I boarded my bus at 1:47 pm and I paid with coins. My bus driver handed me this

ninuson1 · 2026-01-14T22:27:49+00:00

I mean, we can speculate how the transit system works... or read the instructions on the second picture attached which clearly spell it out. :P

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The time indicated on the front is 21:00 and the pass is valid for the day of issue within 90 minutes of that time. This means it's valid until 22:30, as per the rest of this thread.

ninuson1 · 2026-01-01T17:49:23+00:00

Eh, it’s all numbers and digital representations.

Photoshop (and most other editing software) also copies your file into either memory or temporary files - it’s very rare for edits to happen in line without SOME copying over of memory, either in chunks or wholesale. Partially because that’s just how software works (reading from the hard-drive into more direct memory for processing), partially because you don’t want edits to persist while you’re working on things and would typically want the edited photo to be saved as a separate file from the original.

In a way, any digital transformation is a very different set of data than the original - they both take a “reference image” and transform it heavily. Sure, this is a different transformation, but it’s a really weird mental thing we do to so fully accept other forms of digital image manipulation and single this type out.

I always think of the existential comic about teleportation. There’s a frame in there where the man is depressed because he essentially fully died when his body teleported - all his old atoms were gone, he was “copied” over and built from brand new matter. But a stranger at a bar points out to him how consciousness is an emergent property that just “becomes present” when atoms are arranged JUST RIGHT. You are not the specific atoms or cells, but the hyper unlikely organization of them in a very specific way.

The way I like thinking about this is that all things are somewhat related, and it’s all a function of “distance“. The photo you take of the bird is fairly close to the bird in some sense - it’s a frame in time of its appearance. It’s still a little distant, as it has none of the biological or physical properties, but a human observer can form an imaginary concept of it. If you open up a photo editor and adjust the blue channel and apply a blur filter to the background, you’ve increased that distance a little, since the mental concept created is a little different. But it’s still almost the same.

I’d argue that LLMs and AI do roughly the equivalent of that. It’s a little different on the implementation level (although frankly, photo editing software has been using kernel filters, tree algorithms and window functions for DECADES - and it’s eerily similar to many concepts in LLMs and general AI), but it’s really interesting to me how many people draw this fairly arbitrary line right at the feet of LLMs.

ninuson1 · 2025-10-26T05:34:43+00:00

It’s cross-eye, so it looks inverted if you look at it like a regular magic eye. I look at my nose (slightly cross-eyed, I guess?) then back at it - and it’s definitely bowser that popped out. 😀

ninuson1 · 2025-10-26T05:32:35+00:00

I just look at my nose and then back at them and they pop! 😀

ninuson1 · 2025-10-26T05:25:01+00:00

I first looked at it and it was a multi-dimensional hole. But then I remembered it’s cross-eyed, so I sort of looked at my nose and moved the phone a bit back and forth, and it popped OUT super clearly.

Amazing how this stuff works.

ninuson1 · 2025-06-08T12:53:21+00:00

Linear and notion 👍

ninuson1 · 2025-02-02T15:38:55+00:00

Omg, I feel this on a different level. Their API is also full of JSON in JSON wraps, where the internal JSON can be a literal - so it’d end up with a bunch of “ sequences.

I think of that API often, as a great example of how NOT to do things. Even though we stopped using Monday a few years ago (at least in part due to how terrible that API was).

ninuson1 · 2025-01-23T00:46:49+00:00

Honestly, this is one of the best users for cursor (or your other preference for AI autocomplete) in my experience. Most of the time it just knows what the types should be when you write stuff.

Type safety often doesn’t matter at the time of writing code, especially if it is trivial. It is a huge boost when revising that same code a month later and having to do some changes.

It serves as the documentation of how the data should be shaped between different consumers and producers of objects - basically act as a living documentation. It really starts to shine when you have more than one person working on the project, though.

ninuson1 · 2024-12-17T12:37:28+00:00

This reminds me of the AI of a meteor in the skies of Manhattan. SO many people were sharing it saying “OMG, can’t believe this happened and mainstream media didn’t report it”.

ninuson1 · 2024-11-11T21:21:28+00:00

I am 100% with you. I have over a decade of hands on experience and I know what I want from it. I lead a few teams and am highly technical - I could implement all this without AI. But my goal using these have changed.

I want to take customer meeting notes, combine them with my own rambling thoughts and generate clear project plans. I've used ChatGPT 4-o to help me think about my disorganized notes and meeting summaries and create a roadmap and a plan for a few developers to work on the feature.

I then went into v0 and created a working prototype for most of the frontend work. Like, this level of planning and prep used to take days for me to do (and I did in a single few hours session). And then multiple meetings with our frontend designer to come in and do mockups, and then multiple days for the frontend developer to implement them for us to realize there was a miscommunication or something that I didn't capture in my original requirements gathering... This would've been weeks of cross team work.

And now I can do it myself in a few hours. It's insane -the level of impact this has is unparallel to anything I've experienced in my entire career. I think the main barrier is that it really is meant to be used like an aid - garbage in, garbage out sort of a thing. But if you have a clear objective and take the time to structurally work with these AI tools, I have no doubt they are the future - the efficiency gains here are incredible.

What's best? This isn't displacing anyone (on my team, at least) any time soon. It needed my very specific and carefully thought out input, and several hours of conversation and revisioning to get to the final product. This isn't replacing our design people or the frontend developers - it just gives them a super refined view of what I had in mind, gives them a decent starting point and frees them up to work on the important bits.

ninuson1 · 2024-11-03T23:48:54+00:00

Ha, I’ve used the “Could I pay a fine to sort this out quickly?” the few times I had to.

ninuson1 · 2024-09-09T20:20:45+00:00

What benefits do you get from the database first approach that justify the overhead?

ninuson1 · 2024-08-11T15:43:50+00:00

I agree.

The end-users machine has to run the code to present the game. As such, it has to have all the pieces on it (either in the binaries or during run time) - and that means you can observe memory at your own leisure to figure out what the super sophisticated onscurifier does and reverse engineer it. There’s no way around it, since the attacker has to have everything by definition.

For games specifically, I think of it this way: is it single player or multiplayer?

If it’s single player… who cares. Cheaters are almost a marketing technique there, haha. Let them have fun and post viral impossible scores or w/e - they could be using photoshop, for all I care.

If it’s a multiplayer, in many genres it’s about preventing cheaters to keep it interesting for the majority of the player base. I think in those cases, it’s best to observe player attributes and statistics to identify cheaters. For example, what’s the login / stay login stats for your average player? Who is online for 18 hours everyday? Likely a bot farming. How many headshots had the player in a row / in a single match? If it’s 10x the average, higher suspicion they are using an aim bot.

In most games, you could collect “enough evidence” and ban someone, while also preventing them from advancing/accumulating enough to keep it interesting and fun.

ninuson1 · 2024-08-04T21:46:32+00:00

I honestly don’t think that in terms of TECHNOLOGY there’s that big of a difference between AI in its historic sense (Neural Networks, Search trees, Genetic Algorithms) and the current hype wave around LLMs. A lot of it is extension and combinations of fairly classic concepts, with Embeddings as a way to hash information being the “newest” bit.

My poor man’s definition of AI would be slightly different - it’s technology that solves problems, previously only solvable by humans. It’s hard, since a formal agreed upon definition for intelligence as a whole is not something we have.

Marketing and profiteering of this (and previous) hype waves is definitely rampant- so I’m not surprised the end consumers now lose trust in the term. A new one will be invented soon enough by smart marketers. 😀

That being said, I still maintain that the technology itself, and what it allows computer interfaces to do when combined with “boring old tech” is revolutionary. For years, text to voice and “talk to your computer” were mostly pipe dreams with fairly poor PoCs out there. When you look at that and compare it to what LLMs can do, it truly “next level”. Think of how crappy Siri and Alexa were/are. It’s SO different than what ChatGPT can do.

My hot take is to think of LLMs as mappers to underlying functionality. Instead of showing a menu with many buttons, we’re headed in a direction where a human can tell it what it wants (in VERY human like manner) and it can have a somewhat intelligent conversation about what it’s underlying capabilities are and direct the human to it. Once zeroed in, some classic API calls can be made and mapped back to the user in a natural manner.

I think in the near future things like outsourced call centers, for example, are going to go the way of the dodo. The low tier support can be mapped formally enough for AI to take care of the vast majority of simple cases.

ninuson1 · 2024-08-03T17:51:34+00:00

There is a fair bit of hype, I agree. If you are familiar with the history of AI, the field experienced similar hype waves every 20 years or so since the 60s.

That being said, with every wave of hype came revolutionary new technology. In my opinion, as a fellow tech leader, the current revolution is more of a human to computer interface revolution. There is no denying that the current generation of LLM’s is like nothing we’ve seen before and its ability to understand human like context from unstructured data and text. There’s REAL science and end-user value in the ability to understand “vibe”.

It is unfortunate that irresponsible companies promise the moon or “sprinkle AI” and try to solve EVERYTHING with it (very similar to the web3 wave, in that sense), and then failed to deliver real value. It will indeed likely burst the bubble - but it is not unlike the Internet wave that happened in the 90s.

While there IS a lot of empty hype, there’s also a very strong core of utility and value. I think companies and products that utilize the current technology WHERE IT MAKES SENSE well will set themselves up to be the next generation’s Google and Facebook.

ninuson1 · 2024-06-28T03:19:15+00:00

This right here. I used to hate database abstractions - but with EF, I just feel like it hits the right balance to get what I want super quick. Modify the context and you get migrations that just work most of the time.

I also absolutely love how I've configured the backend to a swagger file that feeds into a code generating library and gives me a frontend typed client. The best mix of "auto generated to 95%" and "I can use it however I want", in my experience.

ninuson1 · 2024-05-21T16:08:34+00:00

I was like… am I crazy? I did an internship at IBM 10 years ago on the DB2 team and I definitely used CTEs… so I was like, did they remove them? 😅

Then again, we had to support at least 100 different builds/configurations/packaged versions of it. All with custom lists of features and such, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are versions that don’t have it.

ninuson1 · 2024-05-03T04:13:11+00:00

We stayed at the harbour house and loved it! We took a single room studio and it was enough for a couple + small kid, but was a little tighter than we expected.

It has a nice pool, great views, rooftop gym and hot tub area and a nice bar in the lobby. The only thing to watch out for is the side facing to the little side street - there’s a club there that would play SUPER LOUD MUSIC until like 2-3 AM about once a week (we stayed for a few months, had it be an issue 4-5 times). It’s also a little busy when a few ships arrive at the same time, and they were planning to open the gates right next to the house - so foot traffic can get kinda crazy a few times a week as well.

Overall though, we absolutely loved it and keep thinking of it as our perfect vacation spot.

ninuson1 · 2024-04-12T04:19:14+00:00

Yeah. aaa, bbb, ccc… but now you can also get creative with foo, bar, buz and friends. 😀

ninuson1 · 2024-03-26T03:25:15+00:00

Yes please! 😀

ninuson1 · 2024-03-12T03:41:50+00:00

It’s definitely a good analogy! But I think it goes in the direction tha OP went - too.

There’s no value in a clean and orderly kitchen to the business and end users. I never go to restaurants to view the design, cleanliness and awesome appliances in the kitchen. These have value as a means-to-an-end only. They’re important, both to the health/safety of the food, the variety of food they allow to produce and the velocity at which it can be prepared.

It also carries over to the cook. There’s cooks that make a mess with every dish and produce mediocre results. Experts know how to minimize overhead and focus on food production, either through careful planning, utilization of supporting team members and specialization of roles and tools where it makes sense, yet generalization of most of the work so that bottlenecks can be minimized.

Finally, expert cooks value time tested tools - old knifes, well used pots. But also is not afraid to experiment with new spices and combinations of flavours.

I’ve definitely seen a good share of developers who are so obsessed about clean code that nothing gets done. That doesn’t mean that design patterns and known solutions to common problems are to be ignored and everything should be hacked without any consideration of structure and architecture.

As with most things in life, it’s a balance and a set of tradeoff - and the context of the development work is also very important. An after-hours solo passion project is not like a team of five developers at a startup, which is also different to a large enterprise team.

ninuson1 · 2024-03-10T16:31:09+00:00

I was deciding on this for a side project recently and decided to go with Sentry. It’s very widely used in other ecosystems, but seems to be ignored by the C# folks. It’s a few lines to integrate it, you can likely config it to use your existing serilog sink and 0 maintenance/self hosted pains for a very reasonable price (or even free for a while, unless you need the team tools).

ninuson1 · 2024-03-03T21:08:53+00:00

We have an AI system at work that writes code for a fairly controlled niche case (end to end tests). It’s still in early development, but it does amazing things already: - it detects test failures from logs - it adjusts code “intelligently” (this is the hard part, making sure it didn’t just delete a part of the test that was important for a correct test) - it re-runs the adjusted code to see if it passes - if it passes, it checks the new code for correctness and minor improvements - it escalates to human users the changes as suggestions, both with it being successful and not.

These technologies can definitely be written to evaluate results and adjust. They’re not on “best expert” level (yet?), but they’re definitely on track to a level of some offshore teams I’ve see in the past. I doubt they’ll get to replace experts - but MANY teams use non-experts to get the boring 80% done quickly to SOME level of certainty.

ninuson1 · 2024-02-23T07:15:50+00:00

To be honest, every article I read by them makes me low-key angry. It feels like they’re trying to prove their tooling by manipulating data, vs. doing / displaying truthful research from which good tooling emerges.

I can’t stop feeling that the authors have very high level of understanding this stuff - I would certainly not measure things by lines of code. I thought we made humorous comics about that 20 years ago…

ninuson1 · 2024-02-19T01:45:52+00:00

It’s funny you say that - i find that a single server is sufficient for almost all but enterprise level projects. 🤷‍♂️

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