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ivan_gammel

5,622 karma · joined February 28, 2011

Scaler CTO, Berlin, DE
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ivan_gammel··on Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation
The word „solidarity“ means here that you empathize with other people and contribute to shared prosperity and success. You share the healthcare system with a lot of people who make the country what it is. Some of them earn less, some earn more, and that‘s ok. With your contributions you make sure that those who bake your wonderful bread, run the public transport or clean the streets in your neighborhood are covered. If you would rather prefer American system with its deficiencies, because you are high earner and don‘t like to share, you can always go there. Dubai is also nice for people with some cash and tolerance to human rights violations.

What is really fucked up about Germany, is that exit to private insurance exists in principle, and our Bundesmimose Friedrich Merz have never used statutory one. The existing system has deteriorated only because nobody in the government is using it and has no clue what people now experience daily.

ivan_gammel··on Java 27
anecdotal evidence: I‘m working on a product in circular economy space at the moment (chemical trader). I chose Java because it just works and allows us to focus on business, no npm supply chain drama, no „how can I integrate my go microservice with a customer SOAP endpoint“ problem, time to hire under 2 months etc.
ivan_gammel··on Java 27
yes, so are the NPEs - both are runtime errors indicating a bug in the code. NPE was a major source of irritation 20 years ago, but what many people do not know is that debugging NPEs in Java is easier now - they carry more information about the source. And the culture has evolved.
ivan_gammel··on Java 27
It is really not a big deal nowadays, the problem of the same scale as having index out of bounds error (no language has good defence against this, yet it is not a catastrophe).
ivan_gammel··on Every invoice in Brazil's economy runs on SOAP 1.2
I think that‘s a matter of days and few hundred dollars in tokens to port it to Go if you really need it. Porting is where AI can do a really good job with the right instructions.
ivan_gammel··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
Few more tips to make failures more rare: 1. interactive orchestrator just ensures that process is followed and the progress towards North Star objective is steady and with predictable quality. 2. Agents use specific skills which have output gates, one of which is always quality of writing and reasoning. Orchestrator accepts work only if gate criteria are met.

This is going to make work much slower and token consumption higher. ROI from fixed rate subscriptions is still quite good. ROI from volume-based subscriptions needs to be watched carefully.

ivan_gammel··on Grok outage
Well, that‘s your subjective opinion. In 1860s people like you rejected impressionism.

Meanwhile:

https://www.art-magazine.ai/program

note some nice venues in the list.

ivan_gammel··on Grok outage
Consensus among whom? AI is a tool, that can be used differently and AI art is well-recognized, admired and exhibited the same way as any other art forms.

Is someone selling their impressionist paintings today on a fair more an artist than someone who has put equivalent or more effort in creating prompts, references, final renders, image curation and postprocessing etc? The latter may at least have more audience.

ivan_gammel··on Grok outage
In AI Art scene people do use Grok. It‘s good.
ivan_gammel··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
I have instructions to combine style of Brooks, Steven King and Economist Style Guide, while avoiding anything that may put wrong emphasis („genuinely“, „load-bearing“) does not contribute anything meaningful („X rather than Y“). The output is quite good* so far even on Opus 4.7-5, when it concerns product requirements. The key is to identify the pattern and focus on the meaning of the undesirable language.

* chemistry + regulations + infosec domains

ivan_gammel··on Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting
Oh, right. It does exist, it is very accurate, but the names sound like LOTR party:

- a gang of dwarfs

- some rocky ones

- and gas giants

- and one star to rule them all

ivan_gammel··on Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting
I‘m seeing this classification for the first time, but it sounds very reasonable and feels like it should have been like that. Is it your idea or is there any story behind it?
ivan_gammel··on Why OOP Exists
OOP is not about doing things harder, it‘s about doing them efficiently. The key elements of software engineering are abstraction and encapsulation: we, humans, cannot load the entire domain into our memory and reason about it at all levels of detail at once. We need to zoom in and zoom out, decompose problems into smaller pieces, then reassemble, treating those pieces at surface value. OOP isn‘t rocket science, it just adds one more piece — the hierarchy of concepts with inheritance and polymorphism. And it‘s just a technique: most programs are written in a mix of styles anyway. The foundational style is procedural, because that‘s how computers work. FP and OOP just build on top of it and translate to it.
ivan_gammel··on Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default
Attribution should be opt-in, but they already support it. Via CLAUDE.md where you can specify how exactly AI contribution should be documented. Relying on whatever convention your vendor will establish isn‘t a good idea. Vendors are replaced, project conventions stay, so it‘s better to state your expectations in writing, instead of assuming that someone guesses them right and maintains conformance forever.
ivan_gammel··on Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need
It‘s „bear service“, and context is slightly different. You do bear service to someone, and Verschlimmbesserung is on something. Both signal intent to do something good, but doing bear service is an act of screwing up while doing that, no prior condition required, and Verschlimmbesserung is the outcome of such attempt applied to something that was ok before.
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
Jain. If you leave only the facts, it becomes a bit boring, because everyone did that and continues doing so via various institutions. But the article pitches with the title and first paragraph a different story. And I doubt that e.g. Picasso was aware of the battle for his mind.
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
So, on the question about your knowledge of European contemporary art you reply with the list of books about American art history, written and published in USA for American reader. Ok.
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
The one with the young Queen, which also invented English language…
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
Yes. Default Country for the world on many English-speaking forums is the same as Default City for Russia.
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
First of all, what "genre"? I assume, abstract expressionism? Second, why would anyone fund specifically abstract expressionism and for what purpose given the diversity of art movements of that time? Third, what do you even know about contemporary art of Europe to make such bold claims?
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
No, sorry, this is not the case. :) Not every popular idea has a free pass on this ground, especially not if it was created by a propaganda machine.
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
Most of the significant works of modern art were created before CIA was founded. The title is factually incorrect and intellectually dishonest. But "who cares" question points to something different: indeed, who cares if the knowledge acquired by the reader will be shallow and misleading? I do care. You may not. It's a matter of attitude. People are free to choose their chewing gum, right?
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
The only thing where "American" art scene dominated was the auction space. And significant part of it was imported from Europe (no tariffs applied) and continued to feed from there later. The rest of the world lived it's own life.
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
The 1860s as a starting decade is a popular conventional definition in English, in other languages "modern art" may be defined differently. But you are absolutely right, it makes more sense to call post-WW2 art the contemporary art or just postmodernism, because something that happened long before the birth of the half of the population of the planet isn't really "contemporary".
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
Reduction of modern art to abstract expressionism is the same as reduction of cinema to MCU. Acceptable for a talk over couple beers, disqualifying factor for pretend-to-be intellectuals, mainly because it is cherry-picking based on the scale of a scandal rather than genuine interest in the history of art.
ivan_gammel··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
Not the first time when the Default Country thinks they invented everything. The title is almost comical.

Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe inspired by technological advances, globalization of trade and cultural exchange. Japanese art made huge blast, photography pushed to seek new forms of expression, social progress demanded new messages and new images. We had impressionism, post-impressionism, then the whole explosion of artistic forms and ideas in 1910s-1930s. All of that was Modern Art.

CIA was founded in 1947 and CIA-sponsored soft power projection was a relatively short period in the world history lasting just a few decades, a part of the bigger game played between the USA and the Soviets, which did exactly the same (and thanks to whom we have now e.g. Studio Ghibli).

ivan_gammel··on What Happens If OpenAI Dies?
Yes. Those on the demand side will benefit from it. And that‘s the whole point. It is much healthier situation economically than current, very distorted market.
ivan_gammel··on What Happens If OpenAI Dies?
Chip makers may be fully booked now and have extra revenue because of AI, but that also creates deferred demand elsewhere. The prices will not fall immediately because of the crash of a single company. The scarcity has probably negative impact on the economy in general, so stock market should recover after that quickly or at least stay near a healthy valuation level.
ivan_gammel··on Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera
That‘s Dutch, and the same sentence mentions Netherlands. Equivalent of LLC exists everywhere, but business insurance still makes sense if you want to stay in business after paying damages.
ivan_gammel··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
I moved recently to Gitoro with private projects, but do not have any meaningful opinion about it yet. It works for me, it’s fast, nothing to complain about. Just mentioning it here as EU-hosted alternative.

https://gitoro.com/

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