enobrev

I just got to book 4 of the Slow Horses series. I've seen (and loved) the series and that would generally dissuade me from read them until I'd completely forgotten the show - but they're still a quick and fun read and I really enjoy having Gary Oldman's voice in my head while reading Jackson Lamb's insults.

In Chicago, we have an API where we can get pricing updates every 5 minutes. I recently set up my AC (largest power draw) to cut off when the price goes above a certain threshold.

I don't have long-term data yet, as I just implemented this about 6 weeks ago, but last month's bill was 10% lower than the previous month and the same month the previous year. I'm looking forward to seeing the results over time.

I've been trying to think of what other automations I can try out when the price gets high. I thought maybe shorter light timers for automated lights, but all of our lights are LED, so the savings isn't really worth it.

To your point I think I'll adjust what I was saying a bit. I was definitely interested. I always thought it would be cool to be able to program. There was good media to make it intriguing from afar. But I had nobody in my life to help me understand.

My mom did a great job making sure I always had a computer but she didn't know enough about them to help.

Elementary school put us in front of them and taught us how to type and let us play oregon trail and print shop, but that wasn't it. And my high school has us programming in Pascal. Meh.

When I was in my 20s, in a new city, working to pay my own way I found the determination needed to teach myself. It absolutely helped that the internet was becoming this wealth of information for the self-taught. That was my launch pad. I definitely think everything else helped get me there

Absolutely agreed.

I had a trash-80 in the early 80s and used to copy BASIC from magazines, and then in the mid 90s I bought a book with a CD in it that taught me how to set up perl-based e-commerce store, which I set up for my mom's retail shop. Neither of those got me interested in programming.

The event in my life that got me there was around 2000, when I bought a Cold Fusion 4 book off of a street vendor - literally on Wall Street - and I spent my evenings building an intranet that replaced the Access database that my company shipped and merged across the country every Friday.

That's when I got hooked, and started building my career (and hobby).

Not sure if something like Scratch would have gotten me there (LOGO definitely didn't) - but I imagine the level of comfort I had with computers at a young age kept me in the vicinity that eventually got me there.

It reminds me of something I've always wanted as a coder but never cared enough to implement, which would be a verbosity switch.

I see the full multi-paragraph comments in my codebases and get annoyed but also feel like the additional context helps improve the llm results over time because that history helps it know what's been tried and removed in the past. It's additional context for the system that improves with context.

The feature I want in the code tool itself (for me) is to adjust how verbose the comments are so I can read "just code", then "terse comments" then "full comments" then "full comments with historical context" (including fit commits and ticket references) and finally, full-on literate programming. And I'd like to switch between on the fly as I read through the code.

I think this is something we could actually produce with llms, and I feel the ability to switch between these modes would help the llm as well.

Sometimes I just need to see what's being done. Sometimes I need to know why. Sometimes I need to know what's been tried. Never always all of these things. And expecting to find this context in git comments doesn't feel right either.

Worse, we're replacing the contents of the library with shit and leaving it standing. Burning it down might be the correct response.

Mislead is the present tense; Misled, the past tense.

I'm not seeing the tenses being used interchangeably with the same spelling on the site, but I may be missing it.

I've been seeing the misspelling of the past tense of lead (led) incredibly often in the past couple years. It's clearly confusing that lead is an actual word, so it may seem right and likely doesn't get caught by auto-correct, although I assume grammar correction should catch it.

My wife recently reminded me of something I made for her while she was sick last winter - Grilled cheese on sourdough (with roasted garlic mixed into the cheese) toasted to a crisp and cut into croutons for a home-made tomato soup.

Most definitely. I'm fortunate to have four record shops in my neighborhood, and I make my way to them every couple months. Along with some friends of mine, we trade off hosting record-listening parties a few times a year.

I love that vinyl has remained relevant. I believe that's true because of the record shop experience. It's one of the few places, besides maybe a cocktail bar, where you can expect to converse with a local expert at length while they're simply doing their job.

I miss the neighborhood officianados.

The movie buff at the blockbuster.

The music fiend at the local record shop

The gamer at the mom & pop game store.

The guy at Egghead Software who would let me play battle chess for hours.

Of course there are millions of them online these days, but that face-to-face interaction with the local officanado was a different thing. It wasn't a forum. And oddly, it wasn't a library either - it was a place of business - but it didn't feel like one in those moments.

Nerding out with a local stranger over a movie or a game or a band was something very different from what we do today. It was a different way for the local nerds to shine, while making a living adjacent to the things they knew so well.

As a near-fifty year old who has been making sourdough for 6 years, makes homemade mayo with a grated garlic clove and freshly squeezed lemons every couple weeks, and keeps a stash of fine cheeses readily available for all occasions - I'm with the 4 year old. White bread, 2 slices of american, butter - it's hard to beat the sheer comfort, texture, flavor, gooeyness, and simplicity of the classic.

I've been maintaining a personal calorie tracker (keeps me entering), and using claude for entering meals has been the perfect experience.

One of my favorite features has been giving a recipe url and having it figure out the calories for that recipe with line-by-line entries for each ingredient. Then it keeps the extracted recipe in markdown format for the next time I want to make it.

Substitutions are also great - "I'm making [such and such recipe], but with half the sugar."

One of the others has been "I had a meal a couple weeks ago at [x restaurant], can you enter that again for right now?" Having the long-term context for entry has been excellent. And a related one, where I upload a photo of the menu, and say which menu items I'm eating and it puts together an estimate for the calorie count.

I lean heavily on a long auto-compacting claude code session for all of this. I have a UI for graphs, history, and simple entries, but claude's been my favorite means of entry by far

I also appreciate the social break my brain seems to need in order to keep socializing. I'm an introvert but also social, so I love to talk to friends and hang out - but I still need that 5 minutes to just stare off into space and recharge before I jump back into the fray.

I quit smoking about 15 years ago, but still vape - and I remain a huge fan of the easy excuse to step away for 3-5 minutes and just zone out, or change from a large group to a smaller 2-person conversation outside.

Even back when we could smoke in bars, I would still sneak outside from time to time to settle and recharge.

Security questions have always been ridiculous, but I'll especially never understand how "favorite [thing]" ever made it to production anywhere. "Favorite movie" can change multiple times in the same conversation.