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crawshaw - 2025-01-06

This document is a summary of my personal experiences using generative models while programming over the past year. It has not been a passive process. I have intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming to learn about them. The result has been that I now regularly use LLMs while working a...

Click to view the original at crawshaw.io

Hasnain says:

Lots to ponder from this piece about using LLMs for day to day productivity.

A few main takeaways for me:

* ensure you can easily verify the output
* getting over the starting hump is really valuable
* having more smaller specialized modules vs fewer larger reusable modules may be better
* use LLMs for tests!

“Let me try to motivate this for the skeptical. A lot of the value I personally get out of chat-driven programming is I reach a point in the day when I know what needs to be written, I can describe it, but I don’t have the energy to create a new file, start typing, then start looking up the libraries I need. (I’m an early-morning person, so this is usually any time after 11am for me, though it can also be any time I context-switch into a different language/framework/etc.) LLMs perform that service for me in programming. They give me a first draft, with some good ideas, with several of the dependencies I need, and often some mistakes. Often, I find fixing those mistakes is a lot easier than starting from scratch.”

Posted on 2025-01-07T03:51:26+0000

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6 former Apple employees charged in charitable donations scheme

Six former Apple employees are facing fraud charges in a scam that targeted the tech giant’s program for matching workers’ charitable donations, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office.

Click to view the original at nbcbayarea.com

Hasnain says:

Same day as unconfirmed rumors hit that 300 employees of another nationality did the same thing, I see a news story about some employees doing this. Like… why

“The former employees, over a three-year period, tricked the tech company into matching thousands of dollars in donations to children’s charities when they were not in fact donating a thing, the DA's Office said. The total take from the scheme was about $152,000”

Posted on 2025-01-06T06:47:27+0000

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South Korea plane crash: Why was there a wall near the runway?

An air safety expert says lives could have been saved if the "obstruction" was not there.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

Hasnain says:

“Mr Kingswood said he would be "surprised if the airfield hadn't met all the requirements in accordance with industry standards".
"I suspect if we went around the airfields at a lot of major international airports... we would find a lot of obstacles that could similarly be accused of presenting a hazard," he added.”

Posted on 2025-01-06T04:24:24+0000

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Hasnain says:

“Now one can try to reverse-engineer how the app decrypts the currency file, and developers have a wide suite of tools to practice security by obscurity. You can read the file backwards, shift everything left by 12 bits, then forward by 2, modulo every second byte with 3, subtract your birthday as a UNIX timestamp, blah blah blah.

While it certainly is fun to dig around and follow the trail to having a usable file, I enjoy actually finishing my projects much more.”

Posted on 2025-01-06T04:20:02+0000

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Hasnain says:

I’ve tried to do some of these on my own sites too. I miss the old web. And also working with / learning from Rachel.

“I've been thinking about things that annoy me about other web pages. Safari recently gained the ability to "hide distracting items" and I've been having great fun telling various idiot web "designers" to stuff it. Reclaiming a simple experience free of wibbly wobbly stuff has been great.

In doing this, I figured maybe I should tell people about the things I don't do here, so they realize how much they are "missing out" on.”

Posted on 2025-01-06T04:03:59+0000

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Lessons from Bootstrapped Companies Founded by Software Engineers

We hear little about bootstrapped companies, despite bootstrapping being an effective way to get up and running. We cover five successful bootstrapped firms you’ve probably not heard of – until now

Click to view the original at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com

Hasnain says:

Great read which I’ll probably revisit over the years

“Engineering choices seem – dare I say? – more pragmatic. Alex Kotliarskyi from Secta Labs said he had to dial down his “tech purist views” from when he was at Facebook and Replit, and instead just choose “good enough” tools. At Fern Creek Software, Keith also said how he noticed how it’s VC-funded companies that aspire to technical elegance, and over engineering things.”

Posted on 2025-01-05T19:33:24+0000

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I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life

I am rich and have no idea what to do with my lifeLife has been a haze this last year. After selling my company, I find myself in the totally un-relatable position of never having to work again. Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don’t have the same base desires dri...

Click to view the original at vinay.sh

Hasnain says:

Honestly, there was some useful stuff to ponder after reading this, since I don't think the problems are necessarily limited to super rich people. The goals and meaning of life are issues that hit us all.

Edit to clarify: this made *me* ponder things given I was already thinking about life and everything else going on and what I want to do in my life.

So that takeaway of “money isn’t everything and an ulterior motivation in life is needed” was definitely an apt reminder, regardless of which form it was delivered in.

This specific guy’s midlife crisis is a bit too out of touch - from calling people NPCs to only being in a relationship as long as it benefited him, to, uh, whatever that was with DOGE, and I hope it goes without saying that I hope to never find myself in that situation.

"I know. This is a completely zeroth-world position to be in. The point of this post isn’t to brag or gain sympathy. To be honest, I don’t exactly know what the point of this post is. I tried to manufacture one, but I just felt like a phony. Then I recognized the irony of creating purpose out of a blog post when I don’t currently have much conviction or purpose in life."

Posted on 2025-01-03T06:48:08+0000

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How Widening Israel’s War Saved Benjamin Netanyahu

The Prime Minister’s domestic popularity has rebounded to pre-October 7th levels, despite his refusal to prioritize a hostage deal in Gaza.

Click to view the original at newyorker.com

Hasnain says:

"There’s an expansionist tendency right now. You would think that this is the time that Israel could conclude that it would expand, it could occupy and it could annex with no serious international repercussions. All of this is strange because Israel is currently facing more international repercussions or threats of international repercussions than ever before in its history, and yet those repercussions haven’t materialized."

Posted on 2025-01-03T05:57:12+0000

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A Mortuary Tangled in the Macabre : In a scandal that has rocked the state's funeral industry, three members of an All-American family face trial in Pasadena in a case that promises to tell a ghoulish : tale of organ theft and--perhaps--homicide.

Assistant Hesperia Fire Chief Will Wentworth listened incredulously as a caller complained that the noxious black smoke pouring from a nondescript building in the desert carried the sickeningly sweet smell of burning human flesh.

Click to view the original at latimes.com

Hasnain says:

This is from 1988. What in the world..

(Thank you Twitter for the olfactory ethics discourse that lead me to this)

“Assistant Hesperia Fire Chief Will Wentworth listened incredulously as a caller complained that the noxious black smoke pouring from a nondescript building in the desert carried the sickeningly sweet smell of burning human flesh.

“I don’t think so, it’s a ceramics shop,” Wentworth replied.

“Don’t tell me they’re not burning bodies. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz,” the man said chillingly, Wentworth recalled.”

Posted on 2025-01-02T20:43:36+0000

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The Story of Stent

Today is my 17th re-birthday. If you’ve been a longtime reader, you know why I call it my re-birthday. If you are new around here, well, here is a short recap. Just after I turned 41—17 years ago—a…

Click to view the original at om.co

Hasnain says:

Lots to ponder from this piece. It’s basically the medical history of the stent couched with a human interest story. Makes me think about life and mortality.

“Over the past 17 years, I have kept notes. I try to eat well, walk, and avoid everything that is not good for me – with an occasional exception. I am first to volunteer for new treatments. It is not that I want to live forever, it is just that I want to enjoy life I have – whether it is a day, a decade, or three. Either way, I want to give myself the best chance of doing that.

Lost in my reverie, I realized that one thing I had not thought about even once was the actual technology that set me on the right trajectory – the stent. It is ironic because both as a reporter and as an investor, my first instinct is learning about the who, why, and what of technology. And yet I never took the time to really learn about how a “stent” works, its origin, and how the technology has progressed since December 28, 2007.”

Posted on 2024-12-30T02:13:20+0000