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> At that point, I reached for an age-old tool that has gotten more useful in the modern age: binary search. That is, you explain the symptom to your coding agent. Then you have it repeatedly remove stuff from your code that might be causing the problem

Can someone give me some high level pointers on how to setup this scaffolding?


When I read the first sentence, I expected the author to use `git bisect`.

However, what the author seems to have done is used a prompt with claude that probably looked something like this:

"Some piece of code is causing the page to load very slowly. To debug this, I'd like to use binary search, where we keep commenting/uncommenting 50% of the remaining code, and then I manually check if the page is still very slow. Let's start now; Comment out a component (or parts of a component) that you estimate is 50% of the page, and I will tell you if the page is still slow."


> When I read the first sentence, I expected the author to use `git bisect`.

Exactly the same. I'd first (or have Claude or whatever) use git bisect. Then I'd focus on the commit that is problematic. And why not have the "binary" detective work TFA talks about.

That said... 1600 ms per heart emoji. Unicode strikes again, combined with a fallback to SVG because that font couldn't color a heart emoji. What a rube-goldberg of a kitchen sink world we live in. It's just sad really.

Honestly beam me back up to the late 80s or early 90s: give me a car with pop up headlights, a Hi-Fi stereo with a CD player, an arcade cab, a Commodore Amiga and my ASCII charset. Life was better.

P.S: nice TFA btw, I enjoyed it


`git bisect` is interesting option. I haven't heard about it before. Thanks for info. Still learning something ;)

I'm old school. I used to do "manual bisection" on git history by just `git checkout <commit_id>` until I find first introducing bug commit.

Then another "bisection" on commit changes until minimal change found.

Deterministic bugs are quite "fine". For me personally worst are randomly occurring bugs in specific conditions for eg. some race conditions.


How well agents can do this is mostly proportional to how well they can understand and navigate your codebase broadly.

There are various contributing factors to this, but they include clear docs, notes and refactors that clear up parts the agent commonly gets confused by, choosing boring technology (your dependencies are well understood) and access to command-line tools that let it lint + typecheck + test the code. A lot of the scaffolding and wiring necessary are built into Cursor and Claude Code themselves now. Hope that helps!


I do this all the time in a dumb but effective way. Add logging statements to code paths that drop timing info. Another dumb but effective way, instead of using a step through debugger, is drop "here, value is {val}". Telling claude to do this is trivial, it's quick, and it can read its own output and self-solve the problem all with just the code itself.

IMHO git bisect is slower, especially depending on the reload/hot-reload/compile/whatever process your actual app is using.


Not sure what you mean, just have a coding agent (e.g. Claude Code) and talk to it.


"git bisect" usually does the trick.


Alex Honnold: No free soloist ever died doing anything cutting edge. Nobody died doing something really hard. A handful people died doing things that are easy. Most soloist died in different types of accidents...base jumping, rogue wave.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9WWUNDb_S0o


Factually inaccurate, the Wikipedia page for free solo climbing has an entire section on prominent free solo climber deaths.

In my view this guy is pretty irresponsible especially for promoting a “sport” that is unnecessarily dangerous in the most preventable way imaginable.

A bunch of kids and stupid adults watched that live stream and a non-zero amount of them now think they can try the same thing without anywhere near as much training and skill.


The keyword is ’cutting edge’.


Not gonna lie, this kind of extreme sport doesn't attract the brightest people.

I have a fascination with this kind of stuff. Taking risks is sometimes necessary and worthwhile in life, but seriously, risking your life just so you can say you realized a specific feat is really dumb. Especially when we have the technology to do the thing just fine with no problem whatsoever. I think those people live too comfortable lives and try to feel something. They could apply those skills to some meaningful work, but of course it doesn't get the same recognition.


In his El Capitan climb (Free Solo), Alex was worried about cameras or presence of friends watching interfering with the climb. As oppose to that, this climb must have felt very different!


I'm wondering if this is because El Capitan is a much more technically difficult climb and thus posing much more risk than Taipei 101.


>Climbing star, 23, dies after falling from Yosemite's El Capitan [this past Wednesday]

>Balin Miller, 23, was live-streamed on TikTok ascending and subsequently falling from the monolith on Wednesday.

>Details of what caused the incident are not clear, but Miller's brother Dylan told AFP he was lead rope soloing - a technique that enables climbing alone while still protected by a rope - on a 2,400ft (730m) route named Sea of Dreams.

>He had finished the climb and was hauling up equipment when he likely rappelled off the end of his rope, Dylan said.

>Tom Evans, a Yosemite-based photographer who witnessed Miller fall, told Climbing magazine he called 911 after Miller tried to free his bag, which was stuck on a rock.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz08jp4xv2jo

https://archive.ph/vjETS


Not sure what your point is here. He died rappelling when his bag got stuck. He didn't die free soloing. And it's unrelated to Yosemite. It was an avoidable accident and very sad. Climbers tend to die from Rappelling more than anything else. And, it's completely incomparable to Honnold's recent climb.


It was a response to this comment:

>I'm wondering if this is because El Capitan is a much more technically difficult climb and thus posing much more risk than Taipei 101.


Yes, Freerider (the route he climbed on El Capitan) is much harder than the climbing on Taipei 101. The style of climbing is also very important, some of the moves on Freerider are very insecure and hard to climb in a reliable way, whereas on Taipei the difficulty largely comes from doing the same moves over and over again which means your body gets tired in a specific ways.

The climbing on Taipei was way more chill for him than the climbing on Freerider.


I was surprised to see him take breaks and wave at the crowd. Very different vibe.


He was able to practice El Capitan over and over, though. Was he able to in Tapei?


I'd assume - unlike El Capitan - the pitches here are all pretty much identical, so by the time he got to the third or fourth floor he had it figured out


If you watch the climb you'll see that the skyscraper definitely wasn't quite so straightforward - there were some interesting challenges along the way.

Of course, no question El Cap was technically far more challenging.


Yes, this past week he was doing a lot of practice with a rope. This building isn't new to him. He's also climbed it in previous years I believe.


Yes. You can see him here climb with ropes: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/24/world/video/alex-honnold-...

It would be insanely reckless to free solo without practicing first.


In the rain! Here's another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljtXTBenYlc


He must have. My impression from the documentary is that he practice the climb route many times with safety gear first.


I wondered the same because there was a helicopter the entire time. Also the very tip top of Taipei 101 appeared to have many cameras mounted on it, at least through binoculars.


This is much easier climbing and you can rest on balconies every few floors. It has nothing to do with slippery granite slab or v7 boulder problems.


Curious, why not use docker?


I like LXC containers and how they integrate with PBS.



> the simplicity and "just works" of writing Assembly code was a great boost to my happiness.

If the author reading: I am curious to see an worked out example where writing the assembly code was necessary.


Do you have to rewrite GLSL shaders when migrating a game from desktop to browser?


Browsers only support OpenGL ES so only if your shaders use any OpenGL specific features you have to rewrite. Otherwise, it's just plain simple to export to both desktop and browser targets.


Thanks. What is your take on building multiplayer game with TeaVM + libgdx? (Assuming the server is hosted off-browser)


Is there similar attempt for MySQL?


> 11:53 – OBR staff and the web developer attempted to pull the PDF from the website,and also to pull the entire website (e.g. via password protection), but struggled to doso initially due to the website being overloaded with traffic

This one is painful to read. What was their option here? Calling WP Engine to take it offline?


@reverserdev This is neat. What is the expected use case you have in mind? At first glance - I thought it was guided tour through the kernel code with question for knowledge check.


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