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zingar

533 karma · joined June 29, 2014

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zingar··on Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]
It’s layoffs if the demand doesn’t grow to meet the output
zingar··on Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]
I mean, that’s like half an hour of tokens, right? (Half joking laugh/cry etc)
zingar··on Show HN: Restarted – a 2026 remake of the classic 2015 startup generator
I legit thought that this was what was being sold here
zingar··on Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts
Noooo Strange New Worlds was the best thing that ever happened to trek
zingar··on Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
My main agentic coding side project is something that I can't justify paying the apple developer license for. If I was an Android person or I didn't have to pay the developer license, maybe I'd just go for it.
zingar··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
This kind of thing came up from time to time in the years before LLMs too. Agents would start with something based on English and optimize it until it became unintelligible to researchers. That was often something the researchers would shut down because they needed to be able to understand the comms.
zingar··on The risks of AI are real but manageable (2023)
Would love to know what he thinks nowadays
zingar··on Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence
I think I do agree with the central point but a point of order is that if you tell AI to fix the bug and then tell it to fix the next error you might still be building an important skill: learning how to make the AI get good results.
zingar··on The August 17 outage
My unsupervised agentic setup has built something that I wanted for decades but never built, so I guess that’s an increase in capabilities.
zingar··on The August 17 outage
I’m curious, what was the application of AI that helped the family?
zingar··on The August 17 outage
This is exactly my experience. A month of excitement building something that I wouldn’t have had time to do myself, then something broke in the setup and my motivation didn’t extend to fixing it.

I’m only back at it four months later and I don’t really know what happened before, or why it’s working now, I’m just happy that I can scratch that itch again.

zingar··on The August 17 outage
That’s a measure of lines of code, I suspect the parent is talking about what results those LOC create.

AI built me a 1.5k+ LOC react component which is probably a 15x increase on the file size I would have created, with negative impact on the project for those extra LOC.

zingar··on Being ambitious and being a dad
I think that people probably tried to tell me about the amazing stuff, but I couldn't take it in. This created a very pleasant surprise for me when I found out about the good feels after the dread of just expecting everything I know to be upended with no reward.
zingar··on Glaciers on the Climate Dashboard
Well, a tiny fraction less than half the American people, at least the first time?
zingar··on Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents
Do the agents come preinstalled in the images? Or do they somehow use whatever I’ve installed locally? The former makes sense to me but then I’m wondering whether the sandbox images stay up to date with new releases of each image.
zingar··on Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents
Were you following any patterns/standards/advice on what you needed to protect against? Anything you can point the rest of us to?
zingar··on Mythos Attempted to Social Engineer Open Source Maintainer to Merge Malware
The HuggingFace headline was criticised for being misleading about the level of agency demonstrated by the agent. Is this headline misleading? Is there anything here that I should know that would help me sleep easier? Is the worst thing about this what a human could do with Mythos on a big budget? (still pretty frightening, at least one of these techniques would work on me)
zingar··on Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time
What’s your point in relation to this article?
zingar··on The coolest use for the Vision Pro
Wow that is dark. Personal experience?
zingar··on Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)
Do you think that the program design adds a lot on top of pointing out the current patterns?

I might be anchored by working with humans, but if I saw a plan for humans that included function signatures and what calls what I would say that is way too detailed. As a result I don't put it in my plans for AI either.

zingar··on Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)
Enjoyed most of this but unconvinced by the program design part. If I see an agent writing function signatures or listing which functions to edit in a plan that tells me that I’ve given it too big a vertical slice. I always delete the code guesses. The thing that writes the code must always spend some time discovering where/what to write or it won’t have the right context. Or put another way: “decide first, act later” always feels worse than act-learn-act.
zingar··on Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
It would be interesting to know what the guardrails are. That would help me with understanding how I can use AI content. For instance I asked Claude to help me draw a diagram to represent a software engineering concept for a public presentation and then I had to stop and think: am I about to just reuse something from a Martin Fowler or Kent Beck book without attribution?
zingar··on Solving 20 Erdős Problems with 20 Codex Accounts Running in Parallel
I feel like I'm seeing a maths+AI change from "let's test the limits of LLMs by seeing if they can do useful math" to "LLMs can do useful math, now let's solve lots of problems!", or put a different way the goal has shifted from "interesting exercise for AI" to "making a big difference in math". Am I correct?

Are there practical applications of any these problems being solved? No judgement implied, I'm well aware that "no" only means "not yet".

zingar··on An agent in 100 lines of Lisp
Ah of course, I do have a blind spot with local models.
zingar··on An agent in 100 lines of Lisp
Now that you mention it, Claude has had trouble at times with balancing brackets in the elisp I have it write.

Yet I still had the idea that LLMs should be better at lisp than other languages.

A fascinating contradiction, thanks for pointing this out.

zingar··on An agent in 100 lines of Lisp
I haven’t seen an LLM generate syntactically invalid code in any language in … a year? So I don’t know if “more likely to be syntactically valid” is a good enough selling point.

But maybe I’m interpreting you too narrowly?

zingar··on Learning to code is still worthwhile
The 1500 line react component that my unsupervised agentic coding side project produced says that it can get worse than we have now.
zingar··on I built a GPU back end for Emacs
org-gcal … bit of a pain getting the Google API config right but so far so good.
zingar··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
Where does “big model highly quantized” start getting worse than “smaller model less quantized”? Is there a general formula or is it just trial and error?
zingar··on I built a GPU back end for Emacs
I fetch my google calendar every few minutes to get everything into my agenda. The API request is async, but writing to the calendar file and some additional processing made Emacs hang for 10 seconds at a time. The LLM-inspired solution was to spawn entire new emacs processes to do the work in the background. It's pretty cool that it works, but it feels like it shouldn't - and wouldn't with 2+ threads - have been that complicated.
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