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synalx

153 karma · joined May 31, 2017

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synalx··on Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code
Imo, the article misses the main point of code review. It's not about finding bugs or spreading around knowledge, but about maximizing value vs maintenance costs. Code is expensive, not to produce but to maintain. Every line of code added to a codebase must be read and understood many times over its lifetime, and therefore imposes a burden on future maintainers. We review code in order to weigh its value against that high cost of ownership. High quality, maintainable code is code which maximizes that value delivered while minimizing the cost of its future maintenance.

AI is changing the game here not by increasing (or decreasing) the value of code, but by reducing its cost of ownership. When it's significantly cheaper to understand, modify, and replace code, the balance point shifts significantly. It's the definition of "maintainable" that's changing.

synalx··on "IT WoRKs BeTter in the App "
One thing that annoys me to no end is when a mobile app can't even load without an internet connection. There's a plague of apps that are thin veneers over a web view. I get that this is easier to deploy and manage, but I find it a really poor experience compared to a well-designed mobile app.
synalx··on It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI
I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.
synalx··on I'm a USB-C Maximalist
With a soldering iron and USB-CD PD trigger boards, I've successfully converted a few of this kind of thing.
synalx··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
Mine is obsessed with "planes". Data plane, control plane, management plane. Everything is a plane :)
synalx··on TinyWind: A pixel pirate sailing game with real wind physics (380k+ kms sailed)
I interpreted this as a visual bug with the sprites.

As a sailor, I love seeing ads or other random imagery of sailboats that's clearly photoshopped, with sails in nonsensical orientations or completely backwards with things like flags or hair blowing in the wind.

synalx··on IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
That might be challenging, I hear people are pretty short on tokens these days.
synalx··on Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
Antigravity's coding agent is worlds apart from Gemini CLI, though.
synalx··on I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now
This stood out to me too - there's an underlying assumption that private entities _can_ say no to governments, but that's only true to a point. If the government decides it needs AI-powered killbots as a matter of national security, it can and will nationalize whatever entities it needs to build them.
synalx··on [dead]
Vibe biology?
synalx··on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
For 3D modeling (assuming you want to do CAD), Onshape is a fantastic alternative to native applications.
synalx··on Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk
In that sense, AI behaves like a human assistant you hire who happens to be incredibly susceptible to social engineering.
synalx··on Show HN: BusterMQ, Thread-per-core NATS server in Zig with io_uring
The problem with "the language tooling is already a build system" is that cross-language dependency chains are a thing. The moment you need a Rust or Zig file to be regenerated and recompiled when a JSON schema or .proto file is updated, you're outside what most of those language-specific toolchains can support. This is where Bazel absolutely shines.
synalx··on Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans
One major disadvantage here is the lack of training data on a "new" language, even if it's more efficient. At least in the short term, this means needing to teach the LLM your language in the context window.

I've spent a good bit of time exploring this space in the context of web frameworks and templating languages. One technique that's been highly effective is starting with a _very_ minimal language with only the most basic concepts. Describe that to the LLM, ask it to solve a small scale problem (which the language is likely not yet capable of doing), and see what kinds of APIs or syntax it hallucinates. Then add that to your language, and repeat. Obviously there's room for adjustment along the way, but we've found this process is able to cut many many lines from the system prompts that are otherwise needed to explain new syntax styles to the LLM.

synalx··on Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
And a major consumer of space, because they have to accommodate bigger ports even if they're only doing USB-C pass-through.
synalx··on StardustOS: Library operating system for building light-weight Unikernels
> Stardust-oxide is a re-implementation of the unikernel in Rust.

Not "Starrust"? What a missed opportunity...

synalx··on Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run – Now Open Source
Not a single mention of AI, LLMs, or Agents. I'm impressed :)
synalx··on Unexpected productivity boost of Rust
More the latter. The lock guard is not `Send`, so holding it across the await point makes the `impl Future` returned by the async function also not `Send`. Therefore it can't be passed to a scheduler which does work stealing, since that scheduler is typed to require futures to be `Send`.
synalx··on Your Favorite YouTube Channel Is (Probably) Owned by Private Equity
What I want the most here is transparency. If a creator thinks they can make better videos by partnering with a media company, great. I'm happy to judge for myself if their content is still for me or not. I donate to a number of creators on Patreon though, and I'd be angry to find out that my $ is profit for a well-funded media company instead of supporting someone working on their dream.
synalx··on Accountant Simulator 2025
I wonder if this is due to the common trope in science fiction literature that changing the past in even a small way has a butterfly effect of unintended and frequently disastrous consequences.
synalx··on Does Earth have two high-tide bulges on opposite sides? (2014)
If you're ever in SF, it's really worth going to see. Such a cool mixture of art and technology.
synalx··on Bluesky quickly sold out of the T-shirt its CEO wore to troll Mark Zuckerberg
Well, it is an all black shirt...
synalx··on The DeskThing: the perfect desk assistant
Without knowing what Car Thing was, I read all 3 of those pages and still have no idea what this project is.
synalx··on OpenAI came after our domain because we use GPT in it
It's because we write the numerals in the same order as the longer form: May 10th, 2023 becomes 5/10/23.
synalx··on Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018)
This is also a core design principle of Angular - the compiler extracts the static template structure and generates code to update dynamic bindings within it.
synalx··on Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?
PR Quadtrees (https://opendsa-server.cs.vt.edu/OpenDSA/Books/CS3/html/PRqu...) got me my current job at Google. One of my interviewers asked basically "how would you design Google Maps?" and I based my answer on this data structure.
synalx··on A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine
I love that the article talks about realizing a "decarbonized grid" by storing energy in literal chunks of carbon.