Hacker New, Brajeshwar

Start treating the Future-You like a Stranger. Write for that stranger, your Future-You will thank you. We think we will remember, but we won’t. So, don’t be too harsh on yourself and make it easier for your future-you. If that stranger finds it easier, it will also be for others; your relatives, kids, etc.

On the same theme of the importance of consistent and quality documentation.

Hacker News, kristjansson, 72M Points of Interest Mark Litwintschik

I always appreciate the near Literate Programming completeness of Mark’s posts, and his consistency in that over years. Every post feels like one could spin up a clean VM and end up with exactly his results just by reading along.

This is further evidence as to why I think being extremely verbose in any technical endeavor is very important. The more implicit instructions you have into setting something up, the harder is for someone to follow what exactly you’re doing and reproduce those steps. Reproducibility is as important in academic settings as it is in minor hobby projects because it makes it easier for other people to build on your work. Additionally, present you is going to forget what past you have done over a long enough period of time. Being able to instruct and direct how you set something up to other people is as important as the setup itself because one day you might be that stranger who has no idea the specific of why a decisions was made because you forgot.

Hacker News, rglover

A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future.

You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don’t know what you don’t know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code).

The hubris around AI is going to be hard to watch unwind. What the moment is I can’t predict (nor do I care to), but there will be a shift when all of these vibe code only folks get cooked in a way that’s closer to existential than benign.

Good time to be in business if you can see through the bs and understand how these systems actually function (hint: you won’t have much competition soon as most people won’t care until it’s too late and will “price themselves out of the market”).

Hacker News, GuB-42

I think that “nothing to hide” is a strawman.

No one really says that in an absolute sense, it is always in context, what it usually means is “I trust a particular institution with the data they collect”, not “I will give my credit card number to everyone who asks”.

For example, let’s say you approve of installing security cameras monitored by police in your residence, if you say “I have nothing to hide” what you are actually meaning is “there is nothing these cameras can see that I would want to hide from the police”. I think it is obvious that it doesn’t mean you approve of having the same cameras installed in your bathroom.

The real question is one of trust and risk assessment. Are the risks of revealing a piece of information worth it? how much do you trust the other party? not the literal meaning of “nothing to hide”.

Generative Pen-trained Transformer, Teddy Warner

It’s funny to look back at my intuition here, to use an LLM to generate a string of numbers, to generate SVG blobs, to feed to a pen plotter, and to call the whole thing the Generative Pen-trained Transformer?