Recent submissions

Comment · 17 days ago
Comment · 18 days ago
When I'm using an LLM to program these days, I increasingly feel like I'm directing one of those renaissance-era painting schools that were sort of like painting-factories, where some Great Master would direct the output of a dozen or more painting-technicians to construct unreasonably-large and detailed paintings on unreasonably-brief time-scales.

They would still come in at the end of the day to add their brush strokes to pieces of the canvas that they thought needed extra attention. We still refer to those paintings as if they were made by the Great Master, and justly so because their artistic imprint is felt in the final work.

In the same way where if you and I were asked to write the same game with an LLM, they would come out looking pretty distinct from each other. And if we wrote them by hand, they would be distinct from each other and the LLM-assisted ones again. All of them are still art and games, though, it'd be silly to call them anything else.

I agree with you that polish and fine-tuning is faster to do by hand when you are well-appraised of the foundations. I think a lot of the challenge of developing Real Software with LLMs today is maintaining the appropriate proximity to the work, when we are no longer holding the paint brush ourselves, so to speak.

Comment · 18 days ago
We were discussing this classic at work today...

How do you all think LLM-assisted coding has interacted with the thesis of this deck?

This is perhaps in contrast to this recent blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-con...

In normal times, choosing to roll your own source control would be akin to spending all your innovation tokens at once. Obviously, Anthropic is now a google-esque corporation so they have many tokens to spend. But one of the implications of that blog post is that non-google-esque corporations may now actually have more innovation tokens than we had previously.

Curious what the wisdom of the HN crowd thinks!

Comment · 18 days ago
I can confirm! I have an eARC setup with an AppleTV, 2 big homepods, a gaming PC and a projector.

I had to buy a special HDMI switch because my projector is eARC-naive, but my understanding is that a lot of modern TVs are eARC-aware and a special switch is not required. The one downside to my setup is that I have to press a button on the HDMI switch to toggle between the PC and the AppleTV, no remote control, but hey it's good to stretch your legs now and then right?

Re audio quality, I really like my big HomePods and find they fill the room quite well and have a solid low range to them. I'd also agree that the HomePod Minis are not suitable for a living room entertainment experience.

Comment · 19 days ago
Just be wary that if your app is a high-write-throughput or high-update-frequency system, this is not a free lunch!

The indices will bloat in size (postgres does not vacuum them in the way a table is vacuumed), and begin to bottleneck primary writer latency.

You should repack the indices every once in a while (you can set up monitors on index bloat) with something like pg_repack, and make sure that your indices are minimally-sized (i.e. omit rows that are never scanned, use pg_stat to verify which indices are actually used by the primary or read-replicas).

Comment · 20 days ago
There’s this really quirky and interesting book on this topic, called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Basically this (totalitarian agriculture genociding alternative cultures) has happened everywhere and his thesis is that the total extermination aspect in particular is a novel aspect of farming culture, which did not exist for hunter-gatherers or herders. Not that violence didn’t exist, but exterminating violence was very rare.

He also connects it to the founding myths of Adam and Eve (who are cursed to practice agriculture, instead of being hunter-gatherers, and who believe they have the power of good and evil to know what plants and animals should live and which should die), and Cain (who sacrifices wheat, representing agriculture and land ownership) and Abel (who sacrifices a goat, representing a herding lifestyle).

If that sounds at all interesting to you should totally read it, it’s a really clever book!

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
Founders swim in the incentive pool of VCs, who swim in the incentive pool of LPs, who swim in the incentive pool of capital-c Capital.

When you architect your industry around "number goes up" as the number one priority that everybody agrees on, and then add multiple layers of abstraction separating capital from labor, you end up with the Ouroboros-style arrangement we have today. The head forgets that it is the tail, and vice-versa.

I think we used to (in, idk, the era of the Roosevelts) have a very different leadership class, with competing interests that were more complicated than "number go up", even in the corporate class.

Since the Kennedy assassination(s!) in the US, I don't think we've had a single leader (corporate or political) who has publicly and sincerely questioned that narrative. At this point we struggle to imagine a civilization with alternative priorities, but history is littered with examples.

Comment · 2 months ago
Yes I tweaked it! The number and copy were mismatched and are no longer!

That worst day is likely an overlapping incidents accounting issue; I tried to account for overlapping incidents in another view but probably failed to port it over there.

Should be fixed soon!

Comment · 2 months ago
Hey! isgithubcooked.com is my site; I made this site in February '26, I think

The contribution graph as an outage calendar idea is a commonly recurring one :). I definitely saw it somewhere else as a static asset first before I made this site.

Comment · 2 months ago
Also, isn't it a major plot point that replicants are not allowed on Earth?

So Deckard being a replicant operating on Earth is illegal; making his status as a replicant "obvious", by endowing him with superhuman traits (or even self-knowledge) would be ill-advised!

Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that this project is ecologically beneficial or neutral (I think that part is beyond debate for many reasons including the noise pollution you've identified)

I was just trying to say that the marshland restoration stuff is likely not lip service, insofar as they actually do need wetland buffer zone to keep their launchpads above sea level.

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