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mjrbrennan

377 karma · joined January 13, 2015

I’m Martin Brennan, and I’m a full-stack staff software engineer working at Discourse.

I'm primarily a rubyist, but I enjoy JavaScript too, and I work with Rails and SPAs all day.

I have a technical blog at https://www.martin-brennan.com and a digital garden for my fiction writing at https://writing.martin-brennan.com. You can contact me at mjrbrennan@gmail.com

Outside of software engineering, my other loves include writing, reading, music, film photography, Warhammer, my lovely wife, our two sons, and our huge menagerie of pets.

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mjrbrennan··on Doomscrolling ourselves to death
Reddit sucks so much if you use the defaults or follow any remotely "controversial" subreddit. If you follow subreddits for your hobbies and so on it's generally okay, I have no issues with the various Warhammer subreddits I follow...
mjrbrennan··on Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal
Yes it's basically every website in Australia you can pay via PayPal now. I use it less and less since Apple Pay is available pretty much everywhere, but it can still be handy now and then.
mjrbrennan··on The lost joy of music piracy
This is a cool idea! Hope whoever gives me the blank playlist is prepared to listen to a lot of Bob Dylan :P
mjrbrennan··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Update to this comment — I switched to VSCode and the only thing I miss is cursor tab. The vscode implementation just isn’t as good :(
mjrbrennan··on Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers
It’s definitely usable as a verb, see https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cow
mjrbrennan··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Yes, I use it as my daily driver at Discourse, the Cursor Tab autocompletion is still the best AI-based editor autocomplete I have used. I switched to nvim earlier in the year because there was no real great AI integrations that didn't feel cumbersome, Cursor in vim mode is a much nicer experience, I like adding lines of code to agent context and so on. All of the extensions from VSCode, LSP integration, and so on are really nice.

That being said I do a lot of work in Codex or Claude now (they all feel pretty much the same to me), and use Claude for manual code writing and tweaks that I feel would be unnecessary for agents to do, or just when I am writing code that I enjoy writing, typically when exploring a new problem I'm interested in, not everything needs to be done at 1000% speed by a robot.

Though I will likely reconsider this now that Elon will own it, either moving to VSCode or to Zed long-term.

mjrbrennan··on Various LLM Smells
The funniest one I've seen with regularity is belt-and-suspenders/belt-and-braces, when I've never seen anyone ever use that term. I had to tell AI to stop using it, it was just annoying.
mjrbrennan··on Neovim 0.12.0
This is why I switched to cursor over the last few months out of nvim. Just wasn't any smooth first class integrations with AI tooling. I still use vim bindings there, and I use nvim for quicker edits, but the AI editing and Cursor Tab is just way better than the AI stuff in nvim.
mjrbrennan··on Agents that run while I sleep
Yes that's fair, but not the case for me. Everything can run locally and specs run quickly for covering things claude changes. For everything else, the GitHub CI run is 10-15m and catches any outlier failures, and I'm usually working on more than one thing at a time anyway so it doesn't really matter to wait for this.
mjrbrennan··on Agents that run while I sleep
Yes I'm still not really understanding this "run agents overnight" thing. Most of the time if I use claude it's done in 5-20 minutes. I've never wanted to have work done for me overnight...tomorrow is already plenty of time for more work, it's not going anywhere, and my employer isn't paying me to produce overnight.
mjrbrennan··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
I responded to the other comment, but I work at Discourse. As a site admin you can disable badges (which is our gamification system) entirely, or you can get rid of individual badges.

If you're interested in trying Discourse, our lowest hosting plan is $20/month, or if you want to self-host there have been a bunch of improvements in the setup process recently, see https://meta.discourse.org/t/self-hosting-discourse-just-got...

mjrbrennan··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
I work at Discourse. As a regular user, if you want to prevent these new user badges (and notifications), head to /u/yourusername/preferences/interface and check "Skip new user onboarding tips and badges".

It is in our plans to eventually rework how this new user education and notification system works, and I suppose eventually with https://id.discourse.com/ the intent would be that your preferences follow you to every Discourse site you sign up for, so you could just set it once.

As an admin, badges can be disabled entirely, or individually.

mjrbrennan··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
I've got a couple, one for my fiction writing and general worldbuilding (a digital garden if you will) at https://writing.martin-brennan.com and my tech blog at https://martin-brennan.com
mjrbrennan··on The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]
This is fair on shorter flights ~1-4 hours, but I am reasonably tall too and I am not suffering through a 14 hour overnight flight without reclining. I don't think there is anything wrong with it in this case, and flight attendants will force people to de-recline their chair in meal times etc.
mjrbrennan··on What services or apps did you see abroad and wonder: why don't we have them?
Brisbane now as well since the past ~1 year or so, much better than the old Go Card system. The only downside in most places with these systems though is that there is no easy way to pay for e.g. children, would be perfect if you could say 3x tickets on this card when you tap in + out.
mjrbrennan··on Ask HN: Is AI 'context switching' exhausting?
Yes, I’ve only just started trying out Claude Code and I do not mesh well with this method of asking AI to do something, then having to wait a few minutes and come back and check its work.

I find this leads so easily to distraction and I find this workflow very boring. If I’m going to use AI I want to use it in a more integrated way, or in a more limited way like just querying ChatGPT.

Will still try Claude more but I’m really not a fan so far.

mjrbrennan··on Snorting the AGI with Claude Code
Yes that's what gets me too. I want to engage with my coworkers, you know other humans? And get their ideas and input and summaries. Not just sit in my office alone having the computer explain everything to me badly, or read through Powerpoints of all things...
mjrbrennan··on Snorting the AGI with Claude Code
Not trying to be rude here, but that `last_week.md` is horrible to me. I can't imagine having to read that let alone listen to the computer say it to me. It's so much blah blah and fluff that reads like a bad PR piece. I'd much rather scan through commits of the last week.

I've found this generally with AI summaries...usually their writing style is terrible, and I feel like I cannot really trust them to get the facts right, and reading the original text is often faster and better.

mjrbrennan··on Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
I thought Waze was owned by Google though? I assumed they would use Waze’s traffic data.
mjrbrennan··on Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
Yes I find this is the main benefit of Google Maps GPS now, predicting and avoiding traffic whenever possible.
mjrbrennan··on Using an 8K TV as a Monitor
Same, I switched back to a single 27" screen last year. For me it's better to focus on one thing at a time especially since my eyes aren't the best, and I switch between virtual desktops with F1-F4 (or when I use my mac with the 3-finger swipe gesture).
mjrbrennan··on El Prado Museum – Virtual Tour
I loved them both for different reasons, I went last year for the first time. As another commenter said Madrid felt very imperial, and as you say was beautiful, clean, and walkable. Barcelona felt more arty and had a great coastal vibe to it. I would go back to either in a heartbeat!
mjrbrennan··on Clojure is a product design tool (2015)
Same, I really don’t like HAML or Jade or other such things as a HTML replacement. I just never saw the point, it doesn’t seem like less work than just using HTML?
mjrbrennan··on Moviemaking and gamemaking are converging
Definitely try to power through Mad Men, I tried to watch it a few times when I was younger but never got past season 3, whereas season 4 is where the real heart and message of it shows through, and the character development reaches new peaks. Really does seem like a show that resonates more when you are older.
mjrbrennan··on Show HN: Filmbox, physically accurate film emulation, now on Linux and Windows
I feel the same way about the one here in Australia -- I always double check it's scanned the correct numbers. Haven't been cheated out of millions yet, unfortunately.
mjrbrennan··on Ask HN: Have you tried using forum software in place of Slack at work?
Disclaimer: I work at Discourse. We discuss all our work on an internal Discourse forum, it makes everything much easier to track and long form slow lane discussion is encouraged and baked into Discourse.

We also have chat built in now, with a strong emphasis on interoperability between chat channels and topics so discussions can be easily moved between the fast and slow lane. I love the way we work and I always feel like communicating with the rest of my colleagues is seamless.

The blog post on our recent 3.0 release goes into this more if you are interested https://blog.discourse.org/2023/01/discourse-3-0-is-here/

mjrbrennan··on Be where your business is
Oh I see, it was just worded kind of awkwardly. Thanks for clarifying.
mjrbrennan··on Be where your business is
> commuting to NY four days a week

How on earth do people do this? This is 3 hours of flight time each way 4 days a week...do they do something like fly 6am-9am, work 10am-5pm, fly 6pm-9pm, then do it all again the next day (this is also giving woefully small buffer times)? Or am I misunderstanding? Sounds awful.

mjrbrennan··on Tell HN: Happy New Year
I’m 32, took my first surf lesson in November and absolutely loved it, bought a board that weekend. I’ve gone out whenever I can since then, about once a week at the moment and still loving it even though my stand-up count is still not that high. It’s such a unique and challenging sport, I’m so glad I tried it, good luck out there!
mjrbrennan··on Ask HN: How to work with people who push back forcefully?
Yes I do understand the legal requirement for these kind of things, I was more trying to be understanding of why there was push back from the person the OP is describing. I also think anyone would be hard pressed to find an engineer who has _never_ copied anything from SO without attribution.
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