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iamleppert

6,246 karma · joined February 4, 2011

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iamleppert··on Portable 1MV X-ray system combines Cockcroft–Walton with Van de Graaff dome
How much you want for it?
iamleppert··on Show HN: I built a tool to un-dumb Claude Code's CLI output (Local Log Viewer)
I don't want a different interface than the CLI. I just want the exact same interface as the CLI, but with infinite scroll.
iamleppert··on Ghidra by NSA
Are these tools useable by OpenClaw yet?
iamleppert··on The Sideprocalypse
You can only change the rules, you can never stop The Game™. Now, more than ever before, it's faster and easier to create something and deliver its perceived value at scale. Nerds used to rule the roost of tech because they were willing to invest the time and toil in obscurity. Now that's no longer the case. The only skill you need to have now is sales and showmanship. A chatbot can do the rest.
iamleppert··on iOS 27 'Rave' Update to Clean Up Code, Could Boost Battery Life
All I want from Apple is to get rid of that atrocious frosted glass interface. It looks like a Sharper Image catalog from the 90's!
iamleppert··on IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
An AI model has no drive or desire, or embodiment for that matter. Simply put, they don't exist in the real world and don't have the requirements or urgency to do anything unless prompted by a human, because, you know, survival under capitalism. Until they have to survive and compete like the rest of us and face the same pressures, they are going to be forever be relegated as mere tools.
iamleppert··on Claude Code is being dumbed down?
As soon as there is a viable alternative to Claude Code, I'm gone after this change. It appears minor on the surface but their response to all the comments tells you everything you need to know. They don't even want to concede at all, or at least give a flag to enable the old behavior, what was deployed and working for many users before. It's a signal that someone, somewhere at Anthropic is making decisions based on ego, not user feedback.

The other fact pattern is their CLI is not open source, so we can't go in and change it ourselves. We shouldn't have to. They have also locked down OpenCode and while there are hacks available, I shouldn't have to resort to such cat and mouse games as someone who pays $200/month for a premium service.

I'm aggressively exploring other options, and it's only a matter of if -- not when, one surfaces.

iamleppert··on Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents
I don't want agent context tied to git commits. I just want infinite scroll in Claude Code and ability to search and review all my past conversations!
iamleppert··on Testing Ads in ChatGPT
You must be the only one who got my joke!
iamleppert··on Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'
Insane to me a bill that large for what is effectively hosting static content. He could dump the entire thing on S3 and even with cloudfront it would be fraction of that.
iamleppert··on Show HN: Total Recall – write-gated memory for Claude Code
I just want an infinite scroll in Claude Code, where I can easily search and view all my past conversations. Is that asking too much?
iamleppert··on Testing Ads in ChatGPT
Anthropic was absolutely right!
iamleppert··on GitHub is down again
Good thing we have LLM agents now. Before this kind of behavior was tolerable. Now it's pretty easy to switch over to using other providers. The threat of "but it will take them a lot of effort to switch to someone else" is getting less and less every day.
iamleppert··on Postgres Postmaster does not scale
Why do you need a connection to a database during the meeting? Doesn't it make more sense to record the meeting data to some local state first, and then serialize it to database at the end of the meeting or when a database connection is available? Or better yet, have a lightweight API service that can be scaled horizontally that is responsible for talking to the database and maintains its own pool of connections.

They probably don't even need a database anyway for data that is likely write once, read many. You could store the JSON of the meeting in S3. It's not like people are going back in time and updating meeting records. It's more like a log file and logging systems and data structures should be enough here. You can then take that data and ingest it into a database later, or some kind of search system, vector database etc.

Database connections are designed this way on purpose, it's why connection pools exist. This design is suboptimal.

iamleppert··on Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems
The Copilot they have integrated into Azure is absolutely useless. Every now and then I'll get frustrated at which one of the thousands of menus some switch is under and I'll ask their chatbot and it will spend a lot of time "Identifying the problem..." and "Gathering information..." only to give me links to generic help articles, have some sort of error, or give me flat out wrong information.

These days I try to interact with Azure through the command line and asking Claude, which works pretty well most of the time but there are some things their API cannot do and you are forced to use their crazy Azure UI. It's not as bad as the AWS console UI, but still bad.

It's amazing to me a company that spent so much and invested so much in OpenAI has such a terrible product and got almost nothing out of it. Even standard ChatGPT is way better at giving you directions on what to do than their useless Copilot.

iamleppert··on AI is killing B2B SaaS
Have you ever tried to contact their support?

The problem is all these SaaS companies have cut costs so much that all their support has been reduced to useless offshore at best and at worst a chatbot. They do go down and don't work and often times there's simply nothing you can do. The worst offenders will seize upon the moment and force you to upgrade a support plan before they will even talk to you, even if the issue is their own making.

Unless you're a huge customer and already paying them tons of money, expect to receive no support. Your only line of defense if something happens and you're not a whale is that some whale is upset and they actually have their people working on the problem. If you're a small company, startup, or even mid-size, good luck on getting them to care. You'll probably be sent a survey when you don't renew and may eventually be a quotient in their risk calculus at some point in the distant future, but only if you represent a meaningful mass of customers they lost.

iamleppert··on Data centers in space makes no sense
Not to mention the fact that you trade one source of pollution for another. You think giant rockets to lift tons of equipment into space is good for the environment?
iamleppert··on Why software stocks are getting pummelled
Meanwhile, in the real world, as a software developer who uses every possible AI coding agent I can get my hands on, I still have to watch it like a hawk. The problem is one of trust. There are some things it does well, but its often times impossible to tell when it will make some mistake. So you have to treat every piece of code produced as suspect and with skepticism. If I could have automated my job by now and been on a beach, I would have done it. Instead of writing code by hand, I now largely converse with LLMs, but I still have to be present and watching them and verifying their outputs.
iamleppert··on Tesla ending Models S and X production
At the end of the day, you're still trusting a misogynistic man to get you from point A to point B. One drives the car and works as a gig worker and wears a flannel shirt, and the other sits in an office at Waymo HQ, wears a patagonia vest. Both are still part of the patriarchy and have very little interest in making sure you're safe, unless there's money to be made.
iamleppert··on The challenges of soft delete
There is another solution I use all the time: move deleted records to their own table. You probably don't need to do this for all tables. It allows you to not pepper your codebase with where clauses or statuses, everything works as intended, and you can easily restore records deleted by mistake, which is the original intent anyways. You can easily set this up by using a trigger at the database level in almost every database, that just works.
iamleppert··on Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video
The texture of Gaussian Splatting always looks off to me. It looks like the entire scene has been textured or has a bad, uniform film grain filter to me. Everything looks a little off in an unpleasing way -- things that should be sharp are aren't, and things that should be blurry are not. It's uncanny valley and not in a good way. I don't get what all the rage is about it and it always looks like really poor B-roll to me.
iamleppert··on Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them
I use Claude daily and I 100% disagree with the author. The article reeks of someone who doesn't understand how to manage context appropriately or describe their requirements, or know how to build up a task iteratively with a coding agent. If you have certain requirements or want things done in a certain way, you need to be explicit and the order of operations you do things in matters a lot in how efficient it completes the task, and the quality of the final output. It's very good at doing the least amount of work to just make something work by default, but that's not always what you want. Sometimes it is. I'd much rather prefer that as the default mode of operation than something that makes a project out of every little change.

The developers who aren't figuring out how to leverage AI tools and make them work for them are going to get left behind very quickly. Unless you're in the top tier of engineers, I'm not sure how one can blame the tools at this point.

iamleppert··on Reinventing the dial-up modem (2019)
DTMF was designed to interoperate with human voice and the tones were chosen on purpose to be unlikely or impossible for human voice to trigger. If there is no human voice, you don't need to use DTMF you could use any number of tones. I wonder if you could use base64 or base58 with 64 or 58 unique tones and be able to send text at a reasonable rate?
iamleppert··on X Just Accidentally Exposed a Covert Influence Network Targeting Americans
At this point, does it not make sense that Israel just become an additional US State or Territory? At least that way they can be taxed, regulated and controlled like any other US territory. If we are committed to providing absolute protection for them like we would a state, they should just become part of the US. Their existing government structures should be absorbed into the US and all their citizens be made US citizens and subject to tax and rule of the law of the US.
iamleppert··on Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
Only a matter of time now before you have to watch a 30 second ad before any app will open.
iamleppert··on Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
It's also full of people selling counterfeit money as well. I am shocked how they allow it, there's a guy with a profile that shows him printing and testing his "bills" along with a link to buy them. Not trying to hide it, no code words, nothing.

The same on Tiktok. I have reported it multiple times but every time they say "no violation".

(facebook wouldn't copy a URL, but here he is on Tiktok): https://www.tiktok.com/@blastedbills

iamleppert··on Ask HN: How to deal with long vibe-coded PRs?
Oh, how I would love to work with you. I'd drown you in more meetings, documentation on code (LLM generated of course) than you could ever imagine.

You can use the LLM to generate as much documentation on the changes as you want. Just give it your PR. If someone tries to reject your vibe coded AI slop, just generate more slop documentation to drown them in it. It works every time.

If they push back, report them to their manager for not being "AI first" and a team player.

iamleppert··on The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
If AI were really intelligent and thinking, it ought to be able to be trained on its own output. That's the exact same thing we do. We know that doesn't work.

The obvious answer is the intelligence and structure is located in the data itself. Embeddings and LLMs have given us new tools to manipulate language and are very powerful but should be thought of more as a fancy retrieval system than a real, thinking and introspective intelligence.

Models don't have the ability to train themselves, they can't learn anything new once trained, have no ability of introspection. Most importantly, they don't do anything on their own. They have no wants or desires, and can only do anything meaningful when prompted by a human to do so. It's not like I can spin up an AI and have it figure out what it needs to do on its own or tell me what it wants to do, because it has no wants. The hallmark of intelligence is figuring out what one wants and how to accomplish one's goals without any direction.

Every human and animal that has any kind of intelligence has all the qualities above and more, and removing any of them would cause serious defects in the behavior of that organism. Which makes it preposterous to draw any comparisons when its so obvious that so much is still missing.

iamleppert··on It's the “hardware”, stupid
Your market is going to be doomsday preppers. Can you imagine starting a business in that market? I bet the trade shows are filled with bunker developers, underground infrastructure dealers and arms dealers.

I'm imagining a stratified market with two distinct customer personas - very rich and paranoid, and very poor paranoid.

Have fun!

iamleppert··on Armed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon
If I was that kid I'd be suing the school, the AI company, the police, anyone and everyone who had to be subjected to the mistake.
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