rayxi271828

Many small oh shit moments, mostly of the variety of: "Oh shit, why am I still paying for this app subscription when I can vibecode it myself and just pay less than $1 per month in API costs, if even that?"

Overdramatic: when I saw friends and acquaintances doing this I couldn't help but feeling a slight sense of loss--that we (I) have lost the person.

At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.

The reason I value a person is the uniqueness of the person's brain's weights and biases. When I lose access to that and I get ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini weights and biases, isn't the person... essentially dead to me and the world?

It's a very unsettling thing to think about. What makes a person a person isn't the fact that the person's breathing air, eating food, copulating, defecating, but it's the person's wetware's weights and biases. Because without those, what is even this meat construct I'm talking to via WhatsApp?

Internal assessment of self-worth is one thing. But one thing that I noticed while I was between jobs, was that the rest of the world was also built under the assumption that you "had a job".

Sign up for financial anything, they always ask you, which company you're with? What's your title? What's the range of your income?

I don't know if this is the case in the US, but in my country, I couldn't even open a brokerage account because the automated form required an office job. Entering freelancing or anything of some sort will get auto-rejected.

So it is in your face, all the time. And actually at that time I was fortunate enough not to have to worry about bills etc.

I'm about a decade behind you, but I also started my programming career during the "good" COM/DCOM/MFC/ATL/ActiveX/CORBA days. Java just came out. I slept little during that time because truly, there was nothing like programming. It was the thing that pulled me awake in the morning, and pulled me from falling asleep at night. I was so spellbound, calling it Csikszentmihalyi's flow felt like it didn't do it justice.

Fast forward 30 years later, I thought those days were gone forever. I'd accepted that I'd never experienced that kind of obsession again. Maybe because I got older. Maybe those feelings were something exclusively for the young. Maybe because my energy wasn't what it used to be. Yada yada, 1000s of reasons.

I was so shocked when I found out that I could experience that feeling again with Claude Code and Codex. I guess it was like experiencing your first love all over again? I slept late, I woke up early, I couldn't wait to go back to my Codex and Claude. It was to the point I created an orchestrator agent so I could continue chatting with my containerized agents via Telegram.

"What a time to be alive" <-- a trite, meaningless saying, that was infused by real meaning, by some basic maths that run really, really, really fast, on really, really expensive hardware. How about that!

Thank you for the kind words! I had great fun implementing it. Robert Nystrom is such a hero for writing Crafting Interpreters.

I love how uv allows me to not think of all the options anymore.

virtualenv, venv, pyenv, pipenv... I think at one point the recommended option changed because it was integrated into Python, but I can't even remember which is which anymore.

Such a pleasure to finally have just one, for maybe... ~99% of my needs.

It’s quite the opposite for me.

The fun / creative part for me is not googling “how to slurp the contents of a file into a string” or “the exact syntax for marking some functions as unit tests” or “the correct order of symbols to specify generic type param”

It’s not “the correct html / css syntax for this basic gui I want to make”

It’s not “how to achieve the thing I’ve done 10 thousand times in other languages/frameworks, but for this language/framework”

It’s figuring the core logic out, building the thing while skipping the boring stuff, playing with abstractions that scratch my itch.

From this pov, AI is the best thing that has happened to my weekend coding. I code recreationally way more than before. Before AI, I would try a new language or framework, and I’d give up halfway because re-figuring out basic stuff for the umpteenth time is boring, it’s not fun at all. Now AI lets me skip those boring parts.

Wonder what I'm missing here. A smaller number of repetitive tasks - that's basically just simple coding + some RPA sprinkled on top, no?

Once you've settled down on a few well-known paths of action, wouldn't you want to freeze those paths and make it 100% predictable, for the most part?

I've been taking these rides 5-6 days a week, everywhere, and also in other countries outside the US. What I've come to realize is this: what matters to me the most is the consistency of the lowest bar of the experience.

I get that sometimes with human drivers, when I'm lucky, I get someone who goes above and beyond, someone who's fantastic to talk to along the way, and so on.

But if I can trade all that with a guarantee that there's a consistent, predictable floor to my worst experience, I'll take it in a heartbeat.

At the end of it, I take a ride to get from point A to point B. I'd rather have a machine does it for me very efficiently, without all the messy human element, with the ups and the downs, because it's the downs that ruin my day.

Pass the link to NotebookLM and get the podcast hosts to summarize it for you?

Men and women will have very different body fat percentage level for similar look. In general it's something like women's = men's +8-9%?

Wouldn't AI be worse at Rust than at C++ given the amount of code available in the respective languages?

As a teenager, I was fortunate that my Dad bought me a copy of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey.

Quote: Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able.” They don’t blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they can choose their behavior.

While it may be common sense/doh-so-obvious today, this was such a mind-blowing reframe for the teenage me back then, and it shaped me immeasurably as a person for the better, for the 30+ years that follow.