balooga's recent activity
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Comment on Air Canada CEO will retire this year after his English-only crash message was criticized in ~transport
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Comment on I decompiled the White House's new app in ~society
balooga LinkNot surprised a garbage presidency is shipping a garbage app. My guess is they vibe-coded the whole thing in a couple hours. The location tracking is by far the most egregious thing but (and this...Not surprised a garbage presidency is shipping a garbage app. My guess is they vibe-coded the whole thing in a couple hours. The location tracking is by far the most egregious thing but (and this is just a sign of the times) probably not much worse than what most mobile apps are doing these days. I would hope that OS-level privacy protections would at least prevent it from leaking users' locations without their knowledge.
But you know what we really need? Deep-dive decompilation reports just like this, for ALL THE APPS. We need a whole searchable site full of them, with top/bottom 40 lists praising the best apps and shaming the worst.
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Comment on Haliey Welch interview (Hawk Tuah) by Channel 5 in ~life
balooga LinkI enjoy Channel 5's long-form interviews, I think they started with the Hunter Biden one which was fantastic, or maybe it was the one where Jacob Chansley phoned in from jail. Callaghan has a...I enjoy Channel 5's long-form interviews, I think they started with the Hunter Biden one which was fantastic, or maybe it was the one where Jacob Chansley phoned in from jail. Callaghan has a knack for choosing unexpected interviewees who are strangely relevant and interesting. I've been watching this new one with Clavicular. I already had my opinions about that guy before watching, but this is honestly my first time actually hearing him speak for himself. Can't say it changed my mind about him (rather it confirmed a lot of suspicions) but I'm grateful for the chance to hear him out and decide for myself rather than just adopting other people's opinions uncritically.
I really appreciate how Callaghan's interviews are neither sycophantic nor adversarial. There's no raised voices or crosstalk. He pushes back when needed but isn't aggressive about it. The entire time he maintains a respectful congeniality. He gives off a youthful vibe that seems unprofessional at first, which helps put people at ease I think, but I think he's on a higher journalistic tier than most interviewers who have bigger budgets and nicer clothes.
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Comment on Jeopardy! YouTube Edition | Teaser in ~tv
balooga LinkI’d love to be surprised but my guess is that Mulligan is going to clean house. That man is overflowing with random knowledge, and quick on his feet, too. Absolutely nothing against the others,...I’d love to be surprised but my guess is that Mulligan is going to clean house. That man is overflowing with random knowledge, and quick on his feet, too. Absolutely nothing against the others, but I think anybody would be quickly out of their depth against him in a trivia game. I’m excited to see him share a stage with Ken Jennings though, that alone should be worth the price of admission.
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of March 23 in ~society
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Comment on Paradise: S01E03 - FAANGball in ~tech
balooga LinkI know there are a few other fans of KRAZAM around here. The new sketch comedy show "Paradise" is dropping new episodes weekly this month, this is the latest one. I think it's awesome and I love...I know there are a few other fans of KRAZAM around here. The new sketch comedy show "Paradise" is dropping new episodes weekly this month, this is the latest one. I think it's awesome and I love the format. Alexis Gay is particularly great!
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Paradise: S01E03 - FAANGball
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Comment on The Treasury just declared the US insolvent. The media missed it. in ~society
balooga LinkSerious question— wasn't addressing this the (stated) purpose of DOGE? That was of course an unmitigated clusterfuck but surely the rapid slash-and-burn had some effect on the national debt? Did...Serious question— wasn't addressing this the (stated) purpose of DOGE? That was of course an unmitigated clusterfuck but surely the rapid slash-and-burn had some effect on the national debt? Did it make any impact at all?
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Comment on The Dude in ~movies
balooga LinkMy spouse and I were fortunate to attend a screening of The Big Lebowski at The Lensig in Santa Fe, around 2010 or so. David Huddleston (RIP) was in attendance. People came in costume and quoted...My spouse and I were fortunate to attend a screening of The Big Lebowski at The Lensig in Santa Fe, around 2010 or so. David Huddleston (RIP) was in attendance. People came in costume and quoted along with the movie. Afterward we hit some local bars on the Plaza for white russians. One of my favorite memories!
It’s hard for me to put my finger on what makes The Big Lebowski such a special movie, but this essay hits a lot of the same points I would. It’s surreal and dreamlike. It’s simultaneously stupid and profound. It can be interpreted with layers of meaning. It’s genuinely funny and eminently quotable. It’s got a great soundtrack… Definitely a modern classic.
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Comment on Seth MacFarlane teases new life for ‘The Orville’: “Season 4 is written” in ~tv
balooga Link ParentToss in Ira Steven Behr and Ron Moore and you’ve got my interest!Toss in Ira Steven Behr and Ron Moore and you’ve got my interest!
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Comment on Kill chain - on the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children in ~society
balooga LinkThis is phenomenally researched. I don’t think I’ve seen a better writeup about Maven, Claude’s actual relationship with it, and the historical and bureaucratic context into which they’re being...This is phenomenally researched. I don’t think I’ve seen a better writeup about Maven, Claude’s actual relationship with it, and the historical and bureaucratic context into which they’re being deployed. For some reason I’m really curious about the names of those Kanban swim lanes.
Also, oh boy do people ever have trouble spelling the word “bureaucracy.” I tease!
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of March 16 in ~society
balooga Link ParentThe stupidity of this timeline is… limitless.The stupidity of this timeline is… limitless.
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Comment on Job hunting absolutely sucks right now in ~life
balooga Link ParentWell if I had any actual prospects I probably wouldn’t have been unemployed for 5 months, haha. Truth be told I’ve been taking a bit of a (probably financially unwise) unplanned hiatus because of...Well if I had any actual prospects I probably wouldn’t have been unemployed for 5 months, haha. Truth be told I’ve been taking a bit of a (probably financially unwise) unplanned hiatus because of the burnout. My spouse recently started a higher-paying job which takes some of the pressure off me and I’ve enjoyed having more time for my kids and creative pursuits.
I’m hoping maybe I can leverage one of my passion projects into something that will help pay the bills. Main focus right now is a solo game dev project, and I’m working on-and-off on a screenplay concept. Both feel like long shots but I’m keeping my eyes open for new opportunities and networking. I may end up picking up part-time work just to give me more time with these.
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Comment on Job hunting absolutely sucks right now in ~life
balooga LinkI was also laid off from my SE job back in October due to "restructuring." I've been in the field for 17 years and I'm just so burned out from repeating this cycle every 1-3 years. All I've ever...I was also laid off from my SE job back in October due to "restructuring." I've been in the field for 17 years and I'm just so burned out from repeating this cycle every 1-3 years. All I've ever wanted was long-term, stable employment doing what I love without waiting for the axe to fall. AI has changed my relationship with coding, I still enjoy it somewhat but I sure don't want my job to be babysitting Claude while it makes subtle questionable architecture decisions in customer-facing products I'm supposed to care about. I've always hated the tech interview process. Just looking for a radical change now, because I can't keep spinning in that hamster wheel.
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Comment on The spread of solar panels in rural areas has become a divisive issue among Danish voters in ~enviro
balooga LinkThe photos in the article help a lot. I was expecting a lot of NIMBY hand-wringing because I was unfamiliar with the scale and density of the solar panels, but I can totally see their point now. I...The photos in the article help a lot. I was expecting a lot of NIMBY hand-wringing because I was unfamiliar with the scale and density of the solar panels, but I can totally see their point now. I still think the "eyesore" argument is weaksauce when it comes to land one doesn't own, especially when the thing one is complaining about is renewable energy tech. But I absolutely wouldn't want to be the family in that house that's boxed in by panels on every side, either. Not that they have the right to demand clear vistas as far as the eye can see, but a reasonable affordance of breathing room shouldn't be too much to ask.
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Comment on Commonly misspelled words quiz in ~humanities.languages
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Comment on I made a word association game - Noun Sense in ~games
balooga LinkFriend code sharing thread! Here’s mine. The leaderboard’s more fun when you have some rivals to compare yourself against 😉Friend code sharing thread! Here’s mine. The leaderboard’s more fun when you have some rivals to compare yourself against 😉
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of March 16 in ~society
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Comment on That one study that proves developers using AI are deluded in ~tech
balooga (edited )Link ParentThat's a fun question— solving drift has been a real problem. I've tried a bunch of strategies, with mixed results. My main project right now is a green-field new app buildout with some very...That's a fun question— solving drift has been a real problem. I've tried a bunch of strategies, with mixed results. My main project right now is a green-field new app buildout with some very complicated architectural needs. Codex has been incredible at identifying and defining all of the requirements. I love to have brainstorm sessions with it, presenting a problem I'm having or anticipating, getting its recommendations, iterating on those, optimizing for certain use cases... the problem is that when we finally land on a big, technical design decision, Codex forgets all about it in the next session and starts undermining our plan with naive tacked-on hacks... not good.
So I did what any lunatic would do... I wrote up a giant, technical explanation of how the drift problem was impacting the project and asked Codex to think hard propose a solution. (I also described all the things I had already tried, and some other ideas I was considering but wasn't sure about, and asked it to scour the web for discussions about this category of problem to find solutions that have worked for other people.) What it came up with genuinely surprised me and seems like it might actually have legs.
The actual jumbo-size prompt I gave it, if you're curious.
This project has a real problem... we have been agentically developing a sophisticated, multi-layered architecture of optimized subsystems. The performance gains have been significant. But every time we start work on a new feature, AI drift undermines our prior decisions! New AI sessions never have enough context to understand the way these systems are interconnected, how they're intended to work, the thought processes and long brainstorm sessions that led to their specific implementation details, etc. So the AI ends up just ripping through existing code that was supposed to be locked in and final. Where a task may call for a careful extension of an existing mental model, the AI instead rewrites the whole thing, throwing out our hard-won performance gains because it doesn't know anything about them.
We've tried keeping a formal spec in the project. The AI has been instructed to keep that spec up to date, every time it completes work. But try as I might, I can't seem to make the AI do this well. It will add something new but not clean up old irrelevant or obsolete information. It will make changes in one part of the spec but not the others, so different part are out of sync with each other. Critically, the level of detail it's putting in the spec is not high enough to describe the intricacies of these systems.
The AI has also been instructed to add comments to the code itself, and maintain those comments, so the code is self-documenting. This also has been insufficient to guard against AI drift, and the AI often leaves old comments unchanged even as the code they're annotating has completely been rewritten.
I think one problem is that we have so many interconnected systems, spread among many files in different locations within the project directory. The AI just doesn't know where to look. When it starts to work on something, it defaults to searching the codebase for keywords. When it finds them, it assumes it has identified the correct file to work on, but does not dig deeper to find related systems that interact with it. It's not bothering to follow code paths to discover the totality of the relationships. And it ends up making partial changes that have giant blind spots, and thinking its work is complete.
We've also added a glossary because the AI makes up new terms to describe the same concepts, in every session. The intent there is that if we define our terminology, we can discuss technical concepts with less vagueness or drift over time. And consistently use those defined terms throughout the code itself, so the files will embed a shared contextual nomenclature to keep them on the rails. This is the most recent accommodation we implemented; I don't have enough data yet to know if it will help, but I'm doubtful it will help much either.
I know I can't expect the AI to just... read everything before starting. That worked when the project was in its infancy but there are too many files now, too much complexity. The AI needs an accurate map, and it needs to know how to follow that map, and it needs to ALWAYS keep that map updated and accurate without drifting. Every time I add MORE agent rules, MORE glossary terms, MORE spec detail, MORE docs, MORE comments in files... I'm just increasing the amount of context that the AI has to track, which decreases its accuracy and fills up the available context window too quickly. That's counterintuitive and ends up making the drift problem even worse.
I don't know what to do! At this point, I'm terrified to keep agentically working on this project because of the constant risk of the AI silently destroying previous work.
I think we need to brainstorm a radically new solution for this problem. Here are some things I've been considering:
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Replace the existing spec, docs, and glossary with a single, much tighter spec format that follows a rigid schema instead of being a free-form human-readable Markdown document. It would emphasize tracking design decisions, defining terms (as the glossary does now), and mapping out relationships between subsystems and technical concepts. It would also need to be designed to be searchable. I have no idea how maintaining that format over time would be achieved, it seems like just another target for drift.
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Introduce a second AI agent that is responsible for tracking all the "meta information" we're afraid of losing, perhaps in a completely different project on disk. This agent would be trusted with remembering system architecture and internal conceptual relationships. I have no idea how it would do that without, itself, drifting. But the idea is that the primary AI agent would not be allowed to figure these things out for itself; it would instead be instructed to consult with the other agent before performing any work. This would keep the primary agent's context uncluttered with exploratory noise so it can stay focused on its engineering tasks.
I need your help. Is there anything worth trying in my ideas above? Do you have any ideas of your own? Research the subject online because I know a lot of other people are wrestling with this exact same problem. See what we can learn from their discussions and recommendations. Put together a concrete, actionable plan that is engineered to overcome the drift problems I described. Your solution must account for LLMs' limited context windows and auto-compaction, and the fact that because all new AI sessions are initialized with no existing context they must discover everything they know from scratch. Be mindful of the way Codex's
AGENTS.mdfile works, including its shortcomings. Prioritize information-dense ways to feed an AI agent complex information without overloading its context.What it ended up building is a repo-wide governance system with a very lean
AGENTS.mdthat basically instructs it about how to use that system and mandates strict adherence to it. The governance system has an API (well, a suite of NPM scripts to be executed at specific times) for tracking all architecture and workflow details, which it stores in checked-in, authoritative artifacts, and gating access to the codebase according to task-scoped permission logic. Honestly it's more complex than I really understand.Here's how Codex itself described the system to me.
AGENTS.mdis intentionally thin, so an agent gets routed into the real sources of truth instead of relying on a huge prompt snapshot. The repo-governance subsystem makes that an invariant inspec/subsystems/repo-governance-context-system.yaml(line 61).- Every task starts with
npm run context:task -- "<task>", which generates an active task packet by scoring the task text against subsystem ids, contracts, invariants, and glossary terms, then listing required reads and tests. Seedocs/context-system/README.md(line 16) andscripts/context-system/shared.mjs(line 813). npm run context:checkfails if derived artifacts are stale, there is no active task packet, changes spill outside the planned subsystem surface, a locked subsystem is edited without allow-listing, a touched subsystem record was not updated, or a locked change lacks an ADR update. That logic is inscripts/context-system/shared.mjs(line 1074) andscripts/context-system/shared.mjs(line 1145).- Sensitive seams are marked locked and fail closed by default. To cross them, the task packet must explicitly allow it, and the same change must update both the subsystem record and an ADR. That policy is in
ADR-0002(line 23). - The repo maintains a queryable architecture map in subsystem YAML files, generated repo maps, and explicit import-boundary rules. It also rejects unmapped first-party files, so new code cannot silently appear outside the architecture model. See
spec/subsystems/index.yaml(line 12) andscripts/context-system/shared.mjs(line 972). - It also guards language drift and structural drift:
terms:checkrejects discouraged glossary synonyms,arch:checkrejects forbidden import edges, anddrift:reviewbuilds a bounded review packet around changed files and subsystem invariants. Seescripts/context-system/shared.mjs(line 1192),scripts/context-system/shared.mjs(line 1229), andscripts/context-system/shared.mjs(line 1287).
It's too premature for me to say if it's going to be effective over time, but so far it seems pretty solid. In fact I just asked Codex to split it out into a boilerplate (TypeScript) repo of its own that people can play around with. Should be trivial for an agent to port the concept to another language if TS isn't your bag. Interested to hear how well it works for others.
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Comment on The 49MB web page in ~comp
balooga Link ParentI'm similarly bemused by reports like your own of people using the web without JS in 2026. Unless you've restricted yourself to visiting a very small curated set of sites I've got to imagine...I'm similarly bemused by reports like your own of people using the web without JS in 2026. Unless you've restricted yourself to visiting a very small curated set of sites I've got to imagine that's more frustrating than liberating overall.
I mean, I think you and I are probably in agreement for the most part... I use Firefox's advanced tracking protection in strict mode, and uBlock Origin + Decentraleyes + CanvasBlocker + Bypass Paywalls Clean, and an always-on VPN. I am 100% on board with controlling your own device, protecting your privacy, yada yada. But JavaScript drives the web today, adding a ton of value and frankly I can't imagine the web is even viable without it. Turning it off entirely feels like going vegan but refusing to eat beans.
"He delivered his condolence video message in English, with French subtitles," according to the article. I get that it's not the same thing as just speaking French, and also that this is a cultural sensitivity issue that I'm far removed from (but lots of Canadians take seriously). Just pointing out that he did offer (arguably more than) a token effort. Assuming the translation was sound, that doesn't strike me as remotely unreasonable — I'm not sure if I've ever seen a CEO or politician deliver a speech with even that basic affordance. But again, it seems silly to me because I'm not in that world, and I'm really unqualified to talk about it.