bcheung

Is there a way to use your Claude Max plan? I checked my token usage (ccusage) if I wasn't on a plan, and last month it would have been over $2000. This constraint prevents me from realistically considering alternatives to Claude Code.

The problem is the training corpus tends towards mediocre code. But with an agentic loop that analyzes the code against those criteria and suggests changes then I think it might be possible. I wouldn't try to get it to generate that right off the bat.

I wonder how many of these rules can be incorporated into a linter or be evaluated by an LLM in an agentic feedback loop. It would be nice to encourage code to be more like this.

I notice you didn't really talk much about types. When I think of proofs in code my mind goes straight to types because they literally are proofs. Richer typed languages move even more in that direction.

One caveat I would add is it is not always desirable to be forced to think through every little scenario and detail. Sometimes it's better to ship faster than write 100% sound code.

And as an industry, as much as I hate it, the preference is for languages and code that is extremely imperative and brittle. Very few companies want to be writing code in Idris or Haskell on a daily basis.

Yes, ADHD definitely seems to correlate with high openness and low conscientiousness. I've also found most self-help and productivity advice to be useless.

I've seen DISC and Kolbe used at companies I have been at. I've learned that I have a low tolerance for structure and work best on large projects with lots of unknowns and autonomy. Explains why I've always preferred startups over larger companies. Seems like few companies can accommodate ADHD people. It's a shame because once I'm focused and interested in a project I do incredible work. But the daily standup, pick something off the queue, weekly sprints don't seem to be the environment I thrive under. Ask me to build a big system or service and I can come back in a month and deliver something incredible.

This makes perfect sense. If people were getting more organic business conversions they wouldn't pay for advertising as much.

Also, I really wish social media platforms provided better tools and didn't have policies that penalized you for deleting followers that are bots or junk followers.

As a Las Vegas photographer that works primarily with models, I often have random profiles blasting out my work. These profiles mostly find sexy content and blast it out in hopes of growing their own profiles. This mostly resulted in my followers being 95% men from outside the US. This does absolutely nothing for increasing my engagement with my actual target audience (female models or would be models in the Las Vegas metro area wanting to book photoshoots).

Unfortunately Instagram penalizes you and has actually removed the search functionality from my follower list because I was using it to delete bots and junk followers. They won't say this officially but their support ignores my requests for why this functionality no longer works.

A lot of these social media promotions work by having people with high follower counts blast you out and try to get their followers to follow you.

The problem is that it is not an audience that would normally be interested in or engage in your content naturally. There are often artificial incentives to follow or engage in someone's content. Often there is some kind of prize giveaway from a "celebrity", that you have to follow everyone on a list to qualify. That celebrity then gets paid to blast out the promotion.

Then after the promotion all of a sudden your massive number of new followers aren't engaging with your content anymore. What are the algorithms going to assume now? Naturally that your content is no longer any good.

It's common for influencers to share screenshots of their analytics or publish them on their websites for people looking for influencers. While the numbers might look impressive, unfortunately, due to how the algorithms work -- mainly things like vector embeddings and placing influencers in a some high dimensional space, the algorithms no longer target and recommend your content to an audience that would be interested.

It used to be that brands would look at your follower count and see how many likes / comments you were getting, but even this is faked now. As your engagement (likes / comments as a percentage of your followers) goes down, they are sometimes artificially propped up by purchasing likes and comments. This worsens your engagement and leads to an endless downward cycle.

While someone might survive for a short while as an influencer using these black hat strategies, brands will be unlikely to use you again if they have not seen tangible results.

Also, if you intend to sell a product or have a certain ideal customer avatar you are trying to market to, it makes sense to do as much as you can to get engagement from that (and only that) demographic.

Follower counts might look impressive on the surface but what ultimately matters is whether you see conversions for your business / brand.

...seems even hirer with marriage.

I've worked at Silicon Valley startups that were that way. I remember thinking this is really odd how high the concentration was (probably about 70% Indian). Didn't really bother me because it was a great team and honestly one of the best companies I worked at.

It didn't really seem like they discriminated in hiring and I never felt discriminated against at work. It was just that coworkers referred people they already knew.

I've had very similar thoughts and have wrote about them here. I would be interested in discussing more.

https://github.com/brennancheung/wasmtalk

Some key takeaways from the above link:

- The programmer's tool should be a tool for manipulating an annotated AST (not text)

- There should be many different types of UX's for different scenarios, each maps to and from an AST in a UX that is optimal for the developer for that scenario

- We must be conscious of human brain limitations and cognitive psychology and work within those constraints

- "Reading" and "Writing" code should have different UX's because they are radically different use cases

- Use RPN. It models the real world. Humans are designed to manipulate their environment in an incremental manner seeing the result each step of the way. When we have to plan out and write code for an extended period of time, trying to play compiler in our head, we overload our brain unnecessarily and highly likely to make simple mistakes.

- Testing should be a first class citizen in the developer experience and indeed baked into how we develop at a fundamental level that it seems strange that they are even decoupled to begin with.

Just got this text from a model:

"I don't trust them at all and nor do the other girls. So diversifying is our best bet"

I think they may stick around because it has the user base and why not, they are already making money so no point giving that up.

But now models will diversify across multiple platforms because the writing is on the wall. They may lose their income at any point so they are going to have backups.

The damage is already done. I was doing a photoshoot at my house with 2 models that have OnlyFans accounts. When the news hit they literally signed up for other platforms within an hour.

The other platforms are capitalizing on the news and finding ways to make migration to their platform as easy as possible.

Used to be the case. They are far behind now. Just read the docs for CCBill. Most of adult is still PHP even for new stuff. And they usually work on the servers directly instead of using version control and staging servers. Only the really bigger adult companies adopt a modicum of modern programming practices.

IRS is leading the way with that. They do it by association and high probability that you own the wallet.

...for how long? They just promised they would be inclusive of adult sex workers only months ago to combat the rumors which apparently were true.

Having worked as an adult programmer, they are really far behind technology trends. You're lucky if they use version control and staging servers.

But most coins are public ledger. And the "know your customer" exchanges are not allowing privacy protecting coins.

I highly doubt they are going through CCBill. They are too expensive at volume. Since they are only charging models 20% I suspect they tried to pretend to not be adult, which they probably weren't in the beginning. But not it is almost all adult and CC processors know that and want their higher cut.

Crypto will eventually democratize business transactions but it will take some time and it will not be without increased fraud.

...for how long? There were rumors they were getting rid of adult and then they put out an announcement saying that they would always be inclusive of sex workers. Then they just announced this.

Their credibility is gone.

Visa and Mastercard allow adult. They just force you to pay the "high-risk" category. Which is much higher fees. OF can't get away with only charging models 20% if credit card processing is taking more than half of that.

I suspect they are currently not classified as adult and the banks are saying, look, you are almost entirely adult so you have to pay us more.

Crypto payments hasn't taken off yet. It's beyond the scope of most people's ability to pay in crypto.

To reach the masses you probably have to go with "know your customer" (KYC) requirements that are going to scare lots of people away when they have to upload photos of their passport and stuff like that to a website.

And governments and banks are going to impose the same restrictions somehow.

Unless they use a coin that is private, all transactions are going to be recorded in the blockchain and publicly viewable to everyone. Nobody wants their porn purchases to be public knowledge.

It will probably eventually get there but probably at least 5 years out.

Were they getting their credit card processing in the non-adult category. I know a bunch of adult credit card processors are in the range of 12-15% and OF only takes 20%. Maybe that is why they are cracking down on them.

There are plenty of porn sites out there operating legally, wonder why the banks are giving them issue.

My guess is that they presented themselves to banks as just ordinary non-adult transactions and now the banks are seeing that they are almost entirely adult so they want to put them into the higher and more expensive "high-risk" category and OF won't be able to get away with only taking 20% from the models.

I guess I'm getting back into the adult website game. I work with tons of adult models as a photographer and got out of making websites due to OnlyFans.

I have a love hate relationship with Typescript. I have come to see it as a tool and to use it when it makes sense and avoid it when it doesn't.

I like the language at a conceptual level and find what it does very useful. The syntax I find less than desirable (especially nested generics).

For smaller projects I tend to use just JS because it's faster if I just want to prototype an idea and I'm not planning on keeping the code around for long.

Where Typescript shines is when working with a team on longer term projects.

The generic syntax gets derives from C++ which I don't think is a very good syntax. When dealing with more complex generic type declarations with nested generics / types your eye is scanning back and forth trying to match angle brackets and it is really hard to parse visually. Other languages like Haskell allow you to just read the "generics" left to right. Aliasing the type helps to some degree.

The other thing I don't like is when you are experimenting and fleshing out an idea you want to take a try it and see approach but with Typescript you have to really commit even though you just want to experiment. When you want to change something there is so much more code that you have to change.

The pros are when dealing with code you wrote in the past and forgot about what the types / parameters are or when dealing with code written by other people. Having the IDE suggest what you need to pass it is amazing.

The contrast to that is having to jump to a function to see what POJO style object it will return, what the exact spelling of the property / key are, and things like that. Having static typing saves so much time when dealing with other code.

If your project involves you working with others' code or code you wrote in the past and don't remember well then this is Typescript's sweet spot and it is a huge win.

One of the things I find most lacking in Typescript is pattern matching. If you have strong static typing like Typescript does then pattern matching pairs really well with that. It makes your code much more declarative and easier to read / write.

Personally, I love Haskell and wish I can use it more. This article does not do justice convincing people to invest time to learn it.

Is this like the curse of teaching monads? Once you know them you lose the ability to teach someone else about them?

If we sincerely ask "why learn Haskell?", then we wind up learning Haskell!

No. We wind up doing a search for "Why learn Haskell" and unfortunately this article might pop up. And if we don't see a benefit or pain point being removed we aren't going to learn it.

They don't even make an argument for why. They just jump into a philosophy lesson on logic. That's not an argument for learning Haskell and is completely tangential.

The basic rules of copywriting requires that you understand your target audience and make a case for how their life will better.

The gold standard is a logical reason.

LOL. No, it's not. The gold standard is an emotional reason. Perhaps this is why Haskell has not taken off. What pain point does it solve or what benefit does it give you?

For me personally, it has expanded my thinking and allowed me to write clearer and more concise code in other languages. It has allowed me to think in terms of new concepts that increase the reach of what I am able to do. Its type system provides for safety as well as making the intent of programs clear. Pattern matching allows you to specify your intent much easier and conveniently than the typical imperative approach. The compiler is your friend and reminds you if you fail to take into account all possible scenarios (total function). The syntax may seem strange at first, but I have come to love it and wish other languages had adopted such a clean syntax devoid of visual clutter.

The gold standard reason for me is that I am able to tackle, think, and solve higher levels of complexity than are possible in other languages. I am able to express myself much more fluidly and I am able to reuse code to a much higher degree.

The political class benefits from conflict and division like this. It gives them a scape goat they can use for whatever the pressing issue is at the moment and any consequences of their actions.

US universities are not free environments of vigorous intellectual debate anymore

This seems like one of the most pressing dangers we are facing right now. How can this be changed? Where can people go to have honest intellectual debates?

It's a bit of a white lie but I don't see it being harmful to claim that. It is increasingly becoming true.

Lots of fields are adopting CT. And being taught CT earlier on in the process would provide a useful framework for building upon future knowledge.

Mathematics seems to have 10 different names for the same concept depending on which field you are in. CT provides a common vocabulary.

CT is universal in the sense that if you understand how it is applied in one domain you can easily apply it to others.

The problem with CT education IMO is that it cannot be taught at the abstraction level only -- there are too many floating abstractions that people can't anchor to any existing knowledge.

This means CT can only REALLY be understood once you apply it to a domain. The problem is that not many people outside of mathematicians understand the domains that CT is traditionally taught with.

CT for Engineers, CT for Programmers, CT for XYZ, is probably the only viable way CT is going to see wider adoption.

Yes. This is why so many are fleeing California and the bay area. This and taxes were probably the 2 biggest motivations for me to move out of the SF bay area.