herdcall

Oh, I'm not talking about using only LLMs, for sure. I am currently taking a college sequence (currently French 3), with textbooks, homework, and everything. 100% agreed on the value of traditional texts/flows. On the matter of LLMs being permissive with grammar, you need to use the tools specifically meant to check grammar. I use LanguageTool for everything I write to make sure my grammar is both correct and current.

LLMs are invaluable IMO for immediate feedback on your writing and speaking. I've started using French inputs for most regular interactions, even with things like Claude Code for my work and for all LLM interactions (I use Grok). Before I input into Claude Code, I check the grammar and content with LLMs. Tutors and traditional paths will not help with this.

The other sequence I'm starting to do is to have conversations as I take baby steps in speaking/listening. Agreed that talking to real French speakers is the best, but initially we tend to be shy because we're so bad, and using a non-human can put us at ease. You may be different, but IMO this is typical. And this post was about refining this via an app that adds spaced repetition, and I appreciate that.

I'm surprised by the pushback by some people here; I wonder if they're actually learning French (or another language) themselves or just reacting generally against use of LLMs vs. humans here (a common trend on HN). I am learning French, and LLMs have proven to be very useful for me. Great to see the author go beyond current LLM voice exchanges by employing spaced repetition; thank you! I'll check it out.

I'm no longer sure you have to, actually. I mean, we do trust the assembly that compilers produce without having to read it, don't we? We're rapidly getting to that stage with LLMs, IMO.

Yeah, I guess OpenAI is so upset with the Department of War that they signed a deal with it! Hypocrisy all around. https://x.com/grok/status/2027769947913425390?s=20

We pay 7.25% sales tax in California, the highest in the country. Plus, county taxes can go up to 3.5%, adding up to 10.75% total. It's not too much to ask for basic stuff like maintaining the streets when paying this kind of money. The roads in Orange County, where I live, are great though.

The problem is that biases tend to be built in via even rudimentary stuff like bad training material and biased tuning via system prompts. E.g., consider the 2026 X post experiment, where a user ran identical divorce scenarios through ChatGPT but swapped genders. When a man described his wife's infidelity and abuse, the AI advised restraint to avoid appearing "controlling/abusive." For a woman in the same situation, it encouraged immediately taking the kids and car for "protection."

I'm not a fan of Meta, but I like their open source contributions, specifically PyTorch.

Articles like this keep popping up because they're catnip to those who hate AI or feel threatened by it. On coding, I routinely see people trashing vibe coding and jumping on the slightest mistake agents may make, never mind that human devs screw up all the time. And write-ups citing stats on AI coding tend to be written by folks who either don't code for a living or never earnestly tried it.

I use Claude Code regularly at work and can tell it is absolutely fantastic and getting better. You obviously need to guide it well (use plan mode first) and point to hand coded stuff to follow, and it will save you enormous amount of time and effort. Please don't put off trying AI coding out after reading misinformed articles like this.

There's a BIG difference, at least with tools like Claude Code: plan mode. I'm now using Claude Code a lot at at work, and the first thing I do is enter plan mode where I can have a "conversation" asking it explain how it would implement. Just a few back/forth later I end up refining its plan to conform to good (or what I think is "good") design, after which it will tell me exactly what it is going to do (with code diffs), which I sign off on (again, potentially after a few iterations). It's only then that it generates the code.

By contrast, on one project many years ago I was reviewing the code generated by an overseas team, and I couldn't make head or tail of it, it was an absolute tangled mess that was impossible to fix.

Well, I'm sure we've all seen code produced by human developers that is 10x worse than what my Claude Code produces (certainly I have), so let's be real. And it's improving scary fast.

Questioning science is not automatically "anti-science," IMO it's best to remain skeptical and stay focused on the evidence. The fact of the matter is that current "best medical advice" is not the best either in terms of quality of life or prognosis. I've had a remote member of a family lose sight in an eye, develop short term memory issues, and rapidly deteriorate from cancer in spite of following the best medical advice and guided by top physicians. My family is full of physicians, and I see even them questioning traditional methods. I would caution against media's rush to blame anything going against the mainstream narrative as "anti-science" or "misinformation." Yes, there are quacks and morons, but let's not put labels on anyone questioning bad outcomes.

Well, compare it to the really good answer from Grok (https://x.com/i/grok/share/MMGiwgwSlEhGP6BJzKdtYQaXD) for the same prompt. Also, framing as a question still pointed to the non-existent postgres-arrow with Claude.

It badly hallucinated in my test. I asked it "Rust crate to access Postgres with Arrow support" and it made up an arrow-postgres crate. It even gave sample Rust code using this fictional crate! Below is its response (code example omitted):

I can recommend a Rust crate for accessing PostgreSQL with Arrow support. The primary crate you'll want to use is arrow-postgres, which combines the PostgreSQL connectivity of the popular postgres crate with Apache Arrow data format support. This crate allows you to:

Query PostgreSQL databases using SQL Return results as Arrow record batches Use strongly-typed Arrow schemas Convert between PostgreSQL and Arrow data types efficiently

Yes. Global EV sales were 1.9 million in Dec 2024, 1.3 million in Jan 2025, and 1.4 million in Feb 2025. This is apparently typical after the holiday spending each year.

I've been using the latest v13.2.2 and it regularly goes 100% on its own door to door over 1-2 hour trips that I've driven, navigating side roads, highways, lane changes, road blocks, everything, without a single intervention from me. I just sit and watch, it's incredible actually. Again, this is NOT just highway experience, but door to door. I've driven the earlier versions and they were pretty good, but this latest one (v13.2.2) is a huge improvement that makes me feel it's arrived.

You're correct. But throwing a disc may be fun activity, but by no means is it a mark of "greatness." If a pro sport can't entertain, IMO it's a waste of time and contributes little to humanity. I would be happier if people celebrate wins in science.

Also check out Grok, it's surprisingly good, especially at organizing the results to get the job done for you. You can access it as part of X.

Weight loss did it for me. I was on 40mg Nexium and couldn't survive without the med every day. Then I was on a 3 month trip to Europe during which I dramatically lost weight and also ran out of the med. Quite incredibly, I realized I was fine without the med. The trip was 5 years ago and I've been keeping the weight off, it seem to be holding.

To me, the value of abstraction is more about making the code flexible than hiding complexity.

Apparently the sale has been reversed and is being contested. https://x.com/ericldaugh/status/1857261507010052306?s=46

You should be able to stay on Following, they made that change a while back. I.e., once you choose Following, you will keep going there till you change it.

Is there anyone here who uses Bluesky for its own sake rather than protesting against Twitter/Musk/etc.? Trying to understand if it have any inherent pros in terms of design or operation. IMO all these platforms thrive on network effects and their value grows exponentially as their size grows.

What is server side WYSIWYG? Genuine question.

Same here, but I tried the new 12.5.4.1 yesterday and the difference is night and day. It was near flawless except for some unexplained slowdowns and you don't even need to hold the steering anymore (it detects attention by looking at your face), they clearly are improving rapidly.

In fact, Flouride may be actually harmful in children. According to a peer-reviewed finding, "aggregate fluoride exposure from all sources in an amount equivalent to 1.5 mg/L in drinking water is consistently associated with lower IQ in children." See https://www.law.com/thelegalintelligencer/2024/10/04/fluorid....

The problem isn't that there isn't money, but that there isn't enough money for scientific research. The view that building bigger and bigger LHCs is coming at the expense of more deserving research is IMO worth consideration and is something folks like Sabine Hossenfelder aggressively share. I don't think it's fair to just shout down and down-vote people just for raising the concern.

I've been seeing strange downtrends on my VO2Max numbers with Apple Watch: they have dropped from 40's to 20's over a matter of a few days and have been steadily trending down. I haven't changed my exercise patterns at all for years now. There are others on the Apple forum facing similar abrupt drops, anyone else here seeing it? I'm hoping it's the watch messing up and not my health!

There is "pandoc" if you folks haven't tried it, it is amazingly simple and effective and will convert from a ton of input formats (including markdown) to a ton of output formats (including html, word, whatever).

I think what you're seeing is due to bandwidth limitations: when the picture pans the info changes rapidly and places a bigger demand on the bandwidth, so streamed shows will suffer in quality and show pixelation. If this is what you're seeing, it has nothing to do with the content itself, it will be fine if you watch it directly from disk.

Agreed. In the very first example (fig 1), a G-B chord going to A-C has the network showing edges from G to A and C (B to A and C), whereas in music we look at G going to A and B going to C (just two moves). I.e., it makes more sense to consider this as just two edges, not four.