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bibabaloo

548 karma · joined July 25, 2019

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bibabaloo··on I Dream of Quieter Computing
There's precedent here in things like fast food vs. farm to table, mass produced goods vs arts and craft, digital photography vs film. Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'. Maybe it's because the internet is seen more as a tool than something to experience. Or maybe it's because we're still early in the 'mass produced internet' age. Or maybe network effects make transitioning away from the big networks to smaller ones difficult, unless you're only communicating with online-first groups. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the future, because right now it certainly seems like things are trending in the opposite direction.
bibabaloo··on There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
For anyone who wants more books that dig into the games industry, all of Jason Schreier's books are fantastic.
bibabaloo··on Codex for almost everything
> doesn't really work with a black box code generator.

Sure it does, just blame the vendor.

"Nobody ever got fired for picking IBM/OpenAI/whatever AI incumbent"

bibabaloo··on Padel Chess – tactical simulator for padel
Having played both there's a lot of overlap in the social side. You can find games with randoms or join social match plays with little friction. From what I've heard, it's not that easy with other racket sports like tennis.

I agree the skill gap is wider in padel, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you want to play with.

bibabaloo··on I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me
Asking that question just signals that you don't obey social cues.

Most hiring managers won't like this, as they don't want to be responsible for hiring someone volatile like this.

I think the only place you could get away with this is if you're interviewing with a C-Suite member who has nobody to answer to.

bibabaloo··on OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network
Are LLMs actually decent at this sort of data crunching though? I thought at best they could write a script to help.
bibabaloo··on Claude Code is being dumbed down?
Yes I don't understand why Claude code needs to be a terminal app.

It doesn't compose with any other command line program and the terminal interface is limiting.

I'm surprised nobody has yet made a coding assistant that runs in the browser or as a standalone app. At this point it doesn't really need to integrate with my text editor or IDE.

bibabaloo··on What makes you senior
I think you’re being a little pedantic here. Even if we assume "senior" is an arbitrary title, the article is still a useful description for how to be effective as an experienced engineer. The title is the least interesting part of it.
bibabaloo··on A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
The problem is that the alternative is usually only sites created only to chase affiliate revenue. At least on Reddit, there’s a _chance_ I’m reading something from someone genuinely sharing their opinion.
bibabaloo··on Magic Lantern Is Back
Uh, sure, maybe in a professional setting where you’re getting paid. But this was unpaid volunteer work. If, as a community, we start enforcing professional grade standards on people who are just contributing their free time to give us neat toys and tools, I kinda worry it makes the whole thing the whole thing less fun or sustainable. And if that happens, we probably stop getting these free toys altogether.
bibabaloo··on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
> I just think it's ironic that this advice is useless to junior engineers but unneeded by senior engineers.

That's a good way of putting it. The advice essentially boils down to "do the right thing, don't do the wrong thing". Which is good (if common sense) advice, but doesn't practically really help with making decisions.

bibabaloo··on Gemini 2.5 Flash Image
Why take photos at all if you can just imagine them?
bibabaloo··on Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team
Because they have an interest in the ongoing work of archiving of new things I guess
bibabaloo··on Vibechart
But how could have they used ChatGPT-5 if they were working on the blog post announcing it?
bibabaloo··on Denmark to raise retirement age to 70
I feel, generally, with an aging population + rising unemployment due to AI, we'll reach a crunch point that puts governments under immense pressure to increase taxes (probably on megacorps & the wealthy) more in order to fund welfare. The most optimistic, utopian, solution would be UBI and an artisan economy, but I think we all know that capitalism isn't kind enough for that to play out so we'll probably end up with something much more dystopian.
bibabaloo··on 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak
Planes have just as much spaghetti code as anything else, the only difference is that it's extremely well tested (functionally) and verified spaghetti code.
bibabaloo··on Yocto, RockPi and SBOMs: Building modern embedded Linux images
I agree. I don't understand how people prefer buildroot. Buildroot feels like an adhoc system of glued together Makefiles, whereas yocto actually feels like it was built for purpose.
bibabaloo··on SP1: A performant, 100% open-source, contributor-friendly zkVM
You don't _have_ to, I think the parent poster is just giving an example of how this can be used.

The "Zero Knowledge" part is that you can tell me "for this particular program code, I know an input that gives an output of 'foobar'" and I can be convinced that you're telling me the truth without seeing what that input actually is.

bibabaloo··on Egoless Engineering
I feel this so much. I feel like most of my job is playing politics to make sure people are happy and let them feel like they're adding value. Rather than shipping things to users to improve the product. It's honestly so depressing. Strongly considering going back to work at a small startup, to avoid having to work with these layers of middlemen that really add little to no value.
bibabaloo··on Region-specific Machines pricing
Looks like they've quietly (?) deprecated the hobby plan too. Getting 3 instances a month for free was probably too good to be true forever..
bibabaloo··on Ask HN: What are your Favorite Things?
What'd you find restrictive about the Kindle out of interest? I quite like mine for reading, but admittedly I don't do anything very advanced with it
bibabaloo··on How to boss without being bossy
The subtext here is probably that the asking person doesn't _want_ to be commanding, much less making checklists. :)
bibabaloo··on Ask HN: Why can't I get interviews or offers anymore?
> I know developers like to put their head in sand and pretend to the contrary, but credentials do matter. Things like security or cloud certifications and security clearances

Interesting, I've interviewed with and for a number of tech companies and it's never come up. What companies are you seeing who are interested in certs?

bibabaloo··on Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted
Looking online I see reports that FTX owes its creditors $3B. If Anthropic has 6.5x then the initial $500 million is now worth $3.25B.

Is it actually possible that all creditors will get their money back? Pretty crazy if so.

bibabaloo··on The costs of microservices (2020)
How many developers do you have working on that monolith though? The size of your binary isn't usually why teams start breaking up a monolith.
bibabaloo··on Banging errors in Go
Errors are composable so this isn't such a problem in practice. Most of the prod code I wrote would do something like this

    use thiserror::Error;

    #[derive(Error, Debug)]
    enum Error {
        #[error("Could not open given decomp file: {0}")]
        FileOpen(#[from] std:io::Error),
        #[error("Compressed read error: {0}")]
        CompressedRead(#[from] gz::Error)
    }

    fn decomp(filename: &Path) -> Result<Vec<u8>, Error> {
        let fd = File::open(filename)?;  // File is automatically closed by its destructor.
        let zd = GzDecoder::new(fd);   // flate2::read::GzDecoder::new does not return an error.
        let mut data = Vec::new();     // Rust makes the caller allocate the buffer for reads.
        zd.read_to_end(&mut data)?;
        Ok(data)
    }
bibabaloo··on Ask HN: What is the purpose of the “press any key” screen in video games?
Hah, classic Goodharts law example
bibabaloo··on RustRover – A standalone Rust IDE
JetBrains IDEs have support for copilot: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/getting-started-with-gith...
bibabaloo··on Ask HN: How much equity do early software engineers usually get?
So being generous and assuming you paid 50% tax, that means you got 0.07% of the company, so about 10x dilution. Is that normal?
bibabaloo··on If you can use open source, you can build hardware
> No different than writing software to a releasable stage.

It's extremely different, imo.

Releasing buggy software to prod: no biggy, hotfixed in a couple of hours

Releasing buggy hardware: recalls, mass customer dissastifaction.

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