post_below's recent activity
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Comment on Static analysis, dynamic analysis, and stochastic analysis in ~comp
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Comment on Things that don't suck in ~talk
post_below Link ParentAlso interesting: Their enormously ineffective mating process (even when they're not screwing people's heads). https://nokyotsu.github.io/parrots/ It's truly a miracle that they're still around.Sirocco, a famous kakapo who saw humans as his flock, specifically trying to mate with heads.
Also interesting: Their enormously ineffective mating process (even when they're not screwing people's heads).
https://nokyotsu.github.io/parrots/
It's truly a miracle that they're still around.
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Comment on Static analysis, dynamic analysis, and stochastic analysis in ~comp
post_below LinkHaha... it really is useful. Tip: have the model write to a file with notes about skipped/dismissed items so it doesn't re-surface them on the next run.stochastic analysis
Haha... it really is useful. Tip: have the model write to a file with notes about skipped/dismissed items so it doesn't re-surface them on the next run.
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Comment on Things that don't suck in ~talk
post_below (edited )LinkMore good news Call a Boomer/Zoomer: payphone connects seniors and youth Scotland rewilding: bird species up 261%, pollinators up tenfold Record kākāpō hatching season in New Zealand ^ I'm always...More good news
Call a Boomer/Zoomer: payphone connects seniors and youth
Scotland rewilding: bird species up 261%, pollinators up tenfold
Record kākāpō hatching season in New Zealand
^ I'm always especially excited about news related to animals featured in Douglas Adams lesser known book Last Chance to See
Reversible nonhormonal male contraception
China and India both reduce coal power generation for first time since 1973
Renewables hit nearly half of global power capacity 692 GW added in 2025
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Comment on Things that don't suck in ~talk
post_below Link ParentFinding positive stories isn't as easy as you'd hope. It's not that, in a world of 8 billion people, they aren't happening constantly. It's that they don't get as much engagement so there's less...I wish there were more stories under that tab
Finding positive stories isn't as easy as you'd hope. It's not that, in a world of 8 billion people, they aren't happening constantly. It's that they don't get as much engagement so there's less incentive to write about them.
That's why I sometimes go out of my way to remind myself that humanity is pretty awesome. It's really easy to forget when the bigger part of what gets published is some version of people sucking.
Thanks for the story, those are the sorts of smallish things that profoundly change the world.
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Comment on No-stack web development in ~tech
post_below Link ParentI don't think the definition has changed, the author is just ignorant. I mean that in a literal rather than insulting way. OS/web server/server side language/javascript/HTML/CSS is definitely...I don't think the definition has changed, the author is just ignorant. I mean that in a literal rather than insulting way. OS/web server/server side language/javascript/HTML/CSS is definitely still a stack.
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Comment on Things that don't suck in ~talk
post_below Link ParentUsername checks out? Agreed, the mission has been a breath of fresh air, and if the amount of coverage is any indication, support for space exploration is as strong as ever.Username checks out?
Agreed, the mission has been a breath of fresh air, and if the amount of coverage is any indication, support for space exploration is as strong as ever.
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Comment on Things that don't suck in ~talk
post_below Link ParentYes, definitely penguinsYes, definitely penguins
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Things that don't suck
So much of what the algorithms surface is negative. For all of the reasons that mostly everyone's aware of at this point. It's easy to get the general impression that times are dark without...
So much of what the algorithms surface is negative. For all of the reasons that mostly everyone's aware of at this point.
It's easy to get the general impression that times are dark without realizing it. I think sometimes it's good to intentionally offset algorithmic (and general human) negativity bias.
Lets do a positive news thread, I'll start:
Hungary votes out Orbán after 16 years
Perovskite solar cells hit 34.85%
Portugal hits 80.7% renewable electricity
Hidden drainage system found in human brain
First lab-grown oesophagus using hosts own cells (fully incorporated with muscles, nerves, arteries within 6 months)
And of course Artemis II! Why is space exploration somehow more positive than the sum of its parts?
Please post anything, it doesn't have to be "news". The full range of the humanities works too
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Comment on US begins blockade in Strait of Hormuz in ~society
post_below Link ParentDo they? I mean eventually, entropy being what it is, everything collapses. But in actual practice the last time a major world power collapsed it wasn't complete and it was 25 years ago. Before...All civilizations collapse
Do they? I mean eventually, entropy being what it is, everything collapses. But in actual practice the last time a major world power collapsed it wasn't complete and it was 25 years ago. Before that what, the Qing dynasty? Except China didn't really collapse. The Spanish empire? Except really they just contracted back to their original civilization but bigger.
In actual practice I don't think "all civilizations collapse" is very useful. There's a long way to go before actual collapse is even on the table for the US. Not to say that the current admin won't do more dumb things to get there faster... but in the meantime the world has figure out what to do about the reality we're in now.
Or to put it another way, there's a whole lot of human life between where we are now and a theoretical "everyone's starving to death" future, with a lot of important decisions to be made along the way, any of which could change the outcome.
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Comment on Half-baked idea for metered inline image allowances in ~tildes
post_below Link ParentThere's no denying it's technically less wrongThere's no denying it's technically less wrong
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Comment on Half-baked idea for metered inline image allowances in ~tildes
post_below Link ParentThis is not ok. Young Tildans seeing this could get a warped idea about anatomy. The only solution now that you've done it is to allow real images to set the record straight about cat tits.This is not ok. Young Tildans seeing this could get a warped idea about anatomy.
The only solution now that you've done it is to allow real images to set the record straight about cat tits.
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Comment on Half-baked idea for metered inline image allowances in ~tildes
post_below LinkI don't expect images on Tildes to happen anytime soon given that they were intentionally not included at the start. And I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. I guess I lean...I don't expect images on Tildes to happen anytime soon given that they were intentionally not included at the start. And I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. I guess I lean pro-image.
But if they were to happen I don't think complicated schemes would be the best way to go. Just quick and easy moderation by superusers and the ability for people to turn them off for their account, maybe with some sort of visual indicator or "show" option where an image would otherwise be.
I don't think images would hurt the quality of conversation, a little more irreverance would probably be a good thing. It would probably be annoying sometimes but we'd all survive. And also I don't think the lack of images takes away anything important from what Tildes wants to be.
It would be really interesting, though, to see what Tildanians would do with more expression options. I guess in 2026 we'd see a lot of AI generated images.
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Comment on Why Microsoft’s war on Windows’ Control Panel is taking so long in ~tech
post_below LinkIt's a strange choice that MS is making. Rapid enshittification only works if you have a high level of lock in. Social media apps rely on the network effect, Google relies on market dominance....It's a strange choice that MS is making. Rapid enshittification only works if you have a high level of lock in. Social media apps rely on the network effect, Google relies on market dominance. Microsoft relies on enterprise inertia and OEM deals.
But I don't think that's going to be enough in the long term. They'll likely hold onto their enterprise dominance for quite a while longer but if they start to bleed consumers the whole empire could come, slowly, crashing down. They've been losing the tech crowd for a long time already.
Their strategy seems to be to capture the LLM agent market in both enterprise and development but I don't see any indication this is working. At best they're positioning themselves as middleware, which is a tenuous place to be for a company their size. Even if they're successful they won't have any kind of moat. They don't have a modern equivalent to the Office suite on the horizon and things are changing too fast for anyone to have a safe bet on what that would even look like. It's unlikely to look like Copilot! And very likely to come from the model providers, which MS has so far failed to become.
They have their cloud and datacenters, where they're second place. If they start to lose their enterprise pipeline into that ecosystem, Google is well prepared to take their spot.
It's not shocking anymore to see big successful companies make dumb moves, but MS seems particularly out of touch with reality at the moment. It's too bad because Bing is the only realistic competitor to Google search. DuckDuckGo you say? That's essentially Bing in privacy mode.
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Comment on Sam Altman may control our future—can he be trusted? in ~tech
post_below Link Parentidk... I thought the ending was deft. It moved from catching him clearly contradicting himself, implying that he's after money and power despite his claims to the contrary, and then brings it home...idk... I thought the ending was deft. It moved from catching him clearly contradicting himself, implying that he's after money and power despite his claims to the contrary, and then brings it home by using Altman's own words to make a veiled comparison between Altman's 'magic' and LLM sycophancy and hallucination.
It would be hard to walk away from that read with anything but the impression that Altman is full of shit. Tempered, I guess, by grudging acknowledgement of his Jobsesque salesmanship.
It reminds me of middle stage Musk with even less attachment to the truth. I wonder if he'll go as completely off the rails?
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Comment on Sam Altman may control our future—can he be trusted? in ~tech
post_below Link ParentThe author didn't call him a liar, journalists shouldn't want us to trust their opinions. Thus the neutral(ish) tone. But they did spend an absurd amount of time getting quotes from people calling...The author didn't call him a liar, journalists shouldn't want us to trust their opinions. Thus the neutral(ish) tone. But they did spend an absurd amount of time getting quotes from people calling him a liar. It's essentially the thesis of the whole novella length article. Sociopath was also mentioned more than once.
Cheers to them for the public service message, even if it was also a guaranteed viral hit.
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Comment on AI Coding agents are the opposite of what I want in ~comp
post_below Link ParentThat's the right direction (meaning automation, not local models, they aren't quite there yet). You can call agents programmatically so if you wanted a collection of agents watching over your...That's the right direction (meaning automation, not local models, they aren't quite there yet). You can call agents programmatically so if you wanted a collection of agents watching over your shoulder, ready to head off in various predetermined directions, you could definitely build it.
But really there are already fairly low friction ways to handle those things without starting from scratch. Custom agents, slash commands, skills, hooks, more recently loops and scheduling. Most of the tools you need to customize the environment any way you want are already built into Claude Code and (always just a little behind) Codex. For anything that's missing, both CLIs have a headless option.
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Comment on AI Coding agents are the opposite of what I want in ~comp
post_below (edited )Link ParentNot really that out of date, November 2025 was the last big leap in capability. Which is odd, if you gave a frontier coding agent clear structure and pseudo code in January 2026, generally it...Not really that out of date, November 2025 was the last big leap in capability. Which is odd, if you gave a frontier coding agent clear structure and pseudo code in January 2026, generally it could turn that into working code even if that specific pattern wasn't in the pre-training. The top models are really good at translating from one language to another, even if the target language is code and the source is well structured english. They have a huge corpus of patterns to match against in both languages. The exception maybe being obscure programming languages, I haven't tried to use an agent for a language that wasn't in training but I imagine it would be more trouble than it's worth.
Context matters a lot in this case, if you were to prompt "write code to solve X problem" and there were no solutions even vaguely similar in the training, the agent might struggle.
If you said... "Our goal is to solve this [problem]. We want to normalize X data and then do Y with it, based on its relationship with Z. The result needs to conform to [criteria]. Let's talk about how to accomplish that". You'd be on your way to a solution. Or to put it another way, on your way to creating sufficient well structured english that the model could reliably translate it into code. Note that the above is an overly simplified example.
As for myself, one of the first steps in solving a novel problem is often gathering information. Agents are really good at speeding up that process. By an order of magnitude sometimes.
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Comment on AI Coding agents are the opposite of what I want in ~comp
post_below Link ParentIndeed. I've said this before, but it's going to bear repeating for while: In practice coding agents aren't simple tools. In theory they're simple, but two different people will get very different...They are? Those all exist.
Indeed. I've said this before, but it's going to bear repeating for while: In practice coding agents aren't simple tools. In theory they're simple, but two different people will get very different results for the same task unless they're using identical scaffolding and similar prompts.
It's not an all or nothing between pure vibecoding and "just autocomplete". You can decide what the tool is for and when to use and not use it. You can absolutely use agents just to audit for security issues, or just to write tests, or whatever.
But the key point is that, unless you're doing something very straightforward or someone has dropped you into pre-made scaffolding that provides a specified workflow, you're going to need to play around and iterate to get it working the way you want reliably.
Possibly part of the problem many have is that a lot of the conversation and marketing around agents is some version of "ask for a thing, get the thing". Which only works sometimes, and pretty rarely for certain kinds of tasks. People read hype pieces and get a distorted idea of how to use the tools.
One of the things I love about building software is the space where the best answer isn't immediately obvious and there isn't an established canonical way to handle it. That's the most satisfying kind of problem to solve and making agents do what you want is very much that kind of problem. Everyone is still figuring it out in real time, the model providers included. They didn't build the models to deterministically solve particular problems, wasn't even really an option. They just built general models and then paid close attention to how people ended up using them and then worked to support that via fine tuning and harness design.
It's uncharted territory
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Comment on Enjoying reading in the age of LLMs in ~humanities
post_below Link ParentAgreed, I should have said qualified it with "completely". No question that it's already replacing a lot of human writing.Agreed, I should have said qualified it with "completely". No question that it's already replacing a lot of human writing.
It's smart not to start with a significant refactor. As you nudge the ball forward, have Claude map out and summarize architecture, features, practices and patterns you encounter, modularized and loosely organized in some way. Use those files as context for future experiments (or demonstrations). Opus can actually be really good with legacy systems if it has enough context to pattern match effectively.