manofmanysmiles

Hot take: It's time for something like Java/Web Aassembly to come back, built into the OS.

JIT and AoT translation like Rosetta can make it almost native. Trimming out the middle of the stack will make it in practice be faster than almost anything out there today.

I think this might be wildly incompatible with the business models of most big corporations, because if this is done well, there can be true portable apps. The core operating system can dissolve into something even less exciting then the BIOS. Or perhaps there can be genuince technical innovation in the OS space, supporting a universal new canvas.

I've also been playing with a "bare metal" "gui toolkit/compositor", and wow is it fast, buttery smooth, and uses almost no resources. I don't know that even with LLMs I'll be able to pull it off myself in any meaningful way, but if I'm doing it, maybe some other people are too.

I love the following section of their copy:

> Even More Value for Upgraders

> The new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max mark a major leap for pro users. There’s never been a better time for customers to upgrade from a previous generation of MacBook Pro with Apple silicon or an Intel-based Mac.

I read as "Whoops we made the M1 Macbook Pro too good, please upgrade!"

I think I will get another 2-5 years out my mine.

Apple: If you document the hardware enough for the Asahi team to deliver a polished Linux experiene, I'll buy one this year!

> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.

1) I guess I am not included in the set named "most software engineers."

2) If the title is "Software Engineer," I think I should be engineering, not coding.

This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro ai" and "against ai" in the software world is: "Dp you do (this) becuase you like writing code, or because you like building things for the world?"

Of course I don't think it's a binary decision.

Although I more more motivated by building things, I do somewhat miss the programmer flow state I used to get more often.

There are some people who still know these things, and are able to use LLMs far more effectively than those who do not.

I've seen the following prediction by a few people and am starting to agree with it: software development (and possibly most knowledge work) will become like farming. A relatively smaller number of people will do with large machines what previously took armies of people. There will always be some people exploring the cutting edge of thought, and feeding their insights into the machine, just how I image there are biochemists and soil biology experts who produce knowledge to inform decisions made by the people running large farming operations.

I imagine this will lead to profound shifts in the world that we can hardly predict. If we don't blow ourselves up, perhaps space exploration and colonization will become possible.

I'd like to see this with a proper local "instruction cache."

It might even be fun that the first call generates python (or other langauge), and then subsequent calls go through it. This "otpimized" or "compiled" natural langauge is "LLMJitted" into python. With interesting tooling, you could then click on the implementation and see the generated cod, a bit like looking at the generated asssembly. Usually you'd just write in some hybrid pytnon + natural language, but have the ability to look deeper.

I can also imagine some additional tooling that keeps track of good implementations of ideas that have been validated. This could extend to the community. Package manager. Through in TRL + web of tust and... this could be wild.

Really tricky functions that the LLM can't solve could be delegated back for human implementation.

I'm working on this. It's wild.

Or "institution", or "legal system", or "government."

I'd propose using our current view of physical reality to own a subset of the UIID + version field if new physics is discovered.

10-20 bits: version/epoch

10-20 bits: cosmic region

40 bits: galaxy ID

40 bits: stellar/planetary address

64 bits: local timestamp

This avoids the potentially pathological long chain of provenance, and also encodes coordinates into it.

Every billion years or so it probably makes sense to re-partion.

I wrote a wrapper python script debug.py that will run gdb as a subprocess, and then takes input from the args.

Usage is somewhat like:

$ debug.py start $ debug.py -c "break main" $ debug.py -c "continue"

Cursor at least doesn't seem to like running interactive programs yet.

I love the idea of chat.md.

I'm developing a personal text editor with vim keybindings and paused work because I couldn't think of a good interface that felt right. This could be it.

I think I'll update my editor to do something like this but with intelligent "collapsing" of extra text to reduce visual noise.

I've found LLMs (since Opus 4.5) exceptionally good at reading and writing and debugging assembly.

Give them gdb/lldb and have your mind blown!

I don't think there is anything technically interesting.

I think it's socially interesting that people are interested in this. If these agents start using their limbs (e.g. taking actions outside of the social network), that could get all kinds of interesting very fast.

One of my favorite blog posts. I enjoy it every time I read it. I've implemented two C package managers and they... were fine. I think it's a pretty genuinely hard thing to get right outside of a niche.

I've written two C package managers in my life. The most recent one is mildly better than the first from a decade ago, but still not quite right. If I ever build one I think is good enough I'll share, only to mostly likely learn about 50 edge cases I didn't think of :)

I would love to ask the author: are you sure that large language models are only modeling language?

This is the question though isn't it?

With sufficient structure and supervision, will a "team" of agents out-perform a team of humans?

Military, automotive and other industries have developed rigorous standards consisting of among other things detailed processes for developing software.

Can there be an AI waterfall? With sufficiently unambiguous, testable requirements, and a nice scaffolding of process, is it possible to achieve the dream of managers, and eliminate software engineers? My intuition is evenly split.

I completely agree.

I haven't shouted into the void for a while. Today is as good a day as any other to do so.

I feel extremely disempowered that these coding sessions are effectively black box, and non-reproducible. It feels like I am coding with nothing but hopes and dreams, and the connection between my will and the patterns of energy is so tenuous I almost don't feel like touching a computer again.

A lack of determinism comes from many places, but primarily: 1) The models change 2) The models are not deterministic 3) The history of tool use and chat input is not availabler as a first class artifact for use.

I would love to see a tool that logs the full history of all agents that sculpt a codebase, including the inputs to tools, tool versions and any other sources of enetropy. Logging the seed into the RNGs that trigger LLM output would be the final piece that would give me confidence to consider using these tools seriously.

I write this now after what I am calling "AI disillusionment", a feel where I feel so disconnected from my codebase I'd rather just delete it than continue.

Having a set of breadcrumbs would give me at least a modicum of confidence that the work was reproducible and no the product of some modern ghost, completely detached from my will.

Of course this would require actually owning the full LLM.

What I've been doing is running an agent inside a locked down k8s environment. Agents are spun up by operator, and have access to a single namespace.

It's not perfect, as container escape is not entirely unlikely.

I am working in a future version where all agents run inside firecracker VMs, log all actions logged externally.

With Kubernetes it's like having a bunch of virtual employees making git commits, firing up name-spaced ephemeral resources and collaborating like "remote" employees. It's certainly fun, but I haven't quite polished it to the point where I recommend this architecture to anyone.

I make projects following almost identical patterns. It's a little uncanny. Maybe the people in the python developer ecosystem are converging on a pretty uniform way to do most things? I though some of my choices were maybe "my own", it seeing such consistency makes me question my own free will.

It's like when people pick a "unique" name for their baby along with almost everyone else. What you thought was a unique name is the #2 most popular name.

This isn't getting much love.

I love this not because any individual tool is necessarily that impressive (though some are very cool), nor the shear number of them, but rather this shows me a hint of a very different software world, one where every tool is a response to a immediate need.

Each one of these looks almost like crystallized intention. This makes me think what's needed next is a meta tool that indexes all of these in a embeddedings db.

So what would happen if you placed a giant dice rolling machine to control a weapon systems based on the outcome of rolling dice?

Seems like it's unknown, and anyone doing so with the expectation that it is anything but a gamble is missing the whole point.

If you don't want your weapons influenced by randomness, don't connect them to systems that rely on randomness for decision making.

Although I don't usually use react, for me, there is a certain joy and also efficiency that comes from using some of the abstractions that you got from the larger JavaScript/web ecosystem while also having the ability render all that magic to a folder with a couple of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.

With LLMs to help wrestle the boilerplate, I've found I can whip up a fast static site using advanced ergonomic abstractions that make the whole process a joy! In the past, wrestling the Node and NPM ecosystem was a a complete nightmare. Now it's, a dream — with the occasional storm cloud.

I love it! I effectively achieve similar results by asking Cursor lots of questions!

Like at least one other person in the comments mentioned, I would like a slightly different tone.

Perhaps good feature would be a "style template", that can be chosen to match your preferred writing style.

I may submit a PR though not if it takes a lot of time.

Theoretically yes, but tricky from what I gather.

Reasons

1) Most DNA is same with sparse deltas, so pathogen would need to match large amount of DNA and ignore lots. Challenges in biometrics and general mirror this.

2) Things tend to mutate, so even if this was possible with a single pathogen, it may mutate either targeting other genetics, or changing behavior.

3) Targeting someone specifically, and getting the "germs" into their system is tricky. I haven't thought about this as much but high mutation rate means that it would need to be introduce physically and socially close to target.

Maybe targeting specific racial groups or some other evil thing would be easier. There are many existing disease which affect different groups (not just racial) in differently with statistical significance.

That being said, I hadn't thought much about this before and it's certainly a "fun" scary thought.

How about a wireguard tunnel from an ingress box? You still pay for one VPS, but can run everything locally and just load balance at the ingress. I just manually add configs to nginx, but there are automated tools too.

I think family related stress and conflict could definitely explain some of it. I'm not sure how to design an experiment to test though. I'm not sure how to quantify "family related stress."

I won't say that I "understand God's design," though I am flattered that someone would say so!

I claim only to be in awe of this reality, and see glimpses of an intelligence and love larger than myself. I strive to align my action, thoughts, feelings and intentions to be in service to all life and guided by the dim glimpses of that which is beyond thought and form.

I agree with you. It's a lonely world for those that think and feel like you and I do. You are not alone.

Doesn't "under color of law" mean that it is unlawful, just appears to be lawful?

"“Under color of law” refers to actions taken by government officials (such as police officers or public officials) that are done in their official capacity but violate someone’s rights or are unlawful. These actions appear legal because the person is using their official authority, but in reality, they can be an abuse of power or a violation of laws or civil rights.

In the United States, such actions can lead to legal consequences under federal law, particularly 42 U.S. Code § 1983, which allows people to sue for civil rights violations committed under color of law." - ChatGPT

Woah, cool, yes, exactly this!

I think I read a paper or blog post about this concept a while ago, but never saw it implemented!