Martin Beták 🇺🇦

Distributed systems hacker, in love with functional programming. Enemy of the state.

[Jesús Enrique Rosas @Knesix]

Let's talk about Cuba. Take away the Soviet checks, the Venezuelan oil, the Chinese rescue boats and the Iranian friends. What is actually left?

An island with nothing to sell and nobody left to pay the bill. No oil worth seizing. No industry worth taking. No strategic mineral buried under the sugarcane.

By every material measure that a normal country is judged on, Cuba leads nowhere. It is a sixty year money sink that bled every patron foolish enough to adopt it, and then outlived them.

So you might be asking, why has Trump set his sights on it? Why is Marco Rubio counting the minutes like a man watching the last grains run out of an hourglass he flipped over himself?

Why are they even bothering?

Not for what's under the ground, for sure. There's nothing under the ground. They're going after what's above it.

Because Cuba was never a country to the people who ran it. It was a billboard. The single surviving advertisement that filthy communism could plant itself ninety miles from the most powerful nation on earth and refuse to die.

That was the whole product. Not sugar. Not rum. Not nickel. The export *was* the communism.

Cuba sold the world a story that communism could outlast America, and for sixty years it kept that story on life support so every campus radical and every jungle guerrilla and every tin pot revolutionary had a poster to point at, while the island was crumbling under the weight of the Castro regime.

That propaganda abomination is about to die and I, for one, couldn't be happier about it.

You cannot sell the dream of the worker's paradise while the workers cook on firewood in the street and the hospitals run on flashlights.

What is collapsing on Cuba, besides the buildings and the barely functioning cars, is the last functioning piece of evidence that the filthiest idea of the last century ever worked anywhere.

Cuba's only real export was communism, and it's about to be permanently discontinued.

And the world will be lighter for it.

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

Kurzgesagt on Demography 💯
https://t.co/I8ZEuGsaJg

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

@KirillJuran skvelý jak vždy! 💯

[Kirill Juran @KirillJuran]

Obvykle radím, jak daně optimalizovat.
Dnes přejdu na druhý břeh a poradím státu, jak vybrat na daních víc.💸

Nové video má ambiciózní cíl. Rád bych, aby s ním souhlasili zároveň jak socialisti, tak i ankap boys 😉

Příjemný poslech 👇
https://t.co/iqczGI8VFm

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

@HonzaPoboril Ako spanielsky bernak boura vsechny rekordy

[Tomas Latal @TomasLatal]

Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Tell random people at the bus stop.

⛺🌳 Elm Camp 2026 tickets are on sale!

This time we'll be seeing each other on June 15–18 2026 in Olomouc, Czech Republic 🇨🇿

Visit https://t.co/6WbY53eHnh for more information. See you in summer!

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

@hispanicnomad Safety concerns

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.

Coding workflow. Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. i.e. I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly telling the LLM what code to write... in words. It hurts the ego a bit but the power to operate over software in large "code actions" is just too net useful, especially once you adapt to it, configure it, learn to use it, and wrap your head around what it can and cannot do. This is easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks. I'd expect something similar to be happening to well into double digit percent of engineers out there, while the awareness of it in the general population feels well into low single digit percent.

IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side. The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do. The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don't manage their confusion, they don't seek clarifications, they don't surface inconsistencies, they don't present tradeoffs, they don't push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic. Things get better in plan mode, but there is some need for a lightweight inline plan mode. They also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don't clean up dead code after themselves, etc. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?" and they will be like "of course!" and immediately cut it down to 100 lines. They still sometimes change/remove comments and code they don't like or don't sufficiently understand as side effects, even if it is orthogonal to the task at hand. All of this happens despite a few simple attempts to fix it via instructions in CLAUDE . md. Despite all these issues, it is still a net huge improvement and it's very difficult to imagine going back to manual coding. TLDR everyone has their developing flow, my current is a small few CC sessions on the left in ghostty windows/tabs and an IDE on the right for viewing the code + manual edits.

Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work and that with LLMs in hand it has been dramatically increased.

Speedups. It's not clear how to measure the "speedup" of LLM assistance. Certainly I feel net way faster at what I was going to do, but the main effect is that I do a lot more than I was going to do because 1) I can code up all kinds of things that just wouldn't have been worth coding before and 2) I can approach code that I couldn't work on before because of knowledge/skill issue. So certainly it's speedup, but it's possibly a lot more an expansion.

Leverage. LLMs are exceptionally good at looping until they meet specific goals and this is where most of the "feel the AGI" magic is to be found. Don't tell it what to do, give it success criteria and watch it go. Get it to write tests first and then pass them. Put it in the loop with a browser MCP. Write the naive algorithm that is very likely correct first, then ask it to optimize it while preserving correctness. Change your approach from imperative to declarative to get the agents looping longer and gain leverage.

Fun. I didn't anticipate that with agents programming feels *more* fun because a lot of the fill in the blanks drudgery is removed and what remains is the creative part. I also feel less blocked/stuck (which is not fun) and I experience a lot more courage because there's almost always a way to work hand in hand with it to make some positive progress. I have seen the opposite sentiment from other people too; LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building.

Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually. Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain. Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.

Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We're also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements.

Questions. A few of the questions on my mind:
- What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows *a lot*.
- Armed with LLMs, do generalists increasingly outperform specialists? LLMs are a lot better at fill in the blanks (the micro) than grand strategy (the macro).
- What does LLM coding feel like in the future? Is it like playing StarCraft? Playing Factorio? Playing music?
- How much of society is bottlenecked by digital knowledge work?

TLDR Where does this leave us? LLM agent capabilities (Claude & Codex especially) have crossed some kind of threshold of coherence around December 2025 and caused a phase shift in software engineering and closely related. The intelligence part suddenly feels quite a bit ahead of all the rest of it - integrations (tools, knowledge), the necessity for new organizational workflows, processes, diffusion more generally. 2026 is going to be a high energy year as the industry metabolizes the new capability.

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

If you've been successfully resisting being AI-pilled so far, read this.

[Eyad @eyad_khrais]

https://t.co/i5L6UIPgH8

[Ondřej Šimíček 🇨🇿➕ 🇮🇱🇺🇦 @Sima_Ondra]

Zločinecké činnost bank. Psal jsem o tom před lety.

Tohle je reálně mnohem horší zrada západu a pomoc masovým vrahům, než nějaké blábolení komerčního kolaboranta Okamura.

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

Dúfam že si bankoví byrokrati spomenú na to ako buzerovali naších zbrojárov keď im bude ruský tank demolovať barák.

[DonVito007 @Don_Vito007]

„Kolegovi, co má obchod a prodával zbraně na Ukrajinu, uzavřela @CSOB_CZ běžné účty všech členů rodiny,“ - co taky cekat od banky jejiz matka je ze zeme otevrene kolaborujici s Russkem🤷‍♂️ jo a @Ceskasporitelna a @Fio_banka jsou taky pekna sebranka🤮
https://t.co/fIS7jPPIgI

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

@itsolelehmann If you don't mind the "Eastern European esthetics" then Sofia, Bulgaria could be worth checking out.

[DHH @dhh]

Europe is full of incredible people, has an incredible history, and is more than capable of adopting better ideas for how to run a competitive economy and retain a cohesive culture. It is in no way doomed to stay in the current hole forever. But it has to stop digging.

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

@rtfeldman @YouTube please implement this finally!

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

https://t.co/kHCH1ELa8j

[Donald Tusk @donaldtusk]

The problem with North Stream 2 is not that it was blown up. The problem is that it was built.

[Miroslav Kalousek🇨🇿🇺🇦🇮🇱 @kalousekm]

Politici @SpoluKoalice se panicky báli nezbytných reforem, aby jim to neprohrálo volby. Tak do reforem nešli…a prohráli volby. Škoda těch čtyř let. Příště, až bude naléhavost reforem ještě větší, bude to mnohem těžší.

[Honza Pobořil @HonzaPoboril]

Tohle je boží.

https://t.co/WcEBkK1FFA

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

@bratricek Za živý battle Bratricek vs Ruscak bych zaplatil top satoshi!
Hmota a antihmota...

[Martin Beták 🇺🇦 @matobet]

@MichalTheDragy @AGunsberger @voluntiacz Jaké je oficiálne stanovisko @voluntiacz ohledně konfliktu Israel/Palestína?