Marcelo Cantos retweetledi
Marcelo Cantos
460 posts
I had Claude run some comparisons across different types of datasets and different compression formats.
As expected, protobuf wins everywhere except homogeneous-record lists, where JSON's repeated keys compress so well that the gap disappears (×1000 = tie) or flips (×100 = +3% JSON). For everything sparse, numeric, boolean, or enum-shaped, compressed protobuf is meaningfully smaller (10–70%).
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I have the exact same payload encoded in JSON and as a protocol buffer. The JSON is 34kb, the protobuf is 15kb. I compressed them in different ways and was surprised to see that the JSON often compresses to a smaller file than the protocol buffer does.
Does this surprise you?
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@thesarmie @elonmusk What greater adventure is there than travelling to another world?
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@WallStreetApes Over twenty years ago, HP wanted to charge me to download software driver updates for my printer. I haven't bought an HP product since and never will, and I never miss an opportunity to caution others against making the same mistake.
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American bought a brand new printer. She bought the ink for the printer, she bought the paper for the printer, now she’s at home and is ready to print
She can’t print
“They remotely shut off my printer until I paid $7.50 cents to print in my own home, to print on my printer, that I own in my home”
This is the new $7.50 subscription plan by HP Printers
Here’s how the plans work
HP’s Instant Ink and newer All-in Plan programs are subscription services options:
- You pay a monthly fee based on pages printed (not ink used).
- Plans start low, from $1.79–$7.99 per month for 10–100 pages
- $7–$8 per month plans are for around 100 pages
If your payment fails. HP will remotely shutoff your printer
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@dotpem @ibuildthecloud The march of 9's will take us to 0.2%, 0.02%, ... ad infinitum. Somewhere on that curve, reviewing the code becomes pointless and AI begins producing executable code directly. The future is going to be wilder than any of us can imagine.
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@ibuildthecloud the problem with slop is it compounds on itself, so even if it goes 2% south, our old friend compounding catches up to us fast, then the whole code base is trash. and god help you if it just didn’t implement what you want in the first place
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We're definitely going to get to the point where handwriting code doesn't make sense. Similar to handwriting assembly doesn't make sense. But the analogy breaks down. Developers don't really know assembly and they can't really review assembly. On top of it, the assembly that's produced by compilers is so optimized and confusing that you can't even understand it. For AI the code that's being produced, the developer needs to understand it could have written it themselves but it's just not as efficient or safe to do so.
AI is not a new abstraction layer. It is a tool to create something you understand. We still need people to understand the mechanics of coding. We still need people to learn these skills and these are important skills. And even with the power of AI, you can't get away with not knowing these skills if you want to be effective. As always, there'll be people who try to take shortcuts and they'll get short-term gains and then it will fall apart.
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@M2Fauzaan Feel free to take inspiration from my project. It discovers and pre-cooks various inline formats. It then submits it to Prince, which I would like to avoid in future. github.com/marcelocantos/…
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@marcelocantos Images yes, math and mermaids need some handling.
For now, it’s just focus on pure md format. But it would be nice to have
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Anyway, I fixed it.
I built a tiny native app that lets you open any Markdown file on Mac.
> Just press Spacebar → instant clean preview
> Watch your AI agent write in real time
> Open your favorite Markdown editor to edit
Install once and literally forget it exists.
Fauzaan@M2Fauzaan
Every major operating system should come with a default Markdown reader at this point
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I reinvented SQL github.com/marcelocantos/…. It can now output nested JSON with arbitrary recursive depth and XML (non-recursive for now). I bolted that onto a realtime SQLite sync library that I also wrote and used it to build a realtime dashboard that renders and updates the entire page off a single query subscription. It's literally React straight from a database over the wire, and works over unreliable datagram transports. It took me several weeks of thinking, prompting, design work, pushing the model like crazy to understand the recursive structuring model and convincing it that it was even possible; it builds recursive JSON as rows of tokens and then stitches them together with a big concat, and because it's recursive, this happens arbitrarily many levels deep with the higher layers stitching together results from the lower layers. If you can repeat that in a weekend, my hat off to you. And even if you can, I don't care because I now have an amazing tool that gave me immense satisfaction in building and is incredibly useful across my other projects.
That's just one of many projects I've built in the last few months, all of which are far beyond anything I would have imagined myself capable of just six months ago. You can still do hard stuff that's challenging and extremely rewarding. And yes, there are lots of humans on the planet and it's hard to differentiate. It always has been and always will be.
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@marcelocantos @owen_venter Yes but coding lights a very different part of the brain.. now anyone can solve almost any problem so there’s no challenge.. and even if you dream bigger anyone can clone it in a weekend. Some of us enjoy coding just for the sake of coding, we enjoyed optimizing for loops..
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Programming used to put me into FLOW state often. That’s a big part of why I fell in love with it. Late night missions building games, apps, whatever, it felt great.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a great quote on this:
“The best moments in our lives… occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.”
AI has kind of nuked the personal challenge part of that. I don’t fall into those same FLOW states nearly as often anymore. It’s a strange position to be in because I’m undeniably more productive, but some of the joy is gone. I still love building software, but now the enjoyment comes more from seeing products come to life and have real-world impact than from the actual process of writing the code.
I’ll miss the deep flow states that came from fighting code for hours into the night, but I feel like I do need to find new areas that still offer that same sense of challenge.
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@lamboc0rp @owen_venter Agreed. I work harder in terms of hours expended, but I don't feel spent at the end of it. Even when my eyes droop uncontrollably and I'm forced to sleep I want to get back to it as soon as I'm up again. Tired but not fatigued, if that makes any sense.
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@marcelocantos @owen_venter "worked so hard" - for me there's a massive difference in having to do solo dialog to problem solve or dialogue with an LLM to problem solve in terms of energy I expend, so it's much less hard work even if your hours counted are different or more or whatever
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@_wilfredh Apparently, we had always been at war with Eurasia.
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@_wilfredh I distinctly recall no trailing semicolons being shoved down my throat at some point in the evolution of JavaScript. Then less than two years later they were all back and suddenly that was the only right way to format code.
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It's funny how languages can offer multiple forms of syntax, but formatters standardise to a single form.
E.g. single vs double quotes in JS, optional semicolons in JS, different ways of grouping imports in Rust.
Should new languages be more syntactically opinionated?
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Damn right! We moved from Java to Go and a nontrivial portion of the productivity gain was that arguments about formatting all but disappeared. Mind you, we still managed to get into it over whether a multiline parameter list should end in ) or ,\n\t). (The former is clearly stupid, as is the lack of an optional terminating comma in JSON lists.) I would have been happy for them to go even further and codify long-line breaking rules.
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@_wilfredh Yes. Whatever other criticisms one might have of Go, I think they have demonstrated the utility of having only one indent style that is rigorously enforceable by the normal toolchain.
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If you didn't need to understand the code when it was written then why is it necessary to understand it when it needs fixing or improving? A common assumption that there are certain things we can get the computers to do and certain things we can't and therefore we need to be across all of it, just in case, is understandable at this moment in time. The machines have strange failure modes that we find perplexing. As a result we're inclined not to trust them and that's a perfectly reasonable stance to take. But it doesn't then follow that we should trust them more for writing code and less for debugging code. That's just an assumption. If anything, I find that the machines excel at diagnosing problems with existing code, even code they didn't write. At this point, I think you'd be mad to try and diagnose production issues without throwing everything you've got at it, including all the AI with as many tokens as you can conjure up. Same goes for performance, security, etc. As time passes, having our eyeballs across every line of code will become increasingly untenable. We will have to figure out new models for building future systems that accounts for this.
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@anagatakaya It is specifically an issue for the one's who do not understand the code at all. In the long term, sustaining the projects without the fundamentals will be an issue to sort out all the security issues, vulnerabilities and scaling
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@_ZaniarAhmadi @burkov Why would a human debug something an ai wrote? Let the ai debug it.
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Why do critics like Eliana look at this "spaghetti" code? It wasn't written for critics like Eliana. It was written for the computer, to be run on a computer and to be fixed by a computer.
Would critics like Eliana also criticize how sausages are made? You know that you had better not look at the process, but you like hot dogs anyway.
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@Scobleizer I've never heard it argued at any time that making money off open source is easy. The fact that Red Hat succeeded doesn't really prove anything. They found it hard too.
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Open Source's big problem.
Last night I went to a Y Combinator party in San Francisco and met an entrepreneur who is making a top Open Source AI model.
He told me it is very hard to make money in open source. Yeah, it is cool being popular, he told me, but figuring out how to make a business out of it is proving to be very difficult.
The Chinese are pounding the price into the ground with their open source models. Which makes it tough.
In the old world of Open Source you could make money with them by consulting, service, etc, like RedHat did.
But in this new world, he told me, it's much harder to make a good business out of it.
Is anyone making a good business out of open source?
What would your advice be to the businesses that are trying to support Open Source?
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@neogoose_btw When you use the term "dishonest," people naturally assume you're accusing someone of lying. They are then naturally predisposed to wonder who you are attacking and what exactly the lie is.
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people somehow see “hate” in this post
For real can someone tell me where is the “hate”?
It does allocate memory - you can check it. It’s not reported to the process RSS - it’s also a fact.
Why the most factual technical discussion is considered as hate nowadays just because it touches some of the star project you like?
Dmitriy Kovalenko@neogoose_btw
It's pretty dishonest that software like ripgrep considered "free" just because folks never see a memory and CPU usage impact when it's executing as a child process but it's not free On every query in chromium repo it allocates 58 megabytes and what is worse it needs to always return it back to the system and allocate again. every single time you search. again and again
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@CuriousSoul13 @ZackKorman Vulnerabilities are frequently discovered in code that no-one imagined could become an attack vector. It is in fact a key focus of black hats because they know that that code doesn't get the same level of scrutiny that security-related code does.
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It should be only for high risk activities. I wouldn’t give 100% trust to agents. I think autonomy should be there for the activities that are day to day but anything unusual or high risk should be human loop. Having visibility is one thing but doing something about is something else
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Mandatory human-in-the-loop is a cybersecurity cop-out. People are giving agents more and more autonomy. We need solutions that accept that world because there is no stopping it.
It's like telling people in the 90s to not use the internet to avoid getting hacked. Good luck.
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@billyhollis Being able to copy paste text from anywhere in a UI is a huge advantage of web apps vs traditional. I hope they don't regress on that at least. Otoh, I copy screenshots into Claude these days so maybe it doesn't matter anymore.
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For 25 years, the web centric, fashionable set has been pushing the idea that native apps are dead, you can do anything in a browser, and those of us who prefer native platforms for richer UX with better interactivity are just old fuddy duddies who are out of touch.
And every few years, the need for better UX results in some realization that the world just isn't as simple as the "web can do it all" people think it is.
Windows Latest@WindowsLatest
Microsoft’s distinguished engineer teases that “native apps are back,” as the company plans to build 100% native apps for Windows 11. Windows 11's biggest problem isn't ads or performance, but the app experience. Apps like Netflix, WhatsApp, and even Microsoft's own Windows apps are now powered by either WebView2 or PWAs (web app technology). I don't hate web apps, but they feel slow and not truly part of the operating system. A right-click makes you feel you're browsing Edge, and have options like Inspect Element. Microsoft has confirmed it'll build 100% native apps for Windows 11, and it's also moving some OS features back to native code. This includes the Start menu, which is currently powered by React and is now moving to WinUI. The upcoming Agenda view, which was a WebView2-based component, is also moving to native code. However, the biggest challenge is that Microsoft needs to convince developers to build native apps for Windows.
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