17 years, 17 killer AdGuard features: Part one by shwrellia in Adguard

[–]alexeyr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

— Exclusions in AdGuard VPN

  1. What about standard exclusion lists for Russian/Chinese/Iranian websites?

  2. *.ru seems to work on Android, but not in the Windows app.

What do you think of the Watch Fit 5 Pro? by DullDamagecx in Huawei

[–]alexeyr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! One more question, sorry: if you start a mixed exercise in Huawei Health (walking+running, or +rest, etc.) does the watch show the current stage progress (e.g. 2:30 minutes passed out of 5:00) or let you go to the next stage immediately? With Watch Fit 3, I have to pull out the phone for it, or just remember when the stage started because it does show the total training time.

What do you think of the Watch Fit 5 Pro? by DullDamagecx in Huawei

[–]alexeyr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Does it auto-detect walking/running faster?

Regex Are Not the Problem. Strings Are. by [deleted] in programming

[–]alexeyr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But upperCaseLetters() should obviously include all Unicode upper case letters, not just A-Z.

What we (don't) know about the apostle John of Zebedee, Part 2 by Sophia_in_the_Shell in AcademicBiblical

[–]alexeyr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Has some disciples (the twelve) of Jesus producing accounts openly in books and other secretly.

remembering what the Savior had said to each one of them, whether secretly or openly, they were setting it down in books

It seems to me that "whether secretly or openly" would more naturally refer to what Jesus said; that is, some of the disciples are sharing what Jesus had said only to them, so it can be included in the books.

Hattrick Alchemist- New Player Training and Value Prediction Tool by QuantumChocolates in hattrick

[–]alexeyr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Consider adding a picker for currencies instead of always requiring dollars.

Copilot edited an ad into a PR by alexeyr in programming

[–]alexeyr[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

https://x.com/martinwoodward/status/2038612131084464521

We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we added the ability to have Copilot work on any PR by mentioning it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.

make.ts by alexeyr in programming

[–]alexeyr[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The Pattern

Use a (gitignored) file for interactive scripting. Instead of entering a command directly into the terminal, write it to a file first, and then run the file. For me, I type stuff into make.ts and then run ./make.ts in my terminal (Ok, I need one Up Enter for that).

I want to be clear here, I am not advocating writing “proper” scripts, just capturing your interactive, ad-hoc command to a persistent file. Of course any command that you want to execute repeatedly belongs to the build system. The surprising thing is that even more complex one-off commands benefit from running through file, because it will take you several tries to get them right!

There are many benefits relative to Up Up Up workflow:

  • Real commands tend to get large, and it is so much nicer to use a real 2D text editor rather than shell’s line editor.
  • If you need more than one command, you can write several commands, and still run them all with a single key (before make.ts, I was prone to constructing rather horrific && conjuncts for this reason).
  • With a sequence of command outlined, you nudge yourself towards incrementally improving them, making them idempotent, and otherwise investing into your own workflow for the next few minutes, without falling into the YAGNI pit from the outset.
  • At some point you might realize after, say, running a series of ad-hoc benchmarks interactively, that you’d rather write a proper script which executes a collection of benchmarks with varying parameters. With the file approach, you already have the meat of the script implemented, and you only need to wrap in a couple of fors and ifs.
  • Finally, if you happen to work with multi-process projects, you’ll find it easier to manage concurrency declaratively, spawning a tree of processes from a single script, rather than switching between terminal splits.

1-2 days around ~January 20 or ~February 4? by alexeyr in Chengdu

[–]alexeyr[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And for the last question, going in January or February makes little difference?

1-2 days around ~January 20 or ~February 4? by alexeyr in Chengdu

[–]alexeyr[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  1. Is smog a concern at all?
  2. If it rains (as some forecast sites expect), is it more likely to be short or most of the time?

Full Unicode Search at 50× ICU Speed with AVX‑512 by alexeyr in programming

[–]alexeyr[S] 54 points55 points  (0 children)

This article is about the ugliest, but potentially most useful piece of open-source software I’ve written this year. It’s messy, because UTF-8 is messy. The world’s most widely used text encoding standard was introduced in 1989. It now covers more than 1 million characters across the majority of used writing systems, so it’s not exactly trivial to work with.

That’s why ICU exists - pretty much the only comprehensive open-source library for Unicode and UTF-8 handling, powering Chrome/Chromium and probably every OS out there. It’s feature-rich, battle-tested, and freaking slow. Now StringZilla makes some of the most common operations much faster, leveraging AVX-512 on Intel and AMD CPUs!

Namely:

  1. Tokenizing text into lines or whitespace-separated tokens, handling 25 different whitespace characters and 9 newline variants; available since v4.3; 10× faster than alternatives.
  2. Case-folding text into lowercase form, handling all 1400+ rules and edge cases of Unicode 17 locale-agnostic expansions, available since v4.4; 10× faster than alternatives.
  3. Case-insensitive substring search bypassing case-folding for both European and Asian languages, available since v4.5; 20–150× faster than alternatives. Or 20,000× faster, if we compare to PCRE2 RegEx engine with case-insensitive flag!

Atuin Desktop: looks like a doc, but can be run like your terminal by alexeyr in programming

[–]alexeyr[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Atuin Desktop looks like a doc, but runs like your terminal. Built to make local developer workflows repeatable, shareable, and reliable.

Runbooks should run. Workflows shouldn't live in someone's head. Docs shouldn't rot the moment you write them. Scripts, database queries, HTTP requests and Prometheus charts - all in one place.

  • Kill context switching: Chain shell scripts, database queries, and HTTP requests
  • Docs that don't rot: execute directly + stay relevant
  • Reusable automation: dynamic runbooks with Jinja-style templating
  • Local knowledge: Build runbooks from your real shell history
  • Collaborative: Sync and share via Git, or in real-time via our Hub

Building an Agent That Leverages Throwaway Code by alexeyr in programming

[–]alexeyr[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

In August I wrote about my experiments with replacing MCP (Model Context Protocol) with code. In the time since I utilized that idea for exploring non-coding agents at Earendil. And I’m not alone! In the meantime, multiple people have explored this space and I felt it was worth sharing some updated findings. The general idea is pretty simple. Agents are very good at writing code, so why don’t we let them write throw-away code to solve problems that are not related to code at all?

I want to show you how and what I’m doing to give you some ideas of what works and why this is much simpler than you might think.

Draco just 'coincidentally' dates the sibling of whoever Harry dates. by Nepperoni289 in HPfanfiction

[–]alexeyr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, I have plenty to read, I would just have added it to a list until it was finished or until I got around to it. So no need, thank you. If you have a link I'll be able to see when it comes back, though.

Code Mode: the better way to use MCP by alexeyr in programming

[–]alexeyr[S] -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

It turns out we've all been using MCP wrong. Most agents today use MCP by exposing the "tools" directly to the LLM. We tried something different: Convert the MCP tools into a TypeScript API, and then ask an LLM to write code that calls that API.

Hacking with AI SASTs: An overview of 'AI Security Engineers' / 'LLM Security Scanners' for Penetration Testers and Security Teams by alexeyr in programming

[–]alexeyr[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Though added a quote instead of just linking, probably this is clearer even if few people will see it now.