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film42

1,269 karma · joined July 27, 2012

Garrett is my name, I make stuff. This is my everywhere username. If you find me, say 'Hi!'

film42 [at] google mail

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film42··on Sonnet 5.5
Bingo. And to prove your point, after switching to cheap open models (I think Qwen?) it did indeed find a bug in my WAL implementation.
film42··on Sonnet 5.5
Working on a write-ahead log implementation, I had Opus 5.5 look to verify that it was durably writing as safely as possible. It got flagged and forced me to Opus 4.8. Switched to OpenCode + OpenRouter and continued working.
film42··on Typst makes big strides
I use typst for all sorts of things in customer apps: conference badges, customer invoices, social media asset generation (like thumbnails for podcasts, customer reviews, etc.), certificates of completion, progress reports, and much more. It's just so robust, efficient and works everywhere. Never again do I need to worry about html formatting to make PDFs.
film42··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
I guess it might be relative, but switching from VertexAI endpoint to OpenRouter was like 2-3x faster for us.
film42··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
It depends on how you're querying Gemini models. OpenRouter is the fastest by far. I'm guessing they bought the dedicated pipe from Google. Gemini via VertexAI and consumer API has pretty bad latency.
film42··on Gemini-3.5-Transcribe
Curious if this suffers from the same hallucination problems as Chirp or not. For example, if you pass chirp some audio with noise or even no audio, it will barf text at you like "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." until a request timeout fires after like 10 minutes. It's... really bad. For this reason, we've moved back to Whisper for timestamp accuracy and then Gemini Flash for transcription correction.
film42··on The August 17 outage
This. I own a small company with 5 people. I pay Github $250/m. I'm sorry but the narrative of, "look at this burden we have, it's hard to take care of all of this code!" is pretty insulting when I'm paying $50 per person per month to host code and run CI pipelines. If they do not want my money, I'll find a company who does.
film42··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
Or rather, Stripe will find a way to make me pay for it as a Stripe and OpenRouter customer.
film42··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
What you're not seeing are the subsidized Google Cloud startup credits, which includes Gemini. If you're in that program, you choose Gemini because it's essentially "free" and consistent.
film42··on Stripe Radar no longer free, migrates free tier to paid plan
Completely agree. Seems like a weird decision by Stripe. Opt-out or automatically pay more is not good.
film42··on Updates to Radar for LPMs and Billing coverage and pricing (October 2026)
> The version of Radar you've been using is closest to Standard, and you've been receiving it for free. Starting today, you'll receive a free trial of Radar Standard, which now includes broad protection across all payment methods, along with fraud analytics. After the trial ends on January 22, 2027, you'll automatically continue on Radar Standard and be charged $0.05 per screened transaction.

More accurately, the bundled version of Radar is no longer free, and you're being opted in to the paid base tier. Lame.

film42··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
The postmaster is effectively your supervisor. It could see the child segfault and abort the whole DB, but that would be deferring supervision to your init system. Not ideal.
film42··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
You are correct! TIL, and thank you. Connection processes get a SIGQUIT, shared buffers cleared, and WAL replayed, but postmaster stays alive. It's effectively an online restart.
film42··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
A million users? Hell, I'd bet 99.999% of live postgres databases in existence serve less than 5 users on average. Even among products that actually make a profit, I bet 99.9% of them serve less than 100 customers a day. We hooligans on hacker news manage the 0.1% of databases, and in my newfound consulting life, I'm hoping to never support one of those again.
film42··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
A thread per connection is a almost always the correct decision for performance, but by choosing a process per connection, postgres is able to let you load whatever sketchy extensions you want. Worst case you crash the process, not the database. It would be nice if you could strike a balance so a segfaul in the extension only crashes a small percentage of connections, not the whole thing.
film42··on Elastic lays off 7% of employees
I've seen companies put a percentage of the team on a PIP as a "this is not a layoff but we do need to cut costs" situation. Hopefully Elastic is just being honest about it?
film42··on Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails
I'm surprised they didn't do this the first time around. Like, a user says they forgot their password and you tell them they don't actually have an account, that's an information disclosure vulnerability. Not automatically falling back to Opus just lets the "attacker" know they are bumping against the guardrails and they need to try a different strategy.

It's Anthropic's product and they can do what they want, but my concern is what happens if Fable's product team decides that they can route 25% of traffic to Opus, bill it as Fable, and max their KPIs. That just doesn't sit right.

film42··on Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained
Acquisitions change priorities and layoffs put the squeeze on people. AI is for sure in the mix there, but open source decay is a result of no room in budgets for anything but maximizing revenue.
film42··on Claude Opus 4.7 Model Card
To be honest, I think it's just a more honest score of what Opus 4.6 actually was. Once contexts get sufficiently large, Opus develops pretty bad short term memory loss.
film42··on LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash
I hope it comes down to the NTSB recommending more controllers (or better conditions for controllers) to avoid task saturation, not just more process. It's incredible what a single controller is capable of doing, but for major areas like NYC, it's not enough.
film42··on North Korean's 100k fake IT workers net $500M a year for Kim
Camera cuts to a tech bro at his desk with 3 jobs and 5 instances of Claude Code running:

> I had [the Register] explain to me three times what [Kim] got arrested for because it sounds an awful lot like what I do here every day.

film42··on Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
Maybe. When it comes to actual payments, fee structures don't allow for this outside of the laboratory.
film42··on Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR
Maybe so. OLED comes with a risk, but I've run mine at 70-75% brightness with no issues. I probably drive mine ~2,500 hours per year, so if we make it 4 years that is a huge win in my book for something I stare at all day long.

Plus, coding at night on OLED just makes me want to write more code. It's great.

film42··on Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR
I bought an LG 32" 4k OLED for $999 and it's hands down the best display I've ever used. No burn in even with lots of static browser/terminal windows for days and days. The fact that it's $3k and _not_ OLED is insulting.
film42··on Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing
Just 10 minutes ago I was working with a very large semi-malformed excel file generated by a mainframe. DuckDB was able to load it with all_varchar (just keep everything a string) in under a second.

I'm still waiting for Excel to load the file.

film42··on I’m leaving Redis for SolidQueue
I made the switch on a new project and I don't regret it but it's still early days software despite the marketing. Concurrency control is fantastic, but it doesn't always work. I've woken up to see all threads occupied with a job that should be concurrency of 1.

I've also run into issues where a db connection pool is filled up and solid queue silently fails. No error or logs, just stops polling forever until manual restart. Far from ideal.

But, I can live with it. I am going for minimal maintenance, and the ability to run solid queue under puma inside rails on cloud run is just so easy. Having ~3 solid queue related issues a year is acceptable for my use case, but that doesn't mean it will be ok for others.

film42··on Roam 50GB is now Roam 100GB
I spend a lot of time out of reception and starlink has been fantastic. So much so that I leave it on anytime I'm driving where I have cellular reception because it's just consistently good. I get ~100Mbps whether it's a forest service road, ATV trail, or on the highway through curvy mountain passes.

I'm on the 50GB plan so doubling for free is very nice, but it looks like they yanked the ability to optionally purchase additional high speed data for $1/GB. Maybe it's still there?

film42··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
Same here. I was told it would take a at least year on the waitlist. A month later I had 2 friends offer me their spot. They weren't impressed with the truck after a few reviews came out showing bad towing performance. I opted to buy a used ICE truck instead and have zero regrets.
film42··on Mistral OCR 3
Is open router still sending all OCR jobs to Mistral? I wonder if they're trying to keep that spot. Seems like Mistral and Google are the best at OCR right now, with Google leading Mistral by a fair bit.
film42··on A Cozy Mk IV light aircraft crashed after 3D-printed part was weakened by heat
Installed _on_ an engine that operates at 200ºC!
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