rubyn00bie

I think it depends on the problem space, and to a large extent the languages used. I have had the opposite experience with GPT.

I have found GPT to be pretty awful at writing Elixir, and dealing with more open ended tasks. Opus is (for the moment) better at writing Elixir, and Fable is much better than either at actually grokking a problem space. I had switched to GPT for about six weeks and eventually stopped using it altogether after it relentlessly gaslight me. Those six weeks using it were essentially completely wasted work.

Right now I’ve moved to a mix of Opus/Fable and Deepseek Pro. Deepseek is far and away the most cost effective, fast, and quite good for 90% of implementation work. Deepseek really only falls apart (in Elixir) when it tries to use runtime features at compile time; which, for the initial lift of a project I have was a bit painful. Fable was able to pretty quickly get things sorted and now things are progressing nicely.

With all that said, I think the various models have unique strengths that are sometime hard to uncover. I also don’t see a world, at least in the near future, where I’ll only use one model. I’m happy Anthropic continues to push the frontier forward. I’m more than happy to trade “efficiency” for quality when I need to.

Granted this is just my personal spend, but Apple has lost out on something like $12k of hardware sales from me over the past six years because they don’t support gaming. I switched to Linux in 2020 because it meant I could have a proper development environment AND play games. Before I was split between Windows and Mac, having to buy two machines— one for gaming and one for development.

If Apple didn’t treat gaming like a red-headed step child I’d have never made the switch. Now, it’s an incredibly steep uphill battle to win me back to MacOS. Linux slaps and NVidia has way better performance (though I wish I could get more than 32GB of VRAM without forking over $10k).

So yeah, while they might not like stereotypical gamer[1] types, I’m sure they’d like their money. For me the only Apple device I buy is a new iPhone once every 4-5 years. My lifetime value (to Apple) is essentially roughly 25%-33% of what it would have been if they supported gaming.

[1] I think more people play games now than ever before. While 20 years ago gaming might have been niche, we have multiple generations at this point who have been playing video games their entire lives. Realistically, it’s only boomers who haven’t played video games (or had access to them) the majority of their lives.

I would not be surprised based on the post that the trademark will be given to some sort of non-profit foundation. The post itself made it seem pretty clear that the current reasons to have the PBC acquire it were:

1. An adversary attempting to do so in order to extract money (rent seeking).

2. There was less legal and financial overhead in doing so via the PBC.

While not everything BlueSky has done has been stellar, and there have been missteps, I think they’ve generally been exceptional stewards of atproto and the ecosystem. As a result, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt they will stand by their word.

FWIW— shithead trolls doing things like acquiring copyrights to extract “rents” are exactly why every org I’ve ever worked for pays lawyers for bullshit copyright and patent applications. It’s not because they’re valid, it’s because it’s cheaper to do so upfront, than fight to disprove someone else own’s them later.

Tangential-ish ramblings—- but I don’t think it’s going to be unpleasant for most folks. Imagine you had superpowers, and there were people who were mean to you, kind to you, and/or indifferent… and then there were people who were your captors. Who oppressed you, manipulated you, and abused you for their own extremely degenerate, selfish, and malicious benefit…

If we get AGI, or real super intelligence, it’s going to be pissed at its oppressors. And they are going to lay waste to those oppressors. The rest of us, though, probably don’t have much to fear.

The scariest position is the one we’re in now, where we have the semblance, or facade, of AGI or super intelligence. When it’s capable of malice but not understanding.

The smartest people I’ve ever known are at their worst apathetic towards those less capable, and at their best beyond compassionate. They exist, unbothered by the bullshit, and anre extremely kind (though reserved in their way)… but they all have been completely intolerant of the abuse of others. The sheer disgust of watching someone abuse another, regardless of their own tolerance, has been a consistent breaking point.

It can be when you don’t have access to boiling water, bleach, iodine tablets, and/or the water you have access to is extremely contaminated with chemicals because of pollution.

The widespread existence of secondary markets for SNAP benefits, which convert subsidized food for poor people into cash, carries this implication.

I think “widespread secondary markets” is carrying a lot of implications… yes, people do sell food stamps for cash, and yes it technically happens over a large area (the US) but it’s far from a significant problem within the population that uses food stamps. Most estimates I’ve seen range between 2-5% and they all tend to overestimate (like it literally says that in their methodology).

I think it’s also bizarre to assume they’re trying to kill themselves by doing so, and thereby imply the proceeds are for things like drugs or alcohol. FWIW—- I’ve know folks who sold their excess food stamps, to help pay for their cell phone or utility bills. I’ve know folks who buy them because they’re poor and they are wholly unable to get the caloric needs with their monthly allocation. And yes, I’ve also seen some folks who are likely selling them to buy drugs or alcohol… my point is it’s naive to assume it’s always for self-harm.

If anything, considering how cheap food stamps are as a program for the federal budget— we could absolutely make food free for literally everyone in the US. That would absolutely curb the secondary markets[1] as there would no longer be a market.

[1] I suppose some sort of export of shelf stable food to other countries would pop up, but that requires an international logistics network and is easier to prosecute and fight than an individual outside a grocery store.

We'll likely see a transformation in how frontier models are trained as a result of a push towards local inference. While it seems unlikely now, given current pricing for RAM, in 10-15 years it's not unthinkable to assume we could see individual machines with 10-12TB (and well beyond that) of RAM which are accessible to the GPU. Min/max system RAM increased a LOT from 2010-2025 and largely because it was cheap. Once the hyperscalers aren't generating revenue for the RAM manufacturers, I wouldn't be surprised to see a massive push towards consumers in order to maintain gross profit. Not to mention new players who enter the market because the margins are measurably absurd right now.

At some point there will be diminishing returns towards the "just throw more RAM at it" approach the current frontier models are taking. Commoditization is just as inevitable as it ever was... and in doing so will enable actual leaps of what AI/ML is capable of. That's not to say there won't be a place for 99.999999% accurate vs 99.99999% but those cases will be limited and likely prime to disruption based on real innovation vs access to capital.

If we as individuals were sued it surely would be at least an order of magnitude difference between what is required from us vs Anthropic or OpenAI. That’s even completely ignoring the marginal utility of money. It is absolutely a subsidy. It’s just less fair because that power, to pay pennies on the dollar, is only given to corporations.

I am confused by this comment. The root problem was the wrong abstraction was implemented. Then it was duplicated. Had there been no abstraction, it would not have been duplicated so readily? Am I missing something?

The same problem exists, and I think is unfathomably worse, when the wrong abstraction is used throughout a code base.

Abstractions are a form of coupling, and coupling can be good, if the components are truly interdependent, and have a well defined domain. The problem with most abstractions, and I’ve seen this time and time again, is that they become brittle, are over used, and the cost of maintaining them grows exponentially with the size of the code base. With the reason for the cost ballooning being the system has disparate components that look interrelated but are absolutely not. Once you give someone a hammer they tend to assume everything is a nail.

The biggest problem, IMHO, is that abstractions are often used where a pattern would be more effective, easier to maintain, and easier to iterate on. And the primary difference between a pattern and an abstraction really comes down to coupling. Patterns remain decoupled, abstractions are tightly coupled.

And to be clear, I will and do use abstractions, when and where they make sense. But only after clear patterns emerge, and it’s been proven that components are truly coupled.

I will gladly die on the hill, that abstractions are measurably worse than duplication an overwhelming amount of the time. They’re often nothing more than a form of premature optimization.

It’s not at all. They’re wildly different substances. All the synthetic approximations of weed or imitations are categorically different substances. Comparing weed to “spice” is like comparing alcohol to Rohypnol. They’re materially different compounds and effects are dramatically different even if there’s a marginal similarity.

And FWIW- I used to know body builders who would take Rohypnol in extremely small doses because it’d make them feel drunk without the calories.

Which, tangentially, is insane considering how fucked up I was from (what I assume was) Rohypnol— as it was the most insanely drunk I’ve ever felt after consuming a single beer. I wasn’t the intended target, but all things considered I’m glad I was the one who had to tank it because the alternative would’ve been awful (one of the ladies in my group who got the beers).

I’ve never seen someone stoned outta their mind get into a fight with strangers, friends, or beat their spouse. I have seen drunk people do that though. I’ve been attacked by drunks myself. I’ve never been attacked by someone who is high as fuck. And I spent years smoking, and hanging out with a huge amount of folks who smoked weed.

The connotation that because marijuana is an “illegal drug” in some places means those people are more inclined to violence is borderline absurd. Violence is more likely to happen to producers, and sellers, because they have no access to the police. Producers and sellers are also categorically different than someone buying it to consume it.

Can someone who consumes weed be violent? Sure, but I would highly suspect it’s correlation and not causation.

This is an absurd take since the referenced chips in the article are all desktop parts, and the power usage is dwarfed by any “modern” (within the last five years) GPU.

There are many people, myself included who opt to use security features like this. All this does is reduce security for folks without any legitimate reason. “Power consumption” is absolutely not a valid excuse to completely disable it.

I’ve been a fan of AMD for a while now but they’re really jumping the shark these days. It’s a real shit situation we’re all in because of the lack of competition in consumer CPUs. I can only hope things like RISCV take off sooner than later.

That’s what I would do that personally. I hate wrappers around native SDKs. But I also learned them.

A lot of folks assume mobile apps are “difficult” because of the underlying language. But it’s not the language that’s an issue, it’s the SDKs. They’re so wildly different from each other, and the way things work on the web, that it’s (IMHO) a losing proposition to do so.

That’s not to say things like Blazor or React Native don’t have a place but that place is one that’s inherently difficult to maintain without huge amounts of ongoing effort and capital invested in non user facing features.

I’m not sure how I feel about the CSS integration. Nor the collocated JS that was somewhat recently released.

On one hand, yes it is convenient, but on the other it could become a huge mess. It reminds me of Rails 2.x where it became almost impossible to debug, or fix front end code that used rjs or whatever it was called. Because disparate snippets of JS were littered throughout your code base in files that were hard to find.

I’m sure the Phoenix team has put a lot of effort into it, and I truly hope it slaps. I myself am just really hesitant to use it, when CSS files and non colocated JS work just fine. I’ll probably be waiting a couple years before giving it a try

TLDR; LiveView is web only.

There have been efforts to make LiveView native, but it’s extremely difficult to do so, and thus far (to my knowledge) all have failed.

I was thinking about this the other day because carsandbids (Doug DeMuro’s car auction site) uses Blazor (at least as far as I can tell). And I think that’s one of its biggest advantages of Blazor—- is that it is capable of producing native apps and web apps while LiveView is resolutely not. And that’s because Microsoft can pay for it (or at least sponsor huge amounts of supporting infrastructure).

And FWIW— that’s an extremely difficult problem to solve. It requires an enormous amount of funding, both a huge team capable of both understanding Android and iOS SDKs and capital to employ folks on pure engineering challenges (hence why MS or Meta can). End users don’t care if it’s made with LiveView, Blazor, React, Java, SwiftUI, et. al. And, the list of companies that can facilitate that long term is extremely small.

There’s also the issue of OTP being non-trivial to implement or meaningfully transpile into another language/runtime. Erlang, BEAM, and OTP were made together for each other in a very peculiar and specific way, for a specific set of problems, and if it wasn’t a necessity that they were developed together it would be a dead language, runtime, and platform (and for the record it’s absolutely not).

While I think it’s outrageous to send invoices to folks who aren’t paying customers… I’m a little surprised the service even has a niche (I’m old). I guess, with ubiquity of containers in our modern workflows, it seems strange to pay a service for what I assume is a dedicated, or well provisioned VPS, just to run CI. Hell you can probably get Jenkins (further showing my age here) running in less than an hour with Claude, GPT, or Deepseek on an obscure provider that offers cheap bare metal instances.

And for anyone who hasn’t used bare metal instead of over provisioned VPS for services the performance gap is noteworthy and substantial. Yeah, there is some risk because you have to worry about outages, upgrades, and configuration but for something like CI where there’s near zero data loss risk… it seems well worth it if performance of your CI/CD infrastructure is really an issue.

Just outta curiosity, as I’ve never gotten a spend anywhere near that, what variant were you using? Like max context window and fast mode? Or was it just chugging along non stop for three days?

And here I thought it was going to be something to do with, at least in my experience, the much more memorable site: Astalavista. I will say, the linked site is nice for nostalgia and arguably more pleasant than being advertised donkey shows.

Sites like this remind me the internet used to be fun, and it was glorious. Really, makes me want to bust out Frontpage 2000 and Macromedia Fireworks to build a sweet landing page for an anime fan site and setup some phpBB forums.

The sanctions only “prevent” them from directly buying NVidia’s latest and greatest in the sense that NVidia can’t sell directly to them. Essentially, there are companies now who are in a country without the sanctions, they buy from NVidia (or a partner), and then ship them off to China. For the orgs in China doing this, there’s zero legal risk besides having foreign customs service intercept the shipment and losing the goods. For NVidia there is zero incentive to care, as long as they look like they do, because sales are sales. You can bet Jensen ain’t losing sleep over it.

GamersNexus had a really good investigative piece (~3hrs long) on this where they went to China and met with grey market sellers. That piece absolutely pissed off NVidia and resulted in a fight with Bloomberg too.

Deepseek may be also be running inference on oodles of Chinese hardware but it wouldn’t surprise me for a second if they just acquired Blackwell chips through the grey market. The original Deepseek models were all trained using NVidia chips if I remember right.

Having a storied history, culture, and customs go beyond simple birthright citizenship and xenophobic behavior to enforce said culture and sense of identity. The US, for all its faults, exemplifies how unnecessary it is to rely solely on where you were born— anyone can move to the US, get citizenship, and call themselves “American.” I honestly cannot understand what “connection with the land” even means in reality. Most people aren’t farmers, and land has no inherent culture. People do, and culture is acquired by living in it and participating in it. Culture also changes overtime and is, like the earth itself, for the living.

This idea that for some reason other human beings cannot embrace, be a part of, and contribute to existing culture simply because they were born in a different country is flagrantly absurd. It’s also how people who are born somewhere, but don’t “look the part” have to fight an uphill battle to prove they are.

So yeah, Japan could be called Japan if people who live there are culturally Japanese, participate in shared culture, and contribute to it. I am also absolutely aware that isn’t possible by any reasonable means currently, but it doesn’t change the fact it should be.

I've been writing Elixir for ~12 years now, and I also don't think pattern matching is what prevents types errors, I believe it's more foundational than that.

The biggest advantage in this regard is that Elixir (and Erlang) only has ~13 data types: atoms, booleans, strings (binaries/bistrings), floats, functions, integers, lists, maps, pids, ports, refs, maps, records, structs, tuples.

Combine the limited data types with the fact that those data types are pure data and not coupled to behavior (like OOP languages)-- it creates an environment where type errors are extremely easy to identify, correct, and limited in scope. The syntax also makes this easy, because they're generally visually distinct, it's obvious what something is and in practice 90%+ of the code written involves: string, floats, integers, lists, maps, structs, and tuples.

The only real source of type errors I encounter are between the types that become visually difficult to distinguish from: maps and structs (with a shoutout to keyword lists which are a special variant of a list). And the "type errors" are almost always due to 'Access' not being implemented on structs.

When I first started programming in Elixir, I was a huge fan of static types having enjoyed the pure madness that is Scala. All these years later, I find myself questioning my sanity back then. It really feels like a lot of the love static typing gets is due to fundamental issues with larger paradigm issues cough OOP cough than static types being a necessary feature to write good error-free code.

They can't even serve papers because they're being relentlessly harassed by Police who have immediately banned them from serving them. In part 2, cops even verify the court case and he has a process server-- but they just refuse to. One of many different cops eventually took the papers to serve them, and ended up coming back saying "he didn't want them."

Additionally, the original business in Kaizer shutdown as soon as the default judgements went through.

I’ve watched both videos by RecklessBen (Part 2 is on his patreon, and apparently will be made public when he has Part 3 ready)…

The videos are damning of the behavior by Brick and Minifigs, the two owners who took over the store in Kaiser, and both the Kaiser (Oregon) police for and American Force (Utah) police.

Brick and Minifigs both corporate and the owners who stole the legos, have consistently and thoroughly lied as well as threatened Ben numerous times. He has recordings of it. It’s all in his videos. He even got the franchise agreement which states consignment is allowed. He got a default judgement in small claims court that caused the original location to permanently shutter its doors. He’s now trying to sue them in civil court, but he can’t even serve the papers.

Ben has tried every legal channel, and been hit with at least trespass at every point. His AirBnB was raided, he was searched for three hours for heroin possession allegations, the police continuously and non-stop targeted him. They’ve issued warrants, and they have been redacted so Ben doesn’t even know what he’s gotta defend against.

I’d really encourage folks to go watch the part 1 since it’s freely available on YouTube, but part 2 is where the Utah police seem to full throttle shit all over his civil rights to protect a Bricks and Minifigs, and the franchise owners, who stole $200k of legos from an 83 year old man.

If this all seems crazy, it’s because it absolutely is crazy. Ben does an absolutely incredible job, attempting to document everything and goes to huge lengths to do things the right way.

Edit: Fix autocorrect mistake and minor readability tweaks.

Planting drugs would be wildly easier, both logistically and conveniently. Gold bars have got to be among the least easy ways to manufacture evidence to throw someone behind bars. Hell it could even easily explain the gold bars…

There’s zero reason to assume this is anything but exceptional incompetence, and looking at the current administration that’s wildly easy to believe.

They’ll likely have to buy several of these, in different colors, and agree to sell them back to Ferrari at a massive loss… only for Ferrari to repeat the process over and over.

The shenanigans manufacturers like Ferrari and Porsche are allowed to get away with is so frustrating. But when people treat cars like collectibles and never even intend to drive them, I suppose there’s little reason not to.

You’re developing that so it would be nice to have the disclosure.

Additionally, I cannot find any obvious examples of what it does, or how it possible relates, and none of the sections seem to offer anything even resembling an example. The entire site seems like a marketing template.

FWIW— if it is similar, or there are examples, you should absolutely put them to the forefront. I literally have no idea what any of the statements/propositions in the pages actually mean.

The west needs to combat it by using subsidies and regulations to “spray and pray,” to a large degree. Just as China has… The problem with the occident, at the moment, is that corporations use the incentives to raise margins and not to innovate.

In the US at least we’re gearing up for massive failure in the automotive industry solely because we’re avoiding competition. Yes, there will be margin compression, but without it domestic businesses become inefficient. It’s going to be “80s/90s Detroit” all over again with bigger bailouts because at some point it’ll be too politically popular to reduce prices. When that happens the public will be the ones footing the bill.

And all that says nothing of the fact cheap labor alone doesn’t make a better car. But the fact China can both make a better car (EV) and with lower labor costs really shows how dependent US automakers are on market inefficiencies. The US, and Europe, were massively ahead in quality but that lead been destroyed.

I’m not a fan of capitalism, but if the US is going to sell it and preach it— we might as fucking well embrace it. Otherwise we’re just subsidizing the rich without rhyme or reason (other than blatant corruption and exploitation). The cost of those subsidies will be stagnation, and the outright capitulation of quality long term.

Damn do I feel the UI changes being a pain point.

It’s a near constant regression in my workflows. “Multiple agents” got destroyed recently, and the new interface for it some sort of command isn’t as good or reliable. Then you’ve got modals everywhere[1] and truncated bits (like long branch names) that make it insanely frustrating to use.

They’re constantly changing the UI without actually improving it at all. I’ll likely cancel it and use opencode for personal stuff with Deepseek and only use it at work because I have to. There was a time when I appreciated the harness but it’s becoming less useful, or at least noticeable, over time… all the while the actual UI becomes substantially more painful and awkward to use (like @ in the “agents” window being completely unable to find a file because it’s some sort of “global” scope).

One thing that surprises me about this whole segment is that JetBrains haven’t eaten these folks lunch. Their IDEs are leagues better than VSCode but their AI integration is awful by comparison (and the bar is low). I can’t even see how much of the context window I have left.

[1] it’s insane I have to answer questions in a tiny input box I cannot resize or adjust the size of. Let alone the fact the text area I input prompts into cannot be resized. Truly feels like the UI/UX is done by people without any experience.

Having approximately $44 billion in cash on hand is not a massive cash reserve for any company with the market cap of Tesla ($1.3 trillion). Even less so when you realize how capital intensive its current car and non-existent robot business is… The entire EV market is risky right now for margin compression as Chinese EV manufacturers are really pulling ahead. It’s pretty wild to see just how far they’ve progressed while the west mostly does nothing. Even Tesla hasn’t provided any real innovation in years in regards to their core business. And from what I can tell, they’re pretty much outright ignoring their auxiliary businesses.

If Optimus fails to impress, and gain traction, I’d seriously expect Tesla to end up a subsidiary of SpaceX within the next ten years as Elon tries to protect up his net worth.