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gatkinso

169 karma · joined December 26, 2017

gavinatkinson.com
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gatkinso··on Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart
Pretty cool, I would suggest removing the z axis grids. Finding them very distracting
gatkinso··on Hi
hi
gatkinso··on Radar Laboratory – Interactive Radar Phenomenology
unreadable text
gatkinso··on Sandboxels
I still fondly remember fsgforums, where I was banned for impersonating the typical forum noob.
gatkinso··on Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying
The dream of a single family home (in SF) is dying
gatkinso··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
I observe the same thing but it doesn't cause me difficulty. I think I more or less aim for the edge, vs the inside or outside.
gatkinso··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
Its not a great update and hopefully with Dye out they will make some changes, but personally I don't have this issue.
gatkinso··on Moiré Explorer
grow up
gatkinso··on Moiré Explorer
Highly recommend checking out Andreas' other work on https://ertdfgcvb.xyz/. Probably one of my favorite websites of all time, his body of work is what complete commitment to an idea looks like. Couple cool hardware projects in there too.
gatkinso··on Web development is fun again
It's amazing to be able to try a bunch of ideas with very minimal cost. That being said, AI code assistants don't have eyeballs and they often make things that don't look very good. Craft, polish and judgement still matter.
gatkinso··on Microtonal Spiral Piano
Very cool. May i suggest making the keys pizza-slice-shaped so they are slightly easier to press?
gatkinso··on Games’ affordance of childlike wonder and reduced burnout risk in young adults
One of my favorites as well. A folk space exploration sim. I did find a few of the puzzles a bit too difficult though.
gatkinso··on Public Makes Millions on Plunging Crypto
I am making the point that this asset class is not very big.
gatkinso··on Public Makes Millions on Plunging Crypto
The entire crypto market cap is about $2.8T, which makes it about 75% as big as Apple. Would the same argument make sense if the author were to say Apple employees alone "push up prices for houses, resort hotels, and all sorts of other things they do with their money". Kind of a stretch if you ask me.
gatkinso··on Claude Code is a slot machine
in the sense that if I have to change the shape of a complex static object or do anything tedious, it can just do it. What exactly would you say I have to learn from tasks like that?
gatkinso··on Claude Code is a slot machine
and a damn good one
gatkinso··on A Review of Aerospike Nozzles: Current Trends in Aerospace Applications
Is that an AI generated image of the Venture Star? It's missing portside wings..
gatkinso··on Sustain your creative drive in the face of technological change
First result on Google
gatkinso··on Google to buy Wiz for $32B
Insider baseball IMO.
gatkinso··on Bayleaf · Building a low-profile wireless split keyboard
Beautiful work, loved reading about your process.
gatkinso··on Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'
How about a "no" to having product managers?
gatkinso··on David Lynch has died
the brighter the light, the deeper the shadows
gatkinso··on The Washington Post kills off its "Democracy Dies In Darkness" slogan
the reason is simple - they lost
gatkinso··on Cheating Is All You Need
I use Cursor as well, totally understand what you mean about glimpses of the future. The composer and tab complete are good at writing isolated units of functionality - ie pure functions, especially when they are trivial and have been written before. I appreciate that it saves me a google search or time spent on rote work.

I do wonder how much more sophisticated LLMs would have to be to really excel at multi-file or crosscutting whole-codebase editing. I have no way of really quantifying this but I suspect its a lot more than people think, and even then might require a substantially different approach to making software. Kind of reminds me of the people trying to make full length movies with video AI - cool trick but who wants to sit through 1.5 hrs of that? The gulf between those videos and an actual feature length film is _massive_, much like the difference between a prod codebase and a todo crud app. And it's not just about the level of detail, it's about coherence between small but important things and the overall structure.

gatkinso··on Cheating Is All You Need
Have any of these LLM coding assistant enthusiasts actually used them? They are ok at autocomplete and writing types. They cannot yet write "80% of your code" on anything shippable. They regularly miss small but crucial details. The more 'enthusiastic' ones, like Windsurf, subtly refactor code - removing or changing functionality which will have you scratching your head. Programming is a process of building mental models. LLMs are trying to replace something that is fundamental to engineering. Maybe they'll improve, but writing the code was never the hard part. I think the more likely outcome of LLMs is the broad lowering of standards than 5x productivity for all.
gatkinso··on H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
Tracking was available by Jan 2020 at the latest
gatkinso··on A “meta-optics” camera that is the size of a grain of salt
All kinds of exciting implications for small cameras and lens assemblies in VR/AR
gatkinso··on A rudimentary quantum network link between Dutch cities
Did you hear a cat just now?
gatkinso··on New iMac with M4
Interesting to roll out the M4 with the low end machine
gatkinso··on Micro-Dosing Caffeine
That reminds me. I should make a pot of tea.
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