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andyferris

1,580 karma · joined June 27, 2017

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andyferris··on California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
Sure, the ISP _should_ deliver the packets. No worries.

The user agent should... be an agent for the user, and be able to perform actions on their behalf.

(The legality of those actions is of course assumed by the user here... if I add an automated flamethrower to my mailbox and burn my bills, well the debt collectors may come regardless if I read them or not - we cannot shift blame to the USPS here).

andyferris··on The Letter S, by Donald Knuth (1980) [pdf]
How many great inventions and discoveries were the product of yak shaving? I'd imagine quite a lot.
andyferris··on Houses are for living, not for speculation
Interesting timing, with Australian budget night (removal of tax discounts for both capital and trusts, and for investment in existing housing stock).
andyferris··on Learning Software Architecture
My example here is: it’s impossible to know what spaghetti code is until you experience it, and are on the hook for its bugs and outages.

We hear a lot about it prior and upon experiencing it I could name it. (Like love, I suppose?)

andyferris··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
To me applying LLMs to a python (or similarly dynamic) code base where it’s currently spaghetti and monkey patched, it can miss things just like I can.

But… I have to admit Opus 4.7 has been very pragmatic in detecting root causes and proposing sensible fixes to bugs in this situation (ie bugs encountered in production not compile time).

It’s also fine at matching current styles and conventions (which is great if they are good styles and conventions).

In terms of new code, rust would have been near impossible to write with such a high degree of non-local reasoning, so I’m assuming these bugs wouldn’t be present.

andyferris··on Lakebase architecture delivers faster Postgres writes
Yes.

Maybe I’m wrong, but AFAICT this is block (page) storage backed by S3, tuned for Postgres with some paxos-linked storage/caching servers sitting in front? Sounds good, but I’m not sure “lake” or “warehouse” is a word I’d choose… much closer to Litestream-with-reads, or the somewhat-famous “I ran out of RAM so I downloaded some more” blog article.

andyferris··on Making Julia as Fast as C++ (2019)
Meh, I’ve never been associated with the company and AFAICT they provide value through platforms for enterprises. Not everyone gets OSS sponsorships to fund team (and using a social media presence to achieve this was a post-Julia phenomenon).

It’s nothing like Google-the-ad-company influencing Chrome. The company consumes Julia for products to sell, rather. Maybe this affects the ordering of features landing, but… meh.

andyferris··on Making Julia as Fast as C++ (2019)
Personally I never struggled. You can employ interfaces and maintain them judiciously.

But interfaces are informal. Not using a monorepo say makes it harder to be sure if your broke downstream or not (via downstream’s unit tests).

But freedom from Rust’s orphan rule etc means you can decompose large code into fragments easily, while getting almost Zig-style specialisation yet the ease of use of python (for consumers). I would say this takes a fair bit of skill to wield safely/in a maintainable fashion though, and many packages (including my own) are not extremely mature.

andyferris··on Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school
> outsourcing

It should also be pointed out that children and teens especially benefit from a range of role models and mentors. Having the parent(s) provide 100% of the (life and academic) lessons is not actually ideal.

You say outsourcing, I say providing a range of different people to learn from. (It takes a village to raise a child…).

Not saying the current school system is perfect (it’s a rather dystopian “village”!), but keeping the teens locked up at home isn’t going to help.

andyferris··on Agents need control flow, not more prompts
Good point. We need the mean, “any 1 of 10” and the “all 10 of 10” success rates in the metrics, so we can estimate reliability (the last one).
andyferris··on Seeing like a spreadsheet
I feel it's the extreme of "static vs dynamic languages". In Excel, even variables (cells) are dynamic, not fixed names in a lexical scope.

The reactive programming aspect is genuinely good; I wish my business logic could be expressed declaritively and the system just reacted automatically.

I also find it fascinating to consider the looks-like-a-spreadsheet-but-statically-typed-and-scoped world (airtable is a step in this direction, for example).

andyferris··on $500 GPU outperforms Claude Sonnet on coding benchmarks
I move the record to another _index_, generally.

It depends whether you reliably control all the DB client code, of course.

andyferris··on Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
Vibe coding is actually "good" for small, bespoke things. The same way that Excel is "good" for small tasks, bad bad for larger things. Too easy to make mistakes, too hard to maintain.

I could equally ask - where are all the Excel workbooks that are actually _good_? No-one needs to share their Excel workbooks. They don't need 10k github stars. They just achieve some small goal of the Excel user. These LLM agents just need to do what the user needs doing at any moment.

(Sometimes, that can be a small part of a larger job in software, or a series of small parts perhaps - but again you are going to see this "show up" as a part of peoples workflow in maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do, in other words, you won't directly see it at all. And no, digital cameras didn't change the field 18 months after the first somewhat-usable one was released - it took quite a while for the technology to become good enough and cheap to democratize filmmaking).

andyferris··on Apple Business
Custom domains (BYO or buy through Apple) and email hosting is in the announcement, too.
andyferris··on Apple Business
I believe it said it will be free, starting April 14.
andyferris··on Apple Business
I think what they've announced is the best fit for small businesses, not large enterprises. They can still treat it as a B2C-style service - many tiny customers with similar needs. Mom and Pop can now get a domain name through Apple, with email accounts - for a lot of people that might be the only way they'd know how to do something like that.

The business needs here aren't so different to family manangement features, say.

Throwing in Entra ID / Google Workspace authentication and multiple Apple IDs per device is probably the most "interesting" part as to where that ends up in the distant future.

andyferris··on How I'm Productive with Claude Code
When people say the "bubble will pop" it's meant in analogy to the dotcom era - businesses and investers lost money, but the internet (and its opportunities) didn't vanish.

Even open-weight local models are becoming good enough for teaching yourself quite a range of stuff, especially the beginner aspects. LLMs are not going to simply disappear because of a financial reallignment. The worst thing might be not being able to access a super-duper frontier model for free?

andyferris··on US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects
Thank you. I needed that.
andyferris··on Claude Code Cheat Sheet
I guess it would be too obvious a lie to say Codex is "the present"?
andyferris··on iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM
I highly doubt the A20 Pro will be slower than the A19 Pro - particularly for AI workloads.
andyferris··on An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]
I am not a carpenter; I use a saw at least once a month.
andyferris··on How BYD got EV chargers to work almost as fast as gas pumps
Canada might not own car manufacturers but they do have factories that build cars for GM, Ford, etc, and these are important to their economy. I thought some were sold in the US even?

Chinese companies aren’t exactly building factories in Canada to sell to NAFTA, but I guess Carney figures it’s worthwhile overall?

andyferris··on Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout
My theory is that social media simply increases the connectivity and reach (of the “rumour mill” or what have you) and thus it amplifies an existing social “failure mode”.

(That and earlier mass media was heavily moderated and regulated, while things like Facebook or twitter/X are basically a free-for-all).

andyferris··on Astral to Join OpenAI
Everything “just works” and is fast - and that’s basically it.

You can run a script with a one liner and it will automatically get you the same python and venv and everything as whoever distributed the python code, in milliseconds if the packages are already cached on your local computer.

Very easy to get going without even knowing what a venv or pypi or anything is.

If you are already an expert you get “faster simpler tooling” and if you are a complete beginner it’s “easy peasy lemon squeezy”.

andyferris··on Long overlooked as crucial to life, fungi start to get their due
I actually really like "milky" tastes - has there been much progress on replicating the flavour?
andyferris··on Shall I implement it? No
It's new
andyferris··on The MacBook Neo
It's definitely a product for the middle class, not the poor ("broke students" vs "mom bought me this laptop").

The distinction is a lot of (most?) Apple products are _expensive_ for middle class buyers, while this represents good value.

If it's well designed and robust, it might be a great machine to buy second hand in 3-5 years.

andyferris··on What Is a Tort?
The methodology here is interesting.

I'm looking at this exercise in exploring hypothetical situations as like throwing fuzz tests at the law, and using the results to correct the "code" (either legal code or how to interpret the common law, depending on how your juristiction functions). I can't say it's a bad approach for "engineering" a good system.

andyferris··on I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now
> So what’s the Pentagon’s plan — to coerce and threaten to destroy every single company that won’t give them what they want on exactly their terms?

I mean... isn't that pretty much the way the current administration behaves in general? If the answer to this question is "yes", and the US executive does not in fact share the values of the author about free and open society, then the rest of the article is kinda moot (except the point that we should be talking about these things now, and encouraging congress to act).

andyferris··on How the Sriracha guys screwed over their supplier
I don’t understand the sriracha “thing” in North America. Don’t you guys have 100’s of sambal oleks from SE Asia to choose from?
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