blixt

Joined 15 years ago

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1,473
Submissions
310
Member since
Nov 7
https://blixt.me
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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 days ago
I always found Erlang (and Elixir) to be an interesting use case for this kind of agentic harness. It can run distributed across machines and can hot swap any function. It's order of magnitudes faster to update, and often easier to introspect and keep compatible over time.

I built something for this and also found that the idea of a "guardian" core that can detect misbehavior (crashing etc) and roll back a messed up state really helped. But it's a lot of work to get a harness to behave well, and each model reacts differently to the harness limitations, so I found more success in building a meta-harness instead (just run existing harnesses inside a common UI and inject all capabilities).

Comment · 22 days ago
I've programmed for 30 years so I'm probably mentally locked into thinking about the code underneath it all. But I never understood the details of the electrons moving around in the computer, and it took a long time to even consider what happened as my code trickled down the compiler/JIT, into the OS, down to the CPU.

I don't think it's productive to tell students today they must spend all their time understanding the code. Because it's clear now so many people will bypass that, even myself included. Some of the most fun I have with software these days is figuring out how to make it without looking at the code (for now on side projects only, see below).

I agree we're not quite all the way there yet to do this with large production systems. Yes, LLMs are highly fuzzy and non-deterministic things, but so are electrons! As computers improved we handled random bit flips that would occur due to a large number of unpredictable reasons. In either case, we have to reach a high enough confidence and redundancy bar that it doesn't hinder our productivity.

Raising confidence and redundancy in code output from LLM is still a nascent field. We're learning some things like "maybe unit tests don't work as well for LLMs as they did for humans", and "if the AI can self-evaluate in a loop against a factual number, it does a lot better".

But yeah, in this rapid wave of change I would consider "write the code yourself" more and more similar to "know how your CPU does branch prediction so your loops perform better", and the majority of our efforts will need to go into raising our confidence in this new fuzzy shape of software.

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
I was surprised to see my Homebrew consider my macOS a Tier 2 for using the very latest macOS version and Xcode version… But I think it's because I don't have Xcode 27.0, which is presumably releasing tomorrow?
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
Yeah the UX doesn't seem great, though I do think in general the AskQuestion tool is very awkward when it gets used in a very long running process (I personally use Claude to run repetitive tests to slowly iterate on a problem and verify in true conditions that it was solved), so I wouldn't like it without the auto-continue either.

(I had originally replied on safety of letting LLMs skip questions but I don't think that was your point so I removed it.)

Comment · 3 months ago
Then I apologize, it seemed to me you wrote that part, but I guess I was reading Claude output.
Comment · 3 months ago
So much attribution to malintent here, but most likely they're trying to build a product with the features that they themselves would use, and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question.

Furthermore, believing that the only thing saving you from disaster is Claude deciding to ask you a question is not a great conclusion either. You need guardrails in the power you bestow upon Claude from outside, not from inside.

Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude and has sentences like "Which cuts less far than it looks.", which I doubt Claude stopped to ask about.

Comment · 3 months ago
The biggest performance bomb you can have in your code is a loop that does something like

    for (...) {
        el.style.height = `${something}px`;
        whatever.value = el.style.offsetHeight;
    }
This forces the browser to recalculate layout multiple times in a single frame. Separating layout changing code from measurement code will help a lot here (most frameworks out there have solved this so we don't have to be too concerned about it though).
Comment · 3 months ago
I think I can see how dynamic data types make sense (eg flat key/value store), but my question would be:

What is least surprising? That INTEGER implicity accepts 'hello world' without error, or that you can't insert such a value unless you use a keyword like NONSTRICT or a type like ANY?

I would wager the vast majority of SQLite users if asked would probably not expect it to work.

Comment · 4 months ago
I tried running this for some market research for my startup and it did a pretty nice job. It didn't necessarily find any obscure data, and it seemed to rely on older data than what I could find myself. On top of this, it had the same sycophantic tendencies as most LLMs these days (explaining why your idea is great and riffing on that), which I find to be unnecessary use of resources.

All put together, paying ~$60 to get a hit-or-miss report seems a bit excessive, but obviously as the models they use under the hood get better it becomes more and more worth it, assuming they also improve their grounding/search capabilities.

I'm a big fan of Sakana though, and have followed David Ha / @hardmaru since the world models papers (with the racing car game and the Doom clone), which were incredible at the time.

Comment · 4 months ago
JWTs are fine, seems a bit sensationalist title...

Some nice topics to talk about instead:

- When to use an encrypted value (and symmetric or asymmetric), vs. a random (but secret) value, vs. a signed value (readable but not tamperable)

- Where to put these values (memory, localStorage, cookies)

- How to make sure these values don't last forever, and whether you need to be able to revoke them (make them invalid before their natural expiration timestamp)

Comment · 4 months ago
In short, it lets you switch between all your Claude accounts seamlessly and will automatically pick the one with the most usage left.

I've been using the c, cw, and cr shortcuts for a long time but today I wished to switch to another account and wanted to keep the simplicity so I built this.

It's been mostly coded by Fable 5, with strong guidance by me. I've vetted the code and made sure the code it executes is readable in one file and that domain is secured, script is checksummed, project is open source, etc. but as always use your judgment and double check what you download from the internet!

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