kretaceous

To me, the article comes across as introspective (which by the way, I found extremely relatable) and not preachy.

Your comment also feels that you are not happy about where the industry is headed but don't you think your anger is misplaced?

In college (~5 years ago) I had to write a move-data-from-A-to-B pipeline¹ for a club. I had a simple version ready in ~1hour but it looked bad and slow. So I stayed up the whole night for the next 6 hours finding about weird MongoDB commands, discovering transactions from first principles², Node.js memory management. I commented it by hand and perfected the code. I don't know if I still have that code but it's a memory I often go back to.

I recently tried to write an elevator simulator (harder than I thought it would be) entirely on my own. I wrote the tests as a markdown spec and used an LLM to actually convert them to tests according to my interface. That was definitely a little gratifying, but not even close to what I used to feel. Of course, fully blaming LLMs is not really fair. There's also Life™ but LLMs definitely helped this soft-atrophy.

I simultaneously feel called out and encouraged by the post. The gym analogy feels apt. I guess I need to work on my recovery as well as hit a different gym which isn't named software.

1: I didn't know it was called ETL back then

2: I'm one of those weirdos who learnt a NoSQL DB first

One of the coolest things I've seen. I'd recommend the "Behind the scenes" video in the page.

This is relatable. I find myself using LLMs more in cases where I don't care about learning and have made multiple tools to fir my workflow (Swift apps, etc. without ever touching Swift code). When it comes to things I do know about or want to learn about, I'm avoidant towards them because I know I can do better even if slower; but the procrastination for these has definitely turned into disinterest.

This was really encouraging to read for some reason, thanks!

A digital theremin! Very fun.

Can you give examples of how they are different? I've only done OOP in JS so I'm not aware of what I'm missing or what's supposed to be different.

Suppose there's the following situation:

    Summary A = summarise(message 1 to P)
    Summary B = summarise(Summary A, message P+1 to Q)
    Summary C = summarise(Summary B, message Q+1 to R)

What does calling lcm_expand(Summary C) do? Does it unroll all messages from message 1 to message R or does it unroll to Summary B and message Q+1 to R?

> volume is potentially arbitrarily large is that one sub-agent can call lcm_expand multiple times - either vertically or horizontally

I'm assuming from this that it's the latter? In that case, that addresses my concern about not blowing up the context window immediately.

Re: the lcm_expand(summaryID) tool

> Because expansion can recover arbitrarily large volumes of earlier conversation, this tool is restricted to sub-agents spawned via the Task tool; the main agent cannot call it directly. This restriction prevents uncontrolled context growth in the primary interaction loop.

What if the lcm_expand is called for a summary that has 1000s of messages that immediately floods the sub-agent's own context window?

Does lcm_expand only unroll one "layer" of the DAG and unrolls more if needed by another subagent?

This is really cool and something I've envisioned building for a long time!

There is a bug in the entity tracking. For the entity "github", it shows a positive sentiment. HN does NOT like GitHub (for reasons good or bad). If you click on it, it shows you stories about other seemingly unrelated stories.

https://ethos.devrupt.io/entities/github

Getting into reading again this year after a long break.

The most memorable read of this year was "The Count of Monte Cristo" (1846) by Alexander Dumas .

It's one of the greatest stories ever told. It's ~1250 pages but I sped through it in 3 weeks even if I'm a slow reader.

Highly recommended!

I also read The Stranger by Camus and the two top Orwells which lived up to the hype.

I'm confused by what Cursor is trying to be. They shipped plan mode and debug mode which are developer focused tools and I'm happy about them.

On the other hand, features like these are kinda distracting to me. I wouldn't mind if it wasn't for the core product and developer features getting buggier day by day.

I've been facing a number of rough edges lately. The plan mode's support for multiple plans in a single chat breaks often, todos don't get created or marked properly, the new changed files UX is atrocious (just take me to the file), it's not able to adhere to simple prompts in a low context window usage chat (Sonnet 4.5), etc.

It sucks to try different editors every few months but I might have to do that if this continues.

> We’ve seen 2x speed improvements in type checking times for internal projects when using TSGO.

That's a lot less that what TSGO promised when it was first announced (A 10x faster Typescript¹). Hopefully this is just the result of it being experimental.

1: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-...

Interesting things from this:

- Smallest animal: Myxobolus Shekel. Smaller than a WBC at 10 micrometeres.

- Biggest butterfly: Queen Alexandra's Birdwing. Bigger than human brain at 18cm.

- Largest insect to ever live: Meganeura (283 MYA). At 40cm long, a dragonfly larger than a house cat.

- Rafflesias are larger than German Shepherds

- Earth's largest crab: Japanese Spider Crab. 1m, legs pan of 3.75m. More than half the size of a human.

- Always thought Mososaurs were largest animal to ever live but it's the Blue whale at 26m. I don't think I ever appreciated how unfathomably huge they are. (The largest Mosasaur found was 13m. There's a speculated size of 17m as well.)

- World's largest living tree: Hyperion - a giant redwood in california at 115m.

Love seeing something so polished and inspiring. Amazing illustrations and even better music.

Thanks Neal for these projects!

Exactly my thoughts. The only incompatibility with Bun is the unavailability of the `using` keyword:

> If you are using Bun (which doesn't natively support using and uses a transpiler which is incompatible with this library)...

I skimmed the issues but I couldn't find any issues on Bun regarding this except for: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/discussions/4325

A linter rule provided by the library could be helpful here. I know it's just a workaround but probably easier than going for a solution that does compile time checks.

I need the search service so bad.

I attempted something like this because I wanted a good books search service which provided me at-a-glance information I needed from Storygraph & Goodreads. The main things I look for when I search a book is genres/Storygraph's "moods", number of pages, whether it's part of a series, rating across services & how much does it cost.

Could never make it work properly.

The first two sections reminded me of an observation I've made about myself: the more I delay "doing the thing" and spend time "researching" or "developing taste", the more I turn into a critic instead of a creator.

> Your taste develops faster than your skill

> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"

They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)

It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.

(See how I turned into a critic?)

I don't understand so bear with me.

If the Uranium came from multiple supernovae, then why is it shocking that earth has different concentrations of U235? Moreover, how is it proof of a past fission reaction?

What if that "part" of U235 came from a separate supernova which is a little older and some more of its U235 had already decayed?

They are in their early 20s and not American¹. Why is that so hard to grasp?

1: https://voxelmanip.se/about/