trey-jones

Yes - the older I get, the more obvious it is that the mind of a child (and young adult) is better suited to learning, reacts faster, and is more creative than mine.

The attention-deficit that is so common among especially (but not only) young people today means that grabbing their interest is of paramount importance to their learning. Just repeating that kids are bad at reading stuffy texts. But if you can put them onto something that they find interesting, they can definitely excel. I've got tales of high school students who are terrible students, but give them a CAD and 3D printer and they will solve any problem you have.

So - in other news, education is broken. How do we fix it?

This is exactly true in my experience. I find myself trusting the LLM better than I ever trusted a development team to deliver accurate work. Just like you would managing a team of junior developers, you have to keep an eye on the output, but I think the agent is more transparent about that than your team would be. And it works faster, and you don't have to deal with emotional meltdown or active sabotage if you criticize in the wrong way.

The trick for the guy controlling the agent is to know about the gotchas that one would normally encounter when doing the work. Asking the right questions and mentioning the right things to pay extra attention to can make all the difference.

I think that's why it will be much more difficult for people to learn how to make software now. Those of us who have been doing it for years and years have experience that is valuable in steering the LLM. It will be hard for people new to software to get that same experience. But then things are changing so quickly right now, everything I just wrote my be irrelevant in a week.

I won't read anything on twitter as it currently stands, because the product sucks. The "fixed" functionality provided by xCancel is what makes it worth it for me to read. So, if you want me as a customer, you need to provide similar functionality.

Not all customers are as particular as I am, therefore a shitty product continues to thrive, and I can go do other things.

Regardless of the legality of the service:

I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.

My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.

I've been using 5.3 since they initially announced it and my gut feel is that it's not as good as 5.2 for agentic tasks. I'm still using it - I don't think it's bad. I'm just not convinced it's better.

This is exactly how I feel about my job now. I'm the new manager. But honestly claude is better than any team of developers I've ever had working under me. It does exactly what I ask it to, in 10 minutes instead of 3 weeks. And apparently we can't afford a development team now anyway...

I'm not working at massive scale. I've not built any public-facing projects from scratch. But I have done years-worth of cleanup and improvement on projects that I'm very familiar with and have been in my backlog. It's not 100% success, but it's better than I could have done on my own, in the last few months anyway.

I used claude with GLM and it's easy to set up, just hard to find the documentation. No headaches really, unless you want to use it against multiple different APIs.

Definitely feels like a lot more than 2x to me. Any time it feels like the agent is taking a long time I have to look in the mirror and say to myself "What could you have done in 5 minutes?"

When I found Tesla P100s on ebay for $75 I thought I was getting a cheap server, but 1/3 of the total cost was RAM. Sorry, first time I've built a computer since the shortage.

I don't know why we're even talking about Qwen3.6 for writing code when qwen3-coder exists. My experience is there's no contest. I'm using 30b with 96k context on a dedicated server.

Qwen3.6 was the first model I ran locally that seemed smart, but qwen3-coder:30b is way, way more responsive and more accurate for writing code according to my tests, including human-eval. If you can run one than you can almost certainly run the other. If you haven't tried qwen3-coder I would definitely recommend it. It feels positively snappy compared to every other local model I've tried. All you need is 32G VRAM and some heat dissipation.

You don't have to have a monopoly to be monopolistic.

I know it uses electricity, but part of the benefit of a local model has to be that you can let it do this while you sleep, and not pay Anthropic for an unknown number of tokens.

Exactly. I have sort of a fetish for trying to make things smaller by trimming out things that aren't needed. Unfortunately this skill has been largely useless since forever, because hardware improves to the point that these optimizations are trivial:

Network Bandwidth, Storage space and speed, memory capacity. While all of these were worth optimizing for at a point in history, that point is behind us. It's probably a reasonable expectation that it will eventually be true for VRAM.

I'm really curious about this, not because I disagree, but because I want to avoid agents going whack. Are you running vllm for yourself only, or a for a team, or for an application, etc? And do you feel there is a minimum hardware requirement for vllm to be useful in this way?

My weekend project is going to be building a home inference server (from ancient datacenter parts) and I'm still massaging in my head what the end result will be.

I saw this years and years ago, and it's actually one of my favorite things I've ever seen on the web. I recommend reading from start to finish.

Or more simply just wrap some orchestrator in a single service file. Could just be a bash script used for ExecStart.

The fact that every job application wants a link to my profile on a platform that tries to push "brain training puzzle and games" on me just makes me angry every single time. I really hate LinkedIn and my active rebellion against it is hurting my ability to find a new job.

I know there has been other LinkedIn hate on HN this week. I know they have some good tools for job searching and hiring. I still wish we as a society could move on and leave this one with MySpace.

Sure. Even a history of safety success contributes to this. We haven't had an accident in 3000 days, what was dangerous about this job again? Also what's this stupid policy for anyway, I've never seen anybody even come close to (non-dangerous-sounding fate) while working here.

But probably the policy is in place because it used to happen before the policy was in place. It's just not obvious to people who have never seen the consequences before.

This is really accurate to my experience learning FreeCAD earlier this year. I am a former professional CAD user (of a lesser software than AutoCAD) and I don't think I would have gotten far without being able to ask ChatGPT for help understanding some of the quirks of FreeCAD.

For free and open it's truly impressive though. Actually I think my time building iOS UIs in Storyboard was at least as useful as previous CAD experience, since constraints are the foundation of (at least one approach to) designing parts.

To be fair, I think human nature is probably a bigger culprit here than the quote. Yes, it was one of the first things told to me as a new programmer. No, I don't think it influenced very heavily how I approach my work. It's just another small (probably reasonable) voice in the back of my head.

DRY is not to avoid writing code (of any amount). DRY is a maintainability feature. "Unless you're very familiar with the code" you probably won't remember that you have to make this change in two places instead of one. DRY makes life easier for future you, and anyone else unfortunate to encounter (y)our mess.

I think this is a reasonable rule of thumb, but there are also times that the code you are about to write a second time is extremely portable and can easily be made reusable (say less than 5 minutes of extra time to make the abstraction). In these cases I think it's worth it to go ahead and do it.

Having identical logic in multiple places (even only 2) is a big contributor to technical debt, since if you're searching for something and you find it and fix it /once/ we often thing of the job as done. Then the "there is still a bug and I already fixed that" confusion is avoided by staying DRY.

I'm sorry that the author got bitten by this. But .com purism is funny to me. I only buy GTLDs for personal projects, and I've never had a problem before. But then, I've never bought .online.

Private keys should never leave the device where they are created.

Right, I'd say this is the best value I've gotten out of it so far: I'm planning to build this thing in this way, does that seem like a good idea to you? Sometimes I get good feedback that something else would be better.

To me, an old guy, I would rather have LLM doing (assisting with) the code review than the actual code production. Is that stupid?

I prefer not, because technically this socialist phase is part of capitalism currently.

Yes - we're in what I like to call the Socialist Phase of AI (user acquisition). We were once in this phase with Google. Eventually we'll move into the as-yet-unnamed-by-me phase that Google (and search in General, also the internet) have been in for quite some time, where they try and squeeze out all the money that they put in during the Socialist Phase.

A late reply to your outrage: I said I'm in favor, I'm not trying to parent your kids, but the effects of putting a phone (or similar) into most peoples' hands is easily observable and marked. I'm not limiting this to children. I observe it in my father who is 75 and I never would have imagined that he would be addicted to his phone. I observe it in myself, despite taking what most would call extreme precautions against phone addiction.

And I especially observe in my children that whatever limit I set, they will use all of it before they do anything else. I observe kids with their chins on their chest looking at a phone and I know it's not physically healthy. All I said is it's worse than cigarettes (meaning if cigarettes are regulated, phones might outta be too), and I stand by that.