Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz

All-around nerd. Programmer. Sr Staff Dev at EverAI. Ex-Shopify. Founder of @rebased and @artragepl. Books, whisky, crossfit, motorcycling. he/him.

[Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz @_tomash]

@WspanialyFD @d_foubert

[Daniel Foubert 🇵🇱🇱🇹 @d_foubert]

There is a curious habit in the Polish 🇵🇱 language that foreigners often find difficult to understand: the almost compulsive use of diminutives.

A diminutive is a modified form of a word, usually created by adding a suffix, that makes something sound smaller, cuter, more familiar, or more affectionate. In English, it's done by turning dog into doggie, cat into kitty, or mom into mommy. But imagine a language in which practically anything — your coffee, your dinner, your money, your house, your bed, or even your problems — can be transformed into something endearing. Welcome to Poland.

In Polish, butter is masło, but it can become masełko. Coffee is kawa, but a pleasant cup becomes kawka. Tea is herbata, but a comforting one is herbatka. Bread is chleb, but it can become chlebek. A duvet is kołdra, but beneath the right circumstances, it becomes kołderka. The objects have not necessarily changed in size. The butter has not shrunk, the coffee is not served in a doll's cup, and the duvet still covers the same bed. What has changed is the speaker's emotional relationship with these objects. The Pole does not merely consume butter. He establishes an affectionate relationship with it.

And this is particularly remarkable considering that the Poles are a nation of warriors. They have fought the Germans, the Russians, the Swedes, the Turks, and occasionally one another. Their national mythology is populated by cavalrymen, insurgents, martyrs, and men who would rather die than surrender. Yet, after a long day of defending Western civilisation, the Polish warrior returns home, takes off his boots, puts on his kapciuszki (little slippers), asks his wife for some zupka (little soup), enjoys a little masełko (butter) on his chlebek (little bread), and finally disappears beneath his beloved kołderka (little comforter).

Imagine a fifty-year-old Polish man, weighing a hundred kilograms, built like a wardrobe, with the face of someone who has personally survived three Russian invasions. He enters a restaurant and asks for a little kawka. He might then inquire about a ciasteczko (little cake), before calling his wife to tell her that he will soon be back in his domek, his dear little house. There is nothing particularly childish about the man. He may be a colonel, a construction worker, or a retired boxer. He simply inhabits a language in which tenderness is not incompatible with masculinity.

And this is where Polish diminutives reveal something fascinating about the national character. Polish culture possesses a strong martial tradition, but also an exceptionally rich domestic vocabulary of affection. The public world celebrates sacrifice, endurance, and heroism. The private world celebrates warmth, nourishment, family, and familiarity. Between the battlefield and the kitchen lies an enormous emotional distance, and the Polish language crosses it effortlessly.

One might even detect here a distinctly feminine, or more precisely maternal, dimension of the Polish soul. Not because tenderness belongs exclusively to women, but because Polish diminutives so often express the emotional logic of care. A mother offers her child zupka, holds his rączka (little hand), kisses his główka (little head), and puts him to sleep in his łóżeczko (little bed). These are not merely smaller versions of soup, hands, heads, and beds. They belong to a world in which ordinary things become objects of affection, attention, and protection. And something of this vocabulary survives into adulthood, long after the child has grown a moustache, acquired a mortgage, and developed strong opinions about Russia.

The importance of women in Polish family life provides an interesting cultural context for this linguistic habit. The figure of the Polish mother, the Matka Polka, occupies a remarkable position in the country's collective imagination. Historically, she has been represented not merely as a caregiver but as the guardian of the family, the educator of future patriots, and the custodian of national continuity during periods when the Polish state itself had disappeared. It would be excessive to attribute Polish diminutives directly to this tradition, but the emotional correspondence is striking. Behind the Polish cult of military heroism stands another ideal: that of the home, the mother, the family, and the intimate world that all those heroic sacrifices are supposedly intended to defend.

Of course, Polish diminutives are not always expressions of affection. They can also convey politeness, irony, condescension, or commercial calculation. A waiter offering kawka may be expressing genuine warmth, or merely hoping for a larger tip. A shopkeeper asking for pieniążki — an affectionate diminutive of pieniądze, meaning money — still expects the full amount. And when someone tells you that there is a little problemik, the situation may be considerably more serious than the word.

Image: Jacek Malczewski, Self-Portrait in Armour (Autoportret w zbroi), 1914. Oil on cardboard, 54 × 65 cm.

[Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz @_tomash]

hugops to folks at revolut impacted by google europe-west2 being down for over 7 hours now

[Revolut @Revolut]

We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe. We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.

[Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz @_tomash]

Behold, he rabbit hole of being weird enough to try to run 1) large models 2) on AMD 3) not GPU but NPU 4) that's from a basically abandoned XDNA1 line already.

https://t.co/zIJ8hvVBu6

At least I got the XDNA DKMS driver to build and run on kernel 7.2: https://t.co/Idqefxrp6Y

[Daniel Bernal @afterxleep]

We’re live in a bubble. Everyone we follow builds stuff, so we start believing everyone wants to. They don’t.

Most people dont give a crap about building software. In fact, most people hates computers.

They just want the dishwasher to work and the app to open. Nobody’s spending their weekend chatting with Claude on their phone. They’re living their lives, and they want tech to stop getting in the way.

[Klaas @forgebitz]

"ai coding is slop"

- developer who used to copy everything from stack overflow and random examples

[lauren @poteto]

something that keeps bothering me is how some people see slop as something that is happening to them, like they're some kind of helpless bystander powerless to do anything about it

excuse me but you are a software engineer, you literally learned how to make sand think and make computers do your bidding?! and now you can't do anything about it? please

the 2 things you should know to cut through all the noise:

1. you need to give your agent a way to verify its own work (i just posted about this so won't rehash)
2. your codebase is memory

the 2nd is not new either, we have always had lint rules, compilers with good diagnostics and strong type systems, LSPs, etc to help us write better code. there is no difference when agents write the code instead, you just need more of them, and stronger ones.

forget rules and skills. you can add those later.

yes, your codebase is a form of memory to agents! agents love extending what already exists. so every nit and every annoyance you've ever seen, every mistake and bad pattern you observe from agents, needs to turn into a constraint, or the agents will just keep repeating those same mistakes like a virus in your code. then you keep observing and repeating this process until your codebase is locked down enough that even agents with little context can one shot a high quality PR.

an even better direction is to refactor/rewrite your code such that agent anti-patterns become categorically impossible. use type systems to your advantage, use libraries/frameworks that reduce the architectural search space, or heck, create your own framework like we did for grok bot and design high quality primitives and well thought out APIs

[Captain Insight @CaptainInsightX]

bro went from code review to damage control 😭

[lauren @poteto]

i love writing. i never let agents write for me. whether it's docs, or tweets, or shitposts, or even prompts (okay maybe that one's harder as agents manage other agents)

there's a simple reason for that: i still strongly believe that writing is thinking. it's a skill i hope to never give up. it's also important to me that whatever i say is always authentic, mistakes and all. my favorite posts are the ones that i just full send without any editing

i suspect it also helps with prompting. being able to clearly express what i want, and knowing the vocabulary i need to be able to direct my agents does seem to make for more effective usage of agents. in the same way that engineers have an advantage when we prompt agents to write code, because we are intimately familiar with the words that make up the discipline

knowing the right word incantations to get an agent to produce a desired goal almost feels like spellcasting. as models get more capable, and that input box looks more and more like a magic box that can output anything, words become the interface between you and the genie

there may come a time when we give up the keyboard in exchange for brain-computer interfaces. but until then, i'm writing every word.

[Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz @_tomash]

@MateuszBrat nie ma żadnego końca programowania

[Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz @_tomash]

@GergelyOrosz having to use gemini for this is probably the hardest part

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Saying software is dead because everyone can create it with agents is like saying movies are dead because billions of ppl have a high res video camera in their pockets

Movies doing better than ever+more ppl make a living from videos, movies, TV than ever

(Analogy from @simonw)

[Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz @_tomash]

@SamVale29 yeah, "code sculptor" has nice artisanal feel to it, while not sounding like an insult nor elevation. just someone doing things the old, manual way for reasons (TM).

[Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz @_tomash]

all right, that's enough for today

[Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz @_tomash]

how about ruby compiled to native binary and running on a microcontroller natively, without any interpreters? or what my agent did throughout the day, as i was prompting it in between playing minecraft with daughter.

[Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz @_tomash]

@andrzejkrzywda this is the way. prototype is the best estimation basis.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Like it or not, modern sw engineering is no longer done without LLMs (AI) and will no longer be done without.

Whoever doesn’t want to use AI, no problem: but you won’t be hired at 99.9% of startups+Big Tech+ambitious companies, even today

It’s as part of sw dev as the keyboard

[Mistral AI @MistralAI]

Meet Mistral Large 4, aka Le Chonk.

• 1T parameters, natively multimodal. 49B active.
It is the best open weights model from US or Europe on aggregated benchmarks.
• State-of-the-art on critical workloads, including cyber defense, manufacturing and finance and it surpasses closed frontier models on visual grounding.
• Forged in Europe end-to-end and is deployable from Europe via our own Mistral Cloud infrastructure.
• Available to all via API today. Working with cybersecurity partners privately.

Open weights release end of October.

[Tomasz always taking it a step further Stachewicz @_tomash]

programming as profession was never about generating tokens. but because generating tokens took so much time and was an essential skill in the profession, a lot of people have confused the two.