Most of the article makese sense but what is this supposed to mean? "Native Rust binaries are hostile to serverless runtimes" . I don't think that is true.

I have such a love/hate with this band. They have some great songs. Great musicians. John Frusciante is one of my favorite guitarists. But they are such cheeseballs, and in the case of Anthony Kiedes, pretty creepy.

I took the last week and a half off work. I've been reading a great book - "Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz.

After six years at the same company, I started realizing I might be ready for a move, but I'm not interview-ready, so I started brushing up on system design, python/leetcode stuff, and other stuff.

It's been interesting to use claude to generate study guides, and even "books" related to technical topics, and send them to my kindle for reading while out for a nice long walk.

Walking at a regular pace helps slow my brain down so that I can think more effectively. My favorite hobby right now is hour-long walks with my kindle (I walk in places where there are very long uninterrupted stretches).

When I read at home, I fall asleep in 2 pages. I have to be moving around. I have a bunch of "flashcard" like stuff on my kindle related to coding, interview prep, etc. The only chance I have is doing this while walking.

I've created a number of apps for myself using just html or, simple node+sqlite running locally. Great for learning apps, personalized todo/priority tracking, etc.

This last week was one of my most challenging weeks in my ~20 year work life. I work in big tech, but am a relative latecomer to it (6 years). I'm a manager, and someone who was a very senior IC, a mentor, and work friend of mine, became my manager 6 months ago. It was a "boiling frog" situation that blew up spectacularly last week. I had to talk to my skip-level manager about it and the only viable solution was me leaving my team behind to go manage another team. I'm still bummed about it and taking some time off before starting the new role.

Do I want to be fired? No, because the job market sucks, I make good money, and I live in a HCOL area with a mortgage, a wife and a young kid. I need to sustain (and grow) this for another 10+ years minimum before having any kind of financial independence.

what are the odds that this won't fail spectacularly?

Good. it will fail in much more pedestrian manner, Spectacular is the less likely fail mode. Bust robots and one back in 10,000 trashed? Sure. But ask yourself what the error rate in badly managed bag handling is in any economy. Japan might be on the low side, people still take pride in doing their job, but accidents happen.

Instagram has something like this where it shows you "least interacted with". It seems broken to me though, as it showed me people who I do interact with.

Are there local models that are anywhere near as good at coding as opus 4.6?

People will insist otherwise, but I haven't seen anything close to sonnet 4.6 that can be run locally.

I don't think anyone can honestly say a huge frontier model is actually going to be matched by something running on 64gb locally?

I have read many comments saying Qwen3.5 various ~30B models, Gemma 4 ~30B models and now Qwen3.6 "better than sonnet".

I don't know how large sonnet and opus are but the rumor is 1T and 5T respectively.

You don't have to use the most recent bleeding edge model to succeed. A local FOSS coding agent coupled with a reasonably priced LLM could yield the optimal ROI.

Not really. Qwen 3.5 and Gemma and a couple of others are quite good though, and the quants are _very_ runnable on a good gpu.

I've had excellent luck using Claude Code to generate "mermaid diagrams" for me, and convert them to .png format headlessly using mmdc/puppeteer. Really helped me out with an engineering proposal I just finished. In past years I would have fumbled around with Visio forever and the result would have been worse.

I find Mermaid diagram rendering is quite ugly by default. I've gotten much better-looking results by asking it to just generate SVGs. As a bonus it can do animations too. e.g. see slide 3 here, which I first tried with Mermaid and then switched to SVG when I couldn't get the rendering to look good: https://talks.mk.gg/2026/atmosphereconf/

I now often have CC make technical/architecture diagrams with tikz, the results look much better than mermaid but still requires multiple iterations to fix bad arrows, bad layouts etc.

Diagrams are still far from solved. We need a good non-gameable diagrams benchmark.

I use Claude Code and Gemini and to LLM as a judge among the two to review each others result and generate a final mermiad diagram.

do the same.

I just ask Claude code for mermaid to visualize any topic I'm discussing.

In a pinch, Claude is also quite good at ASCII art in my experience!

Same here!

You can copy past the mermaid to excalidraw to visualize it.

And yet people here insist that the height of an llm is not being above to draw a pelican or count letters in a word

Well, mermaid diagrams are "just" a list of nodes and their relations. You'd expect any llm capable of generating code to be able to generate them

Writing an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle without being able to see the result and iterate based on that is incredibly difficult by comparison. I'm sure some humans could do it, but I sure can't. That's part of the beauty of it: it's very difficult to do but a toddler could judge the results

Writing an SVG of a diagram by hand would be somewhere on the middle ground. Or depending on the number of nodes might be even harder than the pelican. Layouting diagrams can get tricky very quickly. It's also one of Mermaid's biggest weaknesses

Just wait if they go public. Claude 5.4 fails the Pelican test stock sheds 20% of value pf news. Wall street wonders if the lack of front wheel means there is something seriously wrong with the stocks underlying value

Could you share your setup + workflow? How do you get it to not give shit layouts?