scronkfinkle

Earlier this month I ordered some PCBs. Due to the tariffs OSH park was actually a viable competitor for small batch runs. I've also found them to be higher quality than PCB way

Let's say you have some case law, and to know if it's relevant you need to pull the primary law/codes and regulations .You also need to know when the correct versions of everything are, so the case law needs to resolve to the correct version of the correct piece of legislation. "What is an atomic unit of legislation?" is also fuzzy as amendments will both move and edit named blocks of legislation at once. It's a big messy very hard to track pile of moving targets, and you need to account for the temporal aspect while linking documents not only to the changes but also to documents at certain revisions. Standard git and other version control has trouble expressing many of these concepts, and while it could be hacked in, I have found it more effective to create a purpose-built tool for the job.

A lot of folks have been praising the harmony of Claude code + nixOS. For those of you doing this, I would recommend you to ask your agent to switch your config to nix flakes. It's a much better paradigm for working with the versioning than the default channels interface. Additionally, you should ask your agent to look into home manager, if it hasn't done so already.

I feel you're missing the point. AI has no impact on recreational programming, it's about satisfying your personal curiousities and interests. I'm currently hand rolling a database project in rust because I find writing rust is fun. If you're pausing to ask yourself "what's the use if you can just use AI" then you may not have liked programming intrinsically to begin with, but instead the second order effects it gave you.

> no output price listed

It's weird to think of these kinds of models as having "output tokens". Cross-encoder approaches like Laya add a [MASK] marker per option, but nothing is generated the way an autoregressive transformer generates. It's one bidirectional pass over your input, then a small head scores each option, so you wouldn't really pay for output as much as only input

Yes. JEV generalizes better because they probably have an enormous corpus and trained on it for a long time. Laya's out of the box model is much weaker. However, in the age of LLM's it's incredibly easy and cheap to generate large datasets to fine tune laya for your task, and the training loop is pretty quick and cheap too.

It's so easy that I question why I would ever pay for JEV when eventually I'll have done enough random things that I will also have a large corpus and likely a general model as well.

You're correct that writing code by hand has been heavily displaced by AI programming, but understanding how things work isn't really an "antiquated hobby" and this mentality causes a lot of people to incorrectly assume that latent knowledge of how to program is no longer useful.

It's still pretty undisputed that if you know how to write code, you can generate better AI code than someone who doesn't, and do it with less tokens. I think it's more like in university where in other engineering disciplines you learn the math and underlying concepts and are forced to do them by hand. This gives you an understanding of what you're doing, but in the real world you, ya know, just plug that stuff into matlab.

There is some sense of rose-tinted glasses of pre-LLM coding. A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before AI automated it.

I wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned the first couple paragraphs with pangram and it reported 100% AI, so you're probably correct.

I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I think it's something about these phrases being taken away from us more-so than the AI inventing them.

That's a valid take. The issue I'm wrestling with is the inevitable attempts to point a finger at who is responsible when bad things happen. If you claim it is on the tech companies to know if a child is online, then they will take the safest path for them by forcing ID verification in independent adhoc manners. This is what we are seeing now, and to me this is the worst situation. If you shift the responsibility more to the parents (this child was using a device that didn't send the `PARENT_CONTROL` flag, therefore we assumed they were an adult) it's a completely different conversation. Furthermore, if something happens to a child AND it's obvious from traffic logs that the platform willingly knew a child was being talked to, then that is also a completely different situation than the first.

Leaving it all completely deregulated and/or letting platforms implement it themselves to varying levels of success and personal invasion feels like the worst option to me.

I think you may be misunderstanding a bit. There's no forced verification. It'd be more of an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information. Or do you suspect that giving any ground will cause the ID verification and centralized behavior?

I once heard someone suggest that this should be on the OS level and I'm slowly coming around to the idea. There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device. No ID verification required, the parent is responsible for setting it, and all downstream applications are regulated to respect it, If applicable to the product. This removes the incredibly invasive ID verification, and places responsibility on the people responsible for the minor. Companies like meta then can be sued not for failing to detect children (this is, evidently, not working on any platform trying to enforce this currently), but instead can be judged in a black and white manner (i.e. is the child version of meta too predatory to children?)