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ffreire

142 karma · joined February 7, 2013

I do things, and sometimes they work out!

Feel free to reach me through gmail: ffreire.fernando

Or see some of my work: dogonthehorizon.com

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ffreire··on The last time my family was replaced by technology
I don't think the story is meant to be taken as literally as I'm reading in this comment.
ffreire··on Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]
Lurkers abound.
ffreire··on Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
Agree it's divisive, and I would argue it speaks more to a person's perception of work vs play more than a relationship to tech. If (the general) you think that play is for children and work is serious biz, then yeah I could see how you wouldn't take someone seriously when they say they're "playing around with it". It's usually not obvious which attitude a person has though without getting to know them a little bit.
ffreire··on c100
Why?
ffreire··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
Language choice had less impact than people first assume even before LLMs in most software. A good engineering team produces good code in whatever language they happen to be using. In my own career I've worked in serious Java, Scala, Haskell, Javascript, PHP, and Python application stacks and I've seen plenty of good and bad examples.

I reckon language choice matters more at the edges of economic activity where a specific language feature really does make the difference in the end product, but most activity that is leveraging LLMs now is more generic enterprise SaaS software.

ffreire··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
IME Python has been very pleasant to use with types, even though they are not nearly as expressive as Haskell. I've noticed a shift in my own work where I spend more time playing with/manipulating change than I do making sure things type check. That does happen, of course, but it happens with less frequency then when I was writing Haskell by hand. During that time, I'd have stack running tests on file change and it was pretty smooth as well, but that workflow breaks down a bit with the current generation of agent harnesses we have.
ffreire··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
Are you one of the folks thinking of upgrading? If so, from what generation? What makes you excited? Isn't this a more interesting way to have the conversation?
ffreire··on Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
Are you familiar with ACP[0]? Through that protocol you can run claude code within zed[1]. Or perhaps I'm not understanding what you mean by using CC integration.

[0]: https://agentcommunicationprotocol.dev/introduction/welcome [1]: https://zed.dev/docs/ai/external-agents#claude-code

ffreire··on Malicious skills targeting Claude Code and Moltbot users
I let Gemini add events to my calendar, but that's about it. All the actions in the app require explicit approval.

[ insert butter bot meme here ]

ffreire··on Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce
Deel and Rippling: https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-rippling-employee-...
ffreire··on Learning to Reason with LLMs
You can see an example of the Chain of Thought in the post, it's quite extensive. Presumably they don't want to release this so that it is raw and unfiltered and can better monitor for cases of manipulation or deviation from training. What GP is also referring to is explicitly stated in the post: they also aren't release the CoT for competitive reasons, so that presumably competitors like Anthropic are unable to use the CoT to train their own frontier models.
ffreire··on Arc Browser 1.0
Agreed. It's mainlined a lot of plugins that I used to use in Chrome and default keyboard shortcuts that I would have chosen myself. Window management, spaces, and automated tab lifecycles are by far the most valuable features I use.
ffreire··on Twitter was down
When does the møøse arc begin in Twitter's storyline?
ffreire··on SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities
"Yet" is the operative word. Many banks were insolvent in 2008, or have we so quickly forgotten the lessons from the housing crisis.
ffreire··on Focus Time Saved Me from Burnout
I do this regularly, and to the extent that I'm able I put the task in the description so that my team knows more or less what I'm prioritizing. You can also create recurring OOO and Focus Time events now, so I have lunch blocked off and 30min at the end of each day to prepare for the next. It's a secret super power to staying on top of things and creating rituals that help me sign off at a reasonable hour instead of sliding into unproductively and less time with family.

Really, my only gripe with Google Calendar at this point is that you can't define custom colors nor label those colors. I use that feature heavily now to give me an at a glance view of which projects or activities my time is going to on a weekly basis. The colors don't have consistency across months though because I have to re-use colors for different purposes.

ffreire··on Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020)
> I saw a crow (or a raven, never quite sure)

Assuming you mean it's difficult to tell the difference, as opposed to just in this case:

Telling them apart is fairly straightforward! Crows are smaller, have a flatter tail, and typically flap quite a bit during flight. Ravens, by comparison, are much larger in size, have a diamond-shaped tail that moves quite a bit during flight, and typically glide during flight.

Love the whole family of corvids :D as well as your story!

ffreire··on Listen to Wikipedia
Agreed, this made my day! Such a fun idea and well executed.
ffreire··on Ask HN: What Linux Desktop Environment do you use on tablets?
I find that Linux devotees often leave out the compromises they've made in their computing choices. Thank you for stating yours, it helps contextualize the reasons for choosing Ubuntu!
ffreire··on Dev Fonts
This is a curious position to take given that it's mostly a personal choice. People will like what they like, and that's perfectly fine! No need to denigrate frontend devs, or anyone, for a stylistic choice.
ffreire··on Haskell Mini-Patterns Handbook
I wouldn't consider them rules inasmuch as they're things to keep in mind when working in a Haskell codebase, in much the same way GoF has been useful for OO programmers for decades.

Can you write code without using a pattern from GoF? Sure. Will it work? Probably. Does that make GoF useless? No, I'd think not. This type of content is immensely valuable for beginner and practitioner alike because it starts to build a shared language with which to talk about how codebases are organized :)

ffreire··on Show HN: Dockerfiler: declarative management of images built from Dockerfiles
Indeed, and the meta at the time was Vagrant on top of Virtualbox!
ffreire··on The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
What makes this formalization fake?
ffreire··on One of Estonia's first "e-residents" explains what it means
And by book you are referring to "The Rise of Meritocracy"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology

ffreire··on Write you a Haskell (2015)
Simon Peyton Jones' seminal work "Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" is available free of charge now that it's out of print[0]. If you haven't read it yet I'd highly encourage it!

[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-imp...

ffreire··on How I built a keyboard by hand
I've seen a fair number of folks in the mechanical keyboard community (admittedly rather small already) that customize their switches. For example, a common mod for mechanical switches is to replace the springs in the switch housing, which affects how much force is required to depress the switch. Others replace the stem, which is the colored part of the switch, changing its feel (tactile vs linear, smooth vs course).

Given that, would you consider someone building their own switch as someone who's created a custom switch from these components? e.g. I've read of folks putting Zealios stems in Gateron housings with 80g+ springs to create their ideal switch type.

ffreire··on Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco
Your response coupled with your username gave me a shiver, heh.

That said, why would the Fed tighten money in the fall when we're so close to an election year? I know they hold longer terms to hopefully avoid political swings, but, it just seems like bad timing.

ffreire··on Sublime Text packages are on GitHub
I believe the argument for open source is that the community can continue to maintain the software long past when the creator stops (for whatever reason). Responsible maintainers will often seek new developers from the community to take charge (as is the case with marginalia[0], the first project that came to mind). Of course this isn't the only reason why folks want ST to be open source, but I believe this addresses your point about abandoning closed source software.

[0]: http://blog.fogus.me/2013/08/12/marginalia-has-a-new-home/

ffreire··on Clojure 1.7 is now available
Clojure is often billed as "just another JAR" and in my experience I've never felt the need to install via any package manager. My workflow often consists of a new leiningen project where I define the version of Clojure that I want to use for the current project, along with whatever I else I need for the task at hand. Likewise, if I just need a quick repl to test something out, I'll simply use `lein repl` and fire away.
ffreire··on Genius API
It seems to me like this gives the company free ideas and feedback they can then turn around and implement in their core business. Is this too simplistic, or is this simply not practiced enough?
ffreire··on Show HN: Effective java – A tool to explore your Java code written in Clojure
Were you perhaps talking about this article [0]? If not, it's a good read about the state of Project Skummet and improving Clojure load times on Android.

[0]: http://blog.ndk.io/2015/04/23/state-of-coa.html

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