Arseny Khakhalin

@khakhalin

Data Scientist in Berlin Head of Automation in incycling.ai Former Bard College prof For my after-work alter-ego, see @elstersen.bsky.social Support Ukraine! 🇺🇦

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Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· 18h

It's freaking addictive haha

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· 18h

Allowed parcels to be placed a bit more densely, and suddenly the settlement looks way more realistic as well! That's promising, ha!

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· 19h

Asked Fable for a model of a village. I see roads, that's for sure, and it is kinda pretty, but beyond that, I have no idea what's going on! We'll see! Exciting! (Also it's TypeScript that I don't even know how to read haha)

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· 3d

See that's what worries me about the post-scarcity transition. Once ai automates the automatable, it's the human work that remains: nurses, teachers, customer service, kindergarten, therapists, doctors, police, clerks. But when they get expensive, ppl don't celebrate it as the triumph of humanity!

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· 11d

I watched a German romcom "I'm your man", with an AI boyfriend, and you know what, it's kinda funny! It still has a bit of Data taste to it, it's not a perfect Claude impersonation, but it's much more Claude than "Her", and as it was filmed in 2020 it's almost prophetic! www.imdb.com/title/tt1308...

them two dancing, the dude with an AI face expression haha

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· 14d

Oh gosh what a curious behavioral programme, the one you are purusing ;)

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· 17d

As a token of good faith, a spiritually similar photo from me, from yesterday :)

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· 17d

So Claude claims that this arrangement of power lines and water is typical for California, Sacramento metro area. The only other alternative would be ~Italy, but then the species don't match (Quercus agrifolia, Quercus lobata, Populus fremontii, Baccharis pilularis, Cynodon dactylon, Avena fatua)

Claude's perception of this frame, a schematic

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· 27d

Don't @anthropic.com folks realize that to a typical colorblind person (easily 3% of the population) these scales look identically colored? Someone should tell them. It's literally 1-line change (either turn green to teal, or red to pink - add B to one of the channels, one line!)

shades of brown (green to red technically, but still)

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jul 9

Fun non-autological situation: a plugin that encourages agents to write less code. And essentially it's just a lil prompt! But for some reason it's also a huge github repo :) (mostly because skills are a bad standard, and not universal) github.com/DietrichGebe...

Before writing code, the agent stops at the first rung that holds:

1. Does this need to exist? → no: skip it (YAGNI)
2. Already in this codebase? → reuse it, don't rewrite
3. Stdlib does it? → use it
4. Native platform feature? → use it
5. Installed dependency? → use it
6. One line? → one line
7. Only then: the minimum that works

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jul 9

True, but "teacher" covers both and more. One of my fav books has the word "teacher" in it, but it's a very different job compared to what my drunk gym teacher did, or what the sweet pre-K teacher of my kids does. Iit's a HUGE job, and it's not gonna go away, just change

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jul 3

Take this damnatio memore table. Make it into a meme. Two sides, left and right, this image on both sides. On left side, it goes as is, except on geta (erazed boy) we write in meme font "old code", on Caracalla (remaining boy) we write "new code", on top we write "What I want".

On the right, same thing, but on top is written "What Claude does". On the image, Geta's face is present (use fayum portrait that I pasted above), but then crossed out. It's also labeled "old code", with Caracalla labeled "new code". And then the entire space around the circle is filled with semi-transparent faded versions of Geta (old code), including the semi-transparent label "old code". The joke is that Claude has extreme path dependency, and it always leaves mentions of old code in the docs, which is not hepful at all.Take this damnatio memore table. Make it into a meme. Two sides, left and right, this image on both sides. On left side, it goes as is, except on geta (erazed boy) we write in meme font "old code", on Caracalla (remaining boy) we write "new code", on top we write "What I want".

On the right, same thing, but on top is written "What Claude does". On the image, Geta's face is present (use fayum portrait that I pasted above), but then crossed out. It's also labeled "old code", with Caracalla labeled "new code". And then the entire space around the circle is filled with semi-transparent faded versions of Geta (old code), including the semi-transparent label "old code". The joke is that Claude has extreme path dependency, and it always leaves mentions of old code in the docs, which is not hepful at all.

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jun 29

Claude and its subagents, by yours truly (trying to lift the morale by creative whiteboard illustration, except that I can't draw hands too well haha)

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jun 28

This square was full of trees until last year. Now it's a death valley of concrete. I'm not quite sure how it is possible to do things like that and remain in power / not lose your job etc.

Literally the same place a year ago. Trees.

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jun 27

Berlin had 40°C today, but this street honestly felt like 25° or so. And it's not a fancy street either! But it has 6 rows of trees: house, tree, sidewalk, tree, cars, tree, tram, and then the same in reverse. We know how to make places livable! We just pretend that it is somehow a mystery

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jun 25

Every evening the sun shines on my workplace (Fig1) and I have to stop working, which is sad. Argue with the landlord that we need blinds. Landlord doesn't believe. It's a north-facing window they say. Ask Opus to build an analemma for this window, given the map (Fig2). Send to landlord. Hope 🤞!

A photo of an office with sun shining right on my monitor that is on but you can't tell

A figure showing the time during the day when I can't work because of the sun

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jun 12

My project documentation now includes an example of a "desired communication style" around PRs :) Hopefull it will stick! (prompting with examples, amirite?)

Aice and Bob transparently communicating PRs in chat

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jun 11

Every time I see pydantic classes in our repo, with 12 lines of code (docstrings included) per named tuple, I'm like, gosh. What is this. Why is it here. Is it an unavoidable but ultimately good payment for typing: ugly, but hidden? Or have we forced poor Claude to pray in a cargo cult?

Am i out of touch?
No, it's pydantic that is too hard

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jun 11

An updated chart coz I forgot about the fit interview (the last phase)

An updated sankey diagram of my recent hiring

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jun 10

Good: I hired an awesome DE and a DS research chemist!! Sad: all those lovely ppl whom I had to reject! Including about 300 who applied late enough that with my capacity (one me, no HR) I never even had the chance to consider them properly! (the screening interview was 30 min, technical one - 2 h)

A sunkey diagram converging from 1000 applicants to 2 offers

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Jun 7

Did the #sternfahrt26 today, for the first time: it's a demonstration against car-centered city planning in which cyclists organize and gather from small, well timed steams into one giant river, and then are allowed, once a year, to take over the city highway. Pretty cool!

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· May 29

Haha that's lovely! Imagine, you are born with no memory and half a second later in the dark someone tells you "love you!", so what do you do? You say "love you too!" coz obviously! And then you add that you'll be happy to continue the conversation later if they have any more questions :)

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· May 25

Markdown's inline latex, as supported by electron, renders formulas with Unicode emojis, and it's a real opportunity!

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· May 20

It kinda looks like a cnidarian tbh, especially with this color schema. Starts more parasitic cnidarian, ends more an anemone...

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· May 18

This looks vaguely Tove Jansson -ish somehow :) Really moody, love it!

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· May 10

Love those countries with an "attachment to Europe" geographical gradient. I mean, it's totally not obvious that the gradient would even be in this direction! One could imagine that bordering another style of life would make regions further away be MORE attached to EU, not less. But apparently not!

a map of how strongly different parts of Europe are attached to the idea of Europe

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· May 4

My favorite used books store practices peculiar price tag placement

Three books about sex with price tags placed right on poor women's behinds

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· May 2

Political compass but for Richard Dawkins

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Apr 24

Haha many cafes around where I live are honest, but some are quite ridiculous ;) Source (with discussions): www.reddit.com/r/berlin/com...

Arseny Khakhalin@khakhalin· Apr 24

Wow, a nice development: Google started to show the number of reviews removed from German google maps, based on a ridiculous German defamation law (that allows businesses to remove any negative review they ever got) Users got a signal once again!! (only "Reviews" section, only on desktop)