birdfood · HackerTrans

25 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

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 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

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 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

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 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

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 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

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 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

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 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

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 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

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 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

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 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

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

11 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I certainly can’t say whether this is idiomatic as I was working it all out myself. But I’d basically write a type for each operation (as I’d read elsewhere). And honestly this was a bit of a drag too. I really wanted some reflection to make generating this code more ergonomic. From memory I’d have types like these

Author id: int, name: string, book_id: int

NewAuthor name: string, book_id: int

ViewAuthor name: string, book_title: string

Author represents the data in the db, NewAuthor allows for an insert operation, and ViewAuthor is for showing the data to a user.

You could argue for combing Author and NewAuthor and making id optional but I wanted to enforce at the type level that I was working with stored data without needing to check id everywhere.

birdfood

11 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

OCaml is probably my favourite language.

The most involved project I did with it was a CRUD app for organising Writer's Festivals.

The app was 100% OCaml (ReasonML so I could get JSX) + Dream + HTMX + DataTables. I used modules to get reusable front end templates. I loved being able to make a change to one of my data models and have the compiler tell me almost instantly where the change broke the front end. The main value of the app was getting data out of excel into a structured database, but I was also able to provide templated and branded itineraries in .odt format, create in memory zipped downloads so that I didn't need to touch the server disk. I was really impressed by how much I could achieve with the ecosystem.

But having to write all my database queries in strings and then marshal the data through types was tiring (and effectively not compile time type checked) and I had to roll my own auth. I often felt like I was having to work on things that were not core to the product I was trying to build.

I've spent a few years bouncing around different languages and I think my take away is that there is no perfect language. They all suck in their own special way.

Now I'm building an app just for me and I'm using Rails. Pretty much everything I've wanted to reach for has a good default answer. I really feel like I'm focused on what is relevant to the product I'm building and I'm thinking about things unrelated to language like design layout and actually shipping the thing.

birdfood

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

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

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