victords

> The fastest moving and most effective organizations I've worked at are ones that focused on code quality from the beginning.

I agree with that in the pre-LLM world, but I don’t believe it’s the same today.

You can build something with “bad” code that works and is full of technical debt, but today paying this debt is getting cheaper and cheaper.

So if Claude’s wrong design decision leads to having to refactor several chunks of a codebase in order to implement a new feature, does it really matter if it’s Claude who is going to refactor it in a matter of seconds? Especially for a company like Anthropic which has a virtually unlimited number of tokens to spend on it.

I saw this video on Ars Technica about the making of Prince of Persia in the original Apple II and decided to get the book: https://youtu.be/sw0VfmXKq54?is=_QUEAlmdYJZuXeGr

The book is called “The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993”.

I started coding around 2013, picked up a book, learned Java and started building Android apps. It was fun at the time, and pretty painless to get your app in the store.

Fast forward to last year, with all the rage about coding tools, I got into building small projects again, and built a simple app. After a decade from posting my last app on Google Play I resurrected my account, and started going through the process of publishing an app today... And how awful things got!

Back then it was essentially, title, description, upload your Apk and some screenshots and you're done! Now there are reviews, privacy policy, endless amount of forms and information you need to fill out. I get why (some) things are the way they are today, but when you just want to make an app for fun, getting it out there just feels like work. I gave up on the app, made it into a website, and in the end it actually felt better (and so much easier).

Not OP, but I’m running local models on a M1 Max as well with 64GB RAM.

It varies by model, but I’m getting 50-60 t/s with Qwen 3.6 35B and Qwen 3 coder 30B.

I’ve also used Qwen 3.8 27B but I get 10t/s on it.

It’s useable in some use cases, but I rely mostly on my $20 Claude subscription.

I was interested in learning more about reverse image search, so I built audioguide.london. It’s a simple image search where you take a photo of an artwork in a gallery, tries to ID it and returns a pre-generated audio and a link to the museum website.

The audios were all generated locally, essentially looking at the contents of the website, running it through a LLM to generate a script and Kokoro for TTS.

I’ve built it as an app for myself almost a year ago, so I deployed it as a vibe coded website in here: https://audioguide.london/

As mentioned before, I think Apple hardware is the best alternative right now.

Mac Studio, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, you can find even some used ones with enough RAM that will run models like Qwen reasonably well.

I'm using a M1 Max MacBook Pro and it runs Qwen 3.5 on Ollama (without MLX) at a decent speed.

A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

URL Shortener is still one of the most popular System Design questions, building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it, for example.

Loved the idea!

VictorSantiago.me

Only actual update I do is to change my title / company when I change jobs, otherwise it's just a landing page to link to my GH, LinkedIn, etc. No blogs or anything exciting.

When AWS released the S3 Vectors last year, I wanted to try it since I had no experience with Vector DBs, so I built a simple audioguide app to play around with it.

Basically, just use it to identify artworks from a photo, then return a pre-generated AI-Audio for that artwork based on the data on their site. I put up a basic live version on my site for The National Gallery in London: https://victorsantiago.me/audioguide/national_gallery.html

(If you want to try it, you can open it on your phone and take a picture of some painting on the National Gallery Website, e.g.: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/vincent-van-gog... )

It was pretty fun to try it out and play with different LLMs and TTS models to generate the output. Might make a it a proper web app some time soon!

Are you able to sponsor visa? Already based in London, but would need visa to switch jobs.

The way you put it, looks like IBM is a pretty good place to work at

The homebrew scene still exists today, just moved consoles.

I was just playing around with the Xbox Dev Mode this weekend and trying out different emulators.

> The fact this tech is becoming g democratized is good.

The issue is that it's only democratized if you have the money.

I'd imagine not everything can be paid on a credit card. E.g.: Rent.

> most locals want to go to UK and the US to live

Absolutely not the impression I got when I lived there.

You don't need to be badly paid to enjoy free lunch.

They did pay their bonus in some Binance crypto coin, but at least their base salary was relatively high.

> Out of the two signals, "this person was successful at 8 different companies" versus "this person stuck in one place for almost three decades", which do you imagine is going to get hired?

Why is the assumption not the opposite?

"This person failed at 8 companies" vs "This person was success at one for almost three decades"?

Why is it a sign of success if you are at a company for a short stay before going to the next? If anything, I'd imagine that a short stay would be more likely related to getting PIPd or unable to get promoted/grow there.

Why is it even suspected to be her? Just because of the account name?

Why fiasco?

Not agreeing with his points, but funnily enough, I think Sony does use Azure.

So, in other words is not one person who is pushing to remain on Whatsapp, but instead only one person pushing to leave.

Worked until the end for me. Nice little retrospective game.

Who is the "rest of us"? Facebook, Twitter...?

It's obvious there should have been more moderation. However, Parler is a 30 employee start up. Their efforts would fall sort of the ideal either way...

They may not have failed ethically yet.

It’s virtually impossible for a company the size of Facebook to be free of controversies.

Being more or less problematic shouldn’t be an issue.

If you have moral issues with a company, you should have it with all companies, regardless if one is more or less problematic. Otherwise, it’s just hypocrisy.

That was my thought. Why would a top-tier candidate, who supposedly is already making enough money, bother to go through this process?

Is it really worth it to lose a day in your weekend for a couple hundred bucks and the hope of getting yet another assignment or a job?

> what about PS3 or 360 games?

That's only true for PS3 tho. Microsoft has been doing quite a good job regarding backwards compatibility, and you can still play 360 games in the new Series X.

The thing is that this is a different audience than Quest.

Quest is a standalone headset, and this is most likely the reason why it's one of the most popular.

So, if no other company competes in the standalone headset market, Oculus and FB will still be major players in the VR industry, and a lot of people will still keep buying it. Regardless of how shitty FB is.