedges to expand that crack until she splits.

Source: grew up in a wood burning family, helped split many stubborn hardwood trees (all by hand).

Merad··on Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things
> I enforce CC on my projects because I don’t have the energy to police horrendous commit messages.

And does it actually accomplish that goal? I've been on several projects where someone pushed CC on the team with this reasoning. Every time my experience has been that you get the same crappy messages with a tag that may or may not be accurate.

BTW, AI absolutely knows how to bypass pre-commit hooks and will do so when they come up with some reasoning why their situation is an exception to the rule. I've watched them do it. The only way I've found to strictly enforce things on an agent (tests, linting, whatever) is to use a claude pre-command hook that will block git commit if the checks don't pass.

Merad··on AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
> Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will

Absolutely not harmless if you're the executor of an estate forced to deal with a screwed up AI will. I just handler my dad's estate this spring. It's a frustrating and confusing process even with the simplest of estates.

Merad··on Hershey Bets on Agentic AI to Rethink $2B in Marketing Spend
Not 100% sure if you're serious, but it's a piece of Hershey Kisses candy which predates the existence of emojis by at least a century.
Merad··on Two EA-18 fighter jets collide at Mountain Home airshow, pilots ejected safely
Basically all modern fighters since the 1980s are aerodynamically unstable and require a computer to fly. A collision like this is almost certainly going to do major damage to the airframe (screwing up its aerodynamics) and maybe flight controls as well. I suspect the plane will be well outside the parameters that the flight controls software can deal with, making stable flight impossible.
Merad··on Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
You aren't wrong, but the _overwhelming_ majority of "full stack" devs I've worked with only know CSS at the most basic level and have little interest in learning it in depth. I myself have been programming for more than 20 years, doing web dev for almost 15, and I can't find the motivation to learn it well. There are too many technical skills to keep up with and CSS is pretty low down on my priority list. I would prefer to rely on specialists who are experts but companies aren't willing to hire dedicated front end devs.
Merad··on Appearing productive in the workplace
I've been in a similar situation as the GP. 15 years ago my first job after college was at a large Fortune 500 building LOB apps. The company was full of departments that were run entirely out of a massive Excel spreadsheet (hundreds of MB or more), or better yet a totally custom thing built on Access97 and VB made by a guy who retired 10 years ago. More than a few of the people in these departments had been in the same job for 20+ years and literally done the job the same way the whole time. Our mandate was not to modernize their business processes or make them friendly to automation, it was literally to indulge their stupid whims. But at least at the end they would be on an app where IT had access to the source code, could ensure databases were backed up, etc.
Merad··on Appearing productive in the workplace
> intelligent autocomplete

I'm curious how much value others are finding in this. Personally I turned it off about a year ago and went back to traditional (jetbrains) IDE autocomplete. In my experience the AI suggestions would predict exactly what I wanted < 1% of the time, were useful perhaps 10% of the time, and otherwise were simply wrong and annoying. Standard IDE features allowing me to quickly search and/or browse methods, variables, etc. are far more useful for translating my thoughts into code (i.e. minimizing typing).

Merad··on Ted Turner has died
Definitely have mixed feelings about whats become of CNN and how the 24 hour news cycle has affected the world, but I'm very grateful that Turner financed the movie Gettysburg [0]. One of my favorite movies, based on one of my favorite books. I've probably seen it at least 50 times.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_(1993_film)

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