alloyed

iirc, it's a consumer co-op. So think of it as a vote of all users willing to pay for the membership to the service, who (correspondingly) are more likely to be power users/"activist" in the "activist investor" sense.

This can be contrasted with a private company, which will often have a "activist investor", the actual owner!

yep! 90% of the time if i have a question about a project there's a discussions tab that can take my question with a nearly identical interface to stack overflow's, and I can be reasonably sure there will be contributors or maintainers who will see it. Not much point to stack overflow as a second, silo'd site in that world

the point is well-taken, but i do want to show the bash version just for fun:

    podman image ls --all | sed 's/\s\s\+/\t/g' | tee >(head -n 1) >(tail -n +2 | sort -hrk 5) >/dev/null

this is _still_ all text, and we're relying heavily on sort to do a bunch of internal parsing and be in agreement with podman about how sizes should be formatted. also, for "real world" work, i dunno if the tee trick here has any kind of order guarantees, just that it works fine in this case. I'd probably just end up dropping the header and living with worse output in reality

silly question: what's "world" about what's being generated here? is the an actual abstract representation of physical space (like, eg, a game-engine style scene graph?) or does it just mean "this video generator is more coherent physically than other video generators"

So, in my professional work environment, which is a complex C++ app with long build times and lots of proprietary domain-specific knowledge, LLMs were worse than useless. Not totally surprising, but I originally had hopes for something like Cursor being useful in terms of simplifying the process of large mechanical refactors, which it decidedly wasn't. It could suggest interesting and complex uses of C++ templates, but its application were very slop-adjacent, and even for less complex refactors it would attempt and fall apart in the "check" part of the "guess and check" loop, probably because of the whole "long build times" thing. So we're still paying for visual assist and just wishing it had more (and more specific!) kinds of mechanical refactors available.

for personal projects (more polyglot but rust, js, python, and random shell scripts are bigger and more important here) it's been more mixed to positive; and this is (i think?) in part because i have the luxury of writing off things I'm _not actually_ interested in doing. maintaining cmake files sucks, and the free tier of Cursor does a good enough job of it. I have a few small plugins/extensions for things like blender, and again, I don't know enough to do a good job there, and the benefit of making something extremely specific to what i need without actually knowing what's going on under the hood works fine: I can just verify the results, and that's good enough. but then, conversely, it's made it _wayyyy_ harder to pick and verify third party libraries for the things i do care about? I'll look something up and it'll either be 100% AI vibe coded and not good enough to sneeze at, or it'll be fine, but the documentation is 100% AI generated and likewise, I would rather just have the version of this library before AI ever existed.

more and more I'm convinced LLM agents are only fit for purpose for things that don't need to be good or consistent, but that there is actually a viable niche of things that don't need to be good that it can nicely slot into. That's still not worth $20/month to me, though. and it's absolutely ruining the online commons in a way that makes it hard to feel good about.

(my understanding of claude code is that it's a non-interactive agent, which is worse for what i have in mind. iteration and _changing my mind_ are a big part of my process, so even if I let the computer do its own thing for an hour and work on something else, that's less productive than spending even 10 minutes of focused time on the same thing.)

so i managed to convince my company to try solid on a new project, pretty much on the basis of "this looks like react but solves many of our existing problems with react". since the JSX and project structure is basically the same, we could take our (pretty tiny at the time) demo project and do a 1:1 diff and show the differences inline. and it was pretty compelling! the code was simpler, and faster, and we still got to keep lots of the unique patterns/other stuff we were used to when creating react apps

Probably the most equivalent existing open source thing out there is ENet, which doesn't do encryption or detailed stats. If you've signed the steam NDA (which is free of charge iirc) you can check out the existing docs for the closed source version, which has extra features on top of this.

What if you were the person who watched that show N times, and then saw that ad? It'd be a weird feeling, right?

The concern here is revenge-spam: someone takes your email and submits it to every mailchimp default form they can find automatically, and then your inbox is flooded with ostensibly legitimate email that you have to manually unsubscribe from, for each individual list.

I would say it's mostly a matter of use: In C you deal with void* or typecasts all the time, whereas in higher level languages it's much less common, either because the type system is smarter, or the constraints that it does have are more strictly enforced. For example: you can happily compare a char* and an int in C, but other languages like python might error at the thought.

If your intent is to improve the world, and not just act superior, I don't see what this accomplishes. Hear dissent without action long enough and it becomes noise.

it can still be an issue with memory even if it isn't as blatant as "out of memory".

The easy example being a datastructure growing over time and getting slower to manipulate and query. This is a problem where being cavalier with the amount of memory you allocate and use will hurt you, even if you've got lots of memory to spare.