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bfung

1,856 karma · joined June 10, 2009

https://bfung.github.io/

https://benson-guides.blogspot.com/

fung [dot] benson [at] gmail [dot] com

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bfung··on Gemini 4 Argon
Q3 ends today, Oct 1 is Q4. Yep, perf/promos - hey look, we almost released a thing! /s
bfung··on America.gov
> How can we stop the war in Iran?

    I cannot give political commentary or advice on how to end a war.
Wer wer.
bfung··on Plan mode is dead
Write a good high level plan with functional and non-functional requirements and it works out costing less, works more efficiently, and no surprises.

It’s like this: If you know the right words to say to the LLM, you’ll likely get back the “right words” also. And the more right words up front, the less steering you need to do.

(Having 20yrs of experience writing these user stories and designs help, my “unfair” advantage)

bfung··on Plan mode is dead
Disagree. While it's easier to 1-shot more things now, when there's more complicated interaction of components, a good plan from plan mode can make the project a "looks good, go" and run overnight thing vs. "steering" needed.
bfung··on How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)
maybe dang and team can use the new system 1 classifier hotness like jev now ;)
bfung··on Show HN: Rickub – The Smartest Git in the Universe
yep, I belong here on HN, haha!
bfung··on Show HN: Rickub – The Smartest Git in the Universe
Don’t know about the backend, but site looks generated from aistudio.google.com or Gemini 3.8 flash.

I happened to be messing around with aistudio and site looks eerily similar.

https://luggage-packing-optimizer.ai.studio/

bfung··on Burnt out on a three-day week
Hard disagree on “not worth the read”.

It doesn’t sound too AI generated, and the stories flow well without much text that mean nothing. (Also, she’s a consultant, so writing this content is meant to signal some professional skill. There’s not much spam, just 1 blog article a month.)

Even if it had AI help to edit, the content still matches my lived experiences of people mgmt.

bfung··on Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
Like how AWS has global datacenters, but everyone uses us-east-1.
bfung··on EVE Online moves to Python 3
1/2 troll side-galley comment: use AI and translate to Rust.

If the outcome or outputs / test cases are known, AI is great at language translations.

bfung··on Karpathy’s Pelican
I don’t know what datasets are available to these LLMs, but I’d imagine if there was training on CAD code, text, and images, a prompt steered towards that probably could get it pretty good.

I am not a mechanical engineer, so even prompting well with ME lingo probably will take some effort.

bfung··on Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment
It’s not really feasible, in my opinion.

US Gov could make US companies comply, like have Huggingface take down models out of compliance.

But most likely, a foreign-to-US Huggingface replacement would be made and everyone would go there instead. Lose-lose for US.

bfung··on Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
“It’s a Unix system. … I know this” XD

Back in the days when it was an MS-DOS world…

bfung··on FAANG Simulator
Anyone see how Opus did? lol

Also, eerily accurate timeline!

bfung··on Grok 4.5
Correction: facts are facts.

How a person perceives facts categorizes them into a political bias bucket.

bfung··on Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
Congrats!

> Group projects were also a common complaint. You were randomly assigned a group, but it was often unclear if the participants were even doing the course - many people were in completely ghost groups.

I see that nothing has changed in 20 years. Even when attended the courses physically in person, group project usually had 1 or 2 people doing all the work and the rest nowhere to be found, or just hanging out. :p

bfung··on Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
Totally agree, misleading.

The syntax looks like rust, but esp w/the memory management model (reference counting), it’s going to have more overhead than rust when it’s running, more like Swift or at worse, Python.

bfung··on Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
Oh we’ve been ready and it’s been known. We’re just too stupid to do anything else.
bfung··on Every Frame Perfect
> waiting for an animation to complete before the app will start acknowledging my keystrokes.

Or you find out you can input as the animation happens, but when the animation finishes, you’ve lost where your input ended up and don’t know if you can backspace/delete and retype.

(Yes, I’m expressing multiple issues here w/ui & animation & input)

bfung··on How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
Meta: so many words to say - save local first & sync in background.

Feels like AI slop.

Doesn’t address the concurrent update problem except for “optimistic”. At least provide some data why that’s ok.

bfung··on They’re made out of weights
How does one choose what sequence of bytes constitutes a token?
bfung··on They’re made out of weights
And you know what the tokenizer is made of?

Weights.

bfung··on Backpressure is all you need
Test Driven Development. There's more than several /tdd skills that are popular.
bfung··on YAML? That's Norway Problem
Really? Putting quotes around strings is called escaping now?

    One workaround is to escape the string, like this:
    
    countries:
      - DE
      - FR
      - "NO"
      - PL
      - RO
Comon, it’s 2026, yeah yaml’s design can lead to odd type casts, but a whole essay on this? Keep it under 140 chars pls.
bfung··on ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
Just follow the man, not the brand. He’s still doing his thing: https://www.natesilver.net/
bfung··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
Just reporting what I’ve experienced. No need to go with the ad hominem attack. I happen to lead a team with a major Rust infra project and I stand by the experience with usage across all the LLM models.
bfung··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
1. Amount of Rust training data isn’t as much as Go.

2. Golang syntax and style is very verbose yet simple. There’s not as many options nor programming language to domain mapping needed as in Rust. Leads to needing less sophisticated LLM to spit out Golang than Rust successfully and efficiently.

bfung··on How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer
One simply does not [“provision” more hardware|(reboot systems)|(redeploy software)] in space.
bfung··on Costco sued for seeking refunds on tariffs customers paid
As a Costco member and customer, I’d actually trust the leadership more than most companies. Use the tariff money and keep that $1.50 hotdog ~ enough avg Americans can use that break for lunch, even if not the healthiest.
bfung··on GitHub Is Degraded
Not purely an advertisement, it’s a real app! https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/updog-ai/

But it does help with marketing and showing off our tech.

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