I had previously posted about drawing outlines around fonts. The goal is to make labels easier to read in situations like these:
llm-openrouter 0.3 New release of my llm-openrouter plugin, which allows LLM to access models hosted by OpenRouter. Quoting the release notes: Enable image attachments for models that support images. Thanks, Adam Montgomery. #12 Provide async model access. #15 Fix documentation to list correct LLM_OPENROUTER_KEY environment variable. #10 ...
In no specific order: By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-12-09.
So much of what I take for granted today would have seemed like science fiction to me as a child of the 70s.
I spent a few hours mulling over this website and futzing with it. I tweaked some CSS to simplify things. And I decided to add more tags to some of my posts. The personal category was a bunch of odd stuff. Those posts also have tags like travel, politics, and health. I'm having second thoughts about calling this section of the site a microBlog...
After writing the title for this post, I can’t get that Who song out of my head. Back to Serif… again? Hey look, another inadvertent Music Monday, courtesy of a train of thought that made no sense. What was I talking about again? I posted this almost a month ago to the day: The serif fonts have been retired. It was fun, but they weren’t as...
Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group I just learned about this delightful piece of internet culture via Leven Parker on TikTok. Occlupanids are the small plastic square clips used to seal plastic bags containing bread. For thirty years (since 1994) John Daniel has maintained this website that catalogs them and serves as the basis of a wide ranging...
Sharing one of my favorite music projects: a gorgeous, free - as in freedom - recording of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations
Jimmy MillerThis is part of an Advent Series. Beyond Being There: Making Remote Work Better (pdf) I absolutely love remote work. I've been doing it since before the pandemic. I am more productive doing it, I don't have to deal with all of the annoyances and politics that automatically occur when you get a bunch of people in an office. But I have...
I’ve been participating in the Fediverse through my own mastodon instance since 2017. What started as an experiment to test new things, focused on exploring decentralized and federated alternatives for communicating on top of the internet, stuck. At the end of 2024, I’m still there. The rhetoric on this network is that you should find […]
I don’t think I’ve worked at a company whose website satisfied me. It never gives me a clear explanation of what our product does. After a few years working closely with Marketing, I finally understand why. As a developer, my goal is to provide useful capabilities to people through the software I work on. To ... Read moreWhy is every startup’s...
And thus it has come to pass that holiday decorations are up, Amazon Prime logistics are completely shot (delivery dates are now past December 20) and I’ve just realized that I spent two weekends doing almost nothing whatsoever with computers–well, at least computers you type on. I did have to do some home automation maintenance (one of my first...
I have just committed a couple of changes to my php2Bluesky library. This release includes a simple change to enable the support of international characters in hashtags and a more complex (to explain) change to the options for link cards. International support This was a change to the regex used in the library to identify […]
How worried should we be, that we're wasting electrical energy for no benefit?
It was the week before pandemic lockdowns began. Like many companies, we were thinking about what a fully remote workforce might mean for us. In an attempt to get ahead of things, we scheduled a ‘Game Day’ to test our work-from-home incident response capabilities. You know, just in case we’d need to abandon the office (spoiler: we would). The...
Jimmy MillerThis is part of an Advent Series. Implementation is Semantic Interpretation (pdf) I read this paper this morning and I had the time to just finish this post before my day began. But as has been the case for these posts so far, I procrastinated on it until bedtime. Maybe tomorrow we will break that pattern. Anyway, this is another in...
I wired this blog up to Open AI’s text-to-speech API so you can listen to individual posts or subscribe to the blog as a podcast.
This post was motivated by an exercise in [1] that says Prove that for the hyperbolic functions … formulas hold similar to those in Section 2.3 with all the minuses replaced by pluses. My first thought was that this sounds like Osborn’s rule, a heuristic for translating between (circular) trig identities and hyperbolic trig identities. […] The...
By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much more. To understand my...
Not a lot to share this month; it was a particularly busy time, between a mystery (and now solved, without fanfare or closure) cough and a dearth of time to write as I started to explore easing back into full-time work. Still, some writing (and selfishly, I'm excited to end the year such that five essays is considered a "low" number for a month):...
Not a lot to share this month; it was a particularly busy time, between a mystery (and now solved, without fanfare or closure) cough and a dearth of time to write as I started to explore easing back into full-time work. Still, some writing (and selfishly, I'm excited to end the year such that five essays is considered a "low" number for a month):...
People don't quit jobs, they quit bad managers. Here's what great engineering leadership actually looks like
This article is the eighth edition of the Advent of Patterns series. In this series, running from December 1st to December 24th 2024, I will document one design or programming pattern I have noticed recently. Read more about this series. Applications that aggregate or have lists of information commonly show previews of information in an overall...
In a world buzzing with distractions, maintaining focus and productivity can feel like trying to catch a greased pig. Whether it’s the relentless ping of notifications, the lure of social media, or the temptation to procrastinate, staying on task requires a solid strategy. One technique that has stood the test of time for its simplicity and...
Writing down (and searching through) every UUID Nolen Royalty built everyuuid.com, and this write-up of how he built it is utterly delightful. First challenge: infinite scroll. Browsers do not want to render a window that is over a trillion trillion pixels high, so I needed to handle scrolling and rendering on my own. That means implementing hot...
Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? – Chico Marx (dressed as Groucho), from Duck Soup: In the ACM Queue article Above the Line, Below the Line, the late safety research Richard Cook (of How Complex Systems Fail fame) notes how that we software operators don’t interact directly with the system. Instead, … Continue reading Your lying...
Sharing a quick video I made of Tom Lehrer’s very funny song “A Christmas Carol”
Abigail—who has an awesome site, and who encourages you to have your own space as well—emailed asking what database system we used to organise stuff, as I described in my ill-advised MAC address filtering post: Clara and I maintain a personal DB which includes all sorts of data, from budgets to media collections. One of the tables tracks our...
We’re getting a delivery from a Swedish furniture manufacturer this morning, so I was doing some measurements and calculations to confirm where they’d go in the apartment. One cabinet is going to be a place to display some of our retrocomputers, and I wanted to make sure they’d fit. I was looking at the Computer History Museum to figure out...
I'm definitely not worried about good hackers [i.e. software engineers] getting replaced with LLMs. LLMs are a cute trick, even useful. I don't believe they'll generalize to AGI--I just don't believe it. Something will, but not LLMs.
Yesterday, user @saeri.xyz on Bluesky posted some screenshots of a potential upcoming Bluesky subscription plan.
Prompts.js I've been putting the new o1 model from OpenAI through its paces, in particular for code. I'm very impressed - it feels like it's giving me a similar code quality to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, at least for Python and JavaScript and Bash... but it's returning output noticeably faster. I decided to try building a library I've had in mind for a...
One of the things that happens during moments of crisis is that people look to existing institutions—whether governments, nonprofits, churches, or the like—for guidance on what to do.
A concise primer on the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.
To celebrate IndieWebCamp: San Diego 2024 I want to send you a sticker. I got these stickers printed after Nick Simson got these commissioned from a discussion we had at a past Homebrew Website Club. If you want one of these, you can email me your...
A test of how seriously your firm is taking AI: when o-1 (& the new Gemini) came out this week, were there assigned folks who immediately ran the model through internal, validated, firm-specific benchmarks to see how useful it as? Did you update any plans or goals as a result? Or do you not have people (including non-technical people) assigned to...
These last few months have been transformative in many ways. I have been, as I have outlined in a previous post, Ejecting Things from my life, as well as changing...
I recently learned about Galloping Search while building a distributed log called s3-log. It’s used to search sorted items when the upper bound is unknown. In this short post, I will share my notes and other alternatives I discovered for searching over unbounded items
There was a ‘default apps’ trend, about a year ago, which I took part in. I looked at this post earlier today, whilst looking for a different post and realised that...
Jimmy MillerThis is part of an Advent Series. Intuition in Software Development (pdf) If you haven't read Peter Naur's papers you should. If there is one thinker in the computing space I wish I could emulate, it is Peter Naur. This paper is no exception. It is about the role of intuition in software development but is ultimately an argument...
When you do more manual work, it can be slow, but more valuable than you think.
Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly consumptive hobby that in some small part defines their twenties and – God willing — their enduring adulthood. Some choose sourdough; many choose barbecue; I chose mixology. (A psychologist might suspect that this was in no small part due to being legally...
Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly consumptive hobby that in some small part defines their twenties and – God willing — their enduring adulthood. Some choose sourdough; many choose barbecue; I chose mixology. (A psychologist might suspect that this was in no small part due to being legally...
premise The parallels and invariants between artificial and natural intelligence propose unique practical and philosophical insights into both fields. assumptions Intelligence is prediction–all intelligent systems build models to anticipate future states Self-modeling is computationally necessary–systems must represent themselves to reason about...
Especially in high-level languages, inlining is most useful when it causes: Optimizing the callee’s body based on the arguments passed. Optimizing the call site based on the callee’s return value. Let’s look at some examples. Example: avoiding redundant bounds checks Suppose we have a library for decoding some format of binary files with...
Copy and paste text, images, and files using the new navigator.clipboard API
This article is the sixth edition of the Advent of Patterns series. In this series, running from December 1st to December 24th 2024, I will document one design or programming pattern I have noticed recently. Read more about this series. In Pattern: Link contexts I discussed ways in which additional information can be added to or around a link as...
The new Firebuild release contains plenty of small fixes and a few notable improvements. Experimental macOS support The most frequently asked question from people getting to know Firebuild was if it worked on their Mac and the answer sadly used to be that well, it did, but only in a Linux VM. This was far […]
This is the first post written from the balcony of our new apartment. One of the criteria Clara and I used while house hunting was whether the unit had a balcony to start with, had a nice view, was shaded, and if it avoided direct sunlight first thing in the morning. Sitting outside is important to me. I wake up faster with fresh air, and I’m...
I’ve just committed a couple of changes to my php2Bluesky library based on suggestions and/or code provided by others. These are: Clearing Some Confusion I have also received some feedback that the blog posts written when I was first investigating posting to Bluesky are confusing if you are only looking to be able to use […]
Anil Dash: “Link in Bio” Is a Slow KnifeFor a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly
NiGHTS into Dreams is one of those games I tend to think about when Christmas rolls around. It’s one of my favourites from the Saturn lineup, and it also had a free Christmas version.
Meta AI release Llama 3.3 This new Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct model from Meta AI makes some bold claims: This model delivers similar performance to Llama 3.1 405B with cost effective inference that’s feasible to run locally on common developer workstations. I have 64GB of RAM in my M2 MacBook Pro, so I'm looking forward to trying a slightly quantized...