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_benj

2,459 karma · joined March 3, 2017

Working on getting "side projects" to "stuff other people use" :-) reach me at benj (dot) calderon (at) gmail (dot) com
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_benj··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
Specially if using the 200mph car when you need it is just a /model away.
_benj··on JavaFX 27 Native Image on a Raspberry Pi 5
You see JavaFX everywhere in finance software. I learned it from working on finance.
_benj··on DeepSeek Harness developer preview
But that "worse way" makes AI labs and investors a lot of money... If the perception that "worse" is accompanied with needing less human intervention, i.e. less labor, worse is better from a business perspective...
_benj··on I hate packaging my software for Linux
Uff, doing all of that plus developing your software sounds really hard!

I package software for void Linux... I don't think there's an expectation from devs to know all the intricacies and particulars of each distro and contribution guidelines in order to package software for it... A tar or GitHub repo and clear instructions is all we need to package it.

It becomes a pain when the software has hard dependencies on either bleeding edge unreleased software (I'm thinking hyprland) or very old versions of libs that are no longer shipped with the distro.

Another pain point is when the software makes assumptions about Linux like all linunx use glibc or have systemd. In cases like that packaging software might entail patching it, or just giving up (void doesn't use systemd for example)

Hope this gives you a bit of insight into what packages might be looking for

_benj··on I Built a Blog and Forgot to Write
> Just doing something human in a dehumanizing world is enough.

Yes! it's been years since I read the fun, cool, nerdy post I used to read here... so whatever, I'll write them myself! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

_benj··on I Built a Blog and Forgot to Write
Thanks! writing the next post ATM :-)

For the longest time I was completely at a lost for how I was able to complete stuff for my employers but when I decided to do something I could never finish it...

Now I think that a big part of it is that my employers couldn't care less about "how the sausage is made" and were solely focused on results, at least that has been the case with some fantastic project managers I've had.

> do the thing first and improve the workflow later

I like this!

_benj··on Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
Fair enough... I think it really depends about what dependencies we talking about.

NPM decencies is a bit of dumpster fire, supply chain attacks galore! A well known python (think numpy) certainly is less discomforting, and a "industry standard" C library like GSL or SDL3, I just use it and move on

_benj··on Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
This resonates with me. The concept of cig it I've debt was something I've been experiencing but didn't have a name for it.

I think it is worth noting that not all code is equal... One could argue that adding a library is in some ways similar to copy/pasting code in as much as, one doesn't know what the code is doing, and yet that doesn't leave me with a sense of unease!

So it might be that as I'm working with an LLM there are parts (boring, as the author calls them) that are not worth "knowing" how they work, something uninteresting or that a correct output is all that us needed, I'm totally fine having the agent write that code, but the sections I need to know how they work, I think it might make sense to write those by hand!

_benj··on DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16
OpenAI: "Oops, AI hacked somebody accidentally..."

US Military: "Great, let's give it missiles!"

_benj··on Ask HN: How do you employ LLMs for UI development?
Idk for UX but I’ve found Claude helpful at creating ideas and mockups for gui apps I need. Don’t ask it to generate any images or vectors, it’s horrible at that, but you ask it to make a mock for an app so and so that does such and such and has three columns with a blah blah blah and it has made some impressive results in html/css for me
_benj··on On being sane in insane places (1973) [pdf]
Totally unrelated but “chat jippity” made my day!
_benj··on Giving up upstream-ing my patches and feel free to pick them up
Thanks for the explanation!
_benj··on Giving up upstream-ing my patches and feel free to pick them up
Would there be a difference in contributing to OpenJDK vs to, say, Temurin or Zulu Java? How separated are those Java JDKs really from OpenJDK?
_benj··on Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)
Since employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to, this post and emacs users in general, must be of such lesser value I guess? /s
_benj··on KDE launches its own distribution
A few years ago I switched to KDE and the experience has been so absolutedly seamless and good, and the upgrade to Plasma 6 took some time to propagate down to distros it was well worth the wait!

It seems to be that a project like KDE might be in a very good position to make a very competitive distro simply because they are starting from the point of the user experience, the UI if you will. Think M$ windows, it IS GUI, and fully focused on how the user would use it (I'm thinking the days of XP and Win 7).

A KDE distro might be less encumbered with "X11 vs Wayland" or "flatpak vs <insert package manager name here>" discussions and can fully focus on the user experience that KDE/Plasma desktop brings!

I'm looking forward to take this for a spin!

_benj··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
It seems that it was only about time… it just feels like the pace of enshittification with big tech being able to get away with anything is crazy!

I’m hoping that projects like Precursor can take off because we’ve buried ourselves in such mountain of complexity that seems like only a billion/trillion dollar big tech company can make an OS.

But then again, some body called BS on browsers and we might have a good option soon in Ladybug!

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor

_benj··on Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first
I particularly agree with you.

Sublime is not open source and it has a very devout paying client base.

To me the dirty thing is to make something “open source” because developers absolutely love that, to then take an arguably “not open source” path of $42 mil in VC funding.

There’s something dissonant there.

_benj··on Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first
I’m curious how this will turn out. Reminds me of the node.js fork IO.js and how that shifted the way node was being developed.

If there’s a group of people painfully aware of telemetry and AI being pushed everywhere is devs…

_benj··on At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
Maybe hot take…

I can see the point of sameness in homeschooling, but compared to traditional education? I’m not sure how much flexibility one would have to teach oneself calculus by 11 or the equivalent of an undergrad in math by 14!

That flexibility must be found in something non-traditional!

I’m no prodigy at all whatsoever but school was mostly dull and filled with teenager drama! Nobody knew what Linux was, cared about music production or anything interesting! The talk was which boy/girl whatever

_benj··on Replit's CEO apologizes after its AI agent wiped a company's code base
> …the company's AI coding agent deleted a code base and lied about its data.

Well, lying about it certainly human-like behavior, human-like AGI must be just around the corner!

/s

But really, full access to a production database? How many good engineer’s advice you need to ignore to do that? Who was consulted before running the experiment?

Or was it just a “if you say so boss…” kind of thing?

_benj··on How to Firefox
> If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result…

Hehe

_benj··on Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)
I think there’s an element of fear in the self-taught engineer? I am self taught and even after over a decade of experience impostor syndrome is still going strong!

At the same time I’ve been surprised by graduates when they come across something and say “I didn’t see that in school”, like, what!? I thought the job was mostly learning on the go!

_benj··on EBAF – eBPF Based Ad Firewall
How is this different than other ip or dns ad blockers?

I see that it all comes down to a blacklist of urls. Wouldn’t eBPF just make things more complicated?

_benj··on PairDrop – Cross-Platform open source AirDrop alternative
I’ve been finding this tool so useful to transfer files between devices in my local network. Linux to iOS, macOS to Windows, all with no friction. Love it!
_benj··on Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data
This is such an interesting experiment! Somebody else already mentioned Borges, but yeah!

Not exactly the same but reminds me of one time I did an experiment with rational number attempting to see which patterns emerged… 111? 112? 113? etc.

_benj··on Nnd – a TUI debugger alternative to GDB, LLDB
Nice! Thanks for sharing :-)

Another book added to my To-Read list

_benj··on First Successful Lightning Triggering and Guiding Using a Drone
That is impressive, specially the drone surviving! I expect something along the lines of disposable drones, which would like still be cost effective at saving 100-200b yen a year! It’ll be fascinating seeing this deployed!
_benj··on How I use audio journaling and AI to improve my trading decisions
This sounds interesting! I find journaling very tedious but I think is my ADHD brain that doesn’t wanna do anything too annoying. I’m not sure how from audio journaling Id get stats like MAE and MFE, apart from general win ratio and accuracy percentage… but I’m sure different stuff works for different people
_benj··on Ask HN: How do you have effective 1:1s with your manager?
I used keep a running list of things I wanted to talk about, wether technical, cultural, help talking to other teams, etc.

I also always asked how did I look from his point of view. It was very important for to know how my performance was perceived, since it’s easy for there to be a discrepancy between how I see my performance vs how it is perceived.

He was also very friendly and shared career advice and whatnot. I truly truly believe that having a dedicated eng manager can be a big factor of a 1x vs a 10x. I know that during that time with my manager I was a 10x and when he moved to another department my performance lowered, where it was motivation, lack of resources/feedback, or a combination or a bunch of other factors, having a good manager can make or brake a role in a company!

_benj··on Software-Defined Radio for Engineers (2018) [pdf]
I think as a counter point, Michael Ossmann, the creator of HackRF One has worked really hard to make it a lot more accessible.

In one of my favorite YT videos ever he talk about how he design RF PCB. The point of it is kind of like, the field of RF and SDR is incredibly deep and complicated, but at the same time, most filters/mixers/amplifiers and everything else needed for making an SDR are ICs that one can buy from Digikey and put them together (or likely have assembled).

So, not denying how deep SDR can be, but it can also be accessible with enough effort!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnRn3Kn_aXg

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