✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: Of eyeballs for "human verification;" yes can I please get a venti oh shoot I didn't prompt it right; and age gating 🤝 Android getting locked down 🤝 anti-3D printing bills. 📰 Long-Form Content: Age Gating isn't It, Fam 🌞 Good News!: Open printers and repairable e-readers; the people are pushing back on slop factories and mandatory ID apps; the EU bans their staff from using AI-generated visuals in official comms; disentangling yourself from "Sign in…
How many times in your career as a software developer have you been handed a “requirement” that turned out to be difficult and costly to fulfil? I’ve been there many times, and I imagine you have, too. The hack I discovered a few years into my career is that one person’s “what” is almost always another person’s “how”. Software requirements very rarely describe an actual need – a user goal, for example. They’re usually a decision that someone has taken about how to address a need. When we make…
June in the UK was something of an endurance test, with temperatures regularly hitting the 30s. Also – reflections on my Amazon Kindle review a year on, and how to zero in on your most valuable work. | Read full post >>
Contrary to the belief of people, a fire alarm’s purpose is not just to let you know that there is fire. But also to let you know that it is safe to react or panic about the fire. Bystander effect experiment by Latane and Darley in 1968 states that you are more likely to be inactive or not help when you are in a group of people than when you’re alone. This also means you are more likely to help or react when you are lonely than in a group. So as to avoid embarassment or to be percieved as…
Every year on March 31st I have a sense of minor guilt, anxiety, and sheepishness. It’s World Backup Day and I don’t have good backups. The purpose of the day is to serve as a reminder to check that your backup system is functioning, that you can restore from your backups, and that all your data is included in the backup system. It’s not like I don’t have backups of my data, it’s just they’re not backup backups, you know? I could probably find a second copy of the most important stuff, or…
I was reading Marianne Bellotti’s Kill It with Fire when I found a description of COBOL that sounded strangely familiar: COBOL was a language built for people who did not want to understand how the computer worked; they just wanted to get the job done. Today, we would probably call those people vibe coders. That comparison might sound insulting to COBOL programmers, vibe coders, or both. I don’t mean it that way.
I just finished a 24-hour hackathon. Here is the breakdown: prompting 20 hours video editing 4 hours coding 0 hours We got stuck twice. The first time, someone ran out of Claude Code quota. They tried another coding agent, but it was not smart enough to pick up where Claude had stopped. The second time, someone's agent refused a git push. They couldn't merge the code in CLI. This is at MIT, where a different generation of hackers were born. Hackathons peak sometime after midnight. The coffee…
As much as I like to go thrifting from time to time, often my local thrift shops know nothing about technology and either don’t have technology for sale at all, or they end up mispricing them so badly that I couldn’t really swallow paying the price for it. As I’ve recently been diving for optical discs in Japan, I decided to expand my thrifting net to buy random products from Japan, especially as I would have to pay the commission/shipping overhead anyway, so I might as well grab a few extra…
1. Skills-based: Here’s what I know how to do; what interesting things can I do with my tools? 2. End product: Here’s what I want to do; what tools would let me do that, or how can I use my tools to do that? 3. Process focused: Here’s what tools I want to use; what project would let me use (and/or learn how to use) them? (“Tools” here is also standing in for skills and media / formats.) See also: Decisions are the foundation of art Which projects are worth doing? How to evaluate creative ideas…
A follow-up to One Million Worlds. One million characters took too long to generate so I went down an order of magnitude. The median planet population has 100,000 people, after all. Thank you to MTB and Ms. Quixotic for suggesting questions to ask the dataset. The GeneratorGenerating Classic Traveller characters is a lot trickier than planets, and not just because there are more fiddly components. Whereas world generation is fully procedural, character creation involves moments of decision --…
StarringMichael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, and Andy RichterDirectorCurry BarkerOverviewBe careful who you wish for…After breaking the mysterious "One Wish Willow" to win his crush's heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price.Review Obsession Big meets Swimfan for the Gen-Z world. But in the end it’s just a guy who can’t share his feelings and instead removes all…
Founders, chief product officers (CPOs), and chief marketing officers (CMOs) spend a lot of time talking with and listening to customers. As they should.And, by and large, they do it well. But there's one common mistake that many smart, strong-willed, and vision-driven leaders make. Ironically, I think it's illustrated perfectly by a Kyle Gordon parody song, Mr. Jambo, featuring Barry Bergen, a fictional, oblivious American tourist traveling through Africa in the 1980s. [1]If you haven't seen…
OK, I've been working on this one for a while. Not a while like "since my last post", more like "since the pandemic." Check this beauty out: If you want to play around and generate your own, jump right in! If you learn about what it is and how I made it, read on. What am I looking at?You're looking at a piece of algorithmic science art called a sunplot. It illustrates the sun's position in the sky at any moment of the year. This sample, which visualizes boston's views of the sun, is 365×288.…
Zoey Forbes, a U.K.-based attorney, in the Dial: One hundred and forty years on from the Berne Convention, the basic principles of copyright remain the same, but GenAI poses a threat to authors different from anything that has existed before. Its novel technology is not only destabilizing what it means to reproduce works, but what it means to produce them. This is a terrific and well-rounded exploration of copyright law and generative artificial intelligence from a non-U.S. perspective. That…
Intro At serving time, a model only ever sees a feature’s most recent value. So when training rows are reconstructed from history, each row has to carry the feature value that existed at that moment, not the value the feature holds today. A join that respects this is point-in-time correct: for a label at time T, every feature resolves to the latest value known at or before T. A join that ignores it just grabs whatever’s newest in the table, which for a label sitting in the past is a value from…
I'm working out my own, custom, RSS bot thing that I should be able to auto-post from here and ideally instagram and other corporate social media. :wq
The useful part of a home automation dashboard is that it hides the plumbing. The screenshot above shows weather, heating, doors, windows, temperature, humidity, air quality, lights, and energy consumption. A light is a light, a thermostat is a thermostat, and a water sensor is either dry or it is about to make my evening substantially worse. Behind that dashboard, however, are three quite different device ecosystems. Most of the apartment uses Zigbee devices from Philips, IKEA, Xiaomi, Sonoff,…
AI-generated image of a man talking to a robot over tea Lately, I’ve been having a lot of very interesting conversations with LLMs about a wide range of topics. However, most of them have pertained to technical topics and I thought it would be interesting to post some of them on my blog. I figure there are probably plenty of other people who might be interested in the questions I ask and what AI has to say about it, so why not post them? If nothing else, then at least it’s a way of preserving…
A week ago, a philosopher named Amit Hagar put out a preprint entitled The NISQ Trap: Eight Years of Demonstrations the Hardware was Built to Lose. Here’s the abstract: With a single clear exception, every NISQ-era flagship demonstration of ‘quantum advantage’ has, within eighteen months of its announcement, been classically reproduced, shown to rest on classically tractable structure, or closed by a simulability theorem. Six theoretical results from 2024 through April 2026 explain the pattern:…
This has already been making the rounds but allow me to add my favorite part that I actually lol’d at… It turns out that chatbots are good at chat. It claimed to have implemented authentication. Actually, it had basically written: function authenticate(user: string): bool { return true; } I am fairly sure this is not compliant with the WebAuthN/Passkeys specification, though I haven’t read it to be sure.
Previously: Ordinal numbers and basic set theory We're going to get to in a long and roundabout way. First I want to talk about the game of Nim. Nim Nim is a very simple game for two players. There are some piles of beans, which are called nim-heaps. When it's your turn, you are allowed to remove as many beans as you like, as long as they are all in the same pile. Whoever takes the last bean wins. Nim with only one pile of beans is trivial, because whoever goes first can simply take all the…
Hello, loves! I’ve decided to commit this and refactor. Can always reset if I have to. General rule: try always to move forward. We’ll begin with some tests for what we have. What do we have? I don’t know, that was hours ago. Here’s just the DungeonView init, evidence that all is not well: class DungeonView(arcade.View): def __init__(self, dungeon, testing=False): if not testing: super().__init__() self.dungeon = dungeon self.pub_sub = dungeon.pub_sub self.subscribe(dungeon, self.pub_sub)…
There are two wolves inside of me, lol. Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”. On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something “good”. Making something function often results in a reaction of “Wow, that’s so cool! It didn’t work before and now it does! And I could’ve never made that, nice job!” And sometimes it’s like, good job, you made a bear ride a…
Subscription-based coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex famously have 5-hour and weekly quotas on their LLM usage. Both of these are understandable: 5-hour quotas help stagger usage so the servers don’t get overloaded, and weekly resets prevent users from dumping an entire month’s worth of usage into a single day which a) also prevents overload and b) stops the user from just unsubscribing after they do so. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have played around with quota limits, from doubling…
Holo is an experimental native macOS utility that turns the desk around a MacBook into four assignable tap zones by listening through the selected microphone and extracting acoustic features.
Synology just released DSM 7.4 highlighting their new “storage efficiency” feature. Note that you can’t actually use this feature unless you’re dumb and/or rich enough to fill your NAS with only Synology’s own overpriced drives. It’s unavailable to the other 99.9% of us paying users. I’m so over their antics.
A few years ago I published vanity-keygen, a small Go program that brute-forces ed25519 SSH keypairs until the public key matches a regex. It did about 250k keys per second on my 32-core machine: a minute for love$, days for [pP][cC][aA][rR][rR][iI1][eE][rR].This week an LLM rewrote it from scratch in Rust, with all of the cryptography hand-rolled in a single OpenCL kernel. I provided direction, benchmarks on my hardware, and an RTX 4090; every line of code, including the test suite, is its.…
Hot on the heels of my ESP32 display detour–which went from Cydintosh to Flying Toasters on an ESP32-S3 and then, inevitably, R-Type–I ended up with an M5Stack Tab5 on my desk as a very indirect consequence of chasing e-paper displays. I have followed M5Stack for years and have a couple of their ESP cameras running, plus one of the original stackable Core modules (complete with battery) somewhere in a drawer, but I had not written code for any of them in quite a while (the cameras are running…
I just like saying that. Clearly you should use whatever you want. “What is the SLAP stack?” you ask. Well, I just invented the name on Mastodon a few days ago. I don’t even want to do a web search to see if it’s already taken because that will take the wind out of my sails and I won’t finish this blog post. But first, there’s something you should know about me. I have this aphorism I live by: everyone is weird and everything is complicated. The former is mostly meant as a compliment. But…
The AP explores one important facet of why US soccer, even with an eager and enormous population at its disposal, struggles to produce world beaters.→ AP News
