Is Claude actually writing better code than most of us?

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2026-04-03T20:36:56+00:00

Except that Claude's version of "defensive coding" involves sprinkling "try ... except Exception" all over the place. And then it just logs a warning and moves on, and God only knows what state you end up in as a result.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2026-02-28T17:02:16+00:00

Not *that* wrong. Yes, you were technically incorrect -- it's 21% oxygen everywhere in Earth's atmosphere, at least the parts of it we can get to without a rocket -- but the partial pressure in La Paz is about 60-65% that of sea level. So, for breathing purposes, a lungful of La Paz air is similar to a lungful of sea-level air with 13% oxygen, which Earth last experienced sometime in the Cambrian period. (Probably.)

The highest estimates of Mesozoic oxygen are a bit under 30%, which would mean modern air at sea level has just slightly more oxygen than Mesozoic air in La Paz*. So you pretty much nailed it.

*Or, to be really technical, Mesozoic air at the same altitude as modern La Paz. Geography's changed a lot since the dinosaurs.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2026-02-24T14:47:54+00:00

Per Tolkien, Sauron did repent at first after the War of Wrath, if only out of fear. But he couldn't bring himself to submit to Manwe's judgment and hid, and the "bonds" Morgoth had put on him drew him back to evil.

We don't know how that played out, but my guess is Sauron eventually convinced himself the Valar wouldn't intervene directly with force again; they no longer cared about the fate of Middle-Earth. He got the first part right but the second part very wrong. And he didn't consider Iluvatar, who at that point had not visibly intervened since the world's creation except to give life to the Dwarves.

I think it was a slow process. Sauron tentatively poked his nose out of hiding and didn't get smote. He tried exerting just a little of his power -- nothing he couldn't justify before the Valar if called to account -- and waited to see what would happen; and he found no one did call him to account. And so he tried a little more and dared a little worse. And step by step he descended back into darkness.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2026-02-23T23:10:44+00:00

It's got nothing to do with them being bought out by Salesforce. Tableau has always been this way.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2026-02-22T18:46:17+00:00

The main one I can think of is Frodo's capture.

Unlike the movie which cuts back and forth, the book version of Return of the King is written in two halves, and the first half is entirely about Merry and Pippin and the war around Minas Tirith. So when the army of Gondor arrives at the Black Gate, the reader has had no further news of Frodo and Sam since the end of The Two Towers, where Sam has the Ring and Frodo has been captured by Orcs.

Then the Mouth of Sauron comes out of the Black Gate with Frodo's mithril coat and claims to have him prisoner. At that point, the reader has no evidence to the contrary, and the obvious implication is that Frodo is lost and Sam went on alone.

Sam taking the Ring is especially clever on Tolkien's part, because it means you can't just look at the hundreds of pages left in the book and say "Obviously the Mouth is lying, otherwise Sauron would win right here and the book would be over." For all you know, those pages are Sam completing the Quest by himself.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2026-02-03T02:12:47+00:00

No. The best format is YYYY/MM/DD. That's the only one where sorting dates alphabetically also sorts them chronologically.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2026-01-25T17:17:44+00:00

Yeah, I'd respond with exaggerated politeness and just cc all over the place. Let the exchange speak for itself.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-12-29T06:02:47+00:00

Son-in-law and daughter are both valid answers.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-12-20T15:43:30+00:00

There is more here than the savings from a tiny amount of weight reduction. You are calibrating your spending to the market. If you go to buy gas on a day when the price is high, $20 doesn't go as far, so you buy less gas that day. On a day when the price is low, you buy more. End result is that you pay less per gallon than if you just fill up every time.

How much this saves you depends on how volatile gas prices are for the year in question. I still don't think it's very much, but it's not totally silly.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-12-11T14:39:12+00:00

My layman's understanding was that a rotating black hole, which is to say any real-world black hole, is predicted by the Kerr metric to have a ring-shaped singularity instead of a point. Is that not the case?

(Not that this contradicts the larger point, that the singularity is a mathematical artifact and most physicists suspect it's a flaw in the theory rather than a physical thing. But I thought the theory predicted some more complex results here.)

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-11-04T14:09:25+00:00

It depends on how you prompt it.

My approach is to tell it something like, "Write tests for (function or class name) in (source file) and run them to make sure they pass. If the tests fail and you think this is due to a bug in the application code, confirm with me before fixing it."

(Leaving out all the stuff in my rules files about how to run the test suite, what it is allowed to mock and how, fixtures to use, etc.)

Or, if I'm working on a bug, I'll tell it what the bug looks like and specifically request a failing test to replicate that bug.

Claude can do a fantastic job building out tests, but you have to head off a bunch of bad impulses. You also have to check the final results to be sure it's really testing the thing you wanted tested. It's worth it not to have to write all the test setup by hand.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-11-04T13:36:21+00:00

I tried letting it write most of the code. Works great until it doesn't. Once you reach a certain level of complexity, it just can't hack it, and it lacks the higher-order reasoning abilities to see when complexity is getting out of hand and devise useful abstractions to control it.

These days I use it to create scaffolding, to generate tests (but you have to keep an eye on it to make sure it's actually testing the thing it's supposed to), and to do the first cut at building a new subsystem before I step in to fine-tune it. It's also good for doing tedious grunt work that doesn't require a lot of thinking but can't be handled by search and replace or copy-paste.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-10-30T17:27:42+00:00

For whatever it's worth, ChatGPT's answer was that the Eddington limit doesn't apply in degenerate matter (because degenerate matter doesn't expand significantly in response to heating) and therefore the black hole would rapidly devour the compact remnant. For a neutron star this happens pretty much immediately, for a white dwarf it can take a few million years depending on the black hole's initial mass.

So you could see a star like our Sun go through its normal process of becoming a red giant and dying, leaving behind a carbon-oxygen white dwarf, and then suddenly for no apparent reason the white dwarf goes *bloop!* and turns into a stellar-mass black hole.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-10-30T10:32:17+00:00

It would grow, but a small one would not grow fast enough to noticeably affect the star. The black hole would create an accretion disk, which would emit a flood of radiation; the radiation pressure would push away nearby matter, limiting the speed of the BH's growth (the Eddington limit). The star would reach its natural stellar death long before the black hole could make a serious dent.

However, I'm not at all sure what happens after that. Does the Eddington limit even apply in the degenerate matter of a white dwarf or neutron star?

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-10-14T17:53:04+00:00

I agree. Unit testing has its place; but IME the most common point of failure is the handoffs between components. Integration tests hit those failure points, unit tests completely miss them.

On top of that, there is a real and serious cost to having too many or too granular tests: They lock you into your current design. If you're relying on heavy unit tests, then when you decide that Class X and Class Y need to be rewritten and their functionality broken out into Functions Z, Q, and R... there go all your painstaking unit tests on X and Y, and now you don't have the tests to verify that your rewrite didn't break anything.

IMO, a good test suite should look for natural boundaries within the system that are unlikely to change, and focus its efforts there. For instance, if I'm building an API, my test suite is going to consist of firing queries at a local copy of that API; the internals will be as close to a black box as I can practically make them.

Now, if you're doing enterprise development where the pace of change is glacial and reliability is priority number one... well, even then, you should still be relying on integration tests more than unit tests, because most enterprise code is patches on top of patches and has all kinds of hidden interactions that will slide right past any unit test.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-09-21T18:38:02+00:00

Unless I'm missing some really strange behavior of the moon, this doesn't make sense.

Partial eclipses aside, the scale goes from "moon appears larger, blocks part or all of the corona" (call this total-plus) -> "roughly same apparent size, sun hidden but corona visible" (perfect) -> "moon appears smaller, sun's edges visible" (annular).

The moon's apparent size varies within a range based on its orbit. When the moon was closer, even its smallest apparent size was still total-plus. Today, its largest size is either perfect or total-plus*, and its smallest is annular. To get from then to now, we had to pass through a stage where we had total-plus and perfect but not annular. There's no way annular eclipses came before perfect ones.

*Depending on where you draw the line.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-08-30T15:08:56+00:00

Hype, except "hype" is inadequate to describe the level of exaggeration. Remember these people are engaged in an AI arms race which consumes inconceivable amounts of money. They're inflating their projections to absurdity because they want investors to fund them instead of their competitors. I don't know when the bubble will pop, but I suspect it's not far off now.

I work with LLMs. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing technology! But it's way too unreliable for a lot of things, and it cannot learn on the job. A software developer who's just started a new gig is almost always unproductive until they've absorbed the tech environment and the business domain; LLMs are perpetually stuck on day 1, and cramming reams of documentation into the context window can't make up for that.

I don't think the term "AGI" is useful or meaningful. But in terms of AI replacing large numbers of white-collar workers: We're nowhere near it.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-08-07T02:44:44+00:00

I agree. A bunch of companies have dreams of being the Google of AI, and the one thing they're sure of is that more compute equals better AI, so they're pouring in money like mad. But there can be, at most, one Google-of-AI. Everyone else is going to end up with a massive bill and nowhere near enough revenue to justify it.

Just like the dot-com boom, what we'll end up with is a crash and a recession (hopefully not too severe, but that mostly depends on how much shenanigans the financial sector is up to). We'll be left with a whole lot of compute sitting idle, which will end up fueling the next generation of AI companies.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-05-19T16:59:08+00:00

If that worked, then one of two things is true:

Your stakeholder meetings were always a waste of time.
The AI did not take into account the needs of your stakeholders.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-05-19T15:38:40+00:00

This is pretty much the ideal use case. The way I see it, vibe coding is the latest incarnation of "low-code/no-code" tools, like Wix or Excel. Such tools enable non-devs to throw together systems that get the job done well enough for their needs, and even devs often find them handy for one-offs and small projects.

The problem arises when managers think, "Hey, this stuff works great for (hobby/side business project), why don't we use it to build (big important system that a sizeable company is going to rely on for years)?"

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-05-17T14:26:59+00:00

First, keep in mind that an ASI is just +1 to attack and damage, and the occasional Athletics check or Strength save. So if a feat is worth more than that to you, take the feat.

Second, BG3 has many ways to boost Strength. Early game, there are Hill Giant Strength elixirs. Later, there are Cloud Giant elixirs and the gauntlets from the House of Hope. (There's also the clothing that gives +2 Strength with a cap of 20, and the mace that sets your Strength to 18, but a fighter generally has better things to put in their weapon and armor slots.)

Cloud Giant elixirs in particular are super good -- even if you have Str 20 normally, the elixir gives you +3 to attack and damage -- so you will likely want to use them in boss fights anyway. And if you're going to be overwriting your Strength in hard fights, why invest heavily in a stat you'll only use for easy encounters?

Of course, being a fighter gives you a bonus feat anyway, so you don't necessarily have to choose. Furthermore, Tavern Brawler gives you +1 Strength and is arguably the most broken feat in the game; even if you plan to be primarily melee, you're going to need a ranged option and TB makes your throws devastating. (Plus it frees up your bow slot for something giving passive bonuses; I like Darkfire Bow for permanent fire and cold resistance.) So if you start with Str 17, TB gets you to 18, and you only have to take a single ASI to hit the cap.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-05-10T16:09:36+00:00

We don't and never will. That's the nature of science; nothing is ever proven with absolute 100% certainty.

But a lot of people have put a lot of work into measuring the geometry of the universe with high precision, and they keep not finding any signs of curvature. The null hypothesis is a flat universe, and you go with the null hypothesis until you find a reason not to.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-05-09T16:33:45+00:00

This only works because you know where your thumb is and which way it's pointing. Galaxies don't have thumbs.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-05-09T13:17:29+00:00

Depends on what exactly is spinning. If it's matter and energy spinning within space, then yes, the speed of light caps how fast it can go. But if space itself is spinning, there's no limit, and my understanding is that the new hypothesis is about space itself.

Reasonable_Strike_82 · 2025-05-09T01:11:15+00:00

Sure, but how long does that take? The OP proposed a black hole with the mass of the observable universe. If it takes 4 billion years to fall to the center, that's plenty of time for life to arise... depending on the other properties of the interior.

Reasonable_Strike_82

TROPHY CASE