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albrewer

Re:State of Devs 2026 survey results: developers are exhausted on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @02:06PM (#49996509)
I mean, this is anecdata, but I've had to combat multiple hallucinations from Opus 5.5 _today_ about what a codebase I hand-wrote just last year does.
Re:GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @10:42AM (#49909684)
Qwen 3.8-27B being on par with Opus 4.6 from ~18 months earlier is a sort of case in point, right?
I have a hook that auto-denies when it sees 'python -c "', ' awk ', ' sed ', and '&&'
Re:My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini on Thursday September 03, 2026 @11:32AM (#49551697)
> the cost is included in your electricity bill

Acting like an extra $20 on my electric bill is equivalent to a $200/mo subscription is... a take.

Re:Muse Spark 1.3 on Thursday September 03, 2026 @10:58AM (#49550865)
A series of hot takes:

Benchmarks are useful but only on a log2 basis. One model performing at 50% and another at 75% is just as impressive as one model performing at 78% and another at 90%. Confoundingly, a benchmark becomes useless once a frontier model scores over ~95% on them.

Re:Gemini 3.8 Flash on Thursday September 03, 2026 @10:35AM (#49550462)
If I get a better Gemma 26b-a4b MoE model out of it I'm all for it. Really wishing Qwen 3.8 would release a MoE variant of their 27b model size, but I wont complain if google beats them to it.
Re:Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions on Friday August 28, 2026 @02:59PM (#49482905)
I think it'd be pretty easy to fix, too. Have a point on the line that represents "10 seconds from now" and orient your camera along the line between that and the point representation of your car, with slow, smooth panning so as not to get jerky transitions. If "10 seconds from now" is within a certain range of the car, it ought to just default to whatever its doing now.
Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @05:11PM (#49440693)
Because I spent $15k in AI costs last month doing real work at my day job; I'd like to do the same thing for myself but I don't like lighting cash on fire.
It it has less than 64gb then probably not
Re:Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork on Monday August 03, 2026 @12:32PM (#49158006)
The dream. Or a qwen-3.8-coder model.
Not OP, but your math is a bit off - I have solar panels :)
What problems are you running into? Ive been running multiple qwen coder next agents locally and it works fine.
> the battery often dies around the time most people would consider upgrading anyway

Most people I know would prefer to just use the same phone they're familiar with until its physically not possible. They don't want to learn new things. They dont care about the latest features. It's an appliance; a means to and end and nothing more.

Re:Why Today's Python Developers Are Embracing Type Hints on Monday September 29, 2025 @11:39AM (#45415166)
Define a protocol[0] that declares it implements `__getitem__` and type annotate with that protocol. Whatever properties are needed inside the function can be described in other protocols.

These are similar to interfaces in C# or traits in Rust - you describe what the parameter _does_ instead of what it _is_.

[0]: https://typing.python.org/en/latest/spec/protocol.html

My AI experience has varied wildly depending on the problem I'm working on. For web apps in Python, they're fantastic. For hacking on old engineering calculation code written in C/C++, it's an unmitigated disaster and an active hindrance.
Re:Code Review Can Be Better on Thursday August 21, 2025 @02:30PM (#44976348)
> Because in the software engineering world there is very little engineering involved.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've been given the time to do a planning period for something less than a "major" feature in the past few years. Oddly, the only time I was able to push good QA, testing, and development practices was at an engineering firm.

Re:My Bank Keeps on Undermining Anti-Phishing Education on Friday July 18, 2025 @12:11PM (#44606408)
Don't be ridiculous. It's a set of solenoids typing into a punch card machine.
I've housed two sibling that were labeled as "mentally unstable"(raised by mentally abusive narcissists) and "lazy"(has narcolepsy), respectively. Both situations were pretty bad before they landed in our home, but everyone in their lives called us "angels" for taking them in.

Each of them lived with my family for two years. All my wife and I did was let them exist in their own space with no pressure to do anything (other than coexist in our house, but that's purely logistics).

Both of them have gone on to go to college and pursue their respective dreams. The elder of the two lives independently, and the younger just shipped off to college.

The broader point being that most people just need a support network and a stable place to live to start to thrive.

Granted, that's just anecdata on my part, but it seems to line up with moth metal health studies I've read when it comes to homelessness.

Re:The Invisible Light That's Harming Our Health on Thursday June 19, 2025 @10:30AM (#44319033)
> This made them useful for astronomers because their light was easily filtered

The wavelength is so specific that it can have all kinds of cool applications:

https://youtu.be/UQuIVsNzqDk?si=R4VUDCfC6zcHd4XC

Re:What methylene blue can (and can’t) do for the brain on Wednesday June 11, 2025 @10:28AM (#44247994)
> but norepinephrine is actually the common thread among all ADHD medications

Anecdata, but my ADHD (and depression!) didn't significantly improve until I was on both lisdexamfetamine and buproprion. Both drugs lift production of both neurotransmitters, but they "specialize" in dopamine and norepinephrine, respectively.

Re:The Rise of the Japanese Toilet on Monday June 02, 2025 @11:01AM (#44159524)
> People who have been doing this their whole lives can probably aim with a precision of a Marine Corp Sniper but to us

I bought these sprayers for my house when people lost their minds hoarding toilet paper during the initial COVID lockdowns in the US. It only took a few days to start getting it right the first time, every time.

Re:Human coders are still better than LLMs on Friday May 30, 2025 @11:48AM (#44137407)
> LLMs can reliably solve the problem of a blank-page.

This has been the biggest boost for me. The number of choices available when facing a blank page is staggering. Even a bad/wrong implementation helps collapse those possibilities into a countable few that take far less time to think about.

There a company awhile back that did almost exactly this called CoinHive
I worked for a foundry that had been at the same location for 120 years. GE ran it into the ground and closed it 2 years after acquiring it.
Even if it did, wouldn't the development of the wrong genitials for their preferred sex make an edit like this meaningless? The existence of XX AMAB and XY AFAB people goes to show that it's more about what happens in utero than what genes you have after birth.
I had a similar experience but had an opposite takeaway. I learned that my car, in dry, daylight conditions, could comfortably go 20±5 mph faster around curves than those signs suggest.
I was thinking more like "Ear" and "Car" or "till" and "tilt"
Re:Wasting Inferences with Aider on Monday April 14, 2025 @10:59AM (#43682053)
> often

Often being about 30% of the time in my experience

> It’s deporting illegal aliens.

There are multiple news stories of them deporting US citizens and legal residents. Here's one[0].

If citizens don't have due process, then nobody does. All it takes is the government to declare you a non-citizen; there will be no due process for you to prove otherwise.

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/deported-family-us-citiz...

Google learning this the hard way with the recent chromecast outage[0]

[0]: https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Streaming/Regarding-a...

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