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jnmandal

Re:LLM Voice on Thursday October 29, 2026 @06:25PM (#50297070)
Extremely relevant for about half or more of blog posts submitted here. Honestly has become a sad state of affairs
Re:Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @09:26AM (#50273182)
Incredible write up. The visuals are amazing
Re:The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @11:45AM (#50261045)
Pretty much the whole thing. Also I checked just now and the AI detection services say its from 60-90% AI written lol
Re:The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @04:26AM (#50256067)
Is it just me or is this article itself AI? Or is everyone just adopting the AI tone and writing style now?
Certainly not declining consumer spending. Couldn't be that
Pretty wild that the international community tolerates this. Realistically this should catalyze a UN intervention.
Re:What About Rails? on Friday September 25, 2026 @07:24AM (#49843023)
Not trying to be a jerk but at this point SRE is my main use case for heavy LLM stuff. It's pretty awesome at that. Deployments and CI pipelines have become a breeze. I used to have to ask DevOps for that and wait days. I have even let agents run deployments for side projects and they seem to do better work than most humans I've worked with. It's wild they will actually read all the logs and debug problems so fast. Not something we could ever keep up with.

The actual code and architecture is where it still lacking IMHO. Especially in rails... Like it will just build the least scalable features if you let it do it's thing. Ten queries for what could be one. No separation of concerns. Huge files, lots of duplicated code and then tens of thousands of units tests that just grow like a fatberg.

If your app does anything serious, if you have serious traffic... you are going to need to review each session finely (and your DB schema with each deploy). It could be that this is maybe an indictment of rails more than LLMs, I guess maybe time will tell.

Re:I accidentally logged phone calls to military bases on Saturday August 22, 2026 @06:42AM (#49398375)
Its hip again on some parts of the fediverse.
We really need solutions like this if we are going to reverse atmospheric carbon the necessary amount to mitigate planetary catastrophe. Thanks for working on this. Good luck.
Re:Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds on Thursday July 09, 2026 @10:56PM (#48855238)
I can't imagine a worse use case for AI. Literally thought the title was a clown
Re:4K years ago, Mohenjo-daro grew more equal over time on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @08:36PM (#48378159)
A David Graeber inspired study!?

In case you haven't heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

Re:All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:41PM (#48298585)
Title is pretty clickbaity. Cool data set though
It is extremely early days for these offerings. Synthetic ferts are a relatively mature technique and the related product offerings (which are now effectively commoditized) had state-subsidized R&D for several decades. Mycorrhizal inputs have had a hundredth of the R&D and only been used commercially for a few years at best.

Its not really a fair comparison. This is like comparing PDAs to desktop computers in 1991, and surmising that mobile devices are just marketing hype.

They just leave it in place mostly. Sometimes in big mounds that become berms over a few years. Discarding wood chips is actually very expensive.
Re:Greek Alphabet Cards on Saturday May 16, 2026 @11:12AM (#48160919)
Μπράβο ρε. Πόσο όμορφο
Placing it at the root of the trees makes a ton of sense as it increases yields and lowers need for inputs. Also helps with the compaction from all the mechanization in the orchards.

Selling it as fuel is maybe some added revenue in the short term but really just doesn't make sense. Now if you were getting a premium (lumber, specialty hardwood, etc), then processing and selling could make sense

Re:0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix on Monday February 23, 2026 @02:00AM (#47118984)
Incredible work folks. Can't wait to try it out. The Germans look cool!
Re:AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse on Thursday January 08, 2026 @10:35AM (#46542232)
Yep. Not just stack overflow -- pretty much everywhere. If only someone could have foreseen this problem!!!

Anyways, no issue. We'll just get claude to start answer stack overflow questions!

Compared to itself. Same phenomenon as in Japan. Rising powers almost never have this issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_tsunami

Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.

Two things are important to think about.

1. Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute. (For a good treatise on this, read Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.

2. Great nations/empires generally become so at least partially through population growth. This can be organic or engineered (ie: continuously conquering more and more territory) but rising dominance almost never coincides with demographic stagnation, which the US is experiencing. This population plateau has been accurately predicted by the US Census for my entire lifetime.

Also nothing about this decline is unusual or unexpected. This is the course of empire, which is not a new concept.

Cyanosis is the medical term is but I should clarify its not like their skin was purple all the time. What happens is that if you drink a lot of the polluted well water then when your veins narrow (like from cold) it gets a more purplish hue. This happens naturally (like when your lips are cold after swimming) but its just more noticeable if you are drinking polluted well water from farming runoff.

A thing kids would do at my school is stick their hand out the window of the bus in the fall/winter and then compare whose hand is "more purple". Dumb kid stuff. I still remember a single person I knew whose cheeks would be super purple every time we came inside from playing in the winter. Almost like the character in the willy wonka movies.

So like its well known the color is simply more noticeable when you are being constantly exposed to nitrates. The person I am thinking of -- he was almost certainly drinking bad well water at home, perhaps for his whole life. I can't imagine that was only from the fountains at school. As far as I know its not a huge deal but like the article is saying... it quite obviously has knock on health effects.

Data centers should do everything they can to reduce water usage.

That said, this is masterful scapegoating. The ag lobby must be gleeful if they're not directly responsible for this narrative.

In 2003 my middle school in Central Pennsylvania had this exact same problem. All our water fountains had to have signs posted stating that the water was not safe to drink. Many of my classmates had the purple-tinged skintone that is characteristic symptom of consuming the polluted water.

The issue stems from high input, fossil-fuel based farming, and most of society simply looks the other way because no one has figured out a cheaper way to produce enough food. Data centers are just a red herring.

Re:Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980 on Thursday October 30, 2025 @09:15AM (#45759702)
As others have already said, the reason is mainly to cycle yard and food waste, as well as some garden tasks (they can be used to prepare beds as well as cut my lawn). I also plan to raise black soldier fly eventually.
Re:Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980 on Thursday October 23, 2025 @07:46AM (#45680736)
As someone who keeps backyard chickens and recently got a new flock, I will say anecdotally this spike was observed even in livestock.

In March 2025, I tried to order baby chicks to replace some of my aging flock. Not only was every hatchery sold out, but going in person to farm stores meant waiting in lines on the days shipments were received and dealing with rationing (3 chicks per person, etc).

I opted to order chicks for the fall instead of doing a normal spring brooding and luckily the weather cooperated, but as is normal I ordered some extra chicks as padding. The extras I have now been able to sell locally at a premium, covering my entire cost.

Let me just add I don't think backyard eggs are cheaper, even at the height of price spike, because when externalities like feed and enclosure are calculated the resulting product won't have the economies of scale. But I think many people decided they wanted a steady supply after eggs became hard to come by. I personally keep chickens for reasons besides eggs but I am still happy that more folks are keeping chickens.

I've seen folks doing both. Certainly, once you understand the OTP well enough, it makes sense to build all your systems on it. I've been doing that for seven years now; the only real issue was trying to train juniors to be productive on those systems. It did take longer to get them going I found.
Re:You can't grow cool-climate plants in hot climates on Saturday August 23, 2025 @10:26AM (#44996255)
Joey has really pushed boundaries on botany. Great to see his thoughts being discussed here. I think everyone could learn something from him
Telco integration sounds amazing. Wishing yall success
Nice. Yeah, we are dogfooding some systems I built in my household. We use whisper.cpp and I haven't had any issues. I get told frequently I should be using eleven labs but I just have been too lazy to build a benchmark that would help me decide
Looks really cool, exciting to see. I have two questions around this:

1. Given that you are concerned with providing access a class of folks that are traditionally ignored by technologists, do you plan to make these models usable for offline purposes? For example an illiterate person I know from Uttarkhand: his home village is not connected to road. Interestingly he does speak Hindi, but his native language I believe is something more obscure. To get home, he walks five hours from the terminus of a road. Connectivity is obviously both limited and intermittent. A usable device might want the voice interface embedded on it. Any plans for this?

2. I have minimal understanding of this but as someone who has learned Hindi/Urdu as a foreign language but in the US, I am often in mixed conversation w/ both Indians and Pakistanis. There never seems to be any issues with communication. I have heard that certain terms (like for example "khub suraat", "shukria", "kitaab") are more Urdu than Hindi. I also studied Arabic, Farsi, and Swahili so I am familiar with these as loanwords Arabic and/or Persian, but in practice I hear Hindi speakers using these terms often. Is the primary value add here political? Is it an accent thing? Thanks in advance for any explanation. This is still very much a mystery to me.

Looks like a really cool project. Do you have any opinions on which transcription models are the best, from a quality perspective? I have heard a lot of mixed opinions on this. Curious what you've found in your development process?

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