nrclark

Joined 10 years ago

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2,694
Submissions
661
Member since
Feb 5
meet.hn/city/37.5872576,-122.0215737/Union-City
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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 days ago
That might be true for general consumers, yes. Not so true for software developers though. For developers, the tooling is definitely not a moat, and that means the models are what must differentiate.

Claude code is very polished, but I can get the same jobs done using Cursor CLI or any number of open-source coding harnesses (I like Pi, personally). Most plugins/skills/mcps are portable between harnesses with minimal or no effort.

I use the same skills, rules, and MCPs across claude code, cursor, and pi. My tools/plugins aren't identical between harnesses, but porting them from one to another is just a prompt away.

Comment · 21 days ago
LLM-driven programming doesn't necessarily imply slop. I know some very good developers that use LLMs carefully. As a research tool, code reviewer, Q&A about a large codebase, error message decoder, bug-hunter, and for first-pass implementations. They're always on the newest models and they care about the craft.

Not everybody is oneshotting with Sonnet medium and pushing unreviewable code.

Comment · 22 days ago
Another option is that it's affected by the order of consumption.

I know somebody who got really into blood glucose monitoring, and she tells me that the order in which she eats a meal affects how much it spikes her glucose. So if she eats a piece of toast followed by a piece of cheese, it causes her a bigger glucose spike than she'd get if she eats the cheese first and then the toast.

Looking at the two meals in the study: if I sat down to eat the processed one, I'd probably start with the veggie straws. If I saw down to eat the unprocessed one, I'd almost certainly start with the egg or the cheese.

edit: and here are some other options: I notice that the unprocessed one is grain-free, vegetarian and has significantly less sucrose. I don't know if any of that makes it more or less healthy, but they're significant differences nutritionally.

Comment · 1 month ago
As currently practiced, yes. Non-dividend non-voting shares might as well be pokemon cards. Their only real value lies in getting somebody else to buy them, and new money has to flow in from the outside. The question isn't "will it collapse?", it's "when?"
Comment · 1 month ago
I think the GKI initiative is great, personally. I've worked with chip companies that are super-resistant to upstreaming their code, and just give me a fork-of-a-fork of the kernel and kind of say "welp, good luck maintaining that unless you pay us".

I don't love how much control Google is exerting over Android, and I don't love having to use their signed kernel. But I do prefer that vs. being stuck on an abandoned vendor kernel. If I have to accept low-quality proprietary kernel code, I'd rather keep it in small module-shaped boxes.

Companies like Qualcomm complain about this, but their historical practices are what drove Google to mandate it in the first place.

Comment · 1 month ago
How open will the boot stack be for this chip? Qualcomm has historically been pretty bad about this: mandatory closed-source bootloaders, mandatory closed-source hypervisors, mandatory closed-source TEEs, forked UEFI, etc.

An open Linux is hobbled without the rest of the stack.

Comment · 2 months ago
Yes, that's normal for an Android build. Maybe even on the lightweight side as far as build requirements. I agree that it's an absurd about of space.
Comment · 2 months ago
Same for me.
Comment · 3 months ago
oh, no that wasn't a correction - it was a pun because "cooked" in American slang means "broken / destroyed / over". In parent's context, "boiling" is correct.

"Boiling" does have a few meanings in English. As a verb, it can either mean "cook in boiling liquid", or it can mean "heat a liquid to its boiling-point". As an adjective, it means "heated to boiling-point". Also "boiling angry" means very, very angry.

Comment · 3 months ago
Cooked.
Comment · 3 months ago
That's around 100k/year if used at the same rate for every workday. So the question becomes: does it make your engineer X% more productive, where X is some multiplier based on their salary? There are some software engineers out for sure who are expensive enough that this is worth it.
Comment · 4 months ago
I don't see this happening any time in the near future. The extra hardware cost is nontrivial, and there's a software support burden. Cellular bandwidth also isn't free, and probably wouldn't be covered by the value of any ads/telemetry that it carried.
Comment · 4 months ago
OK, but SpaceX is not printing money out of thin air. And neither does the stock market. Somebody will be left holding the bag eventually.
Comment · 4 months ago
> Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture.

Highly subsidized? I have to assume you're not talking about America. I pay $3200/mo to send my kids to a very middle-of-the-road preschool. That's almost $40k/year just in childcare costs so that my wife and I can go to work. The difference between a 1-bedroom apartment and a 3-bedroom apartment is an extra $20k/yr or so in my area. Then there's health care premiums, taking them out for activities sometimes, etc.

I can ballpark the cost of having preschoolers in my area as $30k/yr each. And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly see any government subsidies helping me carry that burden.

Comment · 5 months ago
PEGs are a great replacement for a complicated regex, and can express a lot of things that are hard to do with a regex. But they're also more verbose, and fewer developers are familiar with their usage. PCRE regex is kind of the lingua franca of text-matching, and making it available would be helpful for newcomers imo.

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