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bonsai_bar

60 karma · joined July 1, 2025

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bonsai_bar··on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
I'm sure if they hired the best of the best like you nothing would go wrong.
bonsai_bar··on ZuckOff Is a Free App That Sees Meta Glasses Before They See You
This is Wired, not some random substack. What a lazy, cynical comment.
bonsai_bar··on Music Theory for Programmers
What does "break" mean here? What does "at this level there are no notes yet, just a number" mean?
bonsai_bar··on Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days
That's exactly what managers should be doing.
bonsai_bar··on Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
Yeah the college professor's kid became mayor due to nepotism. That makes total sense.

You can dislike her policies but this is just bs: > "If you haven't paid your own bills with money you earned (no jobs from family) for the last 10 years, you can't run for office. Literally the mayor of Seattle has never paid her own bills and her husband has never worked either. There is no universe where someone with that life experience makes a good leader."

bonsai_bar··on Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
It's not true (https://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=3880890&GUID=4...).
bonsai_bar··on Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
You can find her resume here: https://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=3880890&GUID=4....

Her parents are biology professors. It's not like they're putting her on the board of companies.

bonsai_bar··on Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
X has probably the lowest level of censorship for right-wing racist incels of any social media platform.

FTFY.

bonsai_bar··on Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
You're making it seem like the mayor is an out of touch nepo baby when she's living a regular life dedicated towards helping others.

You may want to get your info from more places than Fox News.

bonsai_bar··on Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
You mean the 8 year old shouldn't be thinking about how she will maintain this code when she's 15? This generation is lost.
bonsai_bar··on Changes to Google DeepMind teams
I'd bet my mortgage that if the first sentence was "We've got amazing products, amazing talent, and world-class compute", you'd be in the comments complaining that they didn't put talent first.
bonsai_bar··on Discovery Loop
You sound like you're quite jealous of him.
bonsai_bar··on Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
Doesn't seem like many are taking his side based on this thread.
bonsai_bar··on Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
We take annual training that warns us against doing what this engineer did.
bonsai_bar··on Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
Is it so extreme?

If you work at Google, there's a very clear policy for doing any outside "work" (volunteering, an open source side project, a business, being on a board, etc.): if it's related to your day-to-day work and/or related to Google's business (which virtually anything software is), you need to fill out a disclosure form and get a go-ahead from legal.

Obviously a Google Workspace CLI is related to Google. Why would you release this without getting a go-ahead?

I'm sad that a clearly talented engineer who cares about users was fired. I wish more engineers cared enough to make things like this. But it seems like poor judgment from the engineer's side :(

(Note: I do work at Google. This is my personal writing, though. Nothing to do with my employer)

bonsai_bar··on First recording of a dying human brain shows waves similar to memory flashbacks (2022)
Could you _be_ more condescending?
bonsai_bar··on Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war
> Cursor and IDE extensions are nice, but not something that generates billions in revenue.

I mean Cursor is already at $500 million ARR...

bonsai_bar··on Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management
Gotta love that SWE arrogance.
bonsai_bar··on Gemini 2.5 Flash Image
> soon no one will believe what they see on the Internet as real.

Now is that so bad?

bonsai_bar··on AI coding tools can reduce productivity
Yeah, that was a pretty lazy response on my part. Let me try again.

In my opinion, it takes several weeks of active use to nail down your preferred workflow with these tools and to get a meaningful understanding of their abilities and limitations.

I.e., yes they hallucinate and don't have great understanding of truth/fact (however you choose to define those terms), but you need to develop an intuition for how to work around those issues and how to recognize the problems in your setup that increase the likelihood of the LLM heading down false paths. This intuition cannot come until you fight through the initial struggle period.

In some ways, it's similar to picking up emacs/vim and learning the shortcuts. It's a negative to your velocity until it's not, and once you overcome that initial hurdle, your productivity takes off. Admittedly, it's not for everyone (I never bothered to learn the ins and outs of vim bindings because my bottleneck isn't my speed of writing code), but it provides a huge productivity boost for those types of engineers.

Coming back to my main point: your LLM needs quite a bit of guidance in the early stages, especially as you're feeling out what types of tasks it's able to knock out the park and what types of tasks it'll struggle with. For instance, in the example you gave here, I wonder what would happen if you asked it to present you a detailed plan before it gets to writing any code and to provide a list of assumptions it is making? You will need to do a bit of review with it before you let it go execute the plan (siilar to how a junior engineer would come to you with questions before being able to handle certain tasks).

I also recommend writing up a thorough self-review checklist that it stored in your repo (e.g. in an AGENTS.md file) that provides the customized instructions you want your LLM to follow (it won't always do so but it helps a ton). Otherwise, each new session is essentially starting over without it learning, which is pretty frustrating.

I'm happy to talk more because I'm pretty optimistic about LLMs and enjoy using them in my day-to-day where appropriate.

And finally, I'm not sure how much you've thought about giving them more autonomy, but I do recommend doing so if you have a safe, sandboxed environment. The real magic and productivity boost of LLMs come when you give them some more autonomy and provide them with tools to figure out the problems they encounter, unlocking your time to be spent on higher-leverage tasks such as designing systems and processes. If it can run linters, unit tests, and grep your codebase during its development process and use this to iterate, you'll have a much more fun time.

Does this help?

bonsai_bar··on AI coding tools can reduce productivity
You're using it wrong -- it's intended to be a conversational experience. There are so many techniques you can utilize to improve the output while retaining the mental model of codebase.

Respectfully, this is user error.

bonsai_bar··on Show HN: I Built a Paul Graham AI Advisor for Founders and Hackers
Isn't this a little creepy? It's mimicking an identity of someone that you haven't gotten the permission to do. It feels wrong.
bonsai_bar··on Show HN: I Built a Paul Graham AI Advisor for Founders and Hackers
You're a big fan but have never read his essays on Startup Advice?