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manmal

7,083 karma · joined December 1, 2011

iOS developer since iOS4. Masters degree from UT Vienna.

Living near Vienna, Austria.

meet.hn/city/at-Vienna

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manmal··on Claude Says
> That speed is what we used to have in software engineering. So much careful craftsmanship, no line just yeeted out.

That reads like nostalgia. What you describe sounds like the code I brought forth on a sunny Sunday afternoon, but certainly not on a hectic work day under deadline stress. I had Stackoverflow open _all the time_, and started googling at the earliest inconvenience. There were the dangerous parts of the codebase, where I paid more attention, much like I do now. But the rest, well - not everything needed the polish, and corners were cut all the time.

manmal··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
Your tool calls (MCPs?) are very likely too wasteful. Apply some filtering logic on the offending tool’s output. Either a wrapper CLI, or just tell codex how to filter.
manmal··on Guitar amp and effects pedal built on the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-2.06
I have a Kemper. Yes, the base tone is what it is - you’ll usually download a profile like “Basket case” and it will sound roughly like the song if you have the right guitar. It’s heavily pre-styled and you can’t really make it sound that different - and why would you?
manmal··on Grok 4.7
I agree, the models keep getting better at one shotting. That’s useful in a lot of situations, like for small one-off scripts that filter/transform some tool call, or make a clever bash call. For the code itself, it doesn’t help me much though.
manmal··on GPT-6 Sol and Luna
It does, usually. Luna seems like almost infinite on the 20x plan, and that’s reflected in the API price. Isn’t that the case for all providers?
manmal··on GPT-6 Sol and Luna
I’d rather keep 5.6 Sol, and get that even more optimized. I’m not sure I’ll like 6 Sol if it’s anything like Astra.
manmal··on Claude Opus 5.5
That cost reduction seems to stem from cheaper cache reads, mostly.
manmal··on Grok 4.7
No, Astra isn’t better for coding. I’ve switched back to Sol.
manmal··on How to Write with an LLM
I’m familiar with how those are used, but not sure what you mean in this context.
manmal··on I think you should almost never use AI to write
That’s not entirely true. High end models will point out things that are misrepresented or plain wrong, and this will often be accurate.
manmal··on How to Write with an LLM
Astra is such a mixed bag. It makes some amazing reviews and sometimes architecture suggestions that I like. But it’s also lazy and will just make up things.
manmal··on Replacing Pull Requests with Delta
I do want the messy in-betweens. The earlier you catch problems, the cheaper they are to fix. I hope this will become the default of collaborating.
manmal··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Have the really good copywriters left the profession already?
manmal··on Claude is a Contrarian
I work with Sol and Astra only in my daily work, and occasionally I check out Claude Code so I don't get completely out of touch.

I can't stand the way Opus is patronizing me as a user, and don't know how people put up with it. It uses language that I guess is supposed to instill confidence in what it says, and it just irks me, because I know the confidence is not justified. Just present me the facts or theories, without trying to convince me, is that so hard?

manmal··on Real-SWE: Benchmarking AI models on private, real-world, enterprise codebases
GPT doesn’t do all of that all that much when it itself is the implementer. RL has made implementation and reviewing two different behavior sets.
manmal··on Will there be a 7G?
The thing that changed with 5G is that my iPhone 13 Pro‘s battery has been draining 30% faster. Enable the hotspot and it gets burning hot.
manmal··on Fuck it, make it anyway
The critical IP that isn’t in the weights yet, is often a few hundred to a few thousand lines of code. All the rest, surrounding code, is infrastructure that is indeed in the weights.
manmal··on OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees
Even benchmark improvements over Sol are not that great (and they certainly tried). If we exclude the weird ARC-AGI situation.
manmal··on OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees
Unless you’re making 3D models of apartments and oneshotting trivial games, I‘m not convinced Astra writes better code than Sol. I‘m way more often disappointed about Astra forgetting some aspect that Sol just nails.
manmal··on OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees
I‘m using Sol all day every day. It’s on average doing better than Astra at what I need it to do. Astra is like an absent minded professor - gives good direct responses, but too inconsistent and forgetful for my codebase.
manmal··on OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees
It is a convenient time, just as coding capability seems to reach the upper end of the S curve.
manmal··on Exercise intensity is associated with cardiometabolic health
The kind of HIIT I'm doing is only 10-20s bursts, to stay within ATP-PCr energy metabolism (little lactic acid production). A short sprint followed by 2 minutes rest. That's hard to achieve with a treadmill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergetic_systems#ATP%E2%80...

manmal··on Exercise intensity is associated with cardiometabolic health
Can you really do HIIT on a treadmill? It doesn't sound safe to sprint on a machine.

Re your observations. Are you referring to elderly people? I'm not sure this study is about them. My mental model of this mechanism is that relatively young people can choose between e.g. long distance running and sprinting, and that the latter will yield better cardiac outcomes.

manmal··on Exercise intensity is associated with cardiometabolic health
I have to disagree on both points. Long races don't do this for me - that's also the point of the paper. And I have had more close calls of spraining an ankle when running uphill. The problem with hills also is that you might want to jog down after, but that's super bad for knees.
manmal··on Exercise intensity is associated with cardiometabolic health
I like sprinting a couple times up our hill, ca 10s each, 4-6 times. It’s full out, and when I‘m untrained (like now), I‘m quite exhausted afterwards.

But the dopamine boost I get from this is immense. It lasts 24-48h. I‘m in a general good mood for this period. Sometimes, a little more competitive than normal - that’s a downside.

Normal jogging or long walks don’t have this effect, at all.

manmal··on Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
When it takes longer than 36h, just revoke and submit again. It's probably just stuck in some queue.
manmal··on GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning
Exactly my thoughts today. They have to make it cheaper after demoing what’s possible initially.
manmal··on My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini
Depends what actors you trust. They are equally bad but personally I‘m way more comfortable with the Discord story.
manmal··on GPT-6 Astra
If you came at it from the perspective of imitating what the human brain does, we now have a very very powerful speech center and short term memory, and vision catching up. The other parts are missing. I‘m sure that’s being heavily researched.
manmal··on GPT-6 Astra
I‘m using mostly the browser automations for things like that now. Same for research - ChatGPT is banned from reading many pages, but Codex can read anything I can.

But isn’t it funny that Cloudflare is blocking AI on their pages, but on the other hand is researching and marketing things like „you can put a browser in a CF worker“

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