tommyderami
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6 months ago
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on: Claude Code Checkpoints
Under the hood, is this simply checkpointing the files in the claude target folder or are you also checkpointing the claude context? One of my biggest pain points is after a few compactions/edits to claude.md and all of a sudden Claude has made a few mistakes and all the context window cruft of fixes it attempted and reverted actually seem to confuse it further and it would be nice to reset to a known happy place code & contextually and retry from there.
tommyderami
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2 years ago
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on: To Make a Codling Tarte
I read this as a 'coding tarte' and was expecting some sort of hodge-podge of rust transpiled into WASM being invoked by a node process that interfaces with a slice of python in the middle.
tommyderami
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3 years ago
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on: US Army Publishing Directorate – Technical Manuals
The Army has plenty of problems you see in other large organizations related to bureaucracy, strategic initiatives, retention etc, but one thing I think they do very well is their documentation. It is generally organized into four(ish) categories of Army Doctrine Pubs (ADPs) which are summaries of first principals for the major domains the Army operates in, followed by Army Technique Pubs which cover mid-level techniques and descriptive frameworks for various types of work. Field Manuals (FMs) contain more prescriptive information and tasks for both small and large units, and finally Technical Manuals which are basically instruction manuals for specific pieces of equipment or specific tasks.
I think it's debatable given the pace of change in most technology organizations whether it's even desirable to codify the standard tasks and competencies expected from different classes of information workers (ie. SRE1 vs Data Systems Analyst) but having at least ADP level documents that allow employees to align their efforts with company strategic aims is a good idea and having some sort of reference documents for involved technical tasks probably makes sense when the work is not able to be automated.
tommyderami
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3 years ago
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on: Lenovo’s Glasses T1 let you bring a private big screen display with you
They are mentioned in the article, but I just picked up a pair of NREAL air glasses to use with my steam deck and I am blown away so far--the price point is about 1/3 of the T1s but most of the specs are very similar. The support for fixing the screen using the 3dof sensors is limited to their android nebula app for now but if they write a driver that allows it on a computer that would be helpful, but for now I find they are most comfortable to use in a fixed position (ie laying back on the couch). The technology to make compelling head mounted displays is finally here--I've owned various HMDs for drone viewing but nothing I'd want to relax and watch a movie/play a game on (the screens are usually too small and 480p resolution at best). More competition will only improve the space so kudos to Lenovo!
tommyderami
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3 years ago
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on: Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds
I think points 1-3 are valid and certainly contribute to the decision, but many manufacturers believe that the future of the interface is a mixture of voice control (environmental, cabin lighting, navigation etc) and manipulation of steering wheel controls with HUD feedback (infotainment and everything else). Failure to embrace voice interfaces and demanding a button for everything is making 'fossils' out of 20-100 year olds.
Source: I work at one of the big German car manufacturers and have mostly drank the 'use voice, don't look off the road' koolaid.
tommyderami
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4 years ago
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on: How People Get Rich Now
Could you expand on the last sentence a bit more regarding effective altruism? Are the uncomfortable questions related to the utilitarian nature of how the movement racks and stacks the causes they choose to support or not?
tommyderami
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5 years ago
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on: I don't want to do front-end anymore
I feel their pain to a degree, but this also reminds me a bit of someone who says 'When I was young, I loved building tree houses in my backyard with a couple of boards and some nails, now as a structural engineer, I have to do all sort of awful work like material takeoffs, load analysis, job site scheduling--it just isn't fun anymore!'. That's the nature of real work--small hobby projects or simple gigs are easy for a single person to write, but as soon as you bring multiple engineers, legacy system integrations, infosec reqs, etc. things get complicated quickly. It's a big ecosystem out there though, and people are inventing new way to work all the time (Hotwire and Sapper both have interesting ways of doing things compared to the current status quo). All that to say, I hope they find their bliss, and maybe a chance of scenery will at least help remotivate in the face of fatigue with their current set of frameworks.
tommyderami
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5 years ago
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on: iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro
I believe you can generally just capture a scene with a lot of dynamic range (say a person standing in front of a flat wall with the light falloff ranging from dark to overexposed) and then zoom in on a frame and you'll see more or less banding because of the tough decisions the capture device has to make on what data to throw away/reduce and what to keep
tommyderami
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5 years ago
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on: Launch HN: GitDuck (YC S20) – Zoom for developers with real-time code sharing
I appreciated the copy of the landing page--my literal first question after 'what is this?' was why would I use this when slack video and live share has been fine...it's still a tough value proposition but I'll certainly give it a spin and really would love to see a dev-built company like yours suceed!
tommyderami
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5 years ago
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on: Blur Tools for Signal
They have a sandbox you can run the code yourself--I don't think we're at dystopian surveillance level just yet
https://imgur.com/a/IfdLWau
tommyderami
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6 years ago
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on: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
I actually felt the same way about Salesforce until about a year ago when my company bought it. It certainly has a duplo blocks side that let's non technical users do complex things (aka Excel) but their backed is extensible through a language that is more or less Java for custom handlers/queries/etc and they are switching their front end to W3C compliant web components for developer maintainability after getting burned by rolling their own front end framework in the early angular 1 era. They have super tight integration with heroku postgres dbs (because they own them) and have some other best technical tricks up their sleeve to the point that I my opinion has changed quite a bit.
tommyderami
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7 years ago
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on: Netlify Dev
Echoing what a few other people have said, but a few things I've noticed Netlify does really well:
- Their builds on popular front end frameworks that use say webpack are really good out of the box, but can be tweaked and configured as well. I have run into odd bugs going from CRA to a production build on my VPS that for some reason just deploys seemlessly on Netlify. Not that I couldn't have fixed the VPS with a little effort, but it just works™
- The CDN also works on your static assets out of the box and serves so much faster than some of my VPS boxes that have a decent number of xeon cores running nginx.
- While I haven't used it, apparently they put a veneer layer on Lambdas and MSFT Functions that make it less of a pain in the ass to deploy, ie abstracting away all the security groups, scaling etc details
- It's free for everything I've thrown at it. It worries me slightly that if I ever outgrow their free tier the pricing will be really steep since you are enabling all the free tier infrastructure, but for now it's been amazing for JAMstack type apps.
tommyderami
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7 years ago
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on: Why don't I take military funding? (2004)
One thing I thing that is worth considering regarding whether or not to accept DoD funding is what kind of research/end goal it supports. Many research projects seek to improve the precision of lethal actions or the quality of intelligence that informs those actions ie In WWII if the only blunt tool you had hit the enemy was carpet bombing their cities that contained production facilities or government officials, then that's what we did, but with the advent of precision-guided munitions we have the opportunity to limit civilian collateral when striking targets. Similarly, if there was a technology that allowed us to see through walls to see if armed bad guys were on the other side, we could avoid pre-emptively clearing the room with a flash-bang or grenade when it instead housed a family. Certainly, most weapons can be turned into tools of malfeasance, so we shouldn't assume that any advancement will result in lowering the human cost of conflict, but if you accept that violence will happen whether or participate in it or not, some may choose to add scientific knowledge that could make that violence more humane/limited.
tommyderami
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7 years ago
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on: Why don't I take military funding? (2004)
I'd agree, although I don't think the author is being deliberately misleading, it's probably more an issue of public perception due to Hollywood and anecdotal conversations. DoD members swear to "support and defend the constitution of the United States, against all enemies, foreign and domestic". Sometimes that means brandishing a stick, sometimes that means swinging it, but we're pretty agnostic about the means to achieve that defense.
tommyderami
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7 years ago
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on: Why don't I take military funding? (2004)
While I don't come to the same conclusion, I think this is a great example of presenting a well reasoned argument for a position that is not widely held. I would love to see more debate over topics like this they doesn't resort to name calling, straw man arguments and all or nothing conclusions.
