Recent submissions

Comment · 11 days ago
Learning about the concept of “negative zero” in school stuck with me. It was one of those lessons where the professor had us bang our heads against one’s complement to understand the shortcomings and introduced two’s complement like Moses coming down with the stone tablets.
Comment · 1 month ago
I have a goal to make the codebase at work cargo-crap compliant and enforce it with CI. I let an agent run overnight with it once and the diff touched like 40% of our codebase which is untenable for a single merge. So for now I’m doing it piecemeal as the opportunity presents itself.
Comment · 2 months ago
The social contract of accepting scraping for visibility was always tenuous and is now fully dead. But it’s shocking the number of people who are essentially victim blaming here. You should spend YOUR time to optimize your free website so MY use case is not impacted. How is that not incredibly selfish on its face?
Comment · 3 months ago
I got curious one Saturday and ported our monorepo to use Nix for build and test and release. It was a very pleasant process. I had to put aside to tackle more pressing things but I'm all in on using Nix in that capacity.
Comment · 3 months ago
If you listen closely you can hear the thousands of CI jobs that just pull latest UV failing all at once.
Comment · 3 months ago
What good timing to spot this. I've been reading more and more people talk about bringing TTS into their prompting toolkit and wanted to give that a try. The idea of rambling brain dump into a doc -> edit pass -> send to the robot loop sounds appealing.
Comment · 3 months ago
Not responsible for those systems.

The last time this came up I thought “smearing” the second over the course of a day kind of solved the problem a discrete +/- 1 second suddenly appearing on the clocks.

Comment · 3 months ago
In my experience this has an obvious answer (yes). LLM’s yes-and whatever patterns are present in the code base no matter how insane. If you don’t tend to your code garden it will be overcome with weeds in an instant.

At work we had largely moved off of some old hardware but kept partial support for it in the code because normally that would be zero cost. But the constant overhead of bullying, bribing, and threatening the LLMs to leave that code alone was way more work than just excising it and reimplementing it if needed.

Comment · 4 months ago
James Duane, the lawyer from the famous video about never talking to the police, wrote a book called You Have the Right to Remain Innocent. It’s a great read if you want to feel very sad.
Comment · 5 months ago
I credit randomly deciding to take Latin in high school as a huge change in the trajectory of my life. It didn’t even happen all at once. Just a little different perspective on how words are formed. Oh they’re often combination of simple root words.

Right after I graduated the one Latin teacher they had retired and that was it.

Comment · 5 months ago
Talking the problem to death with the AI before implementation is a nice zone for me. I feel productive, get good results out of the AI, and still largely understand the code. That’s the part of the AI revolution that I feel has made me a better engineer because I argue about design and architecture all day with a robot.
Comment · 5 months ago
It started looking a whole lot like OpenBSD’s random number system. Private entropy pool from good system entropy seeds a ChaCha20 stream with random reseeds for forward secrecy in case of compromise. I think Linux is even more paranoid in the early boot environment where even in the presence of a seed file it prefers to get system entropy mixed in before confidently saying it can do crypto activities.
Comment · 9 months ago
The Wire's eternal wisdom "You start to follow the money, you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you"
Comment · 9 months ago
I haven't had a chance to do embedded work but people damn near fall to their knees and weep when talking about how nice the experience is using embassy. Which makes me want to give it a try.
Comment · 9 months ago
I find it interesting that the same process that played out in the forums to feed transition also took place in video games with dedicated servers to matchmaking. I joined a random Counter Strike server in 2005 and ended up becoming close friends with regulars on the server and I'm still in touch with some of them this day.

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