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ctkhn

463 karma · joined December 12, 2024

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ctkhn··on NYC Apartment Aquaponics
It's very fun as a process and it's cool to be surrounded by things you made. We're so disconnected with where things come from (food, clothes, etc) that for me and people I know it's interesting to be involved and see how the process goes even to produce a token amount of whatever it is. I grow my own herbs and cherry tomatoes in homemade cedar planter boxes, sewed my own kindle cover, am sewing replacement covers for my very old patio furniture cushions that I got used, my fiancee knit me some socks and has made sweaters for herself and a few family members, another of our friends sewed an outfit for herself, etc and it really is just fun to do. It also is nice to be a little more self sufficient, not just in a prepper way, but in the sense of not having to get ripped off by some corporation or feeling bad having to buy something new (ie replacing my cushion covers myself instead of buying fully new cushions)
ctkhn··on The Zen of Parallel Programming
I wonder how much a good process of meetings, tickets or whatever sort of documents etc for handling new ideas and features would speed this up or bring it back to linear. I've been in some orgs where good organization at the level above me can make the required communication between me and other dev teams lower and let us live in "good" silos
ctkhn··on The state of open source AI
There are corporations like Blackwater and CoreCivic that subcontract both of these for the US government today or Wagner (RIP) in Russia. The pinkertons and the US state have also both taken on the role of corporate muscle in the past when workers went on strike
ctkhn··on The state of open source AI
Source: I imagined it
ctkhn··on NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook
I never got into the podcasts side but it was good for synthesizing multiple documents in a way chatgpt or google's ai overview couldn't, but now I will just dump a couple PDFs into a new chat in Ollama and then ask it questions about the content. Is there another killer app for notebookLM out there?
ctkhn··on After wearing the Pebble Time 2 for two weeks, I'll never buy another smartwatch
Yeah I love my forerunner 945. Got it used in 2020 and when it died in 2023 Garmin replaced it for $150 including tax and shipping. Couple friends have got the new fancier touchscreen models but I like the simplicity of my watch. I blocked most texts from coming through as a buzz except immediate family or 2FA but it would be nice if Apple's focus modes worked better with it automatically. Been wondering if Pebble would be a good move to get even further away from proprietary software though as someone who runs or hits the gym monday through saturday
ctkhn··on The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
Coming from legacy enterprise I am using claude to do exactly this for some of my team's more bizarre and poorly documented "inventions" that started out as their pet project and then became part of our official workflow.
ctkhn··on The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
> You also have to consider the Amdahl's law: a 10x speedup on 10% of the project is just a 9% speedup overall.

This is totally true for me. I'm working on more features/bugs at work and getting the coding done faster with claude but the coding part is at maximum half of the process and usually less. The rest of it is clarifying the requirements from our product team or given that we're a very legacy place, what the existing state of our infrastructure and other systems are for the new changes to fit in to, etc.

ctkhn··on How we can reduce traffic congestion
Depending on where you are, there are nice middle class apartments that can be family friendly. I have friends not in tech in my same neighborhood with a three bedroom place for 1500. Granted this is the midwest and not SF but their place is near the train to get downtown for work and surrounded with a lot of parks for baseball, soccer etc for kids
ctkhn··on How we can reduce traffic congestion
It looks like a lot of neighborhoods in American cities that are adjacent or outside the downtown business district or even suburbs on the commuter rail lines. A main commercial street surrounded by 1900-1950s houses and apartments, probably with new built mixed use buildings too. Most smaller cities and even big towns have neighborhoods like this based on my last 10 years of road trips across the US so it's not just NY SF etc where this is possible. This is for the the largest cities like NY DC Chicago etc or even smaller ones like Sacramento or Louisville. Not sure we can work out housing policy to be blacksmith friendly and it seems like a pain even out in the suburbs
ctkhn··on Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
I thought tweaking was his highest calling
ctkhn··on How we can reduce traffic congestion
Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car
ctkhn··on How to read more books
Great note about how public transit gives us time back from the commute. When I moved to the city after college I first lived a 12 minute train ride from the office and tried reading but the trip was too short to make much new progress in my books. Now that it's a 40-minute trip I have plenty of time to read, follow up on texts, and do my crossword.
ctkhn··on Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
True, it is pretty bad at getting right to what I want. A genuinely useful integration of AI would be to process and classify listings on upload so that I can have more filters on attributes of items for sale. I'm not holding my breath for that though
ctkhn··on Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected
People like Zuck are incredible outliers when it comes to wealth and most people are basically underwater financially. A lot of us do send some money to the food bank or the local arts initiative but the amount left after the bills for living a regular life come due is a lot less for me than a guy with over $200b and no good ideas. That's a crazy order of magnitude difference, a thousand times a thousand times 200k which most people aren't even making. For all of the pretty gross stuff it seems Bill Gates has been up to, at least he did spend a lot on stuff like mosquito nets and AIDS prevention.
ctkhn··on Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
It feels like the only thing it's really big in now in the states for is facebook marketplace, which is just a slightly higher trust (but still scam and flake prone) version of craigslist using the existing user base. Feels like all his big swings have been strikes
ctkhn··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
I got around 50-60 on my m3 max so 100tps seems very realistic for 2 gens later of chip and double the ram
ctkhn··on The Return of Aspect Oriented Programming
I think that's a good point, never thought about it like that. I like the abstraction level that Spring Boot brings, but working with a principal engineer who was very into AOP on my previous team was a huge pain. Like you and GP said, AOP absolutely destroys readability. Current team has code split into a million xyz-common libraries, which isn't my preference, but I can still click through to see the source of the library. I will never get what AOP truly improves on
ctkhn··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
I don't even travel a ton but portability is huge. It's not a flex, it's a functional thing that lets me move around within my house or work while I'm at my parents or traveling or anywhere else. Other than my media collection that lives on my home server, I want most of my files to come with me on my laptop.
ctkhn··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
I have been running qwen 3.6 35b a3b with opencode on my macbook pro 16" with m3 max and 64gb ram, and it's been great for local planning and coding. To be honest I have been on and off wishing I had future proofed with the 128gb after seeing how powerful 64gb is. On the other hand, I also haven't run up against a wall with a model that is just slightly larger than qwen.
ctkhn··on Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day
Not sure what the actual cost was, but in 2015 my parents got a solar system in California that covers the entire house plus an EV. I remember looking at the time to payoff and I think it took maybe five years, now day to day power and all their driving is essentially free.
ctkhn··on AI Is Upending One of Finance's Cushiest Jobs
I haven't used AI for investment advice, but I did use deepseek and google ai overview to prepare returns from my w-2, 1099s for HY savings interest and brokerage account stock sales, and some non-1099 capital gains from previous employer startup equity that didn't come with a form, but AI helped me figure out that it needed to be on an 8949.

I still filed through an online tax help site just to be safe, but when I compared the forms I saw that my AI assisted forms were a 100% match with what the paid service generated. I can't see myself using AI to pick exact stocks, but I assume most value of advisors provide is in telling the uninformed what is normal and safe for their risk tolerance, I imagine a lot of it can be automated pretty simply. The article mentions extraction from Israel and Ukraine as human advisor perks but I doubt anyone but the absolute highest tier clients was getting that sort of service.

ctkhn··on The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
The US needs to start imagining something else. It's hard to think of the last war that the US won.
ctkhn··on Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis
What theater is that at? Sounds like a mega chain like AMC or Regal. The local indie theater we go to in one of the 5 largest American cities has never been over $15 per ticket and adding popcorn and a drink is maybe $10 more on top.
ctkhn··on Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
This is fantastic. Been looking for a way to get feedback on my pronunciation since I came back from Shanghai and haven't been seeing native speakers every day. Is there any plan to make this a download for desktop or mobile? Would be using it weekly to get back up to par on Mandarin
ctkhn··on Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
Teams is still nowhere near Slack's features and usefulness. I wouldn't say it's a direct competitor, it's like store brand vs a mid-luxury item
ctkhn··on Quill OS: An open-source OS for Kobo's eReaders
I've got a paperwhite 4. But for now KUAL is enough
ctkhn··on Quill OS: An open-source OS for Kobo's eReaders
Love my jailbroken kindle, but would love a full replacement OS like this.
ctkhn··on Germany's train service is one of Europe's worst. How did it get so bad?
As an American I would take DB over Amtrak any day. At least the country would be covered with fast rail to some extent
ctkhn··on Things I want to say to my boss
People have been writing about it for years. This is why we have child labor laws, work week standards, etc except in white collar and tech work we've been tricked into thinking we don't need those things
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