giraffe_lady

I'm like the person you responded to, I've just used fossil personally for years after working at a place using it a while back and always liked it.

This is its moment though. It is so well suited for LLM coding tools. You can jam all the markdown context, skills etc into the wiki. The CLI has wiki and ticket tools so those are just available for it to use. Fossil does not mind if you use the repo DB for your own stuff, so you can log all your sessions in there, fts5 is plenty for as needed on demand retrieval.

Big changes to professional development over the last year and hard to predict how it will all shake out, but I think the tooling will converge on something that fossil already has all the structure for. I was a late adopter on LLM-assisted coding but already feel ahead of a lot of my peers because of how easy and effective this approach is.

There is some bizarre facility with hindley-milner based languages embedded in LLMs, they're basically automatically good at even very new ones like gleam and nanolang. I have a never-released-anywhere hobby ML that compiles to lua and coding models can write it fine. Better than it writes python or php for sure and those have huge corpuses in the training data.

I don't even have good conjecture about why this is the case but right now all my assisted coding is in MLs for this reason.

> Creating wealth from poverty within a few generations is miraculous, and the system that achieved that should be emulated.

I'll convey your admiration to my local sinaloa confederate.

> since homeless will often migrate to where the functional support services are.

I've heard this a lot but I don't have any reason to believe it's true. Never seen a reputable study that asserts it. I've known a lot of homeless people but none that relocated for this reason. Most who moved were looking for work or trying to get closer to family. Most didn't move at all and were just where they had always been, or in the city they were living in when they became homeless.

It's really not. Anything the LLM can benefit from people can too. Keeping minimal explicit information in git history is a cultural norm not proven best practice. The best codebases I've worked on have very large commit messages and searching them is very useful. We should have been doing it that way all along.

Lot of places have a strong tradition of corporal & capital punishment for social transgression and aren't like singapore in other ways. Iran and China have the most similar policies and you don't see a lot of HN people singing their praises for it.

None of that is given.

The secret is maintaining a permanently impoverished underclass without labor rights or a path to citizenship! Much to learn here, indeed.

> Hey, dipshit. You know what compiles in two seconds, deploys as a single binary, and doesn't shit itself when a transitive dependency gets yanked from npm at 3am?

OCaml?

It will be the same two classes there are now and always have been. Those who need to sell their labor and those they sell it to. Class struggle is the only way out. Find some solidarity, you aren't exempt.

Who empties the bedpan?

You're right, you don't know. Just as a quick relevant summary I'm american, old enough to be retired if that were possible, and have lived most of my life in poverty, illness, and incarceration with long stretches of homelessness.

These are your adult responsibilities, it's time to grow up.

> It turns out the reality of taking that class of action is actually a lot more fraught that your 4th grade self thought it was.

It's funny my entire adult life has been me slowly realizing that no, it is not. It is easy to do what is right, it is easy to see what is right to do. Stop making excuses and do it.

Bizarrely I feel like that reflects how a lot of tech leadership are viewing it? I can't explain this behavior but this is the first time I've seen this inversion: leaders believing money spent on something is itself value. I have dev friends who are legitimately under an edict to burn more tokens! It's freakish.

I volunteer for a local organization, most areas have one. Some are specialized around a specific kind of court, others are big enough to be broad and then have specialized training, usually following however your local jurisdiction divides up its courts.

I fill out a form for each session and case and write descriptive notes about what happens in court, including things like language and tone of the judge, conduct of the counsel, etc. I don't evaluate "questionable" myself and I do nothing personally with the notes. They are submitted to the organization and eventually in aggregate make their way into data used by researchers, journalists, law schools, legislators.

I've mentioned this before but I've been a volunteer court watcher for domestic violence court for some years now. Cases where a state surveillance tool or database was used to stalk or harass the victim are completely routine.

Very often it is someone in an administrative role who has access to the tool, and I think they get caught more often because it's easier for automated audits to flag their use as clearly unnecessary. LEOs have a lot of benefit of the doubt on that and, from what I can tell, are pretty much free to do what they want with these tools.

I do follow up on cases, I'm not supposed to participate in court but I can contribute community impact statements about systemic patterns I've observed. I haven't so far ever seen one of the cops in front of another court for this behavior, even when it was clearly documented by an order of protection being granted in DV court.

I assume this problem is far far worse than I can perceive. Victims will only bring this to court with a lot of support and clear evidence, and even then with the offender being police, it's risky and frightening. Our police are automatically placed on administrative leave if served an order of protection, so the local judges are extremely resistant to ever actually granting one.

I'm not in this field but I know someone who used to be and we've talked about it a fair bit. A quick overview of what's needed from what I understand:

Old books aren't that neat, you tend to have a lot of notes and other documents, translations, scribal annotations from different eras interleaved or in the margins. You need to make decisions about that stuff as you go, which requires being informed about the context and meaning of those documents, that may well be in another language, or from hundreds of years before or after the document you're trying to process. For any given physical object it's quite likely that no single scholar has all the information necessary.

It is also extremely important to preserve all the context, things like which exact pages a fragment is stuck between, even its orientation, can be critical information to later scholars. And then in all of this you're handling ancient & precious one of a kind paper documents. It's just slow going, and well beyond what I would even consider "skilled labor" this very much is the work of research & scholarship. By the time you get a camera pointed at a page you're at the easy part.

I mean only in the same sense that you spend 1 second per second doing something. Time is probably not the best way to evaluate the resources this consumes and I doubt it takes much of anything else either.

It does seem weird though even for sqlite. I wonder how oban does it. I also wonder if OP knows oban can run on sqlite.

Oh, yes, I see what you mean now.

Really might be in sqlite. I've learned to never trust my intuition about performance with that thing. So many times I've gone to "optimize" something and discovered that the naive hack way I had been doing it was faster anyway. It's built for this sort of bullshit.

There are transgressions severe enough that your duty to stop them is heavier than your responsibility to "the reputation of your client's product." Amazing this needs to be stated, frankly.

ok lol

A thing that's striking if you spend any time around deaf people is that at the very top there are exactly two distinct branches of human language: vocal and sign. Once this settles into your understanding the implications are profound and it makes it impossible to dismiss as merely failing to love themselves. (??)

Sign language is exactly as rich a linguistic and cultural tradition as all vocal languages combined, it is an equal branch of human expression & life. It's not the hearing or deafness exactly, it's the experience of being one of the participants in and caretakers of this tiny but vibrant and important domain of humanity.

Or like, anything peter thiel says ever.

Fun until that's a real person using a paid bot service to promote their business and you just libeled them in a perfectly preserved medium.

I agree with this too. I decided on constraints for myself around these tools and I give my complete focus & attention to every prompt, often stopping for minutes to figure things through and make decisions myself. Reviewing every line they produce. I'm a senior dev with a lot of experience with pair programming and code review, and I treat its output just as I would those tasks.

It has about doubled my development pace. An absolutely incredible gain in a vacuum, though tiny compared to what people seem to manage without these self-constraints. But in exchange, my understanding of the code is as comprehensive as if I had paired on it, or merged a direct report's branch into a project I was responsible for. A reasonable enough tradeoff, for me.

I'm not completely sure and I only have the insight of an interested hobbyist here but I don't think it's a single reason.

A lot of it is that the production improvements have mostly been in developing processes for synthetic replacements. Natural fibers are agricultural products: wool comes from sheep, that are raised on land, harvested and processed by skilled laborers, with natural variance in the input & output; linen, cotton, silk different variants of the same constraints. Polyester is not like this and it indeed can scale vastly and be very cheap. Rayon can be produced from basically any cellulose input so same.

So a lot of what would be productive gains have just shifted over to these other modes. Cotton is the main natural fiber the industry focuses on and it is mostly a lot cheaper now than it was in the past.

I don't know what the right term is but yeah it's not quite inflation. IIRC households pre-ww2 were spending 15% of their budget on clothing, and the farther back you go the higher that gets even to the point where the concept of "budget" breaks down and the entire family's activities were oriented around procuring food and cloth.

Good fabric has always been and is still very expensive! We have created much cheaper alternatives but if you want the quality your predecessors had you better be prepared to look 15% of your household budget in the face. Homemade isn't even an alternative here. Most of the cost of good clothing is in the fabric and there's just no way around this.

I intentionally throw some weird ones on there just in case anyone is actually ever checking them. Gotta keep interviewers guessing.

This has been the wisdom for a long time but in some areas, clothing especially, it has finally fallen apart.

Currently with clothes the cheapest are arguably good value, you get shit but at cheap prices. And high end you at least get good materials: it may not be "worth it" but if you want high quality fabric, which is extremely real, this is what you're paying. The midrange is the worst of both, quality barely if at all higher than the bottom level, but prices significantly higher.

This is too complicated to approach by looking at brands too. Accounting for diffusion lines, subbranding, white labeling etc there are almost no companies that make only bad or only good quality, and the quality is not very well correlated to price or brand prestige either.

For clothing there are currently very few general value signals that are still working, a huge contrast to 10 but even 5 years ago.