birdfood · HackerTrans

24 dagen geledendiscuss

I live on the Gold Coast and I have seen in my yard Aseroe rubra, glow in the dark mushrooms (not for a while now) and many others. Just this weekend I found one that looks a bit like a king oyster. Where did you get your list? I was looking for a visual guide to local fungi

birdfood

3 maanden geledendiscuss

Getting to spend 3 months on a self learning journey sounds wonderful. My hunch is that these deep skills will be valuable long term and that this new abstraction is not the same as moving from assembly to c, but I am not completely sure. Lately most of my code has been llm generated and I can’t say I feel any sense of enjoyment, accomplishment, or satisfaction at the end of a work day. But I’ve also come to realise I really only enjoy 5-10% of the coding anyway and the rest is all the tedious semi-mechanical changes that support that small interesting core. On the scale of human history working with computers is a blip in time and I wonder how the period of hand writing code will be viewed in a hundred years, perhaps as a footnote or simply bundled as ‘everything before machines were self automating’.

birdfood

3 maanden geledendiscuss

There’s roughly 8b people in the world and somewhere between 2-3b have never used the internet. If OpenAI manages to capture the 6b internet users growing at 100% per year, they have 3 years of user growth left max. Then what?

birdfood

3 maanden geledendiscuss

I spent a couple of years of my career working on a multiplayer / social game. We definitely got some angry feedback on that, but overwhelmingly the users loved it. Our game hovered around a 92% approval rating. I even got fan art! I think I’ll always look on that period as an absolute highlight of my career. I shifted industries to renewable energy driven by a personal mission to work on a greater cause. It’s B2B so I’m back in the familiar place of having users who I imagine would rather be doing something else than using our product. If my work means they get to spend less time at their computers then I’m happy.

birdfood

3 maanden geledendiscuss

These companies pirated their training material and reached settlements with the copyright holders. I imagine they’d do the same with software licenced under Not For Training terms too. It’d be up to you to find out it is happening and then pursue them legally for compensation.

birdfood

4 maanden geledendiscuss

I have a couple of hives of the local native tetragonula stingless bee in my yard. It does feel quite special to see them foraging and returning laden with various brightly coloured balls of pollen on their legs. I’ve managed to propagate two hives, one I split and gave to my children’s kindy, the other started from a swarm which attacked one of my hives. I read that if you move the hive and put an empty one in its place the swarm might colonise it and that is exactly what happened and a friend now has that one. We also get a lot of blue banded bee and teddy bear bees in our garden. It’s comparatively uncommon to see a honey bee.

birdfood

4 maanden geledendiscuss

These companies are telling us software development is over. They are positioning themselves as the means of production. You want to build anything you do it through them. And since ‘software is solved’ this is not a software but a user acquisition.

birdfood

4 maanden geledendiscuss

I was in the same boat as you until I saw DHH post about how he’s changed his use of agents. In his talk with Lex Fridman his approach was similar to mine and it really felt like a kernel of sanity amongst the hype. So when he said he’s changed his approach I had another look. I’m using agents (Claude code) every day now. I still write code every day too. (So does Dax Raad from OpenCode to throw a bit more weight behind this stance). I’m not convinced the models can own a production code base and that therefore engineers need to maintain their skills sufficiently to be responsible. I find agents helpful for a lot of stuff, usually heavily patterned code with a lot of prior art. I find CC consistently sucks at writing polars code. I honestly don’t enjoy using agents at all and I don’t think anyone can honestly claim they know how this is going to shake out. But I feel by using the tools myself I have a much stronger sense of reality amongst the hype.

birdfood

10 maanden geledendiscuss

I’m building a journaling app primarily for myself but with a view that others might want to use it to. I’ve built it in rails and deployed it. The experience has been great and it’s the first “app” I’ve deployed outside of work. But I haven’t shared it with anyone because I don’t want to be responsible for hosting their data considering the intention of this app. The only “business model” (method of covering costs) I’m interested in is pay to use. I don’t want to do ads or tracking. I think saas is the wrong fit for it. So I’m just this week thinking about making it a macOS / iOS app instead and work out how to do syncing without involving a server.

birdfood

10 maanden geledendiscuss

I think a good, related example to your point is the “2 watched literals” algorithm used in SAT solvers. It uses lazy evaluation to significantly improve the speed of the SAT solver. I implemented an SAT solver a couple of years ago just for learning and when it came to refactoring my code to implement the 2 watched literal I had what felt like a moment of recognition of the cumulative time and effort of many people working in this field of research that it must have taken to arrive at this design. It’s just such an elegant implementation that to me seems it can only have come from deeply understanding the theory and implementation of SAT solvers.

birdfood

3 jaar geledendiscuss

https://gleam.run is a statically typed language on the BEAM

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