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ciconia

7,240 karma · joined March 13, 2014

https://github.com/noteflakes
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ciconia··on Inside the AI "Kill Chain" That Destroyed an Iranian School
https://archive.ph/0V37g
ciconia··on US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report
I've been saying it for quite a while now: any sufficiently advanced AI technology is indistinguishable from bullshit.
ciconia··on US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons
Why spend money on healthcare when you can spend it on being able to annihilate any country on earth?
ciconia··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
> terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards.

Oh you mean October 7th Hamas standards or the Israeli Gaza genocide standards, or maybe the US in Vietnam standards?

ciconia··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
It's not clear that Western armies are better either, as we've seen time and again in Iran, Afghanistan and Syria.
ciconia··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
Who in their right mind would want to travel to a country where any random encounter with government thugs can get you thrown in a cage?
ciconia··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
26 years ago I was a post-graduate student in the US, I arrived a couple months before the 9/11 attacks. The current US government, beyond its idiocy and incompetence, is just so hostile, not only to immigrants but also to its own citizens, so it seems. If I were to go study in another country today, the US would simply not be an option.
ciconia··on Why some US restaurants are banning tips
FWIW France has it right: there's no tipping, service is always included.
ciconia··on To become a better writer, read as much as you can
A while ago I took under my wing so to speak the neighbor's kid who plays the clarinet at the local music school, but apparently has listened to very little music (at music school he only gets instrument lessons and some music theory.) I had him listen to a wide range of classical music, just to give him a taste, and see what interests him. I told him: a musician who doesn't listen to music is like a writer who doesn't read books. It's not only the craft, it's also the culture that those works embody, and the feeling of belonging to a tradition.
ciconia··on What the 12,000 lines I write per day do
> How many lines of (effective) code do you write, and how has that changed with AI?

I don't measure my productivity in loc. I also don't use ai to generate code. To me a productive day at work consists of letting my brain digest a given problem over a coffee or two, then write the necessary code in one go over a couple of hours.

I think this whole thing is a silly notion. Since when is loc/day an indication of anything?

ciconia··on Solid Queue 1.6.0 now supports fiber workers
EventMachine provided a event-reactor based concurrency model, but its API was so different and imposed a different style of programming (namely, callback-based) that it didn't really mesh with the "Ruby way" and most importantly was incompatible with most of the Ruby ecosystem (and especially Rails).
ciconia··on Lobste.rs is now running on SQLite
https://sqlite.org/useovernet.html
ciconia··on Why We're Dismantling the International Criminal Court
Oh the horror: the US can't bully the entire world with impunity. Sad!
ciconia··on Why Vanilla JavaScript
How so? Svelte provides a bunch of (very nice, no doubt) abstractions for building web UIs, and there's a build step. In that regard, Svelte is no different from other JS frameworks.
ciconia··on Vance: Iran can have access to $300B reconstruction fund
I got news for you: that private money - a big chunk of it comes from public funds.
ciconia··on Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes
The experts on what? Zionist lobbying?
ciconia··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
Reactionary politics, greed, stupidity. Pick any three.
ciconia··on Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
I've been slowly transitioning from using an ORM to just plain SQL. It's so much simpler. Less magic, more explicitness, and more control. Also, much better performance. I think the thing is to construct your model around the different queries you need to perform. In many cases, especially a CRUD-type situation, you'll end up with 10-20 different SQL queries, and that's it.
ciconia··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
> make developers 2x, 5x, 10x as productive on stuff that matters

What does this even mean? Is this about speed of development? Is this about headcount? LoC? How are coding agents contributing to productivity in places like GitHub, Shopify or Meta? I mean companies that already have an established product. I really wanna understand this because I'm not seeing that GitHub's product suddenly became so much better than it was 2 years ago, so where's all that productivity going?

ciconia··on Where does next-token prediction leave us?
> society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?

I think this ties in with the rise of racism over the last two decades. Historically, antisemitism has been instrumentalized by the elites in order to deflect animosity from the lower classes: "look, it's not us that are robbing you blind, it's the Jews!"

I see the same thing happening today in the Western world. The elites are squeezing more and more of our countries' wealth, turning governments them into hollow sources of rent, while at the same time backing corrupt politicians who tell us our misery is all because of (illegal) immigrants.

> the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.

Indeed. To me if there's one reason to oppose the use of AI technology, it is political. Sadly, the SWE class (if it can be called that), being better off than the majority of humans on earth, seems to care very little for class issues and inequality in general, maybe out of self-interest. But as you said, the machine will be coming for them too, it's just a question of when, not if.

ciconia··on Using AI to write better code more slowly
To me the blocker with using coding agents is having to rely on a paid external service. Are there any local models that are good enough to be used for coding?
ciconia··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
I think it is hard for citizens to understand how precarious it feels to be an immigrant in the present political climate in the US and Europe. I'm a permanent resident in France, I'm white, I have a EU passport, I have a job, I'm OK. But, my naturalization request has already been denied twice, because I couldn't provide some arbitrary document the government demands, and they keep changing the rules, just for the fun of it or so it seems, it's quite insulting.

I really feel for immigrants that are less fortunate than me. we all just want to have dignity, find a job (anyway the low-paying jobs are done by immigrants) and provide for our kids. What's wrong with that? How is this taking advantage of our host country?

Frankly, the present discourse around African/Arab immigration seems to me to resemble a lot the kind of rhetoric around the millions of Jewish Russian immigrants who fled pogroms to Poland and western Europe a 120 years ago. I find the similarities quite striking. The blatant racism, the conspiracy theories, the fascist propaganda, all in order to whitewash (pun intended) a corrupt regime of thieves and sycophants. Absolutely disgusting!

ciconia··on Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby
I'm recently seeing more and more Ruby projects that are at least partly vibe-coded, and I'm kind of torn. On the one hand I appreciate that this allows people to create stuff that they maybe wouldn't have the time to do otherwise. On the other, the code itself makes it harder for people to contribute, especially those, like me, who don't use coding agents.

A random example:

https://github.com/amatsuda/rubish/blob/master/lib/rubish/pa...

Where are the interface boundaries? Why are there methods that are 200 lines long? This is not a dis at the author, and it's not really about "code quality" per se, whatever that means. It's just that if someone would like to study the code and be able to improve it or add features, how would one go about it? Does this mean you have to use a coding agent in order to contribute? I felt the same about the recent Ruby compiler from matz [1]. The code looks impenetrable. What does this bode for the future of OSS?

[1] https://github.com/matz/spinel

ciconia··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
> Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy?

Apparently yes.

ciconia··on Declining America
I think the title is appropriate and is probably meant as a double entendre. The US does seem to be declining in many ways. Personally, visiting the US under the present government just feels too risky, they seem really hostile to foreigners.
ciconia··on I Will Never Use AI to Code
Why is this submission flagged? It's on topic isn't it?
ciconia··on Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
Just switch to Linux people!
ciconia··on OpenAI investor says AI requires an income tax overhaul
https://archive.ph/IokBM
ciconia··on Commit What You Know of Iran to the Flames
https://archive.ph/iWZND
ciconia··on Fast-Servers
> continues to be such a consistent source of bugs - many with serious security implications... just feel that io_uring is a questionable example.

Are you saying this as someone with experience, or is it just a feeling? Please give examples of recent bugs in io_uring that have security implications.

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