aledevv

Yes, I do semantic chunk to better split the text into coherent chunks. I even use Llamaparse api (by Llamaindex) to parsing any type of documents, images or imported study material, with a very high quality results. Llamaparse is great!

Artificial intelligence can do more every day, but deciding what it should do is up to us

For artificial intelligence to benefit from distributed knowledge, it must itself be distributed.

I wish to highlight these two important concepts, with which I fully agree.

Artificial intelligence must enable all of humanity to excel and realize its full potential; it must not be used for the purposes of war, economic competition, or gaining dominance over others.

In other words: artificial intelligence must serve natural intelligence, not the other way around.

if you control the ideas of your software, looking at the code itself is suboptimal and often pointless.

This requires developers to have absolute and unconditional Trust in the LLM. It's not easy to trust it completely to the point of completely ignoring the implementation details of the code.

In one of Salvatore's discussions, he mentioned that he hasn't even opened a single file of DS4. This is a courageous choice.

But the real question is: if the younger generation stops writing code, how are they supposed to develop that "forma mentis" (mindset) that allows them to reason about design and architecture? It's only by *writing* the code that you gradually internalize development and design patterns, specifically by clashing with the "brutality" of bugs and solving implementation problems.

P.S. I read Wohpe. It's fascinating how back in 2022 (I think?) Salvatore already wrote down many insights that have actually come true (including, for instance, the ban on "strong artificial intelligence"...). So I suppose that the future will touch the very development of humanity (like the Genesi project :) )

Loving the homage to the Whole Earth Catalog. The pivot from "infinite growth and optimization" to "computing within limits" and permacomputing is becoming less of a fringe philosophy and more of a practical necessity.

As hardware recycling and e-waste become bigger challenges, projects like the Damaged Earth Catalog remind us that modern software bloat is a choice, not an inevitability. We need more focus on resilient, low-power, and maintainable tech stacks.

“Children will be given back their childhoods,”

As a parent, I completely agree. We need to protect children from the dangers of the completely uncontrolled "jungle" of social media. But above all, we need to give children back the right to experience a true, real childhood, made up of true friends, fresh air, friendships, and real relationships!

If you are a junior developer, “learn SQL properly” is the most valuable 40 hours you can spend. Not a tutorial. Not an ORM. Actual SQL: joins, subqueries, window functions, query plans. That investment pays you back at every job, in every stack, for decades

This is the power of low-level reasoning.

Today, even for a junior developers, even if they have AI that solves syntax problems, SQL teaches you to reason and approach problems logically. Without any wrapper masking low-level logic.

It's something like the letters of the alphabet that form concepts: why should they change?

..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature.

Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that:

what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible.

What exactly is the "adaptive dynamic textbook approach"?

Examples?

Generation effect: Accepting generated code and decreasing generating one's own code can skip the active processing that builds understanding.

Holy truth.

The lower the baseline trust, the more sensitive people become to reputation signals.

This is the key: a person's reputation and the writer's responsibility.

But how will we learn to become sensitive to these social reputation signals?

For most of human history, access to a great education has been a function of where you were born and how much money your family had, and of a parents social class.

The best teachers, the best tutors, the best learning resources, they’ve always been concentrated in a small number of places and available to a small number of people.

In my opinion, the AI has the potential to genuinely disrupt that.

The direction of travel is toward a world where a kid in a rural area with a smartphone has access to a quality of personalized instruction that would have been unimaginable only one generation ago.

I added 5-inch floppies and floppy disks, very very vintage.

During the 40 years since the disaster, it has become clear that many species are living quite happily within the 37-mile-wide (60km) exclusion zone set up around the ruined power plant. But that's not to say nature hasn't changed here – sometimes for the worse.

So.. the radiations has had virtually no impact on the natural ecosystem's regrowth?

Not only... we've always been told about the disastrous consequences of nuclear radiation, but, according to the BBC article (by Chris Baraniuk), that's not the case.

I don't know... I'm quite perplexed.

All of these features are about breaking the coupling between a human sitting at a terminal or chat window and interacting turn-by-turn with the agent.

This means:

- less and less "man-in-the-loop"

- less and less interaction between LLMs and humans

- more and more automation

- more and more decision-making autonomy for agents

- more and more risk (i.e., LLMs' responsibility)

- less and less human responsibility

Problem:

Tasks that require continuous iteration and shared decision-making with humans have two possible options:

- either they stall until human input

- or they decide autonomously at our risk

Unfortunately, automation comes at a cost: RISK.

Only vintage-style images?

If they put a pricing page, I think there would be someone who would buy it, especially nowadays when with embedded llms there is a huge hunger for RAM (as well as CPU). :))

2027. Just-in-time built software and hardware.

also and above all because it can be easily manipulated, as the research explained in the article actually demonstrates

Yes, you're right, but popularity becomes fleeting without real quality behind the projects.

Hype helps raise funds, of course, and sells, of course.

But it doesn't necessarily lead to long-term sustainability of investments.

VCs explicitly use stars as sourcing signals

In my opinion, nothing could be more wrong. GitHub's own ratings are easily manipulated and measure not necessarily the quality of the project itself, but rather its Popularity. The problem is that popularity is rarely directly proportional to the quality of the project itself.

I'm building a product and I'm seeing what important is the distribution and comunication instead of the development it self.

Unfortunately, a project's popularity is often directly proportional to the communication "built" around it and inversely proportional to its actual quality. This isn't always the case, but it often is.

Moreover, adopting effective and objective project evaluation tools is quite expensive for VCs.

All "access control" logic lived in the JavaScript on the client side, meaning the data was literally one command away from anyone who looked

This is the top!

This is a typical example of someone using Coding Agents without being a developer: AI that isn't used knowingly can be a huge risk if you don't know what you're doing.

AI used for professional purposes (not experiments) should NOT be used haphazardly.

And this also opens up a serious liability issue: the developer has the perception of being exempt from responsibility and this also leads to enormous risks for the business.

On 4th example photo the model says:

They likely share an agnostic worldview and identify as heterosexual.

I wonder how the model would know that they are heterosexuals?

let's be careful about categorizing people so easily and in such a simplistic way.

I propose a further and different "key to understanding."

I would add: the second thing to decide, besides the scale, is the Plan.

What do we mean, for example, by the "Ethical Plan." By ethical plan, I mean the purpose... "WHAT do I use mathematics for"?

Mathematics can be something immensely BIG if I use it for something important. Or it can be miserably SMALL if I use it for something petty and trivial.

In short: even in this case, greatness depends not only on the scale, but also on the eyes of the beholder, on the Context in which it is applied, and, why not?, also on the Purpose and the ethical plan.

If mathematics were, for example, something at the service of Justice, it would be something immensely Big.

I'm working on a AI RAG (retrieval augmented generation) system: https://longtermemory.com

It's a tool that use QDrant, a vectorial db, to embedding the texts chunks: LLM api is questioned to generate the Q&A pairs from a chunked texts.

Each chunk is then embedded and stored in the vectorial db to facilitate the Q&A generation, thanks to better context informations.

This tool helping people to study everything thanks to even Spaced Repetition algorithm.

If a single writer handles batches of writes (or reads!), build each batch greedily: Start the batch as soon as data is available, and finish when the queue of data is empty or the batch is full.

..prioritize observability before optimization. You can't improve what you can't measure. Before applying any of these principles, define your SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs so you know where to focus and when to stop.

These principles apply not only to individual applications, but also to all systems as a whole. The single-writer principle improves performance both when writing/reading large databases and when reading/writing to RAM. Where input/output is intensive, performance improves even further.

Commit count by month, for the entire history of the repo. I scan the output looking for shapes. A steady rhythm is healthy. But what does it look like when the count drops by half in a single month?

Let's NOT jump to conclusions; it could mean many things. For example, a period with other priorities, different urgencies, other issues external to the project itself and beyond our control, vacations, illnesses, or anything else that could impact the commit history.

I think these considerations and the others expressed in this article can easily lead to hasty conclusions and erroneous deductions, too simplistic.

Coding flow, like business needs, cannot always be objectively and deterministically measured.

The shed is where you take the blueprints you learned on the job and actually get to play with them.

You try something in the shed on a weekend because you’re curious. You learn the tradeoffs, the rough edges, the things the documentation doesn’t tell you. Then months later, when the team at work is evaluating that same tool or approach, you’re not starting from zero.

These are two opposing concepts, but both True and complementary.

Working for clients (or companies) and home-based side projects are two sides of the same coin and complement each other. What must drive you, in both cases, is curiosity and the passion to do something useful.

My dream is to be able to turn a home-based project into something that generates income. My goal is to have the freedom to work on what I love and on a useful and profitable project of my own.

@teruakohatu Some example of manual labor well payed in your country? In Italy, sometime manual labors are more safe than others not manual jobs.

This is because often the rules and laws protects still human instead the profits.

@sdevonoes What do you do for work?

ps: Unfortunately I agree with you.

Doing a day of manual labour, chatting shit, then going for the onsen and some BBQ and beers is far better than grinding away at some enterprise SaaS that will probably disappear in a few years.

I particularly agree with this statement.

I don't know why manual work has been so denigrated over the last century. We believed that office labor was more important and healthier than manual labor. I don't think so.

As a developer, sitting all day typing in a stuffy office, without natural light, without sun, without air, is certainly no healthier than being outdoors, connecting with nature and other people. We come from nature and are made to be active, outdoors, and in the sunlight.

Today, with AI, many white-collar jobs are being called into question, and perhaps we can go back to loving certain traditional jobs.

Some beloved features have very shaky engineering indeed, and many features that failed miserably were built like cathedrals on the inside.

What's under the hood, the people who use the product, don't care.

Customers, and ultimately companies as well, only care that the product works, is maintainable over the long term, and is bug-free.

Cathedrals in the desert are useless, and over-engineering only complicates things when there's no need yet.

I've also seen several successful projects that were actually quite weak behind the scenes, but they were simple and functional.