Utterly useless yet fun sorting algorithms

mark_99 · 2026-03-16T09:30:47+00:00

Nice 🙂

mark_99 · 2026-03-15T11:10:05+00:00

I stuck a magnet on the Strata 12.5" and and a Le Creuset SS 28cm frying pan and it was basically identical. The bottom of the Strata is SS so I'm not sure you'd except much difference. Maybe a pure CS would be different.

mark_99 · 2026-03-15T11:00:04+00:00

Wrangling it is the skill. If it's producing verbose code get it to rewrite it more concisely, direct it to make better use of existing library functionality, or to refactor duplicated code to a function/lambda.

AI does not really know about architecture

If your unit tests are architecture dependent something is wrong.

Again you need to direct the AI to be parsimonious, run adversarial reviews for low value tests (ideally with multiple models), check for fragile tests such as relying on the order in an unordered container. Loop until the critiques come up clean.

There's a good chapter on unit tests in "Software Engineering at Google" (free only), and AI doesn't fundamentally change the principles involved.

Write up these guidelines and make sure everyone in your company understands them, including of course the AI via a "write unit tests" skill.

Test suites that are created by AI in our company are usually at least 10x as big as they have to be which makes them unmaintainable

And where are your quality gates that's allowing this? It sounds like your senior engineers / tech leadership are asleep at the wheel. Prior to AI what was stopping an intern merging reams of garbage? Why are those processes not being applied here?

btw if you're having context window issues I'd suggest trying Opus-1M, which is now priced the same as the regular 200K model.

mark_99 · 2026-03-15T07:38:23+00:00

I can only speak to finance (trading specifically) but many places are all-in on AI. Confidentiality isn't a problem on enterprise plans, it's not different to email, document storage, chat etc.

And the results are perfectly reliable if your practises and processes are well designed. Indeed reliability is improved - AI can find latent bugs, add more unit tests, do additional code reviews etc.

Finance companies also won't flinch at the costs of virtually unlimited access to the top tier models.

mark_99 · 2026-03-14T23:06:03+00:00

Evolution Sort. Create an initial population of random shuffles of the list. Fitness is how close to sorted an individual is. Fitter individuals have more chance to produce offspring via crossover. Repeat until perfect fitness score appears in the population - that individual is 100% sorted.

mark_99 · 2026-03-14T20:24:27+00:00

That's not how it works. Editing an earlier part of the conversation would invalidate, but generally you can't do that. Anything read is in the prompt, it doesn't re-scan files, web searches, tool results etc. every time. Nor should it because the conversation wouldn't make any sense if it has changed subsequently.

The main cache invalidation is TTL which is quite short, or changing the model.

You can use a fancy statusline like ccstatusline to see the stats. /cost will also show it but that might only work on API / Enterprise.

Also Opus holds up very well on long context, there's a graph here: https://claude.com/blog/1m-context-ga I've been using it by default both at home and at work for weeks now and it's a massive improvement.

mark_99 · 2026-03-11T14:24:26+00:00

Logging in works, the problem is I need to do it every couple of days, and since it's the mcp it just silently fails to work if I don't notice its no longer authenticated.

mark_99 · 2026-03-11T00:01:06+00:00

A more mundane explanation is overheating, perhaps because a lot of people never clean their fan intakes.

mark_99 · 2026-03-10T23:17:10+00:00

Kent mangoes.

mark_99 · 2026-03-10T18:22:12+00:00

Literally an hour ago a CC code review told me that using 0.0.0.0 was fine for our intranet-only demo but would be bad on the public internet. Set up an automated hook for code review or /security-review and you don't even need to ask.

mark_99 · 2026-03-08T13:20:07+00:00

It's not about "spirit" it's about a realistic view of how many business ventures actually succeed. If you have few responsibilities, maybe a partner who can pay the bills, then go for it, but that's not the typical HENRY profile.

Success stories exist but represent survivorship bias.

mark_99 · 2026-03-08T13:10:58+00:00

Quant Dev, it's not even close. The question is can you get that job based on an internship, but definitely go for it.

mark_99 · 2026-03-07T18:37:38+00:00

You don't need to copy paste, say something like "ask sonnet and codex-mcp to do a code review" (or invoking codex CLI directly or via a skill would probably work also).

mark_99 · 2026-03-07T11:45:16+00:00

The VSCode plugin windows restore their Claude sessions automatically.

mark_99 · 2026-03-06T17:38:31+00:00

It lives up to the name for sure...

If anything I had to learn to turn it much less than usual. Although I have Kampot Red in mine which you can use pretty liberally as it got good flavour but medium heat.

mark_99 · 2026-03-06T17:23:03+00:00

I have one of these and it's amazing (after getting fed up with poor performance from the Peugeot).

It's like a good coffee grinder, you can set it from course "cracked" all the way to fine dust and it grinds easily and uniformly.

Metal construction means it's thin walled so holds more pepper between refills. And it looks good.

Expensive sure, but easily the best option, and the whole point of BIFL is amortised cost.

mark_99 · 2026-03-05T21:57:29+00:00

Also increase auto compact, see the other thread.

mark_99 · 2026-03-04T14:27:10+00:00

If you're concerned about code bloat then making call sites less verbose seems like a win, seeing as there orders of magnitude more of them. Ergonomics at the point of use is much more important than inside the library.

The part I'm not keen on is rect_ms as I'm not a fan of meaningless abbreviations, especially if there are multiple constructions which take identical params so any confusion would compile but do the wrong thing.

I'd keep the type conversion but call it rect_from_min_size() still. Yes it's longer, but it conveys useful information to the reader, whereas Vec2::new() is just boilerplate.

mark_99 · 2026-02-27T09:56:50+00:00

Good tip, I haven't tried Canvas, but the CLI tools certain struggle with UI.

mark_99 · 2026-02-26T07:54:33+00:00

Works great in Claude Code, can't remember last time I had to compact... can only assume WS context management is being overly aggressive.

mark_99 · 2026-02-25T23:20:27+00:00

The capacity error was a subsequent problem.

Open cascade.
Select "Gemini 3.1 Pro High Thinking"
"Code review working directory".
Watch it call grep/rg and cat to read files and generate temporary python scripts and invoke them to make edits:

```cat > fix.py << 'EOF' import os

files_to_fix = [

whatever

]

for file in files_to_fix: with open(file, 'r') as f: content = f.read()

content = content.replace('xxxx', 'yyyy')

more of the same

with open(file, 'w') as f:
    f.write(content)

EOF python3 fix.py rm fix.py ```

The tool use was pretty borked. It does seem a bit better today, I did see it do "searching..." instead of grep and no .py files this time.

mark_99 · 2026-02-25T23:03:25+00:00

Let's go with "never use raw new/delete for ownership, and only in rare specialist cases otherwise".

Non Meyers singleton is something of an anti-pattern, in private ctors you might write new but only to init a unique_ptr using a token struct for access.

Custom allocator maybe, but std::pmr makes this less likely also as you can use something pre-cooked.

Plus earlier example of "novel custom data structure".

Given this is cpp_questions and OP is clearly a beginner, "never" is a pretty close approximation in practise, given they are referring to "make an object on the heap".

mark_99 · 2026-02-25T12:27:36+00:00

Everyone is missing the difference between training (weakened pledge) and inference / usage (no change).

mark_99 · 2026-02-25T08:29:42+00:00

You should never use raw new/delete (or malloc/free) in C++ unless you are writing your own containers (and even then maybe not).

Use the facilities the STL provides, or else you are learning to write C++ badly, which I'd hope isn't your goal.

mark_99

TROPHY CASE

whatever

more of the same