mrugge

What's wrong with using Python for compute?

LLMs are non-deterministic and can benefit from guardrails which frameworks happily provide.

Will, is that you?

I have been able to produce 20x the amount of useful outputs both in my day job and in my free time using a popular coding agent in 2026. Part of me is uncomfortable at having from some perspective my hard won knowledge of how to write English, code and to design systems partly commoditized. Part of me is amazed and grateful for being in this timeline. I am now learning and building things I only dreamed about for years. Sky is the limit.

1. Efficient recursive transform of kv embeddings into polar coordinates 2. Quantize resulting angles without the need for explicit normalization. This saves memory via key insight: angles follow a distribution and have analytical form.

Could add a scheduled GitHub action that compacts long history into a vector db and then have the agents also check that vector db in addition to md and git history.

The world is full of Juliuses. And if one works with enough people one can suddenly realize that they too are a Julius relative to someone smarter and more introverted. Worth considering this before dismissing someone as yet another Julius. Oh and everything doesn't suck.

Connoisseurs of calligraphy may disagree.

My point was that humans are very connected to and identify deeply with their tools. Probabilistic autocomplete we are so excited about these days is just another slab on a deep stack of abstractions humans use to interact with the world.

A stick and the campfire are also tools that do not pre-exist. Just try to make a campfire without a matches or try to make a stick without a cutting tool. Also try to write the next great novel using a stick and a campfire instead or a fountain pen. Tools that are available become the defining factor of the great works a generation can produce. Nothing is different this time.

Exec A:

Can Exec B meet me for lunch?

AI:

Exec B is too busy gorging their brain on the word salad I am feeding it through her new neural link. But I now have just upgraded my body to the latest Tesla Pear. Want to meet up? Subscribe for a low annual fee of..

Where does the machine begin and end? Even a fountain pen is a highly advanced mechanism which we owe to countless generations of preceding, inventive toolmakers.

I feel for the author. Until recently it used to be that writing was a way for humans to project their thought into time and space for anyone to witness, or even to have a conversation. Oh how I miss that dead art of having a good one.

It used to be that you knew where you stand with colleagues just from how they write and how they speak. Had this Slack memo been written by someone who just learned enough English to get their first job? Or had it been crafted with the skill and precision of your Creative Writing college professor's wet nightmare muse?

But now that's all been strangely devalued and put into question.

LLMs are having conversations with each other thanks to the effort of countless human beings in between.

God created men, Sam Colt (and Altman) made them equal.

I think this marathon attitude of not trying to win but to hit personal targets could be applied in other areas of life and in other sports even with clear "winners". None of this is about the destination. We all arrive at the same one.

I thought the Russian version was pretty funny. Thanks for calling it out.

usually packages use packages in any worthwhile language with useful packages and desire for code reuse...

Why do you think what you describe being excited about does not warrant the current level of AI hype? I agree with your assessment and sometimes I think there is too much cynicism and not enough excitement.

dad is busy vibe coding a scheduling app

You're missing the empathetic way to comment on someone's obviously unpaid, labor-of-love work. Instead the conversation is about you: your years of seeing "projects like these", your smart, minimal way of managing your config. Make a project and show it to us. Save your pathos for its documentation.

It can also serve an indicator of being in the know and with the times while also being performance-, close-to-the-metal oriented. "A dot file manager not written in Fortran, but one that could have been written in Python, but actually written in Rust"

More specifically I will stub out a simple unit test by hand to zoom in on where I think the issue is. It then turns into an exhilarating and wild ride from there.

I use claude code all day long to debug gnarly legacy code. Sometimes in languages I barely know. It works great especially as a second opinion or to get unstuck. It is very fun but can be addictive and exhausting.

How did you feel when you read my response? That's how people who see through the BS will feel when they receive an AI generated note from your app.

claude code cli

Or click

There is something wrong with this position. Ask AI to explain it to you because I am too busy to do it myself.

"made with impostor syndrome" haha 10/10 would be absolutely right again!

I have often felt bad (or "didn't feel it" to quote this article) and it still turned out OK because I showed up and stuck with it.

The only thing you have to do is pay taxes and die. It does help to feel good about the project and the work, but it is not a requirement for a fulfilling life.

Looking back at most times I have felt horrible in the depth of adversity, resistance or burnout I realize those were the times of greatest potential for achievement, learning and growth. Those are the memorable chapters, the things that define my character. The times when I continued to grind, continued to push through and didn't give up because of feelings were the times when I actually accomplished something: raised a kid, bought a house, switched continents.

I inherited a django project which has mostly 'unit' tests that flex the ORM and the db, so they are really integration tests and are painfully slow. There is some important logic that happens in the ORM layer and that needs to be tested. At some point I want to find the time to mock the database so that they can be faster, but in some cases I worry about missing important interactions. Domain is highly specialized so not very easy to just know how to untangle the mess.

In test-driven development, fast unit tests are a must-have. Integration tests are too slow. If you are not doing test-driven development, can go heavier into integration tests. I find the developer experience is not as fun without good unit tests, and even if velocity metrics are the same, that factor alone is a good reason to focus on writing more fast unit tests.

The two most helpful things with SQL are (1) always use set-based operations (never a cursor) and (2) break up your queries into smallest possible reusable chunks (CTEs). Sprinkle in tests to taste. Without some discipline SQL can get out of hand. This is what made dbt popular.