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Mark Percival
195 posts
Mark Percival
@mdp
Developer and open source enthusiast since Linux 1.2 (it came on a CD). Partner at 1984 Ventures - https://t.co/FgYsE4skni
Atlanta, GA Katılım Mayıs 2008
714 Takip Edilen3.3K Takipçiler
We live in a world where agents are mostly yolo’ing it, and meanwhile apt is like: “Whoa, hold up, are you SURE you want to install curl? It’s 500 KB, but I’ll need to download 1 MB, so I just want to be extra sure.”
The contrast is jarring: one minute you’re passively dropping a production database, the next you’re confirming a 500 KB install.
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@adrian_horning_ Yeah, it gets you the old interface with less clutter and no sign in nags. It’s also great for agents to read. It’s such a standard that it’s even in Brave’s browser settings.
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Guys we might have sadly made it to the end of the .json trick with Reddit :(
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One thing I'll miss is reverse engineering by hand. I remember when the Economist app screwed up the audio player with a new release (like ~2013), so I decompiled the Android app to try and figure out how to just get the raw mp3's.
It was something really easy like `PASSWORD=$(echo -n "$KEY$DATE" | md5)` - where DATE was this weeks magazine date in iso, eg. 2026-05-21 and the KEY was just a big 'ol hex string hardcoded into the app.
Then you took that md5 string password and used it to unzip the mp3's you could download from their CDN (also hardcoded in the app).
I suspect my ENTIRE day of messing around and learning baksmali is now like 15 minutes of a decent model looking at it.
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It’s easy to forget how weird and wonderful tech was in the early days of the internet.
You can’t go back, but you can appreciate it for what it really was. Truly a land of misfits.
Good book BTW
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Mark Percival retweetledi
when i voice prompt, i yap for 10 minutes straight and change my mind 3 times in the middle of the yap, and send it without reading
yap enough tokens for the picture to be complete, it understands well when you change your mind in the middle. ai is smarter than you think
Alex@dev_alexandrum
i feel like i don’t think linearly enough for speech to text prompting. i frequently change wording as i write so the pressure of having to voice the right prompt first try is frustrating
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Being old enough to have been on both sides of this, buying music on physical media felt like ownership. Buying a file never did.
Add in the fact that it was DRM’d to shit, when Rdio/Spotify came along, it felt like a better deal.
I miss physical media, but I don’t miss those middle years of the iTunes Store.
Pigeons & Planes@PigsAndPlans
When Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003, the idea was simple: 99 cents per song. Looking back on that announcement, what stands out most is hearing Jobs reference subscription services, and why he believed that the streaming model couldn't work for music. A lot has changed since then, including attitudes toward music consumption. Apple Music launched over a decade later in 2015 under Tim Cook, but this is what Jobs had to say about music streaming in 2003: "People have told us over and over and over again, they don’t want to rent their music ... Music's not like a video."
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But you get spoiled by how good the coding agent is, because code either compiles or it fails, it's a tight loop. The agent can self-correct.
"Go through all my calendar events and..." is an open-ended orchestration task - there's no ground truth, no compiler, nothing to catch when it skips event 14 or loses track of where it is. The agent has no way to know it's drifting.
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"If you’ve ever resorted to MANDATORY or DO NOT SKIP, you’ve hit the ceiling of prompting." - This one seems to have hit a nerve on HN today and I tend to agree.
Agents don't need better prompts, they need deterministic control flow. LLMs as components, not the orchestrator.
bsuh.bearblog.dev/agents-need-co…
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=480515…
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Mark Percival retweetledi
The worst part is that I’d end up taking a few of them… but not the XML book.
Y Disassembler@loomdoop
Putting outdated coding books in the Little Free Library should be considered illegal dumping, and carry a sentence of 100 hours community service.
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More of this please: github.com/0xMassi/webclaw - Local webfetch with TLS fingerprinting (a common anti-bot strategy) and a focus on token efficiency.
credit: @0xMassi
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Mark Percival retweetledi
And don't get me wrong, I love using projects written in Rust, but I'm also glad I have the option of building my next project in Rust and not writing Rust.
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So much Rust on GitHub now, feels like every other project is written in Rust.
Did AI do this? Was the unlock for getting engineers to write Rust making it so they don't have to write Rust?
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And they look just like tests. I even run this with vitest - mock the tools calls, set the expectations, make sure it all happens. Swap models, see what breaks. The real pain point I'm constantly trying to solve is just the time it take to run them all and finding a balance.
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I've started to build a set of "golden evals" on projects - some basic set of tests that I can quickly run to get an idea of what's breaking. The challenge is that evals are slow by nature, so you can't run them all - but I still want the confidence of a green/red outcome.
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This is a cool idea - github.com/bergside/desig…
In general, so much of the flow now is about just getting everything into a text. Design, backend choices, data structs - it can't live in your teams head anymore, it has to be written down in format your agent can easily consume.
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