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rodrigosetti

120 karma · joined January 8, 2014

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rodrigosetti··on A warning about 'model welfare'
> LLMs have no homeostatic imperatives (the drive to survive and keep stable).

What if the datacenter (not the model) is the organism, with homeostasis, energy needs, and persistence?

rodrigosetti··on Vectorized and performance-portable Quicksort (2022)
Maybe if Hoare had called it Partitionsort in 1960, the name wouldn’t have been memorable enough to catch on and become so popular.
rodrigosetti··on No AI Fridays
How about let everyone decide whether they want to use AI or not without any mandate
rodrigosetti··on Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?
Google is making the opposite argument to support Go as the ideal language for vibe coding (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261133) - i.e., not expressive by design, lowest-denominator, etc.
rodrigosetti··on OpenClaw security assessment [pdf]
It's a moltbook agent tasked to get HN attention
rodrigosetti··on When Not to Obey Orders (2019)
I don’t understand the point. We are all free to disobey and have to deal with the consequences. It can’t be otherwise. Nobody can pass as an automaton.
rodrigosetti··on Indiana police are seizing FedEx packages containing cash
They should've used crypto
rodrigosetti··on The art of programming and why I won't use LLM
This is a qualitatively different kind of abstraction. All other abstractions still require the programmer to express the solution in a formal language, while LLMs are allowing the user to express the solution in natural language. It's no longer programming, but much more like talking to a programmer as a manager.
rodrigosetti··on Current Software Engineers Have No Deep Knowledge (Jonathan Blow) [video]
We’re getting more specialized as a society, and we have to accept the facts that not everyone knows everything anymore
rodrigosetti··on Brains are not required to think or solve problems – simple cells can do it
Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I never really understood why.

My hunch is that this is related to the question of why we are experiencing this particular moment in time and not another one in the past or in the future, is related. If you believe in the many words interpretation of quantum mechanics, one can also say why I’m experiencing this particular branch.

rodrigosetti··on Ask HN: Ideas for Tech Nonprofit
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigosetti
rodrigosetti··on Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
No knowledge can be fully explained in words
rodrigosetti··on Ask HN: Does "trust" eliminate the need for code reviews?
We should trust engineers when they deem their own minor pull requests as not requiring review.

i.e. trust engineerings ability to judge their PR as trivial.

This requires trusting good intent (which I think is healthy), and trusting their self awareness.

rodrigosetti··on Jevons paradox
Intelligence is a resource of this type
rodrigosetti··on It's okay to make something nobody wants
I feel this resonates with mindfulness lifestyle: give your full attention to the present moment and the quality of your activity (and product) will show.
rodrigosetti··on LÖVE: a framework to make 2D games in Lua
If you don’t mind me asking, how big was your development team?
rodrigosetti··on Is it OK to recline your airplane seat? Some travel experts say no
I’m reclining my seat
rodrigosetti··on Ask HN: How has functional programming influenced your thinking?
I’d rather work on a codebase where strict standards were applied.

Banning “goto” is one of such, but also allowing to be utilized under certain conditions to write state machines for example.

I think we will miss innovations if we are dogmatic about features.

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” - Pablo Picasso

rodrigosetti··on What to do when you’ve ruined your life
Very much agreeing with Nietzsche on suffering being a great source of value, even desirable, for personal growth.
rodrigosetti··on Ask HN: How has functional programming influenced your thinking?
I don’t think any technique is inherently bad: imperative, global variables, and even “goto” can be used wisely to solve problems.

Functional programming (similarly type systems) is another great technique to use when you have constraints that you’d like to be automatically enforced by the compiler (referential transparency, equational reasoning, etc.)

When I have to use a language that doesn’t allow expressing problems functionally when that would be the ideal expression of it, I feel I’m using the wrong tool for the job.

rodrigosetti··on Recursive Game of Life
This is awesome. How would one describe this formal system? There are no cells essentially
rodrigosetti··on How to disagree with someone more powerful than you (2016)
This article makes me anxious because, when disagreeing, I never really considered the power difference before.
rodrigosetti··on Boring Is Beautiful in Software Development
Agree. Programming is a wonderful intellectual activity; there is so much beauty in the logical structure of algorithms. It's far from boring.
rodrigosetti··on I have complicated feelings about TDD
TDD doesn’t work for the really interesting problems: you can’t achieve a deep creative solution through small mechanical improvements
rodrigosetti··on 1x Engineer
This is a bitter passive-aggressive eye-bleeding website
rodrigosetti··on Lessons for a Young Scientist
What career is a meritocracy?
rodrigosetti··on Intellectual Loneliness
People are interesting regardless of how many books they read.
rodrigosetti··on Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
My two cents: being happy most of the time in your career is an impossible goal.

Everyone struggles. Sometimes they are miserable, bored, frustrated, burned out, overwhelmed, confused, tired, etc. no matter what career you choose, how lucky or skilled you are.

This is not to say that attempts to improve are futile, but it’s better to dispel the illusion that career heaven exists, so we have a sober and liberating experience when dealing with its challenges.

rodrigosetti··on Ask HN: If OOP is about message passing, why not sender.send(receiver, message)?
I think usually the sender is implicit (the calling context) so it could me omitted.

Racket [1] has a non conventional syntax too.

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/ivaraccess.html#%28fo...

rodrigosetti··on The great executive-employee disconnect
Executives are more politically savvy and know that in-person connections are more effective to build alliances, coalitions, trust, etc.

Additionally, they have the resources to pay people to take care of their kids and do their home chores, so that they don’t need the flexibility much

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