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bmurphy1976

2,421 karma · joined July 18, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/bmurphy1976; my proof: https://keybase.io/bmurphy1976/sigs/d4VIiHnipvNsqAtxpuQcUrssKNkgb-DmhD3-a8HtKSg ]

https://bryanmurphy.me/

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bmurphy1976··on Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI
Let me translate this for you:

"I have not spent the time cultivating the soft skills necessary to leverage this tool successfully therefore it's the tool that sucks."

bmurphy1976··on Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)
You need to 3D print a bracket. That's what will give you the last 10-20%.
bmurphy1976··on New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study
Well that's definitely a take. I'm not going to be the first in line to defend government, but more often than not I'm seeing friends and family getting chased out of the hospital BEFORE they should be.
bmurphy1976··on Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models
NVIDIA sells the tools. The more the better it is for them.

Microsoft and Meta are also-rans at this point. Their best hope of catching up is probably leveraging their infra and open models.

bmurphy1976··on GPT-5.6
I use both. Both are great. But in terms of Desktop Apps I think Codex has the better UI. It's more straightforward, just works, and has small conveniences like the open in editor icon.

Claude's very bloated and convoluted by comparison. Maybe you need the bloat (Claude Design), but I prefer the more razor's edge efficiency of Codex.

Model wise, I can't really tell. They all do what I want them to do most of the time and go off the rails occasionally. The question is increasingly becoming who's faster and cheaper and gives me more tokens, not who's better.

bmurphy1976··on Road to Elm 1.0
We've been calling him out for YEARS. Half the comments on this article are people calling him out. He can't escape it.
bmurphy1976··on Resetting Xbox
With the obvious exception of Elden Ring, most of the games from these studios are quite modest small to medium sized projects.

I wish devs would stop trying to make every game an uber-game. They need all the monetization because they've already blown the budget before work even started.

Nintendo figured this out. When will the other big players?

bmurphy1976··on Road to Elm 1.0
Don't fret it. Many of us were in the same boat. Evan can do whatever he wants, but we can also call it out when it's wrong.

I personally made the same decision. It became very clear to me that Elm was not the foundation for me to build a business on.

bmurphy1976··on Protect your right to run local AI
It's not just NY. California, Colorado, Washington, they are trying to pull this bullshit in a whole bunch of states.
bmurphy1976··on CursorBench 3.1
I end every project with a long interrogation session. Why did you do this? Is there a better approach you didn't consider? Do the naming conventions follow the project idioms? Justify the decision you made here, providing evidence. I disagree with your approach, etc. etc.

Doesn't matter which model wrote the code, they all make mistakes. This is the same stuff I'd do with any junior engineer's PR and it leads to better quality outcomes (something I care about and am finding hard to let go).

Fable is particularly good at having this back and forth I'm discovering.

bmurphy1976··on Podman v6.0.0
It's been a couple months so I forget what problems I ran into, but Docker's AI bullshit pushed me over the edge and I tried switching to Podman. I ran into some compatibility issues. Alas I don't recall the details.

So I tried Rancher Desktop and other than I keep forgetting its name it just worked.

It's another simple option for those who need it.

bmurphy1976··on CursorBench 3.1
I'm not using Cursor at the moment, but when I did (not too long ago) my experience was similar. Plan with Opus, implement with Composer, clean up with Opus.

Composer did a competent but not amazing job with a good plan. What I really liked though is it was fast! Opus could take 30 minutes to do something Composer would get done in 5-10 minutes. Of course the output wasn't perfect, but that's why I'd do a cleanup pass using Opus or Codex.

It's all a balance though, constantly changing and completely dependent on the problem you're solving. I just remain flexible and adapt my process to what's working best in the moment.

bmurphy1976··on Microsoft Needs Windows Lite
It should be installable, just via a package management system. You choose what you need. I think OP hasn't thought this through completely so he's missing this nuance in his post.

That said, knowing Microsoft they WOULD release something like this but cripple it by doing something stupid like disallowing the use of virtualization technology, even as an installed package.

bmurphy1976··on Half-Life 2 in a Browser
Click into the directory. It's there and you can access it that way.
bmurphy1976··on Every Frame Perfect
Oh boy, I wouldn't use Spider-verse animation as an example. I personally hate it. When I saw the first movie I thought something was wrong and asked the staff if I had mistakenly been put in a 3D movie without the 3D glasses.

Impressive and creative yes. Viewable? Not to me.

bmurphy1976··on Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
I was going to ask about others having this experience. I've been using MacPorts for a couple years to install developer tooling because it's far more consistent and doesn't surprise me with new major versions of Python at random. I only use Homebrew for application installation (i.e. Firefox, Slack, Spotify, etc.) that are not available in MacPorts.

Of course, I've also made a concerted effort over the years to migrate everything to uv for Python, pnpm for nodejs, etc. so maybe it's not an issue for me anymore?

bmurphy1976··on Who's the smartest corvid?
Where do parrots fall in this grouping? They're not corvids. There must have been a pre-corvid ancestor.
bmurphy1976··on Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
Hey, at least you can buy them. Small comfort but remember during covid when you couldn't even get a Raspberry Pi?

Truly tragic we are going through this again but here we are.

bmurphy1976··on Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use
Maps is far from done. At the very least it's still riddled with usability issues. One bug-bear I have in particular: when I zoom into a very specifically chosen area, search for a Chinese restaurant, and it zooms out to half the state. Maddening. And it's rife with problems like this.
bmurphy1976··on Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
My daughter was struggling with her Math class back in January. I used Claude to build a tool that allowed me to generate very focused worksheets. The worksheets had problems designed to drill the concepts she was struggling with.

It worked, and it would have been MUCH harder to do this the traditional way.

The tool generates PDFs including an answer key and solution sets that solved the problems using a variety of techniques so I could check her work more easily and we could iterate quickly.

That's powerful. It comes back to how are you using the tool. Are you using it to make things better or to take shortcuts?

bmurphy1976··on SQLite is all you need for durable workflows
At those rates if you aren't sharding your infra you are doing it wrong.
bmurphy1976··on Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
Oh man, sorry to hear that. I had a secondary Dropbox account I used for a few small but important documents. At some point I somehow lost the 2FA factor, and I don't know how as I've managed to keep the 2FA for every other one of my services across multiple app/os/phone installs.

Anyway, I reached out to their support for help and they were utterly useless. I had a couple weeks of back and forth with them before giving up. I hope I never actually need those docs.

I hope you have a better outcome than I did.

bmurphy1976··on Haiku OS runs on M1 Macs now
The platform itself. Like, can it run Firefox? Can I actually do normal stuff in the browser like watch a YouTube video or join a Zoom call? Can I run VSCode? Can I run Docker?
bmurphy1976··on Haiku OS runs on M1 Macs now
How usable is Haiku OS in practice?
bmurphy1976··on AI slop is killing online communities
Let's never forget the summer of 2023 when Reddit forceably removed mods from many major communities and replaced them with corporate shills. That was a major loss of dedicated people who cared more for their communities than Spez's pocket book.
bmurphy1976··on PyInfra 3.8.0
You can build spaghetti in anything and that definitely includes Ansible.
bmurphy1976··on PyInfra 3.8.0
Thank you for this. I've implemented my own version of this a couple times over the previous 25 years. This is how my code always looked.

I've used Salt, CFEngine, Chef, Puppet, Make, Bash, and many hand-rolled iterations of this approach. I finally threw in the towel and forced myself to come to terms with Ansible and it's quirks because I needed the wider community support.

Now with AI tooling, I'm not so convinced the community modules moat is an actual moat. I'm going to very seriously consider porting all my Ansible code to this and see how it feels. I anticipate I'll be much happier after the change.

Do you have any plans to integrate with/build on other communities modules? i.e. even if it's not perfect, being able to call Ansible or Salt modules from PyInfra would be one way to fill the gap.

bmurphy1976··on PyInfra 3.8.0
Just having "home/docker.py" instead of "collections/ansible_collections/home/dev/roles/docker/tasks/main.yml" is reason enough. Which one of the 300 main.yml files do I load when doing a quick open in any modern text editor?
bmurphy1976··on PyInfra 3.8.0
You can write `if CHECK: do something`. There's nothing preventing that.

I've been down this path, implemented my own version of PyInfra many times over the years. I've used Ansible and my own implementations in anger. The _if param is far far far from the worst offender and it's a natural addition, especially when you are laying out a bunch of unrelated checks into something that looks more like a table.

bmurphy1976··on Agentic AI systems violate the implicit assumptions of database design
The dev who ran it. The manager who allowed it. The director/VP/CTO who enabled the culture. They all have some responsibility for it.
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