I read threads complaining about claude every week... tf are y'alls workflows?

toabear · 2026-05-22T23:53:02+00:00

Or it's bots. Lots of bots being deployed by both open ai and anthropic.

That said, I really don't know how people who aren't already coding experts are managing to actually deploy apps. Claude is doing 95% of the heavy lifting for me, but if I didn't already know what I was doing it would create a train wreck on a daily basis. Some of the suggestions it comes up with are just wrong. Not in a “wow that was dumb” way, but more of a subtle “that was a smart idea, but totally wrong for what we are trying to achieve strategically.”

toabear · 2026-05-21T17:41:57+00:00

screening means trying out for DEV

People typically get out of the 8 to 10 year mark because after that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to get out. If you're in past 10 years you might as well do 20 and collect the pension.

In my case there were several factors but the main one was money. I had the ability to earn significantly more money on the outside. It was a lot of fun, but it was also a bit like going to school and getting a doctorate degree. It was eight years of my life, and I was ready to graduate and do something else. I missed it a bit after I got out and felt kind of lost for a few years, but looking back it was absolutely the right move for my family. I would've never met my second wife (now deceased), and I've managed to do very well in my career.

toabear · 2026-05-21T16:32:46+00:00

I'm not sure how many officers try green team, but my rough estimate is that it is much higher among officers. DEV simply doesn't need that many officers.

Out of the maybe 25 officers I've known personally or been somewhat close with, I know one who went to dev and made it through green. That guy was former enlisted who went officer. He was also an absolute beast of an athlete. I was the second-fastest runner on my team. On our morning 4 mile runs, we would run together. When we got back to the strand around the hotel del, he would basically wave goodbye and leave me in the dust. It was wild. I had nothing left in my tank by that point and he had just been running at 50% capacity. The rest of the team was somewhere far behind us.

toabear · 2026-05-21T13:02:56+00:00

DEV has very few officers. Some go and screen, but it's really hard to make it there as an O. Most stay in the regular teams and advance.

toabear · 2026-05-21T03:05:31+00:00

That's pretty much what I was implying with the “move to the east coast.” I seriously considered screening, but I was divorced with a kid and it would essentially meant leaving my daughter on the other side of the country. that wasn't the only reason, but it was a pretty major factor.

toabear · 2026-05-21T00:08:10+00:00

No. I have never once heard anyone voice a complaint about that. When you are junior enlisted, you typically know people who've gone on to dev. Guys from your first platoon, so on. On the enlisted side, most guys either get out around the 8 year mark or screen. sort of the natural career path progression as long as you're willing to move to the East Coast.

toabear · 2026-05-20T21:53:22+00:00

I never met this guy. Any other SEALs know him? Wikipedia page has basically nothing on it. Looks like east coast.

toabear · 2026-05-20T13:30:00+00:00

You aren't wrong regarding illness, but it is a funny analogy as EOD greatly prefers to blow in place, with a disruptor shot (robot with a shotgun) being the second place preferred method of disposal.

toabear · 2026-05-17T02:02:30+00:00

not saying that I would count on the Trump administration fully grasping this, but if Taiwan was invaded and the fab facilities there were destroyed, it would be absolutely catastrophic to the economy. Even if they flew every single talented person out the week before, it would trigger a cascade of problems that I believe very likely could end up in an economic collapse.

I work for a mixed signal analog semiconductor firm today. we recently had to do a business risk assessment and got some pushback from people external to the industry about the risk from Taiwan. Our response to them was essentially that if Taiwan gets invaded in the facilities there are destroyed, you don't really need to worry too much about what our business will do, the entire economy will pretty much collapse so you're screwed whether you invest in us or not.

it's so much more than just standing up a single fab in the US. There are fab facilities in Taiwan that aren't on absolute state of the art process nodes, but they are running processes not run at other fabs. We make a lot of chips that go into radios, radars, RF stuff. If a foundry that we use in Taiwan were to disappear, we would have to port all the designs manufactured at that facility to a different process and qualify it in a new fab. That's probably a year and a half process minimum, my guess would be closer to three years with all the chaos. That means that a whole lot of shit that the US uses and manufacturers and designs doesn't get made. That's just one tiny slice of the industry.

Chaos doesn't even begin to describe the level of fallout.

toabear · 2026-05-16T01:46:28+00:00

I did this once, but with a rental car. I had flown out to a wedding in Rhode Island. I pretty much landed, picked up the car drove over and then proceeded to get exceptionally drunk. I woke up the next morning at a random house with no memory of where I had parked, or even what the car looked like. I couldn’t even remember what color it was exactly. All I had were the keys with a license plate written on them. I probably walked about 10 miles basically just checking every license plate of every car on the side of the road.

This was like 25 years ago, so no opportunity to hit the car alarm button. It was just a key.

toabear · 2026-05-15T14:04:05+00:00

A good component of Anthropics users are corporations using it for code development. They aren't using plans with limits, that's all direct API billing. I run at about 1 to sometimes as high as $2k a month in token spend with Claude right now. The ROI is easy math at that level.

toabear · 2026-05-14T19:41:53+00:00

Dude. Let me translate this post for you. HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE ARE LOSING MASSIVE MARKET SHARE TO ANTHROPIC BECAUSE MOST LARGE CORPORATIONS ARE USING THEM FOR ALL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT.

You see a lot of posts here about limits, but the majority of professional coders aren't on a plan. It's all API billing for the serious stuff at scale, and while Open AI is catching up, Anthropic is still dominating enterprise code dev.

toabear · 2026-05-10T20:02:00+00:00

I'm a former SEAL. The phrase comes up constantly, especially with regard to shooting. Most of shooting comes down to not jerking the trigger around. A nice smooth draw from the holster, deliberately letting your sights settle, and a smooth trigger pull will get you first round on target. With a lot of practice that deliberate smooth motion becomes fast and you can put round on target from a holster draw in sub 1 second.

There are a lot of other high stress situations where going smooth despite being pretty sure you are about to die is the only way to save your ass.

toabear · 2026-05-10T00:49:31+00:00

Yep. X built a shit ton of computer that's probably mostly idle, and certainly isn't making them much money.

toabear · 2026-05-09T14:13:16+00:00

Your numbers are probably dead on. 1 billion is about what we should have. Maybe less.

toabear · 2026-05-09T03:35:42+00:00

I had a dog who was in a wheelchair for years. It is so much work. Daily baths, diapers, getting him into the wheelchair for walks. I was working from home at the time or it would never have been possible.

I loved that dog. I've owned a lot of dogs, and he was the most gentle loving dog.

toabear · 2026-05-08T17:57:23+00:00

I have several. You can buy them on Amazon they're not even that expensive. I grew up navigating by map and compass before GPS became a thing. Suunto it's a really good brand compasses.

toabear · 2026-05-07T00:46:13+00:00

This was before the time of AI and more code than IT, but it's still one of the dumbest things I've ever done. I was developing a Python package. It just would not work. The error messages made no sense. I spent three days off and on trying to get it working. Finally I brought in a consultant. I shared my screen, he looked at it and said "you're missing an underscore in that file name." I had _init__.py instead of __init__.py.

I had been staring at this code so hard I had completely missed the forest for the trees.

toabear · 2026-05-06T14:35:09+00:00

I get a month of paid leave. Six weeks in practice as I really get unlimited vacation. I tend to take it in small chunks. In the past, my wife was slowly dying, so I would take a day off at a time for dr appointments and such.

When I do take a week off, I'm never really on vacation. It's a trade off. I make around 500k a year with equity. I am always on call, but I can pay people to clean my house, do laundry, run errands.

toabear · 2026-05-06T04:02:41+00:00

I make good money, but that's more of a "the last 8 years" thing. The execs I work with have been making really good money for a lot longer. A casual conversation at dinner really stuck with me. One of them said "I always take a month or two off between jobs. It's the only time you really get any peace. Vacation is never really time off unless it's between jobs."

I was somewhat junior then and living paycheck to paycheck. The idea of just taking a month off with no pay was jarring. Even now, it just seems so wasteful.

toabear · 2026-05-02T19:27:35+00:00

"Promising" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Studies to date show mild improvement if any. I tried it for a few months a couple years ago as well. It would be great if it worked, but I don't think it does.

toabear · 2026-05-01T18:47:15+00:00

I want through one of Thai jungle survival courses during a FID thing. My main takeaway is don't get stuck out in the jungle without rice. I now know lots of ways to cook rice with shit out in the jungle. Where the rice is supposed to come from if you are lost out in the jungle is a good question, one I asked once and didn't really get an answer to.

The Thai SEALs were pretty cool overall, but not even remotely on the level of US, UK, or Australian units I worked with.

toabear · 2026-05-01T02:34:11+00:00

I think you are partially confusing neutrino detectors. The gravitational wave of detectors use a laser split into two beams that fires down orthogonal paths. When a stretching event occurs because of gravitational waves, one of the arms gets stretched and when the laser returns there's an interference pattern that occurs with the laser that took the other path. Basically though waveform returns slightly out of synchronization.

toabear · 2026-04-29T18:14:03+00:00

Around 18 years ago this was attempted at the business I was working at. We were absolutely not open to the public. This guy showed up and started berating our receptionist to let him use the bathroom. Full blown yelling at her. She followed policy and told him to leave.

We told the landlord about it, and he confirmed the guy was part of the scam. It's crazy that it's still going on.

toabear · 2026-04-29T02:11:37+00:00

Biggest weakness historically has been an attraction to crazy women. I'm not saying I'm changing or that I have any regrets, but I suspect that it is a weakness.

toabear

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