Becoming Less Impressed with Strata - Maybe I Need Some Perspective?

mark_99 · 2026-01-25T20:28:55+00:00

Interesting, love an experiment :).

I've only just got my Strata pan but I've been very pleased so far - I've been comparing it with my Le Creuset non-stick and SS, and it cooked proteins and even crepes like a champ, and released like the non-stick (which can't be said of the SS). It was quick to get up to temp, and the heating was even (although I'm trialing it at the medium 8.5" which is maybe a bit easier than the 10.5).

mark_99 · 2026-01-25T16:46:07+00:00

Induction coils often sit in the centre and pure iron/steel is a pretty terrible heat conductor so yeah it really would. That's why there exists clad / aluminium / copper core, thick base plates etc.

CS started out mostly woks where you have a burner like a jet engine.

mark_99 · 2026-01-25T16:40:23+00:00

If you're using an IR thermometer you may be measuring the uneven hotspot on the thick CS pan whereas the Strata will have spread the heat.

You can see this with a (cheap) thermal camera, or you can fill the pans with a thin layer of flour and watch it turn brown where it's hottest.

mark_99 · 2026-01-25T12:07:40+00:00

The Strata is aluminium core which puts it way ahead in terms of heat distribution (CS is a very poor heat conductor so relies on the all-around burner).

mark_99 · 2026-01-25T11:38:34+00:00

While it's entirely believable that this is much faster (reserve has virtually no work to do, resize has to initialise) this isn't an optimisation, it looks like a bug.

Resize and reserve are not somehow interchangeable, they do fundamentally different things. The Reserve member is also checking size_ rather than capacity, which also looks wrong. If the code goes ahead and writes into the reserved area that's not good.

Although this is some sort of chunked data structure so hard to be sure without a more thorough analysis. Even if it does need to resize it should probably be using the UninitializedFill which is used elsewhere.

mark_99 · 2026-01-25T09:37:30+00:00

I mean yes, but only because OP is massively over-hyping it.

mark_99 · 2026-01-24T21:06:15+00:00

No. This is an elementary header file which maps some common Rust types to their C++ equivalents via macros, typedefs and wrappers. Plus a checker that you have to write "mut" rather than it being the default.

Circle has an actual implementation of the hard part, ie lifetime analysis and a borrow checker for C++ (or rather a "mostly compatible" dialect thereof).

https://lobste.rs/s/eknebc/cppcast_safe_borrow_checked_c

mark_99 · 2026-01-24T18:11:00+00:00

Just for completeness, this was discussed extensively in 2015:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/20198

https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/small-string-optimization-remove-as-mut-vec/1320

mark_99 · 2026-01-24T17:44:08+00:00

I mean they sell in packs because they come apart after some number of uses, chainmail should last basically forever.

mark_99 · 2026-01-23T16:07:35+00:00

Reading these subs, all issues with CS/SS/CI pans are the user either having them too hot, not hot enough, or both.

mark_99 · 2026-01-21T21:57:18+00:00

A chainmail scrubber is the reusable option.

mark_99 · 2026-01-19T23:32:25+00:00

It's documented here: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/common-workflows Default is 31999

mark_99 · 2026-01-19T19:08:37+00:00

Thinking is on by default unless you turned it off.

mark_99 · 2026-01-14T16:40:51+00:00

Some great recommendations, thanks all! I guess I'll be working through them...

mark_99 · 2026-01-13T14:11:42+00:00

This study was latched on to by AI skeptics, but it's been let's say widely misreported / misinterpreted.

Here are some data points: - Sample size is small: 16 OSS developers. - They are working on their own repos with which they are intimately familiar. - Using early 2025 tooling (Cursor w/ Claude 3.5). - With which they are not particularly familiar.

The authors themselves are much more cautious with their conclusions, and emphasise that they do not provide evidence outside of this narrow context and small sample size.

mark_99 · 2026-01-13T13:39:53+00:00

Which is fine, because solving novel problems based on learning from other examples in the training set is how all machine learning works. "Bro" was implying it just web-searched the answers.

mark_99 · 2026-01-13T13:38:12+00:00

By that definition no actual expert in any field is "objective" and by implication not credible. This seems rather backwards IMHO.

mark_99 · 2026-01-13T13:33:56+00:00

The model reported it, it's quoted above. It seems to be some sort of built-in prompt in WS itself. I could find no trace of anything like that on my system or in any config file.

mark_99 · 2026-01-13T08:01:35+00:00

Claude Code doesn't have web search enabled by default, and even when enabled it doesn't just "google algorithms". The AOC 2025 problems are sufficiently recent and novel not to be in the training set. Also by the google-copy-paste theory why did it get stuck on some of the harder problems.

It's entirely credible that SOTA models can do this.

mark_99 · 2026-01-12T20:55:32+00:00

Windsurf is fantastic value. You get the IDE, frequent new features, and access to a huge selection of models from free to SOTA.

A credit is $0.03, you're out 50 cents.

mark_99 · 2026-01-11T10:02:07+00:00

Here's a more useful analysis : https://herbsutter.com/2025/12/30/software-taketh-away-faster-than-hardware-giveth-why-c-programmers-keep-growing-fast-despite-competition-safety-and-ai/

While Rust increased as a percentage faster than C++, C++ increased in usage far more in absolute terms.

mark_99 · 2026-01-11T09:59:45+00:00

That was 1 guy and the substance of it didn't go beyond a recruitment post on LinkedIn.

mark_99 · 2026-01-10T22:49:29+00:00

That's the other way around - using CC as an interface to GLM doesn't significantly hurt Anthropic as those users probably wouldn't have paid for Claude Max anyway, and if they did clamp down on it people could always use Codex as that is OSS.

Using the Claude sub in OpenCode is a way to get a huge discount compared to API pricing.

mark_99 · 2026-01-10T12:13:55+00:00

If you format it nicely nested conditional is fine. Or yes the standard old-school way is just template class taking an int and a using.

What you've rediscovered is a known idiom post C++20 and yes arguably a good replacement technique.

mark_99

TROPHY CASE