hiq

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
2,459
Submissions
1,176
Member since
Dec 23
https://qhibon.com

Opinions my own, etc.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 18 days ago
I find it hard to believe that Anthropic couldn't have similarly impressive results if they tried. I'm honestly not sure it's worth it though, it's mostly marketing, right? But given how easy it is to switch from one provider to another, why would you choose the model that solved a Millenium problem, instead of the one that solves *your* problems?

I understand that it's still useful marketing, say for IPO or hiring, but it's not clear to me that it really matters in the long-term that they fund this out of their pocket.

Comment · 18 days ago
Not all merges are equal, even if it's a monorepo, it's probably rare that you'd have to look at the whole codebase to implement a new feature or find the root cause of a bug. Once you start looking at the history of a specific folder, it becomes more tractable.

Of course that does require some folder structure, and agents are not necessarily great at that, but they're still decent enough that you do end up with many folders not being impacted hour or even daily.

Comment · 18 days ago
Maybe it's all about how often we encounter the quirks of specific model? Or simply that one's way to prompt triggers more annoyances with a model than another?

I'd be curious to see if people have managed to just add custom instructions to make the outputs more standardized and less annoying. I never have such annoying cases, whatever the model, it's just too verbose, but in this case I ask it to be more concise and it's usually fine.

Comment · 2 months ago
I didn't know about this limitation from openrouter, and I thought plenty of users were using it to quickly switch as needed without incurring such a penalty. Why does there seem to be so many users then? Are some folks just fine paying multiples of what they could?
Comment · 3 months ago
I think you're referring to covered calls, but you can sell naked calls as well, meaning without owning the underlying.
Comment · 3 months ago
I'm honestly surprised, almost disappointed, that Claude couldn't reduce this 4% to way less.
Comment · 3 months ago
Regarding the multi-tasking induced by this new way of working (agentic coding), I've moved from quick and short iterations to a longer ideally one-shot prompt, optimizing for less reviewing and less context switching.

I used to send a prompt as early as possible, meaning that'd really just give the rough idea, barely a sentence, and see what the model would come up with, thinking that I'd save time if it got it right for the first time, and maybe I'd just need to correct what it got wrong (it's faster at typing than me). That means a lot of multitasking at a rather high pace, which takes its toll if you do it for too long.

I've recently switched to writing longer prompts (doing part of the planning myself), hoping to get better results and to have less to review: I'm realizing I'd rather write more and read less, past a certain threshold. I don't really want to iterate with an agent; I want to tell it, maybe in somewhat verbose terms, what I want, I want a quick confirmation that it'll indeed work, and I want the final output (e.g. a commit), that's it.

That's probably what some users have been doing since the beginning, but with all the hype around this tech, maybe I got caught by this idea that with just a few words, I can get stuff done. In my experience, it's indeed just a few words, but for useless units of work (iterations with a model) rather than what I really want (commit) which itself will often require non-trivial amount of input. In this case, I'd rather give it all in one go, in a somewhat focused state.

Comment · 4 months ago
So a 2h ride? Was it easy to find a driver?
Comment · 4 months ago
Both of these are wrong.

Non-EU means it's harder to get a permit, especially without working experience, but it's not impossible either.

Housing is difficult in cities like Zurich but calling it impossible is stretching it, especially if one is fine with a longer commute.

Comment · 4 months ago
I would try to learn some new tech. Definitely not something you can do in a vacuum with no goal for months in a corporate setting, but e.g. learning more about a programming language you already use, or some libraries, some tooling, you can easily spend a few weeks.

After that, yes it'd make sense to find something else.

Comment · 4 months ago
Not sure what you mean by spec and design, but around me, that's always been paid more than simply coding. If you have a clean technical spec that's detailed enough, the code naturally flows and is often left to more junior engineers, with more senior folks reviewing the code but rarely writing it.
Comment · 5 months ago
On which operating system? That wouldn't surprise me on Android, a bit more on other platforms (and worth filing an issue).
Comment · 5 months ago
Same here, music is too important for me to give up this kind of control. I probably miss out on the discovery system of streaming services, but there are enough other sources (e.g. radio paradise).
Comment · 5 months ago
I sure envy you if this qualifies as "catastrophic", because hard drive can and do fail.
Comment · 5 months ago
If "things go catastrophic" your hard drive is not usable at all anymore. At the very least some files can't be recovered at all. So you need backups in any case. Once you have backups, you might as well encrypt your hard drives, especially if you store these in different locations (which you should).

An advantage of encryption is that it makes it easier to give away or resell devices. With recent encryption schemes (well the ones on Linux, given this article), I feel confident that overwriting the encryption keys gets me close enough to not leaking my data once I get rid of an old hard drive.

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