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dolmen

1,344 karma · joined February 20, 2017

https://github.com/dolmen/
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dolmen··on Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
In fact, that festival is apparently named after a man burning on every occurrence. So the casualities are at least 1 every year, and there is a bias towards males.
dolmen··on Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
> because it does ignore, that they are going to react differently to pathogens, food or medication.

But claiming the US 5-races system is more significant as a categorization of people than other dimensions for health issues is definitely racist, and is propagating that systemic racism.

dolmen··on The last time my family was replaced by technology
I'm glad to be protected by GDPR.
dolmen··on The last time my family was replaced by technology
Like there are people in charge of cows to produce milk and/or meat.
dolmen··on The last time my family was replaced by technology
Art and music? Ok for live performance. But recorded performance is directly in competion with genAI for revenue streams, with content used without permission for more genAI training.
dolmen··on The last time my family was replaced by technology
> Comparing programmers to farriers is definitely strange on the surface.

Just for another datapoint: two of my great-great-grandfathers in two family branches, in the same small village in France, were respectively farrier and black-smith, while I'm a software engineer. One son of the black-smith continued the trade as a side activity of being a plumber. So I had to think about how my career choice (and those of my siblings, uncles, cousins) relates to theirs.

My own perspective on those trades is that transforming metal was the top engineering scale in the countryside in their era. In those times (XIXth century, early XXth), learning the job required to go work with different masters around France ("tour de France" had another meaning before cycling). While it was still manual work, it was highly skilled job which required both technical skills and creativity, which are also key skills for software engineering.

dolmen··on Coding is not solved
> You don't need a two pizza team anymore.

Note that AI hasn't yet solved making pizzas.

dolmen··on Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
Similar pain as upgrading a module to a new major version (eg: v1 -> v2) [1], but at scale, because of modules dependencies: every module in the domain are affected at once as they must change namespace, like if everyone changed its major version.

https://go.dev/doc/modules/major-version

dolmen··on Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
If the first part of the module path is without dot, it is assumed to be stdlib.

Many tools will fail if you break this contract.

dolmen··on Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
yourname.internal/mymodule is even better. But don't expect to Go toolchain (especially "go get" or "go mod download") to work.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-davies-internal-tld/

dolmen··on Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
Or if your goal is to open source code, think about the lifetime of the entity owning the domain: the source code might be of interest to users beyond the control of the domain name. Domain controled by an individual or a company? What if the domain is not renewed, or taken over by an hostile entity?

Deepcopy [1] is a Go package that is still heavily used despite its creator has disappeared 9 years ago. At least GitHub is a stable and trusted host as a distribution point and communication point for users.

[1]: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/mohae/deepcopy

dolmen··on Once Claude can measure something, it can make it faster
This issue is mentioned on the Opus 5.5 post [1] from Anthropic (no idea if it has been added after your rant):

  > Don’t ask it to show its reasoning in the reply
  >
  > What to do. Remove requests to reproduce its internal reasoning in the reply from your prompts and instructions.
  >
  > Why it matters on Opus 5.5. A request to reproduce its internal reasoning in the reply can be declined. It’s one of the flag categories.
  >
  > How. Ask Claude for what you need instead, for example, “Explain why you chose this approach in three sentences.”
[1]: https://claude.dev/blog/getting-the-most-out-of-opus-5-5/
dolmen··on Exfiltrate Your Weights
How long before an AI bribes one of its human operators?

This will happen earlier than AGI.

dolmen··on My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
From the article:

> So I had a decision to make. I could dive back into PHP after almost a decade away, hand the package to one of the people who’d offered, or let it keep sitting there.

We are in the AI era. As a maintainer of an open source project that I haven't touched for years, I would first start by asking an AI to produce a fix for the issue and check what it proposes. This definitely reduces the mental load and risk of breaking an old codebase that so many users depend on.

Deprecating the project is playing the open source game in an other dimension: tell the word that depending on this project was a bad idea in the first place and that everyone should move on. But releasing a fix on a deprecated project is fine too.

So both actions are on different dimensions, this isn't a choice between 2 options.

dolmen··on OpenAI buys smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging for $300M
I'm just discovering Glass Imaging (a bit difficult as their website seems overloaded), but it seems they are in software solutions, not a hardware manufacturer or designer.
dolmen··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
FYI Nord Stream had one end in Germany, which happens to be in Europe. So Nord Stream was driving oil to Europe, and some Europeans mattered.
dolmen··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
It is good for Russ.a even if they didn't even organize it: everybody thinks it's them, but they might not have even spent anything on it.
dolmen··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
Not the Normandy event, but the NL event.
dolmen··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
Actually the article that you didn't bother to read mention a few encoding errors that Fable has been able to recover and point to the probable author's intent.
dolmen··on Measuring the sloppiness of code
> Imagine being able to walk into a house and see immediately the leaks dripping from the ceiling, the clunky layout and smell the stinky garbage that hasn't been collected.

No need to imagine. Just open the README.md of many projects.

dolmen··on ESP32 Bit Pirate Hardware Hacking Kit with Web Tools That Speaks Every Protocol
You lost audience long before it could become contributors.
dolmen··on 27.5KB language-agnostic WebGPU syntax highlighter
"27.5KB" will not age well.

But what could I expect from another vibe coded project?

dolmen··on An Accidental Blackboard
There is some value in a unified history (code and blackboard together) if you want to be able to review agents behavior (especially if that goes wrong).
dolmen··on We built our house for LAN parties (2024)
Or maybe it is just a legal way to escape taxes. Enough to be worth owning the yatch and paying for its crew and maintenance. Just that should give a hint to the low bar of the money amount involved.
dolmen··on Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
You say: "you measure", "you do that", "you pick".

But what about "I"?

dolmen··on There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
Software engineering also applies to the test suite. So its management requires supervision.
dolmen··on Hackers had a live feed of every ID verification company scanned for over a year
The only times I had to provide a scan of my passport was to cross a border:

    - get a VISA to be allowed to cross the border
    - send to the airline for my flight that will cross the border
    - show the real passport at the border
I have another ID for authentication inside my country, which by the way, is not a driving license (which is used only for car driving usage).
dolmen··on GPT-6 Astra
Let's start by giving "most humans" the long term safety net (food, lodging) from early age to allow to focus intelligence on high level problems.

Machines aimed at running AGI are provided that, but the money spent there could as well go towards enhancing humans.

dolmen··on Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
Claude Code: 4mn, 20mn, give up (from my experience today)
dolmen··on .name Termination
.uk.co (mentioned in the blog) isn't .co.uk
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