delegate

You get used to it after a while and at some point the parenthesis 'disappear' and stop taking up mental cycles.

I often thought about this - at first I struggled a lot and wasted so much time trying to match parens, but after some time my brain adapted and then I actually liked the syntax, especially if your editor supports selecting forms or you use something like parinfer, which matches parens based on indentation.

Clojure has special syntax for collections of various types, so it's even easier to parse after you get used to it imo.

For me, the bigger challenge was wrapping my head around functional programming using immutable data structures, since that wasn't just syntax, it required me to 'unlearn' thinking in OO paradigm and adopting a new way of thinking about how the program works. You get used to that too after a while.

I sometimes look at it via the metaphor of music.

Playing an instrument vs electronic/computer music.

We do forget skills we don't practice, especially fine motor skills (like playing the guitar or typing code).

There's inherent pleasure in playing a musical instrument - practicing improves fine motor skills and produces satisfaction.

You can play for yourself and that can be a great experience.

Often people create music for other listeners - and now the satisfaction comes not just from your skill, but from how the music impacts your listeners.

They say you can put more of your 'soul' into music made with an instrument, but I'd say there's quite a bit of electronic music with just as much soul.

People who create electronic music don't generate any of those sounds with their fine motor skills, but they do have a plan about how the song progresses and what emotional state it elicits in users.

That's why you have DJs which are more popular than others.

If you stop playing the guitar for a year, then pick it up and try playing something, you will feel very rusty. But give it a week of practice and most of your skill comes back.. and in 1 month you're back to your peak skill.

I guess my point is - If you go full on agentic, you'll loose some of your coding skill, but you can get it back fairly quickly if you go back to manual coding. On the flip side, you get better at using AI if you use it, so your thinking is at a higher level, but you give up understanding the low level details of how exactly the code works.

Either way you're making 'music', albeit a different kind of music.

Here we go again..

Tell me a story of when a service introduced ads and that ended up being a great thing for users ? Because I don't know any. Instead I know many stories where ads poisoned and destroyed the service and turned the Internet into a shit show.

Oh, but in this case, dystopia is highly unlikely, right ?

BitTorrent: 0% increase. Just saying.

This. The world has no political and economic frameworks to face AGI and robotics.

What democracy when the AGI is smarter and more aware of the big picture then all the 'demos' (people) combined ?

It would only make sense to hand over the rule to the AGI, which we are already hard at work doing btw.

The techno utopia - AGI + robots can lead to a form of communism.. with human life having very little value.

Or it could lead to the other extreme.. whatever that is, again human life having little practical value.

We need a new type of political and economic thinking, radically different from the left/right/socialist/capitalist ideologies..

Interestingly how everyone is talking about 'Google', this faceless entity.. but in essence there are humans who work there, employees not doing their job properly. Lazy, detached, disinterested .. with no consequences for coasting.. Or are badly organized/managed, have the wrong incentives, are burned out, going through a divorce, performance review, whatever..

People are people, life happens, job happens, but unfortunately some of these roles have real external impacts on other people. One demotivated employee at a Google* can radiate their unhappiness onto great number of others because of the circumstantial power they have at their disposal.

At the very least they could copy & paste the exact reason for the ban, but no, they'll drag people through mud and automated replies, etc.

Of course I don't have a right to Twitter.

But I do have the right to the public information posted by people who intend it to be public information.

They're not posting 'on X', they're posting to the public and the only reason they do it on X is because there are no alternatives due to the network effect intrinsic for such services.

The 'network effect' part needs to be defined and taken into account by regulators and then regulate the companies such that they make the information available to the public if the poster intends so.

Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?

Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ?

Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take hold.

This is negative for society.

Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.

People who don't have an account are not getting vital information because the company decided to restrict access to the entire network.

This needs to be regulated somehow. At least for public services and major news outlets - as a tax for the network effect these apps benefit from.

This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now.

Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.

Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just purchase intent, the platform will choose what you'll buy.

Powerful algorithms, subliminal design - I feel like a lamb in a dark forest full of wolves when I search on amazon, netflix, prime video ..

There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.

I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 - it would actually find the exact thing you were looking for ! You no longer had to sift through directories of links, you could just filter it..

We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now, since this is by design, not by lack of technical knowledge of how to make search work.

My only practical contribution to fixing this issue is to upvote this article.. and write a message on HN.

I'm in Spain.

I really hope that after this summer, people of Europe will wake up and make fixing the climate their highest priority - at home, at work, in politics. We have very little time left, maybe a few years.

I can still see news articles everywhere blaming 'climate change' and 'CO2 emissions', pointing the finger at the oil companies and the likes. But those 'bad' guys are not operating in a void - they supply the products which are in high demand from me and you and our families - our entire lifestyle is built around them. So what needs to change is our life styles, philosophy, economic order .. drastic changes.

Consumerism needs to go, tourism needs to go, advertising needs to go, travel and logistics needs to be reinvented, industrial production needs to drop by orders of magnitude, everything replaced with healthy and efficient alternatives.

How can this be done peacefully is beyond me, it probably can't. We've had precedent during covid, when the whole world stopped because everyone was scared that they're going to die. It's not so different now.

There's this magnetic appeal to use a visual graph editor as the UI paradigm for your app.. it seems to fit so many problems well.

Yet if you complicate the problem just a notch, the graph becomes big fast and that renders like complex spaghetti you're afraid to touch in the UI.

The other problem is that the UI paradigm becomes the driver - you try to think of the problem in terms of fitting it into the UI graph editor, which is often not a natural way of thinking about said problem.

All of this to say is that I've always thought that graph/flow editors looked cool, except I've never found good use for them in practice except for very simple and predictable graphs.

Just writing the flow as a data structure in text is often a lot simpler and practical..

I was expecting to learn something new from this article, instead I got a bunch of numbers and a careful number of deaths from smoke 'by the end of the century' prediction.

What end of the century ? The way things are going, these cities (in Europe) are going to be unlivable by the end of this decade. They already are. And the fires..

Numbers, percentages, increases, excess, estimated.. We've constructed this abstract parallel universe in which we comfortably live in front of the screens.. and then wonder why the world around us is burning.

Climate change.. Such a comfortable word behind which we can all hide and dispel the responsibility for a life of copious comfort and pleasure.

It's the avocado toasts, the leather jackets, the 1-click-checkouts, the weekend flight to Barcelona, the CL=F price, the bonuses, the 'natural resources' there for us to use and exploit in infinite amounts..

The whole fucking system. That's why the world is burning.

Yeah, I'm guilty of all of the above too. And I have no solution. Just blowing out the smoke from those fires.

I'm looking at this situation strictly as 'What's possible today'. If a 1M lines code rewrite from one language to another goes into production in 1 month, that's a very strong signal that the models are now insanely capable.

My anxiety before merging a 2K lines PR is greatly reduced after 3 frontier models (Fable, 5.6 and kimi K3) finds no issues in it.

Just 6 months ago (Opus 4.6) this was not true, a big PR would have countless number of issues.

Aside from the human drama, the message to all of us is - these things are ready for whatever your imagination can throw at them.

I think that's exactly what Anthropic wanted to communicate.

A better title would be 'My emotions on the Bun Rust Rewrite', since the article feels like an emotional reaction rather than a thoughtful analysis of the situation. Give it some time..

I'm rooting for Zig either way, even though I have nothing against Rust and I don't directly use bun.

A bit meta - the names in this article made me chuckle: Goat Systems, Cowboy State Daily, Cupriavidus gilardii, Frank Strong the Board's Manager and the Crow Creek and Dry Creek facilities. This is gold for a comedy sketch :)

because it's unusable in practice. It's fun as an idea and as a toy, but when you try to use such a visual system to do work, you quickly realise that text is way more flexible and simpler to operate on.

This is and has always been inevitable with tech. Politics can only postpone people's inherent desire to control and dominate and powerful tech makes this easier and cheaper.

We (the tech people) have built the perfect tools to centralize and automate control and we're still doing it, mostly for free.

The way things are going, our imagination is probably too poor to visualize the kind of dystopia this can/will eventually grow into.

It's highly unlikely that the general population will revolt against this - fear makes most people docile and compliant, self censoring and obedient. There are many examples of this in the world right now and it's only going to get worse.

We can only push back to postpone this, but the tide is against us and too few really care about these things.

It depends on what your function does with that memory. If the fn expects any kind of structure at that address, you and your callers are on your own, compiler can't help if the caller passes the wrong thing. Worse, acessing that memory might not immediately crash, but lead to strange side effects in your program.

Dynamic languages can handle this with reflection, but with void* you can only pray nobody makes the mistake..

Fun while it lasted, really cool ! Looks like we hugged it to death though, server is down..

Have you ever used other (modern) programming languages ?

In a lot of languages, you achieve the same with 1 line of code. It's not about familiarity, it's about the fact that it's a long and convoluted incantation to get the name of an enum.

Why do I have to be familiar with all those weird symbols just to do a trivial thing ?

Update:

Zig:

const Color = enum { red, green, blue };

const name = @tagName(Color.red); // "red"

Rust:

#[derive(Display)]

enum Color { Red, Green, Blue }

let name = Color::Red.to_string(); // "Red"

Clojure:

(name :red) => "red"

I was very curious to see what C++ 26 brings to the table, since I haven't used C++ in a while.

When I saw the 'no boilerplate' example, the very first thought that came to my mind:

This is the ugliest, most cryptic and confusing piece of code I've ever seen. Calling this 'no boilerplate' is an insult to the word 'boilerplate'.

Yeah, I can parse it for a minute or two and I mostly get it.

But if given the choice, I'd choose the C-macro implementation (which is 30+ years old) over this, every time. Or the good old switch case where I understand what's going on.

I understand that reflection is a powerful capability for C++, but the template-meta-cryptic-insanity is just too much to invite me back to this version of the language.

Claude code deleted the database once for me. It wasn't production, but it did contain data I needed. The good thing was that I made a backup of the database right before running claude. I told it that I made a backup, so it decided to delete the db rather than drop the table.

Why did you delete the database? you were supposed to drop the table !

• You're right, I apologize for that mistake. You said to drop the table, not the entire database. I should have run: DROP TABLE IF EXISTS model_requests; Since you mentioned you backed up the database, you can restore it and I'll run the correct SQL command to drop just the model_requests table.

I use my Brompton in ways which are not on its label.

Besides rides in the city, I take it on long 100+km rides on the road, on gravel, forests, rocks, mountains.

It has taken me on every street of Barcelona and around it many times over. I've had it for 14 years.

Because of the small wheels it's extremely agile and allows you to go really slow without losing balance. This makes it like a sharp knife in the city but also off road on rocky trails, steep climbs, eg. in places where you'd never think of going with a Brompton.

If the trail is impossible, I can just lift it up and climb with it on my shoulder. Or I can fold it and carry it like a bag, on the metro, trains or in the trunk of the car.

As I understand, I'm not the only one using the Brompton as a gravel/mountain bike, so they released the G-line, which I still haven't checked out, but it's on my bucket list.

If I were to write one eulogoy for a piece of equipment in my life, the Brompton is definitely it :).

Who asked for this ? I'm genuinely curious.

"If only I had an agent which does everything at work for me". The logical continuation would be 'then I wouldn't have to work', right ?

No. Just as with coding agents, it doesn't mean less work - it means a lot more work of a different kind with the main challenge - don't loose your mind when managing the outputs from these agents.

Look at it another way - if these agents work perfectly and really increase productivity and profits and companies agentify all of their processes/development - then won't these companies essentially become extensions of OpenAI and not the other way around ?

The comment was for the article 'Obsession with growth is destroying nature'. Read it. It's not about me personally. In fact, I live a very comfortable life in a beautiful city.

But this comfort has a price, described in the article. It's huge. It's also not static, it's growing and accelerating. Our children will have to pay these bills in one way or another.

What I do with my life (or you with yours) has zero consequence on this, the process can't be stopped. But it will one day, because math.

You can't escape the rat race even if you hide in a cave these days. Life like that is no longer possible, at least not in Europe.

I didn't write that to shame anyone. I happen to like my life in the city with all the negatives.

But sometimes I think about this - is all this 'comfort' worth the destruction of nature ?

But you do realize that all the positives are mostly hedonistic ?

Yeah, there are more places to enjoy yourself and have fun, more entertainment.

I'm passionate about going out to clubs, electronic music events, concerts, restaurants, flying around on a plane or driving my car on the endless roads.

All of this is great, but according to TFA and my own experience, we're absolutely shitting on the natural world to have our nice drink or exotic food which will be gone from our system in 12h.

We've 'borrowed' from the future generations to have our fun and I'm not sure it's all worth the price.

When I was a child, I was spending my summers at my grandparents. They had a cozy house in the village. They worked the land, they had a few animals. They grew their food. They sold some wine and fruit at the market.

They had a big house, land, clean air, clean water and they were healthy. They celebrated the holidays, had many friends, went to church, weddings, funerals, etc. Villagers always greeted them and stopped for a quick chat when they met on the street.

Now compare with life in a big modern city.

I design complicated distributed systems using AI in order to provide shelter and food for myself. Those are tools which other people use to achieve their goal of providing shelter and food for themselves.

Tons of cars, the air is polluted, constant noise, fake bling, restaurants selling food at 20x price, stressed, depressed, lonely people. Each in their own digital rabbit hole on their phones all the time. Smiles for money only.

I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better' than what people have had for millennia without destroying nature in the process.

I tried maintaining chat hostory and summary in a 'changes' dir in the repo. Claude creates a md file before commiting (timestamp.md, commit hash doesn't work as filename because rebase/squash).

I had to stop doing this because it greatly slowed down and confuse the model, when it did a repo search and found results in some old md files. Plus token usage went through the roof. So keeping changes in the open like that in the repo doesn't work.

Not sure how tfa works, but hopefully the model doesn't see that data.

Humans don't abstain from nukes in simulated games either.

'Nuclear Launch detected'.