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phillmv

5,428 karma · joined June 21, 2009

Perfect and upright, eschews evil.

phillmv [at] okayfail.com https://hachyderm.io/@phillmv

formerly appcanary (S15)

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phillmv··on A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website
Similarly, I've never understood the economics behind the constant rescraping that is flooding the internet or really what's triggering it.

It can't all be agents reacting to user queries. It's confounding how much CPU and bandwidth is getting flushed down the drain.

phillmv··on How to automate Instagram engagements with computer vision (and get banned)
what if i were purely interested in archiving local community posts? does anyone have experience on scraping without getting banned?

i have no interest in juicing engagement, purely from a "20 years from now it'll be cool to know this existed at all" aspect.

phillmv··on Port React Compiler to Rust
i feel like ppl have magical beliefs about type systems. just because it's _probably_ (did it use unsafe?) memory-safe doesn't mean it does what you want it to do
phillmv··on Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
javascript is like… unusually messy and weird, so maybe that colours most people's perspective. you don't have to worry about type coercion and weird kinds of equality and so on in python and ruby to anywhere near the same extent.
phillmv··on Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
>Type systems restrict which programs can be expressed and increasing expressiveness often requires increasing type-system complexity (which, speaking from experience, both humans and agents will struggle with). Plus they are not the only mechanism to assert correctness (they only validate a subset of your program correctness and do not replace tests)

This articulates a lot of my own thinking wrt type systems, speaking as a downstream user without a lot of exposure to prog language theory, and I wish this debate were more often framed in these terms.

Another reply to this comment hinted that it might be more about giving LLMs feedback loops and that to me also seems like a more likely mechanism.

I'm not an elixir user but I've watched it from a distance over the years – thank you for your efforts and your experimentation.

phillmv··on Magnifica Humanitas
not going to debate bad faith right wing cause celebres arguing the inverse.

i see it with my own two eyes when i have to yell at recruiters to stop bringing me all-male candidate slates, i see it from studies in social sciences, and i know it from having seen the progression over my own career and listening to my female colleagues. at the end of the day a lot of men don't see women and minorities as people with full agency.

phillmv··on Magnifica Humanitas
there's loads of evidence, y'all just don't like engaging with it cos you don't like the answer because fixing it is work and fundamentally women and minorities are not seen as people with full agency.

i'm old enough to remember when software engineering conferences were _2%_ female. it's exhausting to be having this same conversation decades later.

phillmv··on Magnifica Humanitas
>The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population

i didn't say exactly equitable, i said 80%. it's not possible to have 80% white guys and not be discriminatory.

you're making a bad faith apples to oranges comparison, to say nothing of the merit of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. your viewpoint and disinterest is very clear, i don't know why you even bother arguing about it.

phillmv··on Magnifica Humanitas
the discrimination already happened! it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating. it's curious that the status quo isn't nearly as concerning.
phillmv··on Magnifica Humanitas
i like how when a company obviously discriminates against women and minorities by hiring almost entirely white guys that's fine that's to be expected but if you try to fix that discrimination it's an evil conspiracy
phillmv··on Migrating from Go to Rust
>Are Go backend building custom auth, admin, DB ORM/migrations/auto migrations, templates, email, dev server etc for each project?

lmao, basically, yes. except when you bring this up ppl think it's not a big deal / a means for self-expression. having to sort through which libraries you prefer to glue together is a kind of freedom, if you squint hard enough.

phillmv··on Permacomputing Principles
> does not mean you have to be a post-marxist anarchist

if you oppose a far-right project, what are they going to call you? lol. here is your membership card for the cultural marxist party, welcome aboard comrade!

i just think it's folly for people to complain that "not destroying the environment" is a partisan issue in 2026. being a nice person is a partisan issue in 2026.

phillmv··on Permacomputing Principles
>You can advocate for sustainability … while being strongly capitalist just fine. […] excluding a large intersection of people otherwise interested in the non-political parts

the far-right is literally trying to make it illegal for companies to say they're taking environmental concerns seriously (i.e. ESG bans in tx, fl, etc). in 2026, sustainability is not apolitical.

(it's _never_ been apolitical but i will spare you that lecture.)

phillmv··on The map that keeps Burning Man honest
it helps that there's a regulatory agency that verifies the cleanup happened! if the 4th of july might get canceled the following year ppl might be more aggressive around cleaning up.
phillmv··on Spinel: Ruby AOT Native Compiler
i have wanted to be able to compile ruby to a binary for some time – and have dreamed of poking at this problem with claude – so this is pretty cool.

if you can get a Rack compatible web server to build… i'd waste some serious time playing with this.

phillmv··on Codex for almost everything
giving these things control over your actual computer is a nightmare waiting to happen – i think its irresponsible to encourage it. there ought to be a good real sandbox sitting between this thing and your data.
phillmv··on Can I run AI locally?
i can think of some tasks (classification, structured info extraction) that i _imagine_ even small meh models could do quite well at

on data i would never ever want to upload to any vendor if i can avoid it

phillmv··on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
i mean… your work also went into the training set, so it's not entirely surprising that it spat a version back out!
phillmv··on Malicious skills targeting Claude Code and Moltbot users
i can't imagine running these things outside of a vm and it's bizarre to see how many people yolo it
phillmv··on "Good engineering management" is a fad
i found this comment to be more insightful than the article
phillmv··on Ruby Central Is Not Behaving in Good Faith, and I've Got Receipts
he excels in this kind of dog whistling. it confuses people who were born yesterday, but it is loud and clear to people who agree with him or are the intended victims.
phillmv··on ‘Bluey’s World’: How a Cute Aussie Puppy Became a Juggernaut
oh wow we watched this episode a few days ago; i missed the Holst connection, and yes I also felt tears in my eyes at the denouement. definitely hugged my kids harder after that one.
phillmv··on I Met Paul Graham Once
Hi, thanks!

My unsolicited advice is: whether they realize it or not, _everyone transitions_ ;) http://okayfail.com/garden/everyone-transitions.html

I came out socially for most of a year before I committed to hormones, and it took me another year and a half to commit to removing my facial hair. At some point it really is a leap of faith. But you can do a lot of exploring and trying things out until you feel comfortable – or decide it's not really what you want.

Either way, good luck!

phillmv··on I Met Paul Graham Once
If it's any comfort, I'm also an immigrant who was raised in a single parent household. When we last (it's a long story) moved to Canada, I had to share a bed with my dad for a while.

We were never actually poor, poor, at risk. I never skipped meals, or lacked for clothing, though certainly that was a living memory my grandparents had. It was never in question that I would attend university.

Privilege is intersectional blah blah, there are layers to things. I'm not of the dominant Anglo culture, I have an "ethnic" last name, I don't have the same connections people who grew up upper-middle class do. But people certainly see me as white, I'm smart, and I built my career as a bearded guy.

Living as a bearded white guy is just a lot easier, it presents a lot less friction, than being gender non-conforming. That's it, really.

phillmv··on I Met Paul Graham Once
I was genuinely afraid of this post hitting HN, but thank you for the kind words.
phillmv··on GitHub Artifact Attestations
It does!, as long as it was _built_ inside Actions (source: am one of the authors).
phillmv··on Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
in my experience, the main pain point people experience is:

a) they don't like Ruby for whatever reason, b) they probably only deal in backend or only deal in frontend, and so don't understand the value of the bundled dev experience rails delivers, and therefore c) because of a + b they find the moderate learning curve to be extra painful, so they lash out.

at the end of the day it's all just code. why would it be harder to integrate a service in Rails than in Go? of course it isn't.

phillmv··on Heap memory corruption in GitHub's Markdown table parsing extension
no worries, it's the same patch to two different releases; you linked to the merge commit & I linked to the fix commit.

source: i cut the releases ;)

phillmv··on Heap memory corruption in GitHub's Markdown table parsing extension
the actual commit fix has some comments that may be useful for understanding:

https://github.com/github/cmark-gfm/commit/ac80f7b56522ffa15...

phillmv··on Show HN: WAPM – Package Manager for WebAssembly
Hello,

1. Package managers are very hard! The same problems wrt dependency resolution pop up again and again. Whatever you do, I recommend uhm, copying whatever Yehuda et al did for Ruby, Rust, Yarn, i.e. bundler/cargo/yarn

There's lots of prior art out there, and a few days of reading can save you months of terrible effort! Here's one example but there's loads more out there https://yehudakatz.com/2016/10/11/im-excited-to-work-on-yarn...

2. Namely, I don't see any lock files! I didn't look very hard. But get yourself some lockfiles. I also can't stress this enough.

3. Packaging signing really needs to be baked in from the get go, re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19733085).

Good luck!

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