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rubzah

337 karma · joined August 15, 2012

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rubzah··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
I get the sentiment, but it seems to me like a crutch that should be worked on getting rid of. It can't be that painful to be with other people, if it is, we need to work on ourselves and the culture. The jump from "I'm bored/uncomfortable" -> "might as well get drunk" seems wrong and a slippery slide to boot.
rubzah··on Prompting Claude Opus 5.5
Thing is, you already have limited space for context. A CLAUDE.MD larger than about 150 lines will exceed it. That is not a lot of space to describe, for example, a complex code base, development conventions, and all the other important stuff.
rubzah··on Prompting Claude Opus 5.5
The way it works right now, it is just accumulated cruft of incredibly useless stuff that pushes out important context. The only 'memory' you should have is: Always ask me before adding a memory. Then you just ignore the suggestions, marveling at the kind of crap it wants to store into an already limited context window.
rubzah··on The senior engineer death spiral
I guess "senior" just means older, but in the usual sense, the more senior you are, the more your job involves coordinating with other people. So I don't see how you could disappear when promoted. But I think in this case it's just "you do more work".
rubzah··on iPhone Duo
Only people who have not used foldables worry about crease. I've used one for 5-6 years, and even with an older generation it has never been an issue. Half the time it's literally bent, so obviously there is a kink. At this point my screen has hairline fractures down the middle and even that doesn't actually bother me.
rubzah··on My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test
Completely agree. Saying this as someone who loves handcrafting code and has been doing it professionally for decades, it looks like a dead end at this point. LLM generated code might not be pretty, but these damn models are already so good at handling complexity, that they can actually work fine with a byzantine code base (which honestly would also describe most human-derived codebases I have worked with). I am still reeling from this realization and trying to figure out what it means.
rubzah··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
I recently heard, for the first time, what Space Quest sounded like with a Roland board attached. It was mindblowingly amazing. And all most anyone ever experienced was bleep, bloop.
rubzah··on The Shape of Things to Come
I smell an architecture astronaut getting high on abstractions. Taken far enough, it starts to look like psychedelic ramblings of a manic schizophrenic losing grip on reality.

Interestingly, the author actually has a product, something usually missing in claims of the new LLM powered productivity nirvana. Hopefully, with time, there will be a way to verify the effectiveness of all of this fire and fury, measured in actual worthwhile deliveries of this product.

rubzah··on Polymarket has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators
I feel the same way, the odds are part of the story. The UFC has removed them now, I guess as part of the Paramount deal. This actually makes the events less interesting.

By the way, the UFC chews through athletes so fast (part of their somewhat exploitative business model), it's no wonder it's hard to keep up with the latest names.

rubzah··on Core PPI up 9.6% annualized (0.8% MoM) in May
Saying it seems to have become a taboo, probably because of the existential horror of it possibly being true.
rubzah··on The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0
Suno also runs on WASM. Pretty good showcases, both, imho.
rubzah··on Under Notre Dame, a 'dig of the century' unearths 1,700 years of history
> the students of Paris threatened a general strike

Paris in 1200 was at least somewhat recognizable.

rubzah··on I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it
It's because Claude is so scary good that unleashing it would destroy the world.
rubzah··on FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home
They're very high value by weight, very fungible, and there is much less regulation about carrying them across international borders.
rubzah··on Ferrari Luce
I always wondered about this. Who races their cars around like a madman on public roads? Very few I would imagine (and hope), and even fewer take their car to a track. For a Ferrari, possibly a bit more (still probably 99% of the time they are on public roads). But every car review discusses these things at length, as if normal people race around the countryside or mountain roads, putting the cornering and stiffness of their Toyotas and Fords to the test.
rubzah··on Ferrari Luce
The Mustang Mach-E makes a fake engine sound: https://www.drive.com.au/news/ford-mustang-mach-e-v8-exhaust...
rubzah··on I'm going back to writing code by hand
> Claude is a phd level mathematician

... that can't even count.

rubzah··on Nuclear receptor 4A1 linked to health effects of coffee: study
For the health benefits, without some of the downsides, I believe it is preferable to drink coffee when you are not tired. This way you don't get a crash later, because there is no adenosine build-up (the 'tiredness' signaling molecule that caffeine blocks). I believe this also helps to prevent addiction, because there is also no up-regulation of adenosine receptors.

This works great if you drink coffee for the taste, rather than as a way to stay awake (which works in a pinch but is counter-productive over the long term).

rubzah··on New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
thanc = tanke (thought)

uuldurfadur = alfader (all-father)

uundra = under (wonder)

halig = hellig (holy)

rubzah··on New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
This is the text in Old English for anyone looking: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-5...

Actually, here is the full text with the modern English inserted:

  Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
  Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian,

  metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
  the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts,

  uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
  the work of the glory-father—of every wonder,

  eci dryctin or astelidæ.
  eternal Lord. He established a beginning.

  he ærist scop ældu barnum
  He first shaped for men's sons

  hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
  Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator;

  tha middingard moncynnæs uard
  then middle-earth mankind's guardian,

  eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
  eternal Lord, afterwards prepared

  firum foldu frea allmehtig
  the earth for men, the Lord almighty.
rubzah··on Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones
The fact that you received messages at specific times can be enough to identify you, if you have the data from the sending side.
rubzah··on An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

  https://www.myvibesite.com/?id=10; DROP TABLE customer;--
rubzah··on An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story
I assure you that these kinds of things are happening right now.
rubzah··on An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story
As the sibling pointed out, there are already plenty of laws about, for example, handling of personally identifiable data. Somehow there is a lack of awareness, perhaps what is needed is a couple of high-profile convictions (which can't be too far off).
rubzah··on An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story
I know, through personal acquaintance, of at least one boutique accounting firm that is currently vibe-building their own CRM with Lovable. They have no technical staff. I can't begin to comprehend the disasters that are in store.
rubzah··on The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'
You're right, thanks for the correction. It's a very Jack Blackesque character, in my defense.
rubzah··on The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'
It's a commercial act, the 'punk' costumes carefully chosen for the right signalling, by a couple of middle class kids. What's with this idea that your taste in music must spring from the purest and rawest authenticity, preferably (in no particular order) poor, rebellious, substance abusing, ethnic, and so on. Leading to all these musical acts styling themselves like that.

The Ramones were sellouts and posers, just like most bands. Wearing them on a t-shirt to signal 'punk', the joke's on you. It's an "industry of cool", like Jack Black's character says in Almost Famous.

rubzah··on Goodbye to Sora
Back in business school they used to tell the story of how makers of razor blades would put a good blade as the first and the last blade in the pack. I suspect the LLM services of doing something like that.
rubzah··on Goodbye to Sora
Maybe not untrained, but you work on some easy, boring shit. That may be true for a lot of developers, I don't know.
rubzah··on Java 26 is here
Nobody ever wanted to wire up RPC endpoints, in the form of Enterprise JavaBeans(tm), using XML files. That is one for the history books of ridiculous technology.
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