It’s not an uncommon notion that writing tests is more of a storytelling task than a technical one. Most recently I encountered it in The Bike Shed podcast, but you can find blog posts and conference talks about it as well. And if it is a storytelling act, perhaps we should look into narrative principles to make our tests better? One of the first...
I forgot to write a retrospective for the 2024 Q2 Quarterly Cup, because my approach to forecasting has become kind of boring: I only do it by gut feeling. No research, no analytics, not looking at the community prediction. This is not because my gut feeling is so great – it is because I have too many other things going on that I cannot take the time to forecast more accurately. I forgot to write a retrospective for the 2024 Q2 Quarterly Cup, because my approach to forecasting has become kind of boring: I only do it by gut feeling. No research, no analytics, not looking at the community prediction. This is not because my gut feeling is so great – it is because I have too many other things going on that I cannot take the time to forecast more accurately. I still want to share what my accuracy is, though, in the interest... I still want to share what my accuracy is, though, in the interest...
Cerebras Coder Val Town founder Steve Krouse has been building demos on top of the Cerebras API that runs Llama3.1-70b at 2,000 tokens/second. Having a capable LLM with that kind of performance turns out to be really interesting. Cerebras Coder is a demo that implements Claude Artifact-style on-demand JavaScript apps, and having it run at that...
Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone Lord Howe Island - part of Australia, population 382 - is unique in that the island's standard time zone is UTC+10:30 but is UTC+11 when daylight saving time applies. It's the only time zone where DST represents a 30 minute offset. Via lobste.rs Tags: timezones
When Nancy first meets the detective who lives in her head, she assumed he was a symptom of her drinking, trauma of her parents’ death or just a homeless ghost. Then the first corpse turns up on the beach outside...
This is the first short story in the Chronicles of Ned. Ned is like you and me, but his friends are far stupider, and he somehow attracts a lot of oddness to his life. Ned occasionally gets abducted by aliens,...
Reading Time: 14 minutes In March I published a piece called How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership? It demonstrates (I hope) why production line metrics shouldn’t be copied and pasted onto knowledge work. Then, in a cunning move I ripped from email marketers, I reach the titular question at the very end of the piece and […]
Ada Ada Ada is documenting her transition on Instagram, uploading shirtless photos weekly to test their nudity guidelines #
Apple is Apple. The power button for the new Mac mini on its bottom. I’ve come up with a solution for turning the Mac mini…
I’ve completely switched from Pinboard to linkding for bookmarking. Mostly because Pinboard hasn’t seen development in years, and the creator is getting a little… weird, which makes me wonder about its future. Pinboard still works fine, but linkding is actively developed, has mostly the same features, and can be hosted locally. I have my Web...
It took me more than two months to finally unwrap that eBay present containing a Pine Technology PT-428 baby AT Socket 3 motherboard. The original one in the 486 case, a PCChips M602, died on me this summer. Well, died is perhaps a bit exaggerated: the keyboard suddenly refused to be recognized and the HDD controller started getting funky. Since...
"Behold, student, and behold the place Where you with typesetting must arm yourself." How frozen I became—and powerless then, Fear for yourself now, have you an ounce of wit, What I saw, a being of life deprived. The Spirit of College Students sorrowful Entombed within their LaTeX plight NixOS "broke" my Obsidian install. Instead of fixing the...
I did the first demo of my new editor to a couple of developers I’m working with on our ActivityPub project, something I’m ever-more-excited about. Happy to say the demo was a success. They appeared to love the product, and for the right reasons. It makes WordPress into a fantastic writer’s platform. This is what […]
Maddie Bender for The New York Times: Can John Green Make You Care About Tuberculosis?Mr. Green has emerged as an unlikely spokesman in the global effort to fight the disease. His latest project, a book called “Everything Is Tuberculosis,” interweaves the social and scientific histories of tuberculosis
I sometimes want the inverse of org-refile when I create a subtree and think of things that should probably go into it. This function prompts for a heading that matches org-refile-targets and then moves it to the current location. (defun my-org-refile-to-point (refloc) "Prompt for a heading and refile it to point." (interactive (list...
LTT's Precision Screwdriver - better than iFixit? Two years ago, Linus Sebastian released a general purpose ratcheting screwdriver tailored towards PC building and IT needs. I reviewed the LTT Screwdriver, and found it to be a good tool that did improve a couple things where it counted: the ratchet mechanism was useful for a broad...
I don't like letting go of stuff because I might just need it one day.
I’ve been writing code for the Z3 SMT solver for several months now. Here are my findings. Python is used here as the base language. Python/Z3 feels like a two-layer programming model—declarative code for Z3, imperative code for Python. In this it seems reminiscent of C++/CUDA programming for NVIDIA GPUs—in that case, mixed CPU and […] The post...
I’ve been writing code for the Z3 SMT solver for several months now. Here are my findings. Python is used here as the base language. Python/Z3 feels like a two-layer programming model—declarative code for Z3, imperative code for Python. In this it seems reminiscent of C++/CUDA programming for NVIDIA GPUs—in that case, mixed CPU and […] The post...
I find that ai can help significantly with doing plumbing, but it has no problems with connecting the pipes wrong. I need to double and triple check the updated code - or fix the resulting errors when I don’t do that. thih9 on Hacker News I’ve been skeptical of the AI craze that’s been going on in the developer community. It’s a useful tool but...
Hello! I’ve been thinking about the terminal a lot and yesterday I got curious about all these “control codes”, like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-W, etc. What’s the deal with all of them? a table of ASCII control characters Here’s a table of all 33 ASCII control characters, and what they do on my machine (on Mac OS), more or less. There are about a...
What little I can use of Apple’s “Intelligence” in the EU right now (mostly on my Mac) is barely useful (especially when compared to the ones I built myself, but iA Writer has an interesting take on how to keep tabs on it (pun intended) and is going a little further. I’ve always liked using it for my drafts (including this one), but I wasn’t...
Ruby 3.1.2 vs 3.3.5+YJIT in production In the previous article I discussed about my upgrade process from Ruby 3.1 to ruby 3.3, discovered a potential regression in a specific scenario, and ended up with synthetic benchmark results looking pretty great: Basically much higher performance thanks to YJIT, with an even lower memory usage then before,...
Last week I outlined some communication problems I’ve been having with my primary care physician. I’ve had this doctor for about a year after my previous one unfortunately left Kaiser Permanente, and I chose them based in large part upon browsing the profiles Kaiser doctors have the opportunity to post online. At any rate, this month I’ve been...
he has an extraordinary memory, reliving the stories behind a beautifully simple song #
I glanced at the clock on my bedside table. Three in the morning. My brain was churning—useless ideas, sweet nothings, anything but the urge to fall asleep. Hardly is my annoyance out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of my consciousness, a shape with penguin body and the head of an apple, a gaze as...
So I (mostly) stopped using GitHub a while back. Unfortunately for me, my CMS Grav requires plugins to be hosted on GitHub. As my KaTeX plugin is developed on Sourcehut, this makes publishing the plugin a little difficult. However, I have come up with an ingenious solution—mirror the Sourcehut repository to GitHub. It's really easier than it...
Competitiveness is a vice of mine. When I heard that a friend got Linux to boot off of NFS, I had to one-up her. I had to prove that I could create something harder, something better, faster, stronger. Like all good projects, this began with an Idea. My mind reached out and grabbed wispy tendrils from the æther, forcing the disparate concepts to...
the analogical physics of creativity Consider paint mixing: two colors swirling together create temporary, unrepeatable patterns. These patterns exist only in transition—between separation and uniformity, in a parallel to mental states. Like those paint swirls, certain cognitive configurations exist only in transition, in states of productive...
Just some more notes on programming languages. And also my first failure!
You want to check for strict consistency (linearizability) for your project but you don't want to have to deal with the JVM. Porcupine, used by a number of real-world systems like etcd and TiDB, has you covered! Importantly, neither Jepsen projects nor Porcupine can prove linearizability. They can only help you build confidence that you aren't...
Symmetric encryption algorithms like Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are largely quantum-resistant already
Language is a living, breathing phenomenon, evolving with society’s changing values, technological advancements, and cultural shifts. The transition from “My Computer” to “This PC” serves as a fascinating example of how linguistics have shifted toward branding and consumerism, rather than focusing on individual identity. This article dives deep...
In this in-depth guide, we’ll cover how to create a dynamic airline ticket booking system using PHP and MySQL. This system will allow users to search flights, view availability, book tickets, and manage bookings. We’ll also highlight best practices for building efficient reservation systems, including user authentication and secure data handling....
The Firefox address bar lets you search for URLs given a series of characters. You can then select a URL with your arrow keys and press enter to navigate to that URL. One use of this for me is finding files on GitHub. For example, I can type gith jam def to find the default.html file in the private jamesg.blog GitHub repository. I usually write...
The IndieWeb wiki, like Wikipedia, uses concise, descriptive URL slugs. A “slug” is the part of the URL after the domain name. For example, the following page takes you to the wiki page on coffee. https://indieweb.org/coffee I have recently been thinking about two benefits of concise URLs such as the one above: You can remember the URL so you...
Being a lifelong, born-and-raised Red Sox fan, there’s no reason for me to be paying any attention whatsoever to this year’s World Series, not that I have access to it anyway. That said, being a lifelong, born-and-raised Red Sox fan I am, of course, contractually obligated to be rooting against the New York Yankees. Fortunately, this is made all...
grateful to Mia Sato for staying on this beat, which affects so many smaller sites I care about #
getting it to run DOOM is only a matter of time #
BRAIN scraped 16 years of Twitter to find the first people to post "RIP" when celebrities died, turning it into a morbid competition #
the BBS goes read-only on Friday, replaced by Substack comments, and the community is not happy #
a useful case study given the current debacle stemming from WordPress's "benevolent dictator for life" model #
Here’s Ben Nadal quoting Dave Farley: I've come to the belief that the only definition of quality in code that makes any sense is our ability to change the code. If it's easy to change, it's high quality; if it's hard to change, it's not. Then Ben comments: I'm sure that some people will have the reaction that such an outlook is nothing more than...
in some cases, Meta is automatically creating the pages #
Once upon a time, every project began with the creation of a canonical design document. This was called the system architecture, because it "rightly implie[d] the notion of the arch, or prime, structure."1 Then, documents would be written for each module. These would provide detailed instructions for how the module should be implemented. ...
research and short essays about cultural loss and the critical importance of preservation and access #
Creating a LLM-as-a-Judge that drives business results Hamel Husain's sequel to Your AI product needs evals. This is packed with hard-won actionable advice. Hamel warns against using scores on a 1-5 scale, instead promoting an alternative he calls "Critique Shadowing". Find a domain expert (one is better than many, because you want to keep their...
I missed the date on this, but it’s been over two years since Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ with a sink. Today I looked back at some conversations I had at the time. There were a lot of feelings.
docs.jina.ai - the Jina meta-prompt From Jina AI on Twitter: curl docs.jina.ai - This is our Meta-Prompt. It allows LLMs to understand our Reader, Embeddings, Reranker, and Classifier APIs for improved codegen. Using the meta-prompt is straightforward. Just copy the prompt into your preferred LLM interface like ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever works...
if you wait long enough a github star turns into a github black hole
Join me at the Ride AI Summit in Los Angeles on April 2, 2025, for an exclusive gathering at the intersection of AI and mobility hardtech.
About 15 years ago, I got my first software engineering job, and the way things were done back then--was different.
Zizmor is a new tool to check your GitHub action workflows for security concerns. I found it really helpful to lock down actions.Action workflows can be esoteric, and continuous integration is not everyone’s top concern, so it’s easy for them to have subtle flaws. A tool like zizmor is great for drawing attention to them.When I ran it, I had a...
On my recent trip to CERN, the lab that hosts the Large Hadron Collider, I had the opportunity to stop by the CERN control centre [CCC]. There the various particle accelerator operations are managed by accelerator experts, who make use of a host of consoles showing all sorts of data. I’d not been to the […]