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thunspa

30 karma · joined June 10, 2025

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thunspa··on Who Aligns the Aligners?
Haha, so good
thunspa··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
I'm sorry, not only is this far from definitive, it's not even a sign of an 'early' exodus.

There is not really any exodus, sadly. The US still is significantly more competitive and offers much higher upsides to talented people willing to take risks. I live in the EU and want us to succeed, but I'm skeptical about our ability to compete with America economically and technologically, because we foster a different type of spirit.

It would be nice if this didn't matter.

thunspa··on Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future
You are right and all these people replying to you are living in some kind of fantasy world.

I forget what it's called, but there's this fallacy of ordinary people, that states that we attribute superhuman abilities to people far enough from us on the social scale. In reality, rich people are far from movie villains, life is much more mundane.

It is scary for me to see how many well-educated people here on HN are so conspiracy-theory minded. In a quest to avoid these fantasized dictators, it is very well likely that we will vote for the one who promises to give us what we want, if only we give them enough power. In the end, the world's worst political systems were also the ones promising of liberating the poor and equalizing everyone.

thunspa··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
Please share said stats with us
thunspa··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
Do you assume regular people spend time on EU portals reading legislation proposals?
thunspa··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
I have to reply and say that this ain't so, for anyone reading this and thinking of picking Dickens up: it's worth it.
thunspa··on Being ambitious and being a dad
I agree, I would assume anonymity would allow for some honesty here, but I agree.
thunspa··on Being ambitious and being a dad
Interesting. Did they cite any reasons?
thunspa··on Being ambitious and being a dad
Thank you, I had no idea such games even existed.
thunspa··on Being ambitious and being a dad
A bit off topic, but would you share a few of your favorite board games? Thank you!
thunspa··on Being ambitious and being a dad
The replies in this thread are already very good. I'm a dad of two, but I won't add anything more than that you will be hard pressed to find a parent who will regret having children. I understand the bias in it, but people can be persuaded into honesty and, under anonymity on this website, are more likely to be honest about such things.
thunspa··on Being ambitious and being a dad
As is the case with so many things, the person you're replying to will reply with what they can quantify about the experience, but there is much much more to it that is unquantifiable and hard to convey. It is the difference between "using" someone's child for the satisfaction of these experiences, versus raising a child for their own sake, that you are wholly responsible for, especially in the early years.
thunspa··on GLM 5.2 vs. Opus
Care to share more about your pi setup? I've recently started using it (after long-time Claude Code work) and was wondering how you'd achieve these long-running tasks. Do you allow it to spawn sub-agents? Thank you!
thunspa··on Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
Also interested.
thunspa··on Anthropic acquires Stainless
This is very cool, congratulations!
thunspa··on The vi family
This could probably be solved with a better keyboard
thunspa··on The vi family
Could you share a bit more about this?
thunspa··on Using an engineering notebook
I've been doing this more and more over the past year, but I just write on plain white paper and throw it away after the stack on my desk gets too big.

Like the author, I don't seem to ever need to read my old notes. Instead, it works wonders as a mental bucket of sorts and I've found paper to be extremely powerful for this. I tried doing this on a Surface Pro, for example, but it was significantly less enjoyable or effective.

Now with LLMs helping me write code, planning ahead on paper is even more useful.

thunspa··on After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
I work in Python as well and find Claude quite poor at writing proper tests, might be using it wrong. Just last week, I asked Opus to create a small integration test (with pre-existing examples) and it tried to create a 200-line file with 20 tests I didn't ask for.

I am not sure why, but it kept trying to do that, although I made several attempts.

Ended up writing it on my own, very odd. This was in Cursor, however.

thunspa··on The next two years of software engineering
I resonate with the phrase: "You never learn to ask good questions"
thunspa··on Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
I think there's an unfinished journey whenever I hear such a story. Like someone who learns just enough about music that they "feel like" Bach is better than Taylor Swift, but then never move to the other side to use their newly acquired competence to understand what's nice about Taylor Swift's music as well.

E.g. a great designer will be able to design houses in very different styles, because they can understand what gives each of those styles its own specific beauty.

There's a lot to say about this, but I think your coffee friend never passed the snob-like point, which is a point I think most people reach when they learn just enough about something and that makes them feel superior. But if you keep going, then you start to understand what makes Italian coffee great as well, for example.

Wrt to coffee, I speak from experience, after going through very expensive equipment, I have learned to enjoy very different styles of roasts, coffees, etc. I still have preferences, I'm just far less judgmental.

Applies to most of my hobbies, I've seen this trajectory very often.

thunspa··on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files
unexpected AI W. Congratulations on the new job!
thunspa··on LLM Inevitabilism
> The "hey if you squint this thing it looks like religion for the non-religious" perspective is just one I've heard countless times

To be fair, we shouldn't bundle Augustine and Thomas Aquinas with John MacArthur and Joel Osteen. Meaning that some religious thought is more philosophically robust than other religious thought.

thunspa··on LLM Inevitabilism
What makes an artificial mind greater than ours?

Do you assume that someone will stumble into creating a person, but with unlimited memory and computational power?

Otherwise, if we are able to create this person using our knowledge, we will most certainly be able to augment humans with those capabilities.

thunspa··on LLM Inevitabilism
I mean, it all depends on how one defines "high quality context".
thunspa··on LLM Inevitabilism
This never occurred to me, but it is a brilliant take.
thunspa··on The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
can you say more? how do you do it?
thunspa··on Scrappy - make little apps for you and your friends
Or learning to actually code. I can't see why I would ever learn to use these kinds of tools.

As a developer, I can just make it myself. Now with LLMs, if it's very simple and bounded, I can just vibe most of it with very little to lose.

As a lay person, I don't see what the TAM for this is. Who will spend the time to learn how to drag and drop an application?

thunspa··on How I Program with Agents
Saw Rich Hickey say this, that it is a known fact that tested code never has bugs.

On a more serious note: how could anyone possibly ever write meaningful tests without a deep understanding of the code that is being written?

thunspa··on How I program with agents
Yes, this is what I'm fearing as well.

That we will end up just trying to review code, writing tests and some kind of specifications in natural language (which is very imprecise)

However, I can't see how this approach would ever scale to a larger project.

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