Apos's recent activity

  1. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    Apos
    (edited )
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    I go to school to learn accounting. We do most of our homework using Excel. One thing that I'm constantly doing is writing account names. I coded myself an AutoHotkey script that shows a window...

    I go to school to learn accounting. We do most of our homework using Excel. One thing that I'm constantly doing is writing account names. I coded myself an AutoHotkey script that shows a window with my chart of accounts. I can load the accounts from an Excel sheet, or use a default one based on the course's book. It has a lot of features that allow me to complete my homework assignments so fast. I have a fuzzy search, I can save the delta between accounts and their account number cells so that I don't need to click around when inputting in the general journal, or when building a general ledger from scratch. I found some hack so that even though my window has focus, Excel still shows which cell is highlighted.

    2 votes

  2. Comment on Software engineers / programmers: how’s it going? in ~comp

    Apos
    Link Parent
    I wasn't planning on using LLMs, but at some point (May or April) I learned about Ollama and I tested a local Chinese model offline. It was able to answer questions about the code in my open...

    I wasn't planning on using LLMs, but at some point (May or April) I learned about Ollama and I tested a local Chinese model offline. It was able to answer questions about the code in my open source libraries (the repos weren't on that computer). I figured that if I'm in their dataset, I might as well see if I can get value from it too since they are getting value from me.

  3. Comment on Software engineers / programmers: how’s it going? in ~comp

    Apos
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    Link
    Quite a lot, went from using 0 LLM in January 2026 to a huge amount now. It's similar, I might enjoy it more overall. It's less stressful, I'm working on projects I wouldn't care about before....
    • How has your work changed in the past year? How much of your daily work now involves LLM tools?

    Quite a lot, went from using 0 LLM in January 2026 to a huge amount now.

    • Are you enjoying your work more, less, or the same? Has your relationship with work changed in general?

    It's similar, I might enjoy it more overall. It's less stressful, I'm working on projects I wouldn't care about before.

    • Do you feel like you’re working more or less now? The same?

    Probably more, I context switch way more. And I have my own side projects. If I'm not careful I can easily do 18 hours days. Having access to an LLM removes the excuses that I used to have. They are pretty amazing at removing mental blocks.

    • Are you hopeful or fearful of the future (let’s say next 5 years) of SWE? Mixed?

    I'm not that fearful, so far, the things I'm good at can't be done with AI. I see it now like a tool that can enhance what I can already do. The danger is when I work on something I'm not good at and then I say "good enough" without carring too much. I expect there'll be a lot of tech debt to go through at some point.

    • Have you found any useful tips or advice for thriving in the current landscape?

    Networking is key. You need a safety net so that you're not left with no options. You don't want to have to rebuild yourself from scratch if your situation changes.

    • Has your career trajectory changed? Do you plan on seeking out different types of roles?

    I'm taking accounting / management classes to diversify and have the ability to build projects. I don't expect to become an accountant, but I want to be able to understand all the statements, know if my (future) company is doing well, etc.

    I think that even with LLMs becoming better, there will always be more problems to solve. Complete automation is a pipe dream. As long as there are humans, there will be things that can't be automated.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on X corp is taking down Nitter instances and demands takedown of project repository in ~tech

    Apos
    Link
    They also took down https://xcancel.com/. I guess I'm truly done clicking Tweeter links.

    They also took down https://xcancel.com/. I guess I'm truly done clicking Tweeter links.

    15 votes

  5. Comment on Order of the Sinking Star | Release date announcement in ~games

    Apos
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    You didn't really engage with what I said. I think I've shown above that he isn't necessarily a Trump lover, he was more of a Biden hater (which I can't really fault him for even though I do think...

    You didn't really engage with what I said. I think I've shown above that he isn't necessarily a Trump lover, he was more of a Biden hater (which I can't really fault him for even though I do think he was a better candidate than Trump, but that's not saying much). The Tweet you linked to is also less recent than the one I linked where he calls the USA a banana republic under Trump. (Also can you use xcancel when you link to Twitter? That site sucks to browse without it.)

    I don't advocate for separating the art from the artist. There are plenty of artists that I don't engage with their art. I don't think Jon Blow crosses that threshold based on what I've seen from him.

    If you claim that he finances Republicans, you'll have to show proof because from what I can see, he spends all his money to develop his games.

    Find me any community that respects his views on politics. From what I can see, no one likes his takes so I don't think there's really a platform there.

    1 vote

  6. Comment on Replicating Reddit's best feature on other forums in ~tildes

    Apos
    Link Parent
    It's really useful for recognizing people that post valuable stuff. Sometimes I'll be looking into something that's really niche and see the user name of someone that I added as a friend and then...

    It's really useful for recognizing people that post valuable stuff. Sometimes I'll be looking into something that's really niche and see the user name of someone that I added as a friend and then be reminded of who they were. It's always fun to come across them randomly. It's a good way to recognize the people that know their stuff.

    15 votes

  7. Comment on Sleep struggles: how do I get better sleep quality? in ~life

    Apos
    Link Parent
    Same, I thought it was 0.2mg. I edited my answer above in my top level comment.

    Same, I thought it was 0.2mg. I edited my answer above in my top level comment.

    1 vote

  8. Comment on What are your favourite anime and/or manga? in ~anime

    Apos
    Link
    Lots of good choices, but my favorite of all time is One Piece. It's a lot of episodes, bit it's so worth it. The world is so well developed. I definitely think it made me a better person. It gets...

    Lots of good choices, but my favorite of all time is One Piece. It's a lot of episodes, bit it's so worth it. The world is so well developed. I definitely think it made me a better person. It gets better and better and then the previous stuff also gets better in hindsight. To me, it's the modern Odyssey. And the main character is perfect for exploring that world.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on Sleep struggles: how do I get better sleep quality? in ~life

    Apos
    Link Parent
    There are also other details like brushing your teeth.

    There are also other details like brushing your teeth.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on Sleep struggles: how do I get better sleep quality? in ~life

  11. Comment on Sleep struggles: how do I get better sleep quality? in ~life

    Apos
    Link Parent
    Yeah, he's crazy good too so he doesn't trend to get stuck on the same levels for a long time. I really hope that he keeps going for many more years but I don't know how he stays sane.

    Yeah, he's crazy good too so he doesn't trend to get stuck on the same levels for a long time. I really hope that he keeps going for many more years but I don't know how he stays sane.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Sleep struggles: how do I get better sleep quality? in ~life

    Apos
    (edited )
    Link
    I also had issues for many years. For the past ~4 years now it's not so bad. My trick is to put video games gameplay videos from YouTubers that post daily. I tend sleep within 5 minutes. When I do...

    I also had issues for many years. For the past ~4 years now it's not so bad.

    My trick is to put video games gameplay videos from YouTubers that post daily. I tend sleep within 5 minutes. When I do wake up, I rewind the video halfway and then I'm back to sleep within 5 minutes or less.

    My current selection is:

    • PangaeaPanga - ~20 minutes every day of edited Super Mario Maker. He always says the same jokes for more than 5 years.
    • Real Civil Engineer - He tends to play grind games, his videos are edited to cut all silences.
    • Cephalopocalyse - He plays Brotatoe and talks like every video is a gameplay guide. He always talks with the same tone.
    • Northenlion - Diverse games with good banter, though I don't really watch him as much nowadays because his banter started to become too interesting and I would watch the videos until the end. He is so unhinged sometimes. A true professional.

    Why I think it works: I'm not too interested in the games themselves. They are interesting enough to prevent me from having my own thoughts, but not interesting enough to prevent me from sleeping. So once I start feeling tired, I'll close my eyes and eventually fall asleep to the background noise. They don't tend to have many unexpected noises or screaming (except for Northenlion which is why I removed him from my rotation lately).

    The YouTube algorithm has learned my behavior because when it's my bedtime, the first suggested video is always from one of them.

    Before, I used to not sleep until really late and I thought I had DSPD, but apparently not.

    Oh also, for the days where I think I'm not sleepy enough, I take melatonin. I cut the pills into chunks of roughly 0.3mg. Combined with the videos, I'm usually asleep within 20 minutes.

    13 votes

  13. Boost for Tildes

    ~tildes Ask
    This is an unofficial Boost for Lemmy port. With the Any significant changes to Tildes are extremely unlikely topic (and the Tildes successor one) from the other day about how this site was now in...

    This is an unofficial Boost for Lemmy port.

    With the Any significant changes to Tildes are extremely unlikely topic (and the Tildes successor one) from the other day about how this site was now in minimum maintenance mode, that gave me the motivation to finally look into porting Boost to work with Tildes. Knowing that the site won't change felt like a good time to "make" an app for it. For the longest time, the two mobile apps that I used for browsing Reddit were Reddit is Fun (which Tildes already has with Three Cheers thanks to @talklittle) and Boost. I've been using Three Cheers from the day that it came out. The original Boost creator (Rubén Mayayo) went to Lemmy instead of here and he created and maintains Boost for Lemmy. While Tildes isn't federated, it still has most of the features that Lemmy has, and it's also similar enough to Reddit. In the past few months, a project called Morphe has spawned to patch Android apps. A user on GitHub called Breal, has been maintaining Boost for Reddit by providing patches compatible with Morphe. He himself built his patches off the work from wchill though he's been mia for a few weeks. He's been fixing issues and backporting the new features that were implemented in the Lemmy app. That gave me the idea that something could be done for Tildes.

    Anyway, I got a Claude subscription for the summer and I'm trying to test its limits. I've been a programmer for 16 years and it has been blowing my mind. The more I work with LLMs the more they feel like masochists (the techniques that they use to solve various problems are truly wild). Some projects that should usually take months or years can be done in only a few days through sheer brute forcing. I got a proof of concept done the other day to see if I could connect Boost for Lemmy to Tildes. It worked within only a few hours which was promising. It turns out that implementing this well though was a lot harder than I expected. It took some really heavy modding to keep it seamless. I really wanted it to feel like native Boost while still following Tildes' way of doing stuff. After a lot of trial and errors, here it is. I was able to maintain compatibility so that it can live alongside Lemmy. Boost's account switcher lets your easily switch between Lemmy and Tildes.

    To install it:

    1. Download the Morphe Manager to your phone.
    2. Add my repo as a source URL in Morphe: 
      github.com/Apostolique/apos-morphe-patches
    3. Select Boost and follow the instructions to patch.
    4. Install the patched Boost for Lemmy.
    5. In Boost for Lemmy, select tildes.net as your instance and connect to your account.

    Here's to multiple more years of talking with you guys on Tildes.

    Report any bugs that you find, or issues with my instructions.

    Edit: Some screenshots (low battery because this took a lot of testing to get right):

    36 votes

  14. Comment on Tag test in ~test

    Apos
    Link
    print("Hello")
    print("Hello")

  15. Comment on Order of the Sinking Star | Release date announcement in ~games

    Apos
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    That's my bad I guess but it's because the same kind of discussions always spawns from posting something about Jonathan Blow online. And I wish the comments would be more about the game itself,...

    I wasn't going to respond since you come off as overly defensive.

    That's my bad I guess but it's because the same kind of discussions always spawns from posting something about Jonathan Blow online. And I wish the comments would be more about the game itself, not that it's bad. Reflects more on my thinking than on you. It's my pet peeve (The collapsed comment thread).

    The reason I got exemplary wasn't because of the quality of my comment but because I took time to find videos and write the transcripts of the parts I found interesting.

    I disagree that he is the type to just ask questions. He is really opinionated. snip1, snip2. He has a talk on Preventing the Collapse of Civilization. While I don't agree most of the time, I appreciate that there's a community reposting what he says with discussions from people agreeing with him or disagreeing. I see him as a modern day philosopher more than just a gamedev. But there's also a weird side where what he says gets amplified further than what he intended for example you can see his comment on this video"

    Look, when I stream this kind of thing late at night and am grumpy about the game, it's not meant to be something to be rebroadcast to a large audience, because that makes it into something different that is much more negative than it was meant to be. This was also a significant factor in why I was streaming without a camera for a while, because it decreased the number of these kinds of clips that people were doing. If people are going to keep clipping this kind of stuff it mostly means I can't play games on stream and have honest reactions, which is sad.

    With the uploader responding this:

    Thank you for sharing this, Jon. I genuinely respect your work and that was never my intention to change the nature of what you were doing or make you feel constrained on stream. I'll stop this series going forward. The channel exists because I find your ideas and critique valuable, not to work against you.

    Anyway, my comments tend to be dry and transactional I think. Don't read too much into it.

    Edit: Oh I forgot to reply to this part:

    I'm not entirely sure I'd say they helped with my critical thinking.

    His games tend to have many layers. For example, Braid is about saving the princess, but you can read deeper into it from many angles. Braid Deconstructed - A Retrospective

    There are analyses for The Witness too. A Deconstructive Reading of Jonathan Blow and Thekla’s The Witness

    I didn't care too much about The Witness but I liked other people's reactions to it. The Cracking the Cryptic playthrough was pretty awesome.

    6 votes

  16. Comment on Order of the Sinking Star | Release date announcement in ~games

    Apos
    Link Parent
    Isn't that just proving his point though? I think it's good to be able to express your ideas and get a reality check. It doesn't have to be a negative experience. Everything doesn't have to be a...

    Isn't that just proving his point though? I think it's good to be able to express your ideas and get a reality check. It doesn't have to be a negative experience. Everything doesn't have to be a confrontation. Usually you do that in a safe space. Like there are things I've told my parents that once I've said it, I was glad it was said to them and not somewhere else. Then I changed my thinking. My parents are great people though but not everyone is as fortunate. Where do you go if you don't have an outlet? Or maybe I can call it a "social safety net". Is it not allowed to fail? Is there no recovery once you've failed publicly? That's how I read what he means by "develop a culture where people aren't afraid to talk".

    Is all that progress only allowed to exist within our own minds and never be expressed externally?

    5 votes

  17. Comment on Order of the Sinking Star | Release date announcement in ~games

    Apos
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Can you elaborate on what you mean? It doesn't say that he is financing any specific group. He just seems to have bad takes on politics. For example I found this video where he doesn't seem happy...
    • Exemplary

    Can you elaborate on what you mean? It doesn't say that he is financing any specific group. He just seems to have bad takes on politics. For example I found this video where he doesn't seem happy about either political party: https://youtu.be/-tdp2peI2gY. He is more of a naysayer. If we're going off random Tweets, he has this which is more recent than the Tweet sources in the Wikipedia article: https://xcancel.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1939982295936782396
    Anyway, I don't think we need to agree with everything an artist does or have some sort of purity contest. Jonathan Blow looks like a pretty complex person and summarizing his philosophy off random things that he says feels weird.
    Also I think his art doesn't lean one way or another and generally helps with critical thinking.

    Edit: This topic got me curious so I looked a bit more and found this video from 4 months ago, though I'm not sure when the interview was (edit looks like it was 2 years ago). Here's one quote that I found interesting (3:09):

    And that's one of the lies, right? One of the lies is that this dude [Trump (or maybe he meant Biden? That was 2 years ago)] is making decisions that are meaningful as opposed to just getting up...
    I mean, do you remember when Obama was president, how many speeches that dude did and how coherent and intelligent he was even [host cuts here so I can't make out what he said]. Like compared to that, there's no president, there's no anything. And we all know this except for the people who are really checked out of reality.

    There's this later in the video which is rather meta:

    Literally every time I say stuff like this I get a bunch of crap for it, right? And I think the thing is, and you know, this has been true even before the internet you would always have people just saying the talking points and not wanting to generate controversy by going off script or whatever, but we kind of have to deal with it like it definitely became worse with the internet because there's just so much more talking. And if I'm gonna have a long-term vision again, we have to somehow just figure out how to deal with this as humanity. Like how do you deal with the fact that a bunch of people can just say a bunch of crap about you anytime they want and you can see it and everybody else can see it? And I think the only sane response is to just ignore that stuff or filter it out or something. But like we have to culturally iterate till we get there and maybe if not enough people speak honestly we instead develop a culture or just being afraid to talk and so I don't think we should be afraid to talk. I would not feel, I would not have full self-respect if I felt like I was afraid to talk. It's just part of my personality right? And so I think it would be very advantageous to all of us if we can find a way to steer the culture to a place where people are not afraid to talk. I think that is a danger, like the USA I grew up in, the kind of reticence that you're talking about was mostly reserved for, you know, politicians or CEOs of big companies or whatever, right? But as the internet exploded, I think it's now a thing that's felt by everybody. Everybody feels this pressure that if they say the wrong thing it could be very bad. And that's true, but I feel like it's also just destructive to the soul to live that way. It's like you live behind the iron curtain again all of the sudden. So we have to just not do that. I would like to not do that. I would like to live in a USA where people are as free to express themselves as they were when I grew up. Some people might say some stuff that you think is repugnant, but that's part of the constant struggle that we have to refine our society and make it better. That's just life. I prefer letting us live life rather than like I'm scared the whole time. So that's why I Tweet Bidenomics exclamation point is because I just don't want to see us keep going the direction that that stuff's been going. [...] Talking is how you figure out what you actually think.

    [Host] : It's well said. I mean, I've often said that, not to get too political, but this has come up in the past in different contexts, when I went to college, which I went to in 2002, I was pro-life, and by the time I left college, I was pro-choice specifically by just listening to people's arguments for really the first time ever and being like "oh yeah, okay this resonates with me". You have to be malleable. I was also deeply neoconservative at that era and I'm like completely anti-war now. I found the errors in my own ways from my perspective by listening to people.

    13 votes

  18. Comment on Order of the Sinking Star | Release date announcement in ~games

    Apos
    (edited )
    Link
    Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) has been working on this game for a few years now. It's a sokoban game. I used to follow his development streams a few years ago. The tech for this game was...

    Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) has been working on this game for a few years now. It's a sokoban game. I used to follow his development streams a few years ago. The tech for this game was really interesting. It's using his Jai language.

    Edit: The date is October 8, 2026.

    8 votes