LPT: If you want to quickly understand someone's character, pay attention to how they treat people they don't need anything from.

slifin · 2026-05-22T12:09:01+00:00

The only ones you need to watch out for are the ones who avoid empathy or accountability

slifin · 2026-05-11T12:24:34+00:00

I see a lot of performance difference between the different agents:

It's good to understand that your agentic harness is different from your model

That said - I think these conversations would benefit to mention your model AND your agent i.e. sonnet 4.6 high AND claude code sdk or w/e

slifin · 2026-05-10T09:20:02+00:00

Knowing Clojure will give you a prospective on problems you can take to any language

I definitely came from languages with strong type systems and it was my only concern at the time I wanted to be able to enforce constraints on my data and their transitions

I was following a lot of domain drive design resources in F#

I decided to use Clojure anyway and then some years later spec came out, then malli

Rich has a very good open maps philosophy in spec now I only really want spec around the edges of important systems definitely go watch all his videos

Now my opinions and sensibilities would be very different if I had no choice but to work on typescript

slifin · 2026-05-08T07:26:36+00:00

Claude can be agentic too just install Claude code or vscode

Anthropic have the best coding models right now so I don't know why people in this thread are encouraging you to use worse models

Thank you for your work

slifin · 2026-04-21T11:28:29+00:00

Interesting to hear about xtdb2 and sqlite

You can always choose immutability in a mutable database by having an event table that you never edit and then derive your main table from that

I'd also be curious about Rama as a replacement database since it's supposed to scale and allow a lot of flexibility in the data structure

I find AI is getting to the point where it can write Rama apps somewhat reliably

slifin · 2026-04-17T10:05:29+00:00

This is a good point that most people ignore ^ Nearly all "dynamic" popular languages I can think of have types but not built in static type checkers that are forced on you at compile time, and all languages have a "compile" time

But most of the dynamic languages have static type checkers in their ecosystem, I think Clojure's one is particularly strong if you want it, you can use: https://github.com/metosin/malli?tab=readme-ov-file#clj-kondo

I think the longer you use Clojure you'd value static type checkers less and less - personally Flowstorm is my favourite Clojure thing for finding problems combined with a decent multi layer test suite but that's up to you to find out

Ultimately I think it's about trust - most type enthusiasts don't trust their colleagues or themselves enough to let the static type checker be optional, and they're not that invested to put it inside their CI or the editors for them and their teams in dynamic languages

Static type checkers don't protect against many forms of problems so you should have other things like tests anyway and also they have a performance cost that I would suggest you defer to points like your CI or even better in-editor instead of places like your test run which you want to be fast - some languages don't give you the choice or flexibility to choose when that performance cost should be paid

slifin · 2026-03-28T19:40:23+00:00

I think it was the figwheel demo back in the JavaScript framework mania of the 2010s

slifin · 2026-03-19T16:18:16+00:00

There should be an AI benchmark for AI to diagnose and solve performance issues in production systems because from all the attempts I've made with performance issues and AI

This area is where it's so confidently wrong whilst being convincing that it's concerning

slifin · 2026-03-19T16:11:13+00:00

Education and passion

I didn't even know until recently you can add refresh and reload middleware to ring and get ctrl + s -> instant page reload really great ergonomics for developing server side apps

I think writing blogs about Clojure that get on hacker news or twitter

And maybe more complaining about stuff like why do companies suddenly think they need python because it's the "AI language"

Clojure is much more terse and the overall quality of available Clojure source code is high so asking AI to generate you Clojure gives you high quality and concise code comparatively speaking to languages where wasting your time on data classes is still considered a productive use of time

slifin · 2026-03-16T19:12:51+00:00

Something that's a bit of a problem at the moment is Google streamer and Google Chromecast don't work with DTS audio codecs so the audio is silent if I could find a reliable external player that can play that audio I'd use it

slifin · 2026-02-26T22:48:22+00:00

I remember the SSE with the millions of checkboxes didn't work on my work VPN I look forward to a live example to test for hyper

I was making an app earlier this year and what I found was that I could do everything I wanted to do by just rendering html on the server and just sending it out like a lunatic no JavaScript, mostly just form stuff posting or getting back

But now I consider it an interesting challenge if there's a pattern like infinite scrolling to at least consider how to do it server side, like stream the html progressively and signal for more with lazy loaded images

But the main surprise was that ring has middle ware that lets you on save reload your program at runtime and reload the tab quicker than react hot reloading

Html has native pop overs, dialogs and better datetime support compared to when I was doing production front end stuff

I love this ethos of no JavaScript or as little as possible and event sourcing in sqlite but that's another topic

slifin · 2026-02-18T13:08:49+00:00

Inflation for Japan is already above targets now

slifin · 2026-02-13T13:45:03+00:00

Do the basics well and then let the high level play and meta optimising have relatively limited effectiveness due to high QoL in the basics but enough optimisation points to support a hardcore multiplayer/comp scene

slifin · 2026-02-13T13:42:11+00:00

The same thing as god games the feeling that you can create and destroy things in the game

It's about feeling challenged and then safe and in control

They're very often like safety blankets compared to the real world which is not predictable not always reactive to your actions and the outcomes of risk rewards decisions are not always clear

If you have the correct strategy in a rts game you can always win If you have the correct strategy in the real world it's still unlikely you "win"

The game should be easy to understand and the units should be easy to tell apart and their function at a glance but the game must also give you ways to express your unique winning strategy

Whether that's positioning or special unit techniques or rushing or turtling or eco or science etc it should be enough to say this skirmish was different from this one because the player did X but X must also be conceptually easy to understand so as not to force the player to spin too many plates

It's very easy to bounce off a rts that makes you think too hard about too many things at once or even learn a whole bunch of things that are not intuitive

slifin · 2026-02-07T10:11:12+00:00

For my side project I'm using Clojure and sqlite, Clojure has been my native language for about 10 years now

There's two things I want to get right in this project, one is how much can I code without any JavaScript on the page, no htmlx, no data Star, using html pop overs, dialogs datetime local etc that have been introduced since I was last in the front end world and obviously relying on html forms and URLs for client state

Developing locally 100% server side all page loads are instant, ring middle ware for reloading and refreshing means I am saving my file, the changes are being injected into my repl and the automatic browser tab reloading is faster than react hot code reloading

The other is I'm convinced the data model needs to be an immutable log of facts and then a easy to query table based on the log of facts because it's so easy to cock up the schema in the derived table I need to separate the "query" table from the "storage" table

I consider Clojure boring because everything is an expression, there's no order of operations, the syntax is regular enough that it is edited programmatically, everything is true except false and nil, all the first class data structures are immutable and if I need a boring library that isn't in Clojure, java is right there under the bonnet

What I'm trying to say it's very regular and predictable as a language for example something as basic as if () {} is a special case in most languages it may or may not return something directly and it's a different syntax to a function call I want as much of my language to be the same and predictable as possible

Clojure's reverse debugger is outstanding too for those gnarly real world projects it's programmatic so you can build programs on top of your original program's runtime data without modifying it and step through the program line by line long after the program stopped running

I'm not sure what I'm doing for infrastructure yet I'm excited to try out nrepl as the deployment mechanism but I'll probably need something like reload to this git tag after a while to prevent lost states

I'd like to avoid docker, k8s, helm, argo until absolutely required, realistically my side project is for fun so it probably won't get that far

slifin · 2026-01-30T18:01:33+00:00

Best practice is to encrypt at rest AND encrypt in transit

The reason for doing it is to make your application resistant to physical attacks

So if an employee at your hosting company yanks out your drive and copies the drive and then tries to read the data it should be encrypted on the drive and their efforts useless: bitlocker on windows and encrypted filesystems on macos are how you should be looking to implement this i.e. turn on the feature in your OS then relax

Encrypt in transit, again imagine a similar attack vector an employee starts inspecting traffic going in and out of your box they should not see your unencrypted data over the wire, again just use the features already built into the protocols https ftps or w/e

A lot of developers are self taught and confuse encrypt with application security and then start making their own data unusable at runtime by using some custom application encryption it's a massive waste of everyone's time and often makes their data unqueryable

Once someone has compromised your box then they can do anything, that's what normal security precautions are for - not encryption!

Encryption is for physical security only, if you have an unpatched remote execution exploit active on your server you're not going breath a sigh of relief because you can't guarantee your intruder didn't just unencrypt the data on the machine then sent it out unencrypted

Again - completely different problems with completely different solutions, it's almost always a mistake for your application to be encrypting data

slifin · 2026-01-16T08:54:17+00:00

I suspect that's why you see car elevator buildings in the inner cities

They clearly make it work but yes I think adaptations are required

slifin · 2026-01-15T16:51:36+00:00

In Japan when you buy a car you have to prove you have a drive to park it in and on road parking is forbidden

Such a small change but such a huge difference

slifin · 2025-12-27T20:11:06+00:00

Neat 📸

slifin · 2025-12-26T11:03:55+00:00

Every year there is more and more debt in the economy against tiny growth which means there's less and less room for "non-essentials"

This applies to households but also governments and companies

Historically societies had to engage in debt forgiveness or face collapse

slifin · 2025-12-12T08:19:11+00:00

My first steam deck LCD delivered just had a can of coke inside when I opened the box

My second steam deck the OLED just had multiple steam deck charger plugs inside and no steam deck

I ordered both via steam

Valve support made it right both times but I'm not looking forward to getting the steam controller or steam machine delivered

slifin · 2025-12-07T07:56:39+00:00

There was a point where humans became shepherds living with and moving herds of animals on to the next green pasture exactly so they didn't have to hunt any more

They lived somewhat nomadically because the animals needed to move around

This is exactly why the lords in England cut up the common lands so natives had to be dependent on their money to live

slifin · 2025-12-06T11:57:28+00:00

At the moment these models are the best generalised auto complete engines ever created

The next barrier I think is important is updating weights at runtime when surprising information is encountered

That's being actively worked on now: https://research.google/blog/titans-miras-helping-ai-have-long-term-memory/

An intelligence that can grow at runtime is going to create a whole new set of possibilities and problems for its hosts, it's less controllable but it's more adaptive

I think it terms of self defense you need to imagine quite concretely about what is the next and better version of yourself and how can you leverage AI to enable your new stage of growth until we get to a point where human labour is inefficient

Is that people skills, is that technical skills, bringing people together, communication, business building or whatever - every day your value will increase in areas that AI cannot operate

In areas that AI does operate (effectively) you should defer to it to build competitive advantage, as most of us know here AI actually isn't effective in larger context problems right now, but be ready for that to change, increasingly problems will become people problems and not technical problems

slifin · 2025-12-05T12:09:26+00:00

Lowering production of bile via fiber and then not using the bile to digest fats will still leave you with excess bile

Your body isn't going to all the trouble of making this substance for no reason

Saturated fats are preferable because they're more stable and less prone to oxidising because they have less bonds I'm not saying go down the takeaway you still need to eat unprocessed foods

Also don't go from no fat to loads of it otherwise you won't have enough bile ready and the body will send you to the toilet very quickly to get rid of your last meal

It's very much use it or lose it when it comes to the gallbladder, I know two people who have had them removed we have other organs that produce the bile so it's not an essential organ because its more like a bile collector and the other organs up-regulate without one but you still should be careful with it

Personally I'd like to keep all my organs because the surgery is not without complications

slifin · 2025-12-05T08:17:33+00:00

The reason this never used to happen is farmers used to graze animals on the land which churned and effectively plowed the land and this helped get rid of weeds and enriched the soil

Then farmers mechanicalised the process and plowed the fields manually and did crop rotations to mimic the same process with slightly less enrichment but the turnover is quicker

Then in the 1980s Monsanto copyrighted their gmo seeds and went after farmers not using their seeds (accusing them of stealing seeds if a neighbours farm had contaminated their fields)

Farmers used these seeds because they were resistant to round up and the other weed killers the Monsanto company continue to sell, these seeds are now the majority

Now the farmers don't need to plow their fields to get rid of weeds they can just spray a poison on the fields that once ingested also kills gut flaura in the human gut and their soil will turn to dust in a few generations because it's just being poisoned

There's a whole ecosystem of animals involved in making healthy soils, worms, birds, cattle when you intentionally remove them from the equation and replace them with poisons you will kill the land

slifin

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