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alex_x

123 karma · joined March 19, 2022

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alex_x··on Ask HN: After 20 years of coding it is not a fun hobby anymore. How about you?
Agree on it being a good thing
alex_x··on Korg PS-3300 is back
Am I the only one who takes these “legends returns“ for a lack of innovation?

Noticed that for a while in triple A gaming. I get it, companies are playing safe, but I don’t want to be sold the same thing over and once again..

Edit: typo

alex_x··on You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
A farmer producing meat is a better farmer than me even if I hire my own farmer.

If we invent a meta-farmer profession (for those who hired a farmer) I will be great meta-farmer, but still suck as a farmer

alex_x··on You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
Commit messages, comments and function names are hard to come up with, that's why we spent years to argue on maximizing value. We also learned to pay attention because we new that this particular name is like that with a reason.

Now it's hard to pay attention to code comments and commit messages because costs to produce them is zero and llm doesn't care about communication and your attention budget

alex_x··on You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
All above comes at a cost of author slowly starting to understand less and less code in their own projects.

Then in other projects as well.

After the initial boost is over they will have to pay money just to stay afloat because they have already outsourced their thinking.

I’m not anti AI, but I’m very worried about this bragging “you are not better engineer if you do things yourself”. Yes, you are, it all comes in small details.

alex_x··on I Love the Computer
I got emotional here as well.
alex_x··on Mini Micro Fantasy Computer
Easy-to-learn and built-for-learning-good-practices are two different things;

I think your point is perfectly correct but it's mostly about the second one

alex_x··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
Humans are highly dependent on the environment; you can blame people for eating too much of highly processed food and lots of sugar, but that's what happens if all you see around is highly processed food and sugar
alex_x··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
lmk if you ever visit Zürich :)
alex_x··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
I agree with that 100%
alex_x··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
I also wonder if this is so visible because a lot of people don't really care what they do and will happily use any bullshit machine to simulate work.
alex_x··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
thinking becomes a commodity
alex_x··on Mini Micro Fantasy Computer
That's a fair point for students, but as a beginner who simply wants to tinker with fun stuff, you can go very far without knowing of a program stack.

I think I had the wrong audience in mind

alex_x··on Mini Micro Fantasy Computer
I wonder why all these easy-to-learn languages use indentation to denote scope, not something like curly braces. Isn't it actually harder to explain?
alex_x··on Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card
seeing this slop landings is so tiring.

It makes me not caring about potentially good product in no time

alex_x··on Wrote this for humans, now I use it as a prompt
About year and a half ago I put together code review guide for human-written code to help my team speed things up and show how to operate based on trust, respect, and mutual goals;

This aged well and now the same article shared as a prompt guides LLMs to review generated code focusing on understanding and maintaining consistency in a codebase

alex_x··on Programming Still Sucks
been thinking about the same for a while but couldn't put this into words; thank you
alex_x··on StarFighter 16-Inch
what's your average battery life?
alex_x··on GitHub rushed to fix a critical vulnerability in less than six hours
isn't that a normal timeline for critical vulnerability? Seems like paid marketing
alex_x··on Raylib v6.0
No bindings, I wrote a few wrappers myself to make often used functions a bit more swifty, but otherwise its pretty smooth sailing
alex_x··on Raylib v6.0
a lot of cool-looking stuff in my ECS is supported by Swift parameter packs; however, once you start using them a lot you find limits pretty soon.

One example: the following wouldn't compile in swift:

  func query<each T, each K>(
    _ body: ((repeat each T), (repeat each K)) -> Void
  ) { ... }
so you kinda work around it with extra type wrappers but this looks ugly - I've been using macros to hide some of the ugliness away xD

edit: the example is oversimplified just to show the point - in this example compiler can't really tell where T ends and K starts, so its logical; but I had more complex cases where a human would've been able to infer types correctly

alex_x··on Raylib v6.0
there is not much to brag about yet :'(

About a year ago I was curious about building an ECS-based game engine with world simulations like in dwarf fortress, but obviously at much smaller scale while playing Starfield. Something cool started to materialise after tinkering so I thought why not turn it into a space-sim roguelike with a simulated living world.

I use swift because it gives me fantastic devex with all its great type inference and macros + raylib gives me cross platform input handling / rendering and window management.

C-interop setup is basically instant - you point compiler to c headers and the API becomes immediately visible on swift side

As for swift ergonomics, I particularly love that I can now write very readable code, like:

> world.addRelation(attacker, Attacks.self, target) > world.addRelation(player, Owns.self, sword)

or

> for (entity, position) in world.query(Position.self).with(Health.self, Velocity.self).without(Enemy.self) {}

alex_x··on Raylib v6.0
I'm currently building my roguelike in swift using c-interop with raylib - this brings me so much joy
alex_x··on AI is going to kill app subscriptions
One of the reasons I built pocket.codes https://www.linkedin.com/posts/afedosov_when-i-started-my-ca...

Apple is being Apple and not letting me to release it however :(

alex_x··on Install.md: A standard for LLM-executable installation
I don’t understand how this made it to the front page
alex_x··on Ask HN: Feel stuck and overwhelmed by tech choice
Thanks! Postgres is the easiest choice ever haha
alex_x··on Ask HN: Feel stuck and overwhelmed by tech choice
> Let go all the new possibilities, and use the same stack you used for the preceding project.

I think this is very good perspective, thank you for the advice

alex_x··on Ask HN: Feel stuck and overwhelmed by tech choice
Interesting point
alex_x··on Ask HN: Feel stuck and overwhelmed by tech choice
> The situation you describe isn't easy to get out of until you address whatever fear is causing you to over-worry about every step.

Thanks for the reply, I think this is exactly what I needed to hear; will try to reflect on this.

From the very top of my head: I know exactly what I need to do but I feel like with every tech choice I need to either learn "how" or refresh my previous knowledge.

Wearing multiple hats in rapidly popping up and fading out tech startups didn't really help to go deep with one thing (as I managed to with objc/ios)

alex_x··on Show HN: I made tool for slicing up samples to Ableton Move presets
lmk if I can contribute, had this idea for ages too
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