Viewing profile — rgoulter

Each to their own, but I think free weights is the easiest activity where you get to feel tangible progress from doing it. You move weight around, later you move the same around a …

Nix (& NixOS) are very much in the same "as code" as Terraform. -- You put in extra effort now, to save effort later. This isn't traditionally 'practical'. It's quicker to just ins…

Hmm. Using e.g. Claude code: I could see this as next step: "plain text editor" progresess to "with autocomplete"; using an LLM coding agent is then an abstraction over editing cod…

A naive hope is: you see that the LLM is so good at coding that all you need to do is supply a "yes/no" on what you want. Turns out that understanding the technical domain is impor…

To an extent, but not to that extent. There's a significant difference between (say) 20wpm and 100wpm. -- Your comment is 150-200 words; so that's the difference between spending t…

'Maybe cheap but not free' is a good observation. If I'm getting paid for the work, I'm happy to leverage the LLMs so I can do more. If I'm paying for the work, I expect more from …

> I think the last time I tried was a year ago though, so I assume it has improved. I noticed that coding agents seemed to get pretty good around 2025 Oct/Nov. If it's improved? My…

Another consideration: written by hand, the trade-off of development velocity vs well organised code means that it can be worth taking some tech debt now in order to deliver some v…

Kindof. The problem is: quickly fixing problems (or preventing problems) benefits from having a good understanding of what the code is doing. If you do have a suite of automated ch…

devenv is really nice. devenv brings modularity to development shells. For example, you could configure your devenv module for the shell you want (which env vars you want set, whic…

> Also, NixOS is not very flexible. I prefer e. g. /Programs/Ruby/4.0.5/ I'd characterise it as the opposite: A unique aspect of NixOS is that it avoids global state as much as pos…

> I suppose you're saying ASCII 10 was chosen as newly because it aligns with the down arrow on keyboards of the time. Maybe. The linked StackExchange has it as: > What character w…

> \n is ^J (ctrl-J) so there's some logic there The same 'j' as vi uses for 'hjkl'. https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/42426/why-did-vi-use-...

I recalled Google says "AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses", and wondered why it wasn't in the screenshot. I see it's because you need to click the "show more"/expand …

SKG aren't going for a maximalist "if you publish an online game, it must 100% work forever". Unfortunately, it seems it's not so easy to find a clear mission statement. I see thei…

I do wish that Emacs was more popular with LLM technologies. LLMs are powerful at dealing with text. And Emacs is highly extensible and typically text-oriented. Already I see peopl…

That's an apt term. Or more to the point: 'mode error' is exactly what the upthread comment is complaining about with the Caps Lock key.

> I've switched to programmable ergo keyboards where there's a whole slew of options The best part of these kinds of keyboards is they provide each thumb two keys each. That allows…

Sort of. The downside from the 'state' from Caps Lock is you have to keep track of whether it's active or not. Whereas with layers, typically a layer will only be active if you're …

> If I'm gonna be reviewing all day... I think the point is: Pre-LLM: 1. think, 2. write code & check, 3. review. LLM: 1. think, 2. write prompt, , 3. review. If the thing that you…

> But LLMs don’t seem particularly good at inventing new ways to code (or write, or…). It’s literally all derivative. I think the key part is how much thought goes into something. …

Seems to me LLMs have changed some things. I'm not sure how it's best put, but it used to be: - Seeing code (or a blogpost or whatever) was a result from effort where thought had g…

Opposite in which sense? I guess this is all about rudeness from being too lazy. My understanding is 'lmgtfy' is a response to a lazy request for help. Someone's asking for help, b…

I think it's worth elaborating. Loosely, LLMs give plausible responses. And LLMs are really good at writing confident-sounding responses. LLM output is as if someone is replying wi…