mickeyp

1,917 karmajoined 15 years ago

Python and Emacs afficionado.

I run www.masteringemacs.org and www.inspiredpython.com

mickey (at) semantical.co.uk

http://github.com/mickeynp/

comments

2 days agodiscuss

Who would trust the classifiers, though? I would not.

A team of professionals will trust a gateway they built themselves -- by an AI, most likely, as that is boring work -- that works for their organisation and whatever weird quirks and house styles they have. In a year or two when things are a bit more stabilised that'll be dozens of subagents each testing a little thing each in isolation plus a bevvy of software that looks for antipatterns in addition to running tests and linters and what have you. It'll be tested against the ground truth specification and not the boring crap in the middle.

At no point will anybody's session matter. Results count; nothing more.

2 days agodiscuss

I find the value of someone steering an AI session to be practically nil for nearly everything. Nobody wonders out loud how a senior developer arrives at the result he does without an AI; they care that his deliverable is high quality and meets whatever standard/requirement exists.

So I'm not sure why people going "chop, chop" and "nah make it more red and bigger" is a useful signal of much of anything.

No, the future is a complex "gate" that checks, weighs and measures everything before it gets committed --- a local (or remote) "CI" but... more granular and far more specific and turned to the needs of the project you work on.

5 days agodiscuss

Because SAX parsing is a thing, and the visitor pattern makes it easy to elide searches in sub-trees if an attribute does not match.

So if name == "foobar" then read; else ignore. For a 500 GiB XML file that makes a difference.

As for your other point about an "AST" (it's actually just a DOM.) That's the the benefit? And you're in for a surprise when you learn that reaching into a deeply-nested JSON structure deserialised into whatever memory format most appropriate for your pet language is also an abstract data type that you act on with getters/accessors/what-have-yous that is in all but name a DOM.

And we do have tools to deal with it: XSLT for transformation. For querying? XPath.

5 days agodiscuss

XML is unfairly maligned. Yes, people bought into it too much 26 years ago, but then you would too if you had to maintain someone else's massive packed struct dumped into a file and documented in a poorly-maintained word document --- or worse, a brace of dumb IETF RFCs that contradict eachother.

I am glad that younger generations are looking at it with fresh eyes. XML is a useful format; it has its place in your toolbox. Ignore the haters.

10 days agodiscuss

But people do 3d print frames for drones and gliders. It's undoubtedly worse than carbon fibre, I guess, but I found it interesting enough to share that you can buy especially lightweight filaments designed for aeronautic stuff.

10 days agodiscuss

The same way other databases do it. With join mechanics and proper query planning. You're confusing functionality with implementation.

10 days agodiscuss

Fair --- but I feel my criticism stands. It's awful. Don't get me started on 80% of all deployment uses of neo4j...

11 days agodiscuss

They're a cool feature but honestly a bit tricky to use well, IMHO. And be careful with PII lingering in a temporal void somewhere for a long time :-)

11 days agodiscuss

These things exist to eliminate the risk of ever serving stale information from a materialised view. I.e., their benefit is political/reputational as much as they are technical in the sense that they save you effort like remembering to invalidate a MV after an ingest operation.

Stale MV is a thing you only ever burn your fingers on once. Like how "It's not DNS" is a common meme in networking.

11 days agodiscuss

I mean I don't disagree with you, but they did just add a graph database feature, which is about as orthogonal to relational database design as you can get.

11 days agodiscuss

The graph database feature looks interesting, but I wonder...

SELECT customer_name FROM GRAPH_TABLE (myshop MATCH (c IS customers)-[IS customer_orders]->(o IS orders WHERE o.ordered_when = current_date) COLUMNS (c.name AS customer_name));

That is _awful_ syntax; it is reminiscent of neo4j, which is surely not a tool anyone serious should copy from outright in 2026.

And of course the final thing I am left wondering is if it's fast. Row-level security is such a useful feature and yet only a fool would contemplate building anything serious with Postgres', as the planner goes haywire and does per-row-matching, nuking performance.

11 days agodiscuss

Oh no doubt. I'm no drone expert!

11 days agodiscuss

You know you're doing a great job, OP, when the peanut gallery here has nothing more substantial to add than to critique your em-dashes; greek-latin root word mix-ups despite the common vernacular having moved on from that; and lack of title brevity.

Congratulations --- this is a super cool project. I wonder if you've considered using ultralight filaments and 3dprinting the frame? PLA is stiff but brittle, and I know Bambu and a few others sell specialised versions that supposedly weigh less than normal.

12 days agodiscuss

Because numa topology is an optimisation problem with a wide solution space, and that its configuration and setup depends on the amount of physical cpus and cores; how the RAM is connected to which lanes; and on and on it goes.

> If it does not, I cannot consider it ready for this century.

Mhmm.

15 days agodiscuss

This is a really cool project. And it's so small, too, when you consider what it unlocks and the opportunities it creates.

Really awesome!

15 days agodiscuss

GPU speedups are welcome, but you don't need a shader and a gpu to insert a flashy effect.

Emacs has had this for decades: `pulse.el`. And building your own is very simple also.

You'll still need someone to write the glue code to trigger the pulse, but then a gpu patch on the backend wouldn't give you that either.

I'm sure someone on MELPA/Github has written code to do just this already.

21 days agodiscuss

What? London is one of the greenest cities in the world.

last monthdiscuss

Impressive work. But the problem is not the 30 tok/s which is fine for agentic coding and chat.

It's prefill; slow prefill kills agentic workloads dead.

If you have 100,000 tokens at ~150tok/s per the OP, you're looking at:

    You have: 100000 / (150/s)

    You want: hms

     11 min + 6.6666667 sec

Which is quite a wait indeed.

last monthdiscuss

No the insight here is that you went _back_ and got your PhD with years of experience building professional software.

Expecting a 20-year old undergrad or a 23-year old postgrad to do as well as someone who left and came back to uni to finish their degree(s) is... uncharitable.

2 months agodiscuss

This test would be a lot more useful if the author used images the models obviously hadn't seen before. Pulling images from Wikipedia? They'll have seen 'em before, and the metadata, and all the pages they were casually linked to.

The premise that the long prompt only made the model think 'a second longer' may have more to do with the fact that it knows about the images. So why think harder if you know the answer?

At no point does the author contemplate that.