bradknowles

So, one of the rules I came up with and put into all of my Claude.md files is that after discovering any piece of information, and before doing anything else, that information has to be written to local file storage. That local file storage is then re-read any time the session is compacted or the main process starts up again. Agents may not need this information, but the top-level process does.

And this is on a per-task basis, so we are not polluting the memory of one top-level Claude process with the data from another.

This method should survive all compaction, and allow me to go back and revisit any previous task that I’ve worked on with Claude.

I also have a rule that any important lessons learned also get recorded into the Claude.md, for the benefit of future tasks.

I choose democracy over billionaires, every single time.

Every single one of them can move to a different country and never, ever again come back. And I would be perfectly happy.

Sounds like the beginning of the end, as far as I can tell.

For me, I don’t stop at the LLMs. I use them to do a deep semantic search of the internet. If all I want is a summary, then that may be as far as I go.

But frequently, I want more than just a summary, so the LLM is just a launching point for me to go do a deep dive on the sites it turns up.

Whereas I was thinking that I should start making the migration to Proton.

So, thanks to everyone for the advance warning!

That’s not the way Wallstreet thinks. They insist on continuing growth, year over year. Accelerating growth, even.

If you don’t show growth every year, then your stock tanks because you can’t show them the profit that they would make through buying your stock today and then selling it next year.

At least, that’s the way they normally think.

The story goes that Black Friday was named that because it was the break-over point between where most companies were in the red versus when they turned the corner and were now in the black.

At Whole Foods eStore, during the time I worked there, virtually all of their profit came from Thanksgiving. Not before, not after. Just that one week. Christmas was also something of a bump, but the rest of the year operated at a loss.

This is exactly how I use Claude in all of my technical writing. I even wrote a skill for this.

Every claim has to be backed up by a reference. Every reference has to be double-checked. Primary sources are much preferred over secondary sources, and where no primary source can be found, that must be noted.

I also insist on simpler, more easy-to-understand writing, even if that makes the total output longer. Aiming at a general audience, of the same reading level as a standard newspaper.

Most of the rest of the skill is about ensuring the Chicago Manual of Style is properly followed, widow/orphan control and how that applies to callout boxes, tables, etc….

Hmm. I’d like to learn more about the Research, Editing, and Writing skills.

I have my own Technical Writing skill that I have created, and I think it’s done a really good job on the stuff that I’ve seen from Claude. But I’d like to see how much this might be able to be improved with some additional skills.

Okay. So, it turns out that you can take a substance that can be shaped, have talented humans work on that shape, and the result can be considered artwork.

News at eleven.

What I want to see is the kind of stuff you might get on the Great British Bakeoff, where not only can the artwork look incredible, but the resulting product is also a food that can taste as incredible as it looks. And that could be done with just chocolate, or any other food-appropriate ingredient or set of ingredients.

Apple has focused on making touch a useful additional input method in certain situations, and avoided redesigning the entire experience around touch. The latter is what iPhones and iPads are all about, and we have learned more over time about how that does not scale well to a laptop.

But there is an intermediate point somewhere between “no touch” and “all touch” that I think could make sense for a modern laptop that is created for a generation of people who are brought up with iPhones and iPads. I can’t imagine this feature being useful for me, but I would appreciate the better OLED screen on my regular MacBook Pro. And a lighter machine to boot. And if I can turn off the touch features, then I’d be pretty happy with the hardware — if not the price.

Apple has focused on making touch a useful additional input method in certain situations, and avoided redesigning the entire experience around touch. The latter is what iPhones and iPads are all about, and we have learned more over time about how that does not scale well to a laptop.

But there is an intermediate point somewhere between “no touch” and “all touch” that I think could make sense for a modern laptop that is created for a generation of people who are brought up with iPhones and iPads.

I can’t imagine this feature being useful for me, but I would appreciate the better OLED screen on my regular MacBook Pro. And a lighter machine to boot. And if I can turn off the touch features, then I’d be pretty happy with the hardware — if not the price.

So, for my part, I’m not so concerned about the water inputs that are consumed by datacenters. The most water efficient traditional power generation systems we have are combined cycle natural gas turbines, and they consume about 5-10x as much water to produce a megawatt of power than the data center would use to cool itself from using that megawatt of power, even if they used the worst “one and done” through cooling system.

Check the HARC report on this.

No, my major concern is about what happens to the waste? Does it just get dumped into the sewers? What else might that poison? Where do those sewers get their water treated, and where does that water go downstream? Because my “treated” water output back into the rivers and aquifers is your downstream water input for humans to drink, golf courses to water their grass, etc….

And what happens when there is a toxic spill? Does that go into creeks and rivers on the surface? Where do those creeks and rivers go? Where do they let out, in relation to the closest water intakes?

Does the toxic spill go into the karst geography below the land? Into the aquifers? What all is exactly down there, and how many decades or centuries might they be poisoned? I mean, you may be able to clean up a surface creek or river, but you can’t clean up the karst geography below the surface, or the aquifers.

You could easily poison an entire city with a single spill of toxic waste from a datacenter, and continue to poison that city for years and decades to come.