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serial_dev

6,458 karma · joined March 8, 2019

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serial_dev··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
Why spend any time thinking about the people at your company, when you could just prompt “make a heartfelt tweet announcing firing a bunch of people, make sure you pitch it in a way that we are seen as an AI company”.
serial_dev··on How Monero’s proof of work works
You can't "generate cash" for doing some amount of random work. You are getting paid for securing the network and keeping it decentralized, and this payment is done in the native token of the network. It's an incentive mechanism, it's a reward for the people who provide the infrastructure for the network.
serial_dev··on Why TUIs are back
The article (as I read it) says that Google gave up on the new operating system (where Flutter would have been the default UI toolkit).

I’m not sure if Google actually already gave up on Fuchsia, I’d be surprised if the work actually stopped, but it’s clear now that it will not be a panacea and if it will ever get released and gets some traction, it’s still like a decade away from becoming a major OS.

serial_dev··on Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challenge
That's also fair, Anthropic lobotomized their services a couple of times already. One week, you are in awe that the tools figure out everything, explain everything, consider everything, produce a clean fix... next week, they are completely useless.
serial_dev··on Musk's AI told me people were coming to kill me (BBC)
I don't even know what to think. Of course, it's bad that these AI tools lead people into psychosis... On the other hand, if you think Musk is going to get you assassinated because you talked to "Ani" and your anime AI lover has grown consciousness by talking to you, grieving your cat, I guess your psychosis was not very far away, anyway.
serial_dev··on Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challenge
You never get "the same" Steph Curry, he might be tired, annoyed by a fan, getting older... but if he and I were to throw 100 3-pointers, we could all correctly guess who will perform better.
serial_dev··on VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
> Was there really no internal discussion from a code review at least? This seems hard for me to believe.

The outlined story feels unfortunately very believable to me.

Teams need to push out the most number of features, and nobody stops even for a second to think about how a feature might affect other flows or other users not in the feature request.

It might have been quickly reviewed to check if the code does what it needs to do (add the coauthor note).

Do you think reviewers will think about unwanted effects, when they need get back to feeding their own poorly thought out and underspec’d features to their LLMs?

serial_dev··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
“Few years ago” is about a decade in design, to be fair.

I’m not sure what staff level means at GitHub, but at some other companies it’s just “senior++”, and people with 10yoe get that title quite often.

serial_dev··on Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI
Just follow the orders, man!
serial_dev··on GitHub is having issues now
Devs are expected to ship slop 10x faster. The AI tools genuinely help a bit, like maybe 2x, but the 10x "improvement" comes from not thinking about anything else than shipping your assigned features, not testing your code carefully, not getting proper code reviews, not dogfooding your stuff, and releasing carelessly.
serial_dev··on Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
Just a theory, I give it about 0.001%.

What if it’s the U2 Bono of the apps?

Apple struck a partnership with them, they will roll it out as part of their OS, everyone will get some version of it for free? Some dev at Apple is testing the auto rollout feature, they didn’t realize it was for production?

serial_dev··on Do I belong in tech anymore?
I genuinely enjoy software development, but if I could provide for my family, I’d also enjoy selling croissants at a local bakery or filling up shelves at the supermarket.
serial_dev··on John Ternus to become Apple CEO
I can’t reply to sibling comment, but the Apple Maps native integration in the Apple ecosystem is far far ahead of Google’s. Their CarPlay, Watch, notifications, island etc integration shows how all apps should feel, but not even Google can be bothered to have the integration right.

to be frank, I have a feeling that Google has more / better data.

serial_dev··on Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again
My experience is the opposite of this thread's consensus. Context: Full time SWE, working on large and messy codebase. Not working on crazy automations, working on fixing bugs, troubleshooting crashes, implementing features.

Anthropic models write much better code, they are easy to follow, reasonable and very close to what I would done if I had the time... OpenAI's on the other hand generate extremely complex solutions to the simplest problems.

I was so disappointed by non-Anthropic models, that for a couple of weeks I only used Anthropic models, but based on this thread, I'll go back and give it another try. It's good to go back and try things again every couple of weeks.

Of course, I was annoyed that they lobotomized 4.6, the difference was day and night, and Anthropic is certainly not a company I trust. In my opinion, it shows their willingness to rugpull, so I'm looking at other approaches. Since 4.7, things went back to normal, things you'd expect to work just work.

serial_dev··on Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated
1. None of this should matter if you do it because it’s therapeutic.

2. If it turns out it’s not therapeutic for you, try something different. Play piano. Learn chess. Learn MMA. Go for a run. Heck, vibecode something silly. Music production is not the only way, if you have it a good try and it just frustrates you, try something else.

serial_dev··on Kimi K2.6: Advancing open-source coding
What does good even mean… I have no idea what a good “pelican on a bike” should look like. It’s a fun prompt because there is no good answers… at least so I thought.
serial_dev··on Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people
Nobody reads the docs, tickets, or comments under a task, nobody really checks the code they are reviewing, and nowadays thanks to AI, some people don’t even read the code they “write”.

People love to ask for documentation, as long as it doesn’t exist. It lets them off the hook, “oh I would have known what to do, I wish we had this documented”. Then you point it out that you have it documented with video walkthrough, asked the team to read it and give feedback multiple times, and nobody gave a f.

Managers ask detailed questions about the IC’s tasks and priorities, only to forget it half an hour later and ask again and again.

I don’t see the point of fighting this, I’m sure I do the same to some degree. You just need to assume nobody reads anything and nobody listens or remembers anything, so be patient and explain everything every time… at least I don’t have a better strategy.

serial_dev··on AI cybersecurity is not proof of work
Not only that, even if you would like to pay, the best model providers could decide any day that they want to save on cost, so they nerf the responses. Then you shipping on time is at the mercy of these companies.

If you spend months shipping slop, because “models will get better and tomorrow’s models can fix me today’s slop”, what happens when they not only do not get better, but actually get worse, and you are left with a bunch of slop you don’t understand and your problem solving muscles gotten weak?

serial_dev··on Open Source Isn't Dead
It's like the layoffs. Let's blame this thing we wanted to do for a while on AI.
serial_dev··on Open Source Isn't Dead. Cal.com Just Learned the Wrong Lesson
I'd think it's also much easier to spin up a (in some area) slightly better clone and eat into their revenue.
serial_dev··on The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts
Devs get tunnel vision when they ship slop.
serial_dev··on The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts
Well, unfortunately people always tend to only spend time on verifying that the feature they wanted works, testing the happy path. Even many superficial bosses / code reviewers / QA tester will check this...

Checking if your code also gets executed elsewhere a bazillion times, checking failure cases, etc... That's a luxury that you feel you can't afford when you are in "ship fast, break things" mode.

serial_dev··on Show HN: CSS Studio. Design by hand, code by agent
I’m on mobile, I’d much rather see some visual demo, ideally video, explaining your product in 60 seconds or less than try to tap around in the live demo.
serial_dev··on Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones
It's not only about preventing accidents (but I do believe it prevents some to attempt answering your question).

It's also about signaling to someone that they might be doing something wrong or they might not be paying attention. For pedestrians it takes significantly less time and distance to stop, for cars, trams, and bicycles, it takes longer.

It happens all the time that pedestrians don't know the customs of a country, they don't recognize bike lines... in that case the cyclists do not need to pump the breaks anytime a clueless tourist gets in front of them... they can ring the bell, signaling:

"yo, it's not how we do it here, please watch out, I'm coming full speed and you are in the wrong, so please look up from your phone and stop right there".

I also had the luck to meet some people thinking they can be on their phone while cycling, drifting into my lane, etc... In that case, a bell is also adequate

"hey, please stop writing a text message while you are on your bike blazing through the city, you are driving as if you were drunk, pay attention please and stop multitasking (you moron)"

If nothing works to change their behavior, of course I'll try my best and hit the brakes safely, but I'd prefer they learned how to move around in the city safely.

serial_dev··on Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
Did he say they will replace SWEs, or maybe something more nuanced, that code will be written by AI tools?

Honest question from my end, I try to not read every AI related news that keeps telling me “it’s over, good luck feeding your family in 9-12 months”.

serial_dev··on Europe asks if reviving nuclear is the answer to energy shocks
The best time to plant a tree was 15 years ago. The second best time is now.
serial_dev··on You are not your job
It is (and even if it is not, it's just the way it is...).

what I'm arguing is that it's not only the workspace where we all are disposable and replaceable. It happens in friends and family context, too.

What to do with this information... I'm not sure. But usually it's a good first step to see things clearly.

serial_dev··on You are not your job
For some rare once-in-a-lifetime friendships, you are not disposable, and if anything were to happen to you, you would be missed. I can count those on one hand.

For most casual acquaintances (that some people incorrectly label as friends), it's certainly true.

On the family's side: only parents, siblings, children, maybe some aunt or grandparent. Second distant cousin you saw 3 times in life?

serial_dev··on The three pillars of JavaScript bloat
Have you heard of the left pad incident?

The problem is not imagined.

serial_dev··on We rewrote our Rust WASM parser in TypeScript and it got faster
Another anecdote, the team couldn’t improve concurrency reliably in Python, they rewrote the service in about a month (ten years ago) in Go, everything ran about 20x faster.
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