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strix_varius

2,193 karma · joined March 22, 2012

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strix_varius··on When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
Do you find it impossible to use LLMs productively without giving over your brain wholesale to them?
strix_varius··on When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
Exactly this. Just this week an engineer who seems to purely vibe everything submitted a +700ish LoC fix for what seemed like a pretty simple issue. Moreover it was a perf issue, which in my experience is not usually best fixed by adding more stuff.

Today, I merged my fix, net -381 LoC.

I'm using them too of course, they read and type and hunt for bugs and test faster than I can. But I'm using them as my tool, not being a tool using them.

strix_varius··on When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
lol what? There are definitely ways to make non flashing terminal UIs without this total insanity.
strix_varius··on Ask HN: Is Claude Opus 4.8 broken?
Curious why you prefer 4.6 over 4.7
strix_varius··on The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI
I've noticed and felt this trend, but I haven't ever seen it put so well or really connected the dots with figma & pretty rectangles.

I remember discussions over relative easy of use of gray box wireframes... and that led to better products.

Now I've got designers vibing monstrosities that would have fit right in in the Flash era, I guess in order to draw even nicer rectangles now that execs than wave at AI and get a design.

strix_varius··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
If there were a coding model as good as opus that didn't know multiple languages, biology, etc, I would happily use it. But I'm not aware of one - are you?

It actually seems somewhat difficult to train such a model since "all the text on the Internet" is easier to provide in bulk than a highly curated set.

strix_varius··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Not OP but I've been thinking about this a lot (like everyone ha) and I think my answer is, yes?

I hope there's a "good enough" point but I don't think we're there yet. Like for me hardware got good enough several years ago. But while opus 4.7 is really good compared to everything else, it's not so good that I would use it at a discount over whatever is available in a few months. The improvement in quality, speed, and daily frustration is worth it to me... Spoken as someone whose employer is footing the bill, so take that with a grain of salt.

I want to run my own local models, but I don't think that's feasible without lots of frustration until a few generations of frontier models are so good that they're almost indistinguishable for common tasks. Kind of like how MacBook pros have been for a while.

strix_varius··on The real cost of owning a home
Maybe read the whole sentence?
strix_varius··on Cloudflare Flagship
Booleans as a Service
strix_varius··on The real cost of owning a home
I feel you. That's been my life for a few years too.
strix_varius··on The real cost of owning a home
Insurance and property taxes will never decide to occupy the house and force you to move from your home despite being willing and able to pay.
strix_varius··on A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
But you and I and everyone else here knows about MIT and can probably list a few major breakthroughs that came out of MIT... what's the name of your major public research university?
strix_varius··on A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
Most of what you've said is true, but also largely unrelated to the content of the article, which is about funding research.
strix_varius··on Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
> Why? Because they hunt a singular monster in professional software development: complexity.

I love this sentence.

strix_varius··on Guy Goma's Accidental BBC Interview Lives on After 20 Years
Really? I'm pretty unimpressed. I hope I would do better and "roll with it" more if my kids did that to me. Maybe I overestimate myself.
strix_varius··on Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house
And they, already, don't have qualified immunity while they're doing so. They are also already disallowed in many places.
strix_varius··on I want to live like Costco people
> $65 is the cost of one or two fast food meals.

You mean for a family... I hope?

strix_varius··on Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
Is there any internal data on where students are going instead?
strix_varius··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
> The only way I can rationalize that so many people refuse to believe this is happening is that they are on the seller side and not the buyer side of engineering labor. This means they have blind sides to the buyers view of the market (some sort of information asymmetry), and secondly they exhibit cognitive dissonance to protect their self-esteem as a seller.

This is an interesting response when faced with concrete data that the buy-side of engineering is actively heating up in direct correlation with LLM adoption.

An alternative interpretation of your observation is that perhaps your company has particular traits that are helped more by LLMs than the average eng org. There's a growing SWE consensus that LLMs boost productivity by 10-20%. However, there are contributing factors that can make LLMs much more of a human replacement:

* Selling labour & services, rather than engineered software. ie an agency that builds customized versions of well-understood software, rather than net new capabilities.

* Selling software that has a low ceiling of complexity and a short half-life, such that LLMs can realistically architect & maintain it over its useful lifetime.

strix_varius··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
Span of control is quite different from direct report.
strix_varius··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
Because the data shows exactly the opposite?

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-isnt-killing-software-cod...

strix_varius··on VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
You can't make this shit up.
strix_varius··on Godot 4.7 Beta with HDR Output, Ray-Tracing Improvements and Editor Enhancements
Directly from the dev of that game, who - since so few successful games have been released with Godot - often has random people point to R2V as an example:

> this game is far from being the "Godot 3D Showcase" game since I hardly even use normal maps and most of the assets are just low-poly shapes without any modern techniques (like PBR or photogrammetry)

strix_varius··on Godot 4.7 Beta with HDR Output, Ray-Tracing Improvements and Editor Enhancements
So... One sequel that was a guaranteed success from day one, using any technology?

Slay the spire is also one of the least demanding games, in one of the least demanding genres, for a game engine. In fact the devs specifically pointed this out in their article a year or so back when they discussed testing Godot for viability.

strix_varius··on Godot 4.7 Beta with HDR Output, Ray-Tracing Improvements and Editor Enhancements
Meanwhile, if you have more than 32 or so colors in a palette swatch, the color picker becomes permanently unusable for your project.

Godot is so driven by whatever sounds neat to work on that it has three completely different rendering systems, all buggy and mediocre. At least two shipped tilemap systems, one deprecated. And several systems like its autotiler where the community standard is to never use the built in one and to always replace it with a well known, much better add-on, and then to have to remember to avoid all the built in UI nudging you towards the built-in one.

Such a weird foundation for a project. Tons of hype but not a lot of successful games relative to usage.

strix_varius··on Brands got worse on purpose
And? I'm not advocating for buying jeans at Walmart. I'm using it as an illustration of the lower bounds of jeans pricing.
strix_varius··on Brands got worse on purpose
The contrast of your two perspectives kind of illustrates the information void (of quality vs price) in the article.

At Walmart it's common to get jeans (including Levi jeans) for < $20. But how long will they last? I honestly don't know, and even more I don't know how to definitely pay more for better quality.

strix_varius··on Brands got worse on purpose
I can hear the whooshing from over here.
strix_varius··on Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind
This is a trend, perhaps with most parents, but definitely with fathers and especially with the sorts of hyper focused, contemplative, creativity/engineering-minded fathers who might hang out on hacker news. At least in my anecdotal experience.

What I've found is that as my 2.5 year old gets older it gets easier and easier for me. The ratio of cool shared experiences to frustrating noise gets higher and higher.

We've just had another child, still very much a newborn, and now that I have something for contrast I see how much harder that was. To some degree the frustration and grind of very young kids had faded into the background of my memory.

The older kid helps though as a concrete vision of what we're moving towards.

strix_varius··on Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind
I think this is an unfair characterization. I also go on business trips - about six a year, one week each.

That leaves 230 days of waking up, getting dressed, and walking to preschool. 322 nights of bath time and reading and tucking in.

The occasional trip for work doesn't negate the steady state effort that fatherhood requires.

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