reedlaw

This concept is also known as Borg Complex: https://thefrailestthing.com/2013/03/01/borg-complex-a-prime...

Although Immich does backup from your phone, I don't see it as a viable backup solution. Git-annex, Unison, and Syncthing are much better at keeping files synchronized across devices. Immich will create its own copies of photos and transcode videos for playback on the web. That may be fine if you have enough storage space, but for me it makes the phone backup useless. I suppose you could use a git-annex special remote directory as an Immich external library.

I feel sorry for juniors because they have even less incentive to troubleshoot or learn languages. At the same time, the sheer size of APIs make me relieved that I will never have to remember another command, DSL, or argument list again. Ruby has hundreds of methods, Rails hundreds more, and they constantly change. I'd rather write a prompt saying what I mean than figure out obscure incantations, especially with infrequently used tools like ffmpeg.

Advent of Code (https://adventofcode.com/2025/about) says:

> Should I use AI to solve Advent of Code puzzles? No. If you send a friend to the gym on your behalf, would you expect to get stronger? Advent of Code puzzles are designed to be interesting for humans to solve - no consideration is made for whether AI can or cannot solve a puzzle. If you want practice prompting an AI, there are almost certainly better exercises elsewhere designed with that in mind.

I would advocate for Advent of Code in every workplace, but finding interest is rare. No matter how much craft is emphasized, ultimately businesses are concerned with solving problems. Even personally, sometimes I want to solve a problem so I can move on to something more interesting.

The probability space of a 140-nucleotide chain is 10^84. The estimated number of atoms in the universe is 10^80. The hypothesized RNA self-replicator is far simpler than the 238,000 base pair archaeal genome. But how are they formed? Even the most favorable prebiotic lab conditions have only produced short nucleotide chains. Direct chemical synthesis only recently achieved chains over 1700 nucleotides long [1].

1. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/first-direct-chemical-sy...

Agreed, in the sense that software development is an iterative process of trial and error similar to custom car building. But software isn't like a car. It's more like a car factory. It should produce something of value repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44220245 on the same topic was posted four months ago and has more substance than this short 2007 post.

My point was that AI-produced code is not so foreign than no human could produce it, nor do any two humans produce the same style of code. So I'm not sure exactly what the idea of "engineering brand" is meant to protect.

Isn't the intelligence of every other person alien to ourselves? The article ends with a need to "protect our own engineering brands" but how is that communicated? I found this [https://meta.discourse.org/t/contributing-to-discourse-devel...] which seems woefully inadequate. In practice, conventions are communicated through existing code. Are human contributors capable of grasping an "engineering brand" by working on a few PRs?

I found this: https://joeyh.name/blog/pics/solar_fence_with_powerracks.jpg

Not an Old Testament reference, but a Gnostic belief. 1 John addresses Gnosticism by refuting some of its claims such as Jesus only appearing to be human. While John doesn't reference the Demiurge, the concept goes hand in hand with this Gnostic teaching that Jesus was a pure spiritual being. Gnostics considered material things evil, so Jesus coming in the flesh and a benevolent creator God did not fit their worldview.

Similar prompts didn't work for me.

I couldn't get past Level 42: Reverse Turing using my own responses. Gemini's responses fooled it, which makes it a poor judge of humanness.

Ironic to see this juxtaposed with another front-page story, "We put agentic AI browsers to the test – They clicked, they paid, they failed". The closing thoughts in the linked article ("feeling the AGI" and "very beginning of the exponential takeoff curve") leave me feeling skeptical considering this project prompted agents to port existing code into another language. Impressive, but it doesn't lead me to believe a singularity event is imminent.

I switched from Ubuntu to Arch because of the quality of the Arch wiki. Ubuntu search results were filled with so much misinformation that I realized it was a culture problem. Arch, with its higher barrier to entry, attracts users who maintain its standards.

Same here. I ordered from the link in the sibling comment. Mine took a few tries to connect to wifi.

Emacs is practically an operating system (the vim joke being that it lacks a good editor). With git integration through magit, LSP server for language integration, and Projectile for project management, it very much acts like an IDE.

It depends. Rails is great for rapid application development. You probably don't want to decouple at that early stage. But when your app struggles with slow responses and job management becomes increasingly difficult, you begin to see the flip side of the trade-off between ease of development and performance. This recently featured project, https://github.com/9001/copyparty, is extremely performant but foregoes many of the niceties of Rails. It uses the filesystem instead of a database and has no build step for assets. I'm not sure the solution is to push all queries into repositories, but it's quite easy to abuse the convenience of ActiveRecord by intertwining all the business logic and database access.

Does it drive sales though? Windows XP remained popular long after Vista was introduced. It was seen as stable and familiar. I guess the difference is that in the Apple ecosystem, you don't have much choice over which OS version you use. Apple tends to keep users on the latest version that the hardware supports.

App store software should have minimal warehousing and shipping costs compared with physical software. I was just trying to come up with a ball-park comparable figure.

Amazon charges 15% for physical media, including software [1]. Since Apple is not shipping physical media, it seems something less than 15% would be more reasonable.

1. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...

"Dataset" connotes training data, but this seems to generate sample data, maybe for testing an application. Is there any use for synthetic datasets in ML?

The use case in the article is relatively simple. For more complex structures, BAML (https://www.boundaryml.com/) is a better option.

The authors of those works (Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov) were greatly influenced by Greek classics, Milton, Shakespeare, or their contemporaries (such as Charles Dickens) who were also shaped by some of those same sources.

> At this moment, there are not even any famous literary fiction writers (much less geniuses) in the United States of America under the age of 65.

> Literary fiction peaked on the charts in the 1950s and 1960s and was quite present before then. There was a sustained decline from the 1970s onward.

Authors under the age of 65 grew up in an impoverished literary environment. How could we expect them to compete with those whose imaginations were formed when culture was more uniformly attuned to what has been considered great throughout the centuries? What books did Austen, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky grow up with, or learn in school, that are no longer widely regarded or read?

In case you're wondering what it takes to run it, the answer is 8x H200 141GB [1] which costs $250k [2].

1. https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MiniMax-M1/issues/2#issuecomme...

2. https://www.ebay.com/itm/335830302628

Sounds like https://delta.chat/

So this implements SD3 inference and fine-tuning?

I'm not sure what this means. If it means the Stable Diffusion 3.5 model, why is it fetching that here: https://github.com/yousef-rafat/miniDiffusion/blob/main/enco...

The training dataset is very small, only including fashion-related pictures: https://github.com/yousef-rafat/miniDiffusion/tree/main/data...

I had a similar reaction to Jeffries' Gilded Rose solution in Ruby [1]. After 13 blog posts he ended up with something [2] a lot less elegant than Victor Shepelev who also used TDD but came up with a one-shot solution [3]. Just like Norvig with his Sudoku solver, Shepelev codifies the rules as a set of relationships. He writes:

  When rereading the requirements, we might notice that all conditions can be described as a simple dependency (name, sell_in) => change of quality.

  The most natural representation of this in the modern Ruby would be pattern matching.

1. https://ronjeffries.com/articles/020-01ff/gilded-rose-1/

2. https://github.com/RonJeffries/gold-1/blob/master/wrappers.r...

3. https://zverok.substack.com/i/149071314/the-implementation

Writing software is more akin to building an engine factory than a single engine. At least, much of business software is used over a long period with lots of changes needed. Maybe writing a single game is more comparable to the race engine.

I used something similar based on https://karl-voit.at/folder-hierarchy/ which I found helpful.