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satnhak

13 karma · joined April 23, 2026

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satnhak··on Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
What annoys people about Singapore is that it's an incredibly right leaning society with single party rule and "outrageous" social policies like "get divorced, lose your home", "10 grams of meth and we'll hang you (and we mean it)". And yet it's incredibly successful, and the people there are happy.
satnhak··on Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake
"Scientific Linux was never simply "RHEL with a different wallpaper." It gave the scientific community an institutionally independent implementation of the Enterprise Linux platform."
satnhak··on HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?
Claude Code is an absolute dog. They hijack the scrollbar. Keybindings don't work properly on WSL. A jumble sale of slash commands that are almost all useless. Stupid flair like "Boondoggling...". I despise everything about it.

Compare this to the Codex CLI that is no fluff, minimal and just does it's job. Open AI models are in a totally different league to Anthropic (in the real world) so no loss really.

satnhak··on Performance Improvements in .NET 11
I thought the exact opposite a few lines in, and that's a shame because I'm genuinely interested. But it was unreadable.
satnhak··on Getting your hands dirty is good for you
And no one has dirtier hands than the BBC
satnhak··on Programming is Art
What I find ironic are the "creatives" who declare resolutely that AI cannot create art,... now here is this cool vibe-coded software I've made. It's like saying a chisel cannot create a sculpture. Yeah, OK, but without the chisel the sculpture wouldn't have been made. Who cares. It's a tool. What you do with it is up to you.
satnhak··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
I used to attend Kevin's Number Theory seminars at Imperial College many years ago and he's both a first rate mathematician and a very nice person. His blog has got me interested in maths again. Considering how pro AI he is and that he's been working on this problem for such a long time I'm a bit disappointed that Anthropic didn't involve him directly in this work. However, I think it's important to remember that without all of the work Kevin and people like him have done, the machines wouldn't be able to do this.
satnhak··on No AI Fridays
No thanks
satnhak··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
And we all sit on beanbags, sing kumbaya and write poems about our feelings.
satnhak··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
Come to a country with universal healthcare (England) and realise that if you work then you're paying 5x the market price for the worst healthcare imaginable. MRI scan - we don't know, one month wait, maybe two. Operation - are you going to die tomorrow with out it? No, ok then that could be years.

You need to pay rock bottom wages to doctors to make it work, so guess what all the good doctors leave for private healthcare and you end up with the dregs from the third world.

satnhak··on You don't need React: creating a minimal UI library in Vanilla JavaScript
React isn't immediate mode. The dependency array, amongst other things determine what redraws and what doesn't. Yes, you can make React look like it's running in immediate mode, fully redrawing on every frame. But if you do that then you're probably in the wrong line of work. Maybe try management.

This post is impressively bad. It's been AI generated and the AI doesn't even know what immediate mode is. Did you use Grok?

satnhak··on Rune 1.1: adds Python, an Emacs editor, a symbol index and is now free
Sorry, I just don't understand the premise behind Rune. The whole neovim / emacs / blah blah cult is based around configuring the infinitely configurable ecosystem. It's not better, or more productive, it's a hobby. So if you try to package that you've missed the point.
satnhak··on Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
I saw a chrome tab this week that had Gmail with an empty inbox idling at 2.8Gb. Hard refreshed the page. Still 2.8Gb.
satnhak··on What to learn to be a graphics programmer
Should also include be under 25 and have lots of time to dedicate to it. I've always been interested in the idea of graphics programming and a few years ago I started teaching myself vulkan. Not sure quite how long I spent in total, 6 months of free evenings, maybe a bit less. I'm close to having a rendering framework. But it's one of those things where the further you get with it the more you realise how little you know. You feel like you're sort of happy with how things work and then you discover, no that's not the right architecture. I guess it's basically the mathematics of applied lighting. That's what your doing. The rest of it is the plumbing. Oops, why do my spotlights shine straight through the cube? Oh, I need to calculate shadows. Spend a couple of weeks working out how to get that into the render pipeline. But it is a lot of "fun" if you're into that sort of thing.
satnhak··on The minimum viable unit of saleable software
This is quite an interesting one to me because dotnet has a couple of job queues, with hangfire (hangfire.io) probably being the main one. I've used hangfire for years and it's OK, but it was lacking a few critical features for the current project I'm working on. I've tried extending hangfire before and it's quite unpleasant to work with, so I decided to go down the LLM build route https://github.com/hackf5/sheddueller. It took about a week to build the service that did everything I need. The code is good enough and it was definitely the right choice. The real benefit is that I can add any features that I need and make it work in harmony with the main project.
satnhak··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
Fake news
satnhak··on Lines of code got a better publicist
I once worked in a company where there was an 80% code coverage requirement. Some enterprising contractor had a script that generated a single file with its own covering test suite the size of which could be tuned to achieve 80% over the whole codebase. Mostly the code was untested.
satnhak··on European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low
The problem is that if you look at Russia's actions they are mostly rational and predictable. And by Russian standards Putin is a moderate. The Western wet dream is to "Yugoslavia" Russia. Balkanize it, load it with debt and take all of its assets. They had their man in Yeltsin, but he was such an egregious drunk that even the CIA couldn't get him reelected. In many ways, if you look at things objectively, there may not be a Russia without Putin.

(and you show me a major country where they aren't poisoning political opponents, conducting significantly less relevant wars than the one in Ukraine, and all kinds of other things)

satnhak··on European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low
"Russia is good, actually" is a hard sell to anyone who has been indoctrinated by a lifetime of Western Russophobia. Is I think what you meant.
satnhak··on I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
Good teachers have a thorough understanding of what they are teaching. My guess is that most teachers in UK schools don't. From my undergraduate degree, many years ago, the only people who went into teaching were bottom of the class. For example after a 3 year maths degree a guy who was enrolled in a teacher training course after graduation did not know what a linear function was (y = Ax + C simply blew his mind). It's hard to attract talent because at best it's a lifestyle job that is kind of awful while you're doing it where the pay is low and the expectations are low, but gives you 1/3 of the year off as compensation. Unless your primary concern is a job that fits around childcare, then teaching is not the job for a capable person (pragmatically). Also 80% of the concern in schools now is "safeguarding", which from what I can tell assumes that everyone is a constant threat to everyone.

Learning is not supposed to be fun, the way playing games is supposed to be fun. Sitting alone with books for hours at a time and thinking on problems has a certain joy to it, but that's hard won. Kidding children into thinking that it is, is a huge disservice to them.

satnhak··on EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada
The problem the UK has had is that although the British people voted to leave the EU, most MPs we're against it and there was a very concerted effort to not honour the electorate's wishes. Brexit happened in name and by default. It was the worst possible outcome, but probably predictable.
satnhak··on EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada
Actually, the EU has lots of (probably) intractible problems. For example the closest thing it has to a constitution is the TREATY OF LISBON (the constitution project having fallen apart), which begins HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...). Compare that with the US constitution that begins "We the People of the United States" and you start to understand how bad the situation for the EU is.
satnhak··on Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE
That's exactly what I was thinking.
satnhak··on Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025)
Thanks! Amazing website, so many useful articles. Wish I had a couple of free years to work through these books https://fabiensanglard.net/Computer_Graphics_Principles_and_...
satnhak··on I am building a cloud
AWS. Months of complex dev work to build using their CDK. Terrible disk speed. Frustrating permissions systems. Tiny deployments that take 30 minutes. Rollbacks that get stuck for hours. What you end up with is about 4 CPUs and 16Gb of RAM for $1000+ per month. No wonder Bezos could send his wife and Katie Perry on a jolly into space. The world's richest man 1 IOP at a time.

For that money I can get 5 big bare metal boxes on OVH with fast SSDs, put k0s on them, fast deploy with kluctl, cloudflare tunnels for egress. Backups to a cheap S3 bucket somewhere. I'll never look at another cloud provider.