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andyferris

1,580 karma · joined June 27, 2017

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andyferris··on Most of the US economy is in a recession
I took that as maybe referring to Trump?
andyferris··on We should revisit literate programming in the agent era
I think the externality of issue tracking systems like Jira (or even GitHub) cause friction. Literate programming has everything in one place.

I’d like to have a good issue tracking system inside git. I think the SQLite version management system has this functionality but I never used it.

One thing to solve is that different kinds of users need to interact with it in different kinds of ways. Non-programmers can use Jira, for example. Issues are often treated as mutable text boxes rather than versioned specification (and git is designed for the latter). It’s tricky!

andyferris··on MacBook Neo
Does Apple make a profit of iPad Pro and Air, do you think? Is it a "failure"?

Their mere existance screams "our iPads are a gazillion times better and more powerful than Android tablets". Remember, they NEED to have such a reputation to charge luxury product prices (for tablets and otherwise).

Think about market segmentation. iPad and Neo are for students and everyday/coffee-table computing. iPad Pro, MacBook Pro with M5 Max, Mac Studio, Studio Display, Watch Ultra etc are chasing a completely different market (niche power users and vanity purchases).

andyferris··on MacBook Neo
Honestly I think these will sell well in high schools.

Where I am, our primary schools require iPads, the kids want iPhones (and mabye tend to inherit their parents old phones), and now there's a lightweight laptop for high school cheaper and faster and better screen (and I'm hoping with a more robust build) than the slightly-more-expensive 13" windows laptops I've been buying them.

The parents will later buy them a macbook air or whatever when they go to college.

I think Apple could be onto a winner here, in terms of long-term MacOS uptake.

andyferris··on Who Writes the Bugs? A Deeper Look at 125,000 Kernel Vulnerabilities
I am a bit confused though here - should the kernel be written by unemployed people? Most contributors won’t have full-time funding.
andyferris··on British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
But that's the whole thing.

Why change the clocks when we could change the definition of school time, business hours, liquor/gambling licensing hours, construction noise hours, etc? Just use standard time and then base our society around the physics of the sun.

andyferris··on Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution
There were parallel anti-competitive behavior cases brought against Apple and Google.

Apple was deemed not to be anticompetitive in app stores because there was no existing market of app stores on iOS. Google was more open in allowing other app stores, but deemed anticompetitive by discouraging their use relative to the Play store.

The irony is the more open player was deemed more anticompetitive. OP is saying Google is “fixing” their anticompetitive behavior by eliminating alternative app stores entirely.

andyferris··on Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution
Like many things in the US, this should be settled by congress not judges.

Things that everyone relies on for life are generally regulated by law. Telecom platforms for instance. I’d say the mandatory software platform I need for my bank, drivers license, daily communication, etc should be in this bucket.

The EU declaring both Apple and Google gateway platforms is a much better approach. Congress is abdicating its responsibility to craft the legal frameworks for equal access in the modern age.

andyferris··on Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]
Actually - do they do this in LLM benchmarks? As a measure of overconfidence/confabulation? Seems immediately applicable.
andyferris··on Claude Sonnet 4.6
Bill Gates did... has anyone else followed in those footsteps?
andyferris··on Error payloads in Zig
> stacktraces are only available in certain build modes

> zig has pretty good error traces by default

These seem rather conditional. If I need to run release-fast in prod, say, do we loose these error traces (for bugs)?

andyferris··on I’m joining OpenAI
I don't know. It's more of a sharp tool like a web browser (also called a "user agent") - yes an inexperienced user can quickly get themselves into trouble without realizing it (in a browser or openclaw), yes the agent means it might even happen without you being there.

A security hole in a browser is an expected invariant not being upheld, like a vulnerability letting a remote attacker control your other programs, but it isn't a bug when a user falls for an online scam. What invariants are expected by anyone of "YOLO hey computer run my life for me thx"?

andyferris··on The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling
Honestly, the EU is more likely to change the behavior of e.g. Facebook than a single employee would.

(IMO if the US federal government spent more time caring for it's citizens it would consider doing such things more seriously itself).

andyferris··on GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
I’ve never heard of vigilante justice against someone already sentenced to prison for life, just because they were sentenced in a place without capital punishment?

(I mean - people get killed in prison sometimes, I suppose, but it’s not really like vigilante justice on the streets is causing a breakdown in society in Australia, say…)

andyferris··on Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
The hint from quantum field theory (and things like lattice gauge theory) is that charge emerges from interesting topological states/defects of the underlying field (by "interesting topological shapes" I mean - imagine a vortex in the shape of a ring/doughnut). It's kind of a topological property of a state of the photonic field, if you will - something like a winding number (which has to be an integer). Electric charge is a kind of "defect" or "kink" in the photonic field, while color charge (quarks) are defects in the strong-force field, etc.

When an electron-positron pair is formed from a vacuum, we get all sorts of interesting geometry which I struggle to grasp or picture clearly. I understand the fact that these are fermions with spin-1/2 can similarly be explained as localized defects in a field of particles with integer spin (possibly a feature of the exact same "defect" as the charge itself, in the photonic field, which is what defines an electron as an electron).

EDIT:

> However, there are no theories why this is -- they are simply measured and that is it.

My take is that there _are_ accepted hypotheses for this, but solving the equations (of e.g. the standard model, in full 3D space) to a precision suitable to compare to experimental data is currently entirely impractical (at least for some things like absolute masses - though I think there are predictions of ratios etc that work out between theory and measurement - sorry not a specialist in high-energy physics, had more exposure to low-energy quantum topological defects).

andyferris··on GPT-5.3-Codex
The notes explicitly call out you may want to dial the effort setting back to medium to reduce latency/tokens (high being default, apparently there is a max setting too).
andyferris··on Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions
It does use tokens faster, yes.
andyferris··on Lily Programming Language
The README on gitlab at least has a sentence or two on that: https://gitlab.com/FascinatedBox/lily

> An interpreted language with a focus on expressiveness and type safety

Personally I think typed scripting languages could be the future. They should support AOT compilation where necessary.

andyferris··on The Codex app illustrates the shift left of IDEs and coding GUIs
The output is the program behavior. You use it, like a user, and give feedback to the coding agent.

If the app is too bright, you tweak the settings and build it again.

Photography used to involve developing film in dark rooms. Now my iPhone does... god knows what to the photo - I just tweak in post, or reshoot. I _could_ get the raw, understand the algorithm to transform that into sRGB, understand my compression settings, etc - but I don't need to.

Similarly, I think there will be people who create useful software without looking at what happens in between. And there will still be low-level software engineers for whom what happens in between is their job.

andyferris··on I miss thinking hard
My solution has been to lean into harder problems - even as side projects, if they aren't available at work.

I too am an ex-physcist used to spending days thinking about things, but programming is a gold mine as it is adjacent to computer science. You can design a programming language (or improve an existing one), try to build a better database (or improve an existing one), or many other things that are quite hard.

The LLM is a good rubber duck for exploring the boundaries of human knowledge (or at least knowledge common enough to be in its training set). It can't really "research" on its own, and whenever you suggest something novel and plausable it gets sycophantic, but it can help you prototype ideas and implementation strategies quite fast, and it can help you explore how existing software works and tackles similar problems (or help you start working on an existing project).

andyferris··on Petition for Recognition of Work on Open-Source as Volunteering in Germany
Interesting.

Similarly R&D tax incentives could be made to only apply if the R&D is publically available (for study, and any use)

andyferris··on Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors
My personal take is this is a consequence of the two-party system. In the US you can "identify" as a democrat or republican. Once you do that, you don't _have_ to think, you can let tribalism guide you.

If in another country I vote for these guys or sometimes those other guys, and once this little party that got a seat, but not really those ones, and I really hate these ones, then your "political identity" already has a lot of nuance. In Australia with preferencial voting, a single vote has a lot of naunce.

What can you get in America? Green Party supportors who "strategically" vote for a democrat? Not much else...

andyferris··on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
Apparently it moved (at least for me): https://m0u9gezmt0.ufs.sh/f/5F1wx5BYZG1wbDc8WftgL2Nrvz9BolE3...
andyferris··on Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
Do you not have in-person early voting?

In Australia you can postal vote if necessary, but "prepoll" voting is much more popular (I believe 37.5% of registered voters, 90% of which actually voted, in 2025). It's just so convenient, with the same crowd of volunteers and officials as actual polling day.

andyferris··on Porsche sold more electrified cars in Europe in 2025 than pure gas-powered cars
What about for socialism with Chinese charateristics?
andyferris··on Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy
I thought Walmart was well known as an early innovator in precise-but-low-margin business operations?
andyferris··on Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
The organization plans don't work for very small organizations, for one (minimum 5 seats). Any solopreneur or tiny startup has to use individual plans.
andyferris··on Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned
We are discussing Claude Code clones - the market _is_ programming
andyferris··on There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
True!

Though I worry that instead western governments will beat the judges to the punch and start asking things like DNS providers or even HTTPS servers to keep logs that can be subpoenaed much like a telecom company keeps a log of each phone call ("metadata"), or else be blocked...

andyferris··on Impacts of working from home on mental health tracked in study of Australians
I was physically a lot healthier prior to WFH because I was way more active. Interesting trade off.
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