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heeton

1,123 karma · joined February 15, 2012

meet.hn/city/gb-Exeter

Socials: - x.com/Ifthenalex

Interests: Art, Books, Climate Tech, Freelancing, Gaming, Hardware, IoT, Legal Tech, Mentorship, Music, Open Source, Robotics, Science, Startups, UI/UX Design

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Web: https://www.Alex slade.com

submissionscomments
heeton··on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up
> Why have we not seen an improvements in products?

Huh? I'm seeing improvements in products _everywhere_. E.g. Linear. My team has been a heavy user of Linear for years. They have shipped a huge amount of things in the last 6 months, and the gaps between major changes is dropping.

It is twice as useful for our team as it was last year.

I'm genuinely impressed.

heeton··on I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
If you like building keyboards, you’ll end up using a couple of these.

I have 6!

heeton··on GitHub Actions down again today
As someone who partially uses depot but was still affected by this github issue, we obviously haven't moved over enough. We use your runners but github is still blocking us.

Hope you don't mind the public ask, it seems useful for others.

If we're using depot runners, and want to use them directly, or move off of github actions being the controller for when things run: what do you suggest?

Trigger the workflows directly on depot via CLI?

heeton··on GitHub Actions down again today
Ugh, same. 30 mins with 2 devs trying to figure it out before they posted an update.
heeton··on Ask HN: We need a standard way to declare how much AI was used in a PR
Sardonic but not useful.
heeton··on Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans
1 ticket: you can only sell back, no name change. You’re solo, not going with anyone, this works.

2 tickets: you can either sell them both back, OR change ONLY one name once. This means you have the option of buying two tickets up front, before you lock-in your companion.

It works well, I’ve experienced this for festival tickets.

heeton··on GitHub Stacked PRs
Same, our team has been on it for a year and it's very good.
heeton··on We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
I wouldn't say "buying software that saves us time" is gambling, but you do you.
heeton··on We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
It’s not 17m for an idea to improve git.

It’s 17m for a tool which hopes to serve companies and charge money and make more than 17m in profit as a result.

If you look at the set of dev tooling, teams will frequently pay many hundreds per dev on things like CI, Git tools, code review, etc.

And to be fair, GitHub is really quite bad for a lot of workflows. I haven’t used gitbutler, but my team pays ~$30 a month per dev for tools which literally just provide a nicer interface for stacking PRs, because it saves us WAY more than that in time.

This isn’t even an egregious example of VC, it’s just an enterprise dev tooling bet.

heeton··on OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic
Anecdotally, Claude has worked far better for our elixir team than the others we’ve tried.
heeton··on Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S.
> I totally support the phone-free bar and restaurant experience

If you then expect an exemption because your phone use is different then I challenge that you don’t actually support the experience.

If you want to read news in a phone-free environment: bring a newspaper, a kindle, etc.

heeton··on Embarrassingly simple self-distillation improves code generation
100%. I have a guiding approach when solving problems: keep reframing and exploring until the solution becomes obvious.

I often find, if I've got a complicated solution, it’s because I haven’t fully examined the problem.

heeton··on I'm Not Consulting an LLM
Author’s central point is that an LLM answer “is optimized for arrival, not for becoming” (to paraphrase from the Google “Lucky” part).

So a reasoning LLM that does the comparisons and checks “like a human” still fails the author’s test.

That said, this still feels like a skill issue. If you want to learn, see opposing views gather evidence to form your own opinions about, LLMs can still help massively. You just have to treat them research assistants instead of answer providers.

heeton··on Why I Joined OpenAI
That episode, and this Gavin quote, encapsulate the attitude perfectly.

“I don't want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place, better than we do.”

heeton··on Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
I upvoted because I’m very keen for more teams to start trying to solve this problem and release tools and products to help.

Context gathering and refinement is the biggest issue I have with product development at the moment.

heeton··on Microsoft is quietly walking back its diversity efforts
If you remove a reaction to politics and/or management practice, this is quite an obvious question, no?

Hypothetically: Substitute Microsoft for a company with “zero downtime” as one of their company values.

Now imagine you were asked “What impact did your actions have in contributing to zero downtime at Hostingsoft?”

That wouldn’t be a controversial question.

heeton··on Kagi Hub Belgrade
Random data point: I'm in the UK and have visited Serbia twice for Skiing and time in Belgrade. It was a cool place.
heeton··on The 'Toy Story' You Remember
That's with a naive stereo split. Many would still put the bass on one side, with the binaural processing so it's still heard on the right, but quieter and with a tiny delay.
heeton··on Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower
Rare-earth magnets do not fall under “exotic”.
heeton··on OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
Your comment wasn’t wrong. Neither is the reply wrong to be frustrated about how the world understands this complex topic.

You’re talking about autism. The reply is about autism spectrum DISORDER.

Different things, exacerbated by the imprecise and evolving language we use to describe current understanding.

An individual can absolutely exhibit autistic traits, whilst also not meeting the diagnostic criteria for the disorder.

And autistic traits are absolutely a variant of normalcy. When you combine many together, and it affects you in a strongly negative way, now you meet ASD criteria.

Here’s a good description: https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/what-is-autism...

heeton··on Starcloud
Minor correction: the water is evaporated. It remains in the water cycle but is removed from the water source for any downstream users.
heeton··on Starcloud
I enjoyed seeing it described in those games :)

I'm pretty sure it was that series that also described https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator , with the side effects of different ships having very distinct heat patterns because of their radiator patterns. And that if a ship ever had to make a turn while they were active, big glowing arcs of slowly-cooling droplets would be flung out into space and leave a kind of heat plume.

heeton··on AI and Home-Cooked Software
Member of Golgafrinchian Ark Fleet Ship C here.

I like to make stuff, hack on projects. I code, I woodwork, I solder, I build. I love AI in the same way I love a router and dovetail jig in the workshop.

My son and I were playing minecraft, and we wanted to build a massive egg, just for fun. (My son is 5).

We try, we fail, we try again. We start learning about spheres and how to draw circles, this is peak project-based-learning. But we still can't build an egg that looks good, and now it's becoming less fun and there's no drive to keep trying.

So I spin up claude after hours and in ~30 mins I have an parametric egg-generator in 3d space, mapped to voxels. There is no universe in which my child would be interested in the many years of training to get to the point of building this himself. I also don't have 20 hours free to learn and implement my own 3d voxel rendering systems, just to build an egg in minecraft as a silly teaching exercise.

That weekend we try to use this tool, and we see it's really hard to just see an egg model and build it, so 15 minutes later it can now show us a sliced layer-by-layer view.

The weekend, my son built a massive fucking egg in Minecraft and he's been talking about circles and radiuses and eggs and coding software ever since. He was SO excited to see that we could take a running program, something "real" in the world, and then directly change it. (And now he's trying to learn about code and graphics and stuff. Again, he's 5 - this is the passing interest of curiosity in a child, he's not studying 50-hour courses to learn low level skills)

Are you saying that's not a massive win for everyone involved?

heeton··on Learn to play Go
To be clear, there are 140 active games right now. That 21k number is active “correspondence” games where moves can take a day and games can take months.
heeton··on Learn to play Go
Nice to see other go players here! Here are some go resources I like that I haven’t seen mentioned yet.

1. https://gomagic.org/ , it has free and paid content, and I learned a lot here.

2. The European go journal. A nice print publication, I’ve not lived in or near the Asian countries with a stronger go history so I’ve enjoyed getting printed problems and go news.

3. The “so you want to play go” book series by Jonathon Hop. I like his writing style.

heeton··on Gurted – A web ecosystem introducing the gurt:// protocol
Gurt is a colloquial synonym for “hyper” (The “h” in http).
heeton··on Abundant Intelligence
Adding 10GW of power as they plan, is 87TWh. 2%.

That’s huge. The hope is that this can drive renewables or nuclear rollout, but not sure that hope is realistic.

heeton··on Help us raise $200k to free JavaScript from Oracle
To be that guy: you’re objecting to someone’s subjective phrasing while also using your own subjective phrasing.

Language is malleable and messy, and I find it doesn’t help discourse if you attack the surface reading of a comment. I don’t think OP is “accusing of hate”, I think they’re expressing surprise that such negative sentiments exist to a sensible issue. I agree, as do you it seems.

(And yes, in writing this I asked myself if I’m reacting to your terminology or the intent behind the words. I hope it’s the latter)

heeton··on Tesla changes meaning of 'Full Self-Driving', gives up on promise of autonomy
We already have transponders on freeways. They’re technically passive reflectors, but they reflect a high proportion of incident EM waves, in the visible spectrum, and exist between lanes on every major road in the US. Also known as white paint.
heeton··on VibeVoice: A Frontier Open-Source Text-to-Speech Model
I'm no audio engineer either, but those computer voice sound "saw-tooth"y to me.

From what I understand, it's more basic models/techniques that are undersampling, so there is a series of audio pulses which give it that buzzy quality. Better models are produced smoother output.

https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal/difference-between-wav...

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