dathanb82 · HackerLangs

vor 15 Tagendiscuss

If "inference is cheap," why is OpenAI spending a ton getting Broadcom to design custom AI chips that make inference cheaper? Reports suggest their custom silicon isn't all that good for training, it's all to make inference more efficient. That shouldn't be necessary if inference is already quite cheap.

dathanb82

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Two other similarities: they both rely on burning huge amounts of electricity, and have driven up costs of GPUs around the world.

dathanb82

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

This is a good take. The most effective combination of AI and skilled practitioner is using AI to amplify the abilities of the skilled practitioner. And in particular, max benefit comes from exploiting comparative advantage. AIs are really good at boilerplate -- in many cases better than humans because humans will optimize the process by doing copy/paste and often inject errors in the process -- whereas humans are better at abstract and critical reasoning. There's a very real and valuable use case for AI, but it's not replacing humans, it's taking the things that humans don't like doing (and that a computer can do well already) off the human's plate, so humans can focus more exclusively on the things that they do better than the AI. And at least with the current architecture of AI models, there will _always_ be higher-level reasoning that humans do better than the machine.

dathanb82

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I’ve also heard it being called “comprehension debt,” which I like a little more because I think it’s more precise: the specific debt being accrued is exactly a lack of comprehension of the code.

dathanb82

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Vimwiki?

dathanb82

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Unless you have a “every commit must build” rule, why would you review commits independently? The entire PR is the change set - what’s problematic about reviewing it as such?

dathanb82

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Skills are part of the repo, and CLIs are installed locally. In both cases it's up to you to keep them updated. MCP servers can be exposed and consumed over HTTPS, which means the MCP server owner can keep them updated for you.

Better sandboxing. Accessing an MCP server doesn't require you to give an agent permissions on your local machine.

MCP servers can expose tools, resources, and prompts. If you're using a skill, you can "install" it from a remote source by exposing it on the MCP server as a "prompt". That helps solve the "keep it updated" problem for skills - it gets updated by interrogating the MCP server again.

Or if your agentic workflow needs some data file to run, you can tell the agent to grab that from the MCP server as a resource. And since it's not a static file, the content can update dynamically -- you could read stocks or the latest state of a JIRA ticket or etc. It's like an AI-first, dynamic content filesystem.

dathanb82

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Oh man, Turbo Pascal was my first "real" programming language -- it was all various flavors of BASIC before, and mostly toy projects. The developer experience with Turbo Pascal (by which I guess I mostly mean Turbo Vision) was honestly pretty great

dathanb82

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

The use of XML as a data serialization format was always a bad choice. It was designed as a document _markup_ language (it’s in the name), which is exactly the way it’s being used for Claude, and is actually a good use case.

dathanb82

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

And do what? Leave the ducting, pipes, and electrical lines exposed for the one time in 20 years you need to do something with them?

In addition to being much more attractive than exposed infrastructure, drywall and the insulation that gets put behind it help make your house much more energy efficient.

dathanb82

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

As you might expect from the description -- largely passed on via contaminated water -- the guinea worm is mostly present in areas of extreme poverty. Even if such a treatment were feasible, it would be inaccessible to most of the relevant population.

dathanb82

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

It’s probably even more pronounced, since it’s unlikely that someone is going to _average_ 180bpm for their entire workout, especially as they get older.

dathanb82

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

The auto-attach flag isn’t a huge deal, since it’s a one-liner that can be statically documented and the fix works in all cases. The bigger issue is the JDK / runtime team’s stance that libraries should not be able to dynamically attach agents, and that the auto-attach flag might be removed in the future. You can still enable mockito’s agent with the —javaagent flag, but you have to provide the path to the mockito jar, and getting that path right is highly build-system-dependent and not something the mockito team can document in a way that minimizes the entry threshold for newcomers.

dathanb82

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

I can't remember the last time the speed at which I could physically produce code was the bottleneck in a project. It's all about design and thinking through and documenting the edge cases, and coming up with new edge cases and going back to the design. By the time we know what we're going to write, writing the code isn't the bottleneck, and even if it takes twice as long, that's fine, especially since I generally end up designing a more usable interface as a result of using it (in my tests) as it's being built.

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