MattyRad

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
991
Submissions
328
Member since
Nov 20
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/mattyrad; my proof: https://keybase.io/mattyrad/sigs/1nYbS5ky7IQ8SxeqZpSSj45InSWlD7JGECaAaANJixI ]

HackerSmacker profile: https://www.hackersmacker.org/user/MattyRad?hs=NChLQiGlinD7bO90qe

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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 day ago
This is very disappointing, I've been on Proton for a long time and just assumed a "high trust non-Google" email provider implicitly had integrity. Knowing that they're scummy almost defeats the purpose of using it for me.
Comment · 19 days ago
Is it groundhog day? I'm sure I've seen this article at least as early as 2 years ago. My RSS feed is just the same cycle:

- New model released, this changes everything (plus thumb scaled metrics to prove it)

- LLMs kinda suck

- The bubble will burst any day now

- Are Plinko machines conscious?

- LLMs kinda rule

- Tech companies doing unethical things

- Someone discovers that, surprise, agents work better when given context (skills! mcp! monorepo! etc)

- Slop that successfully conned its audience and got past the filters

- And so on

This particular article is slop that got past the filters. See the title, see the jargon, see the insufferableness, see the total lack of narrative structure.

I guess that means we're due for a new model pretty soon.

Comment · 19 days ago
Moreover, the parent comment linked to a decent PR presumably human made. If an LLM had written the PR, its description would be 9 paragraphs long and the code changes full of assinine comments.

If the author really did one-shot the PR, then the author must have also put in the extremely detailed and tedious work which would be required to tame LLM output for this specific repo, in which case, they actually put in real effort, applyed expertise and thoughtfulness, which is the whole issue at hand.

Comment · 20 days ago
I agree with what I think you're implying, but if it needs to be started explicitly: converting a 100% handwritten, high quality repo to an different language via LLM should be trivial, because all of the hard parts have been reasoned through, and yet these conversions had mistakes, which is unimpressive. Rectifying the mistakes is non-trivial, and the LLMs did not have foresight to rectify them in advanced. (Expectant "you're right, I [sic] did completely fuck that up")

That said, I don't know if it matters at this point.... On top of Brandolini's law (mentioned elsewhere), what's more likely to happen is that developers' intellect, made available in open source, is just going to be harvested as context for different projects (I'm not taking about training data, I'm taking about devs literally cloning repos into an agent to harvest intellect).

Comment · 21 days ago
This is a pattern which I hope manifests more observably in industries and hiring. Right now, tech postings tend to be a litany of arcana and hyper-specific tech. Developers rarely, if ever, have to understand domain knowledge x. But if we were able to "fan out" to "x tech enhancer" which requires 50% x domain knowledge and 50% tech knowledge, that sounds like it could be an effective position all around.

I see two issues with this however, which probably need to be addressed somehow:

- 1 is that, similar to tech, the positions may be seen as cush/low-effort... Like they did half the real work and are going to phone in the rest with LLMs. (Maybe this is already an existential problem, idk.)

- 2 is that domain knowledge is still difficult to aquire... (which may affect whether this manifests, not necessarily that older engineers like myself can jump in)

Nevertheless, if the pattern of dual expertise were to become common, it could open up a lot of opportunities, and is a positive vision of the future, which I think we pretty desperately need.

Comment · 25 days ago
Ok, so 78% of developers are unsatisfied... I had to search for it because their link to 2025 was broken :/ but looks like last year it was ~75%, so ~3% increase in unhappy/complacent.... Not as high as I'd anticipated. And 2024 didn't appear to track the stat.
Comment · 26 days ago
The internet is now a token cache, and we reap those tokens into agents, ethics be damned.
Comment · 27 days ago
I just used 5.5 xhigh reasoning to make a massive implementation spec (for a vibey throwaway project/exploration, not anything important, burned 80% of the 5h window), now my Strix is in the process of implementing it.

I think there's probably low-hanging fruit to outsource reasoning from rote read/writes.... Just speculation though, I'm not a token optimization expert.

Comment · 1 month ago
`npm...` and then instant tab close. The total lack of self-awareness regarding how much they're asking us to infect our toolchain is hilarious. I mean, consider that agents can and should be containerized.... Like, that's what competent engineers- the target audience- are doing. It's just so completely tone-deaf.
Comment · 1 month ago
Yeah, the city search got cut off on mobile. Vibey and janky, but still it's a pretty creative idea.

I would have been very impressed if it made pixel art for cities on demand. If I were able to put in my hometown and see a delightful pixel art memory, I'd swoon and point to it and say "wow wee LLMs are pretty dope aren't they", but instead I'm just thinking this is yet another shallow project which will be abandoned tomorrow.

Comment · 1 month ago
I smirked at the opening joke. But yeah, in true SNL fashion, it's toothless. In this case, they repeated the same joke, with a bunch of nonsequiters. Pretty typical.

SNL has never been funny, at least not in my adulthood. For instance, I got chummed by YouTube, and hooked into watching Tiny Horse, which was embarrassing for both the actors and viewers alike. The the skits play like pre-recorded improv.

Comment · 1 month ago
I just skipped to a random part, 41:47, where the speaker is talking about the chasm of the old and the new, the before and the after, and our acceptance of the new status quo.

These match my own thoughts exactly. As much as I don't love them, I agree with the speaker.

For Factorio players: we used to live in Nauvis. It was beautiful but sparse. Then we outgrew it and unwittingly found ourselves on Fulgora. It is abundant but trashy.

And just like in a game, the rules changed and we adapt. That's what makes the game fun. Granted, that it's all our livelihoods on the line (very high stakes), but all things being equal, we have new challenges in front of us that we can either bemoan or accept.

Comment · 1 month ago
> The hard part of software becomes ... user-interface design.

Seems to undercut some of its own claims, the idea that we need to design interfaces for end users is already antiquated.

Comment · 1 month ago
Yeah the homepage toplines are pure vibeslop, they didn't even bother touching their own homepage. Trust is instantly vacated. Next.

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