nameless912

Yeah like...I incorporated Jev into a shipping product. It's live. It's most certainly not dead or I would be getting paged right now.

I wrote a short story years ago about a tech CEO going to trial over a similar technology that turned out to mass-blind people. Just food for thought I guess.

I've been slowly (slowly....) working on an open source version of what the Seestar provides - a 3D printable shell, easily sourced mechanics and optics, open source electronics (3D printer controller boards are fabulous here). I love the idea of smart telescopes, but I also hope and believe that someday we'll have an open source equivalent to the easy entrypoint of, say, the S30.

Maybe I'm being too much of a purist because late model smart telescopes now allow you to grab the raw FITS files so the relative value of a fully open ecosystem is lower, but I'm trying to build towards the motivated teenager segment: someone who maybe has a Seestar or has seen one, and wants to have that experience, but wants to own it themselves and actually understand what's happening. I have the mechanics mostly working in Alt-Az mode, EQ mode is currently accomplished using a hinged plywood board fashioned into the world's shittiest polar alignment wedge, and now I'm working on figuring out how/where to source good enough optics. I have already learned a whack-ton designing the thing, and I hope that in the future the build will be interesting and informative enough for others to get a bunch of experience in Astrophotography for very little money.

You can buy the sensors used in a lot of these telescopes for <50USD on Aliexpress, the drive mechanics and electronics are ~80, and then all you should need (hopefully) is a cheapo Raspberry Pi 3 or equivalent, putting the total BOM at under 200 bucks. I'm hoping that by early next year I'll have something presentable and we can start building an open source ecosystem to compete with these very impressive but very heavily integrated instruments.

This article smells AI generated, which is _very_ funny given the argument being made.

Either way, while this is true in the absolute, this is the value of building good MCP servers: they should expose only exactly the surface you expect your agent to need, and adding functionality should be carefully considered. The best MCP servers I use day to day (Cloudflare sticks out) do a really good job of exposing only what an agent might actually want to do on my behalf, rather than just all and sundry. Unfortunately the Chrome Dev tools MCP is less discriminating and is only as secure as a browser sandbox with full JS access (not fatal but not as strong as a well scoped REST API).

All of this is sidestepped somewhat by using good isolation primitives - I'm running a Hermes agent as of recently on a DigitalOcean VM that only accepts connections from my devices over tailscale, and it has all its own credentials so I can revoke them easily should they be used maliciously. Giving an agent root on a box is not _necessarily_ a huge deal, you just have to make sure that box has nothing valuable on it.

I kinda feel like we're rediscovering "Cattle, not Pets" when it comes to the environments we run our agents: give it root, sure, but a root that is almost meaningless outside of the functionality you granted it.

Not to overtax the original metaphor but /r/ikeahackers exists for a reason. Giving people fittings and hardware that all more or less work together and a bunch of reasonably high quality fiber boards is often enough to build quite a lot of bespoke stuff. Add a bit of paint and you can (and people have) build gorgeous interiors while saving a considerable amount of money.

I'm not a Luddite or a drooling evangelist; my take on AI coding is basically that it's a good accelerator if you already know the shape of what you want, and have the software engineering fundamentals to build it yourself. I find myself building a lot more stuff these days because I don't have to wrangle HTML and CSS; it's one of those things I know I can do myself but I absolutely hate, and translating designs from my brain to the browser is a horrible pain. But I know, for example, what flexbox is, so I can tell my coding agent that I want something in a certain shape, laid out with flexbox, and it handles the particulars.

I think we have to acknowledge that most software engineering is just putting mostly compatible fittings together to join mostly standard sized boards. That's okay, and unless you're doing something extremely specialized most of the time the standard solution is more than good enough. I've been loving Supabase recently as my backend for AI built things because it turns out that PostgREST is a great shape for >90% of the APIs I would normally build, and RLS handles auth modeling way more concisely than domain code, and it's very easily scriptable to do all the complicated business logic bits in a contained, testable way. It's not optimal, it's not elegant sometimes, but it's fine. Every other engineering discipline coalesced on standard operating procedures decades ago, maybe we software engineers have to swallow our pride a bit and start accepting them in our discipline too.

You can buy very powerful handheld green laser pointers on Amazon for around 20 bucks. You absolutely shouldn't shine one into a camera sensor, ever. It says so on the box!

I'm working on a thing I'm calling TOASST, or the Tiny Open Android Smartphone-based Smart Telescope. The basic idea is to use a smartphone (often the best camera in your house) to do electronically assisted astronomy/astrophotography a la Seestar. I've been working on the solidworks design for a mount to hold a phone for about 3 weeks and started the Arduino firmware this week. Eventually I'll write a small android app to control the mount and coordinate astrophotography sessions, hosted via wifi hotspot so you can see the results coming in on another device.

This project started when my partner told me I couldn't buy a Seestar, so I decided "fuck it, I'll build my own!" It's still early days but I think there's something cool here. I'm designing the whole thing to be easy and cheap to print and build. I hope someday this will be the kind of project that a sufficiently motivated teenager will be able to build with minimal experience and an old smartphone; maybe it's healing my inner child, lol.

I was just talking about this with my partner the other day. We have an amazing retro games shop/arcade not far from our house, so I think for probably my kiddo's 5th birthday I'm going to take him to buy a Gameboy Advance SP and a couple of games He's already shown interest in video games and I think this is a great way to introduce him without overwhelming him. I'm sure the whole package will be <150 bucks and provide him with literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, and the games are almost literally a dime a dozen. It'll be a really simple reward system for school, life milestones, etc: let's go down the street and buy you a new game! Just like in the good old days.

We aren't a fully screen free family. Our kiddo watches probably 1/2 hour to 45 minutes of TV a day and we aren't so naive as to think plane trips and long car rides will be screen free, so we bring an old iPad loaded up with shows and movies he likes. We review the list beforehand and make sure it has what he wants (subject to our approval). But the night and day difference between a moderated amount of screen time and his peers who are full on iPad kids is just astounding. I just hope we can keep up the low screen time for as long as possible.

> XGo is a programming language that reads like plain English

This is possibly the most dangerous sentence on this entire page. The hubris and ignorance of history wrapped up in this one sentence is breathtaking.

We've been trying to do "plain English" programming for 50-odd years. COBOL was supposed to be a programming language for business critters. BASIC was going to eat the world. We were going to UML our way out of writing software. Over and over and over again, it's been proven that there is irreducible complexity in programming that can't just be converted to "plain English" in a way that's meaningful to actual laypeople. AI has, in some ways, reduced the barrier to getting software from zero to one, but it's not a replacement for knowing how to code beyond the very basics.

The more I read of this page, the less I understand what's happening here. None of the examples show anything resembling "reducing the difficulty" of programming; it's still abstract symbols mapping to operations on a silicon chip people fundamentally can't reason about without training and practice. There's no universe in which

  a <- 5, 6, 7

is so significantly easier to read than

  a = append(a, 5, 6, 7)

that it's going to fix that programming as a discipline is not natively easy for people to do. It's like the author never _talked_ to a newbie before making these decisions. A new programmer doesn't know what a "string" is. They don't understand why there are so many curly braces and equals signs and colons. The word "variable" isn't common vernacular unless you have at least a decent high school math education, and even then, the programming usage is very different than the math usage.

I don't know why this makes me so angry. Maybe it's because the pedagogy of software engineering is important and interesting to me, and projects like this are the latest generation of a long line of people believing they have finally figured out the secret formula to make coding "easy". It's just...never going to be easy. That's the nature of complex systems.

Margaritaville Frozen Drink makers, specifically. A sound investment if I've ever seen one!

And they used their supposed ability to refund tariffs as justification for continuing to charge them during a court case last year, per another comment in this thread. We live in unserious times.

I was prototyping to this end the other day - what would it be like for a coding agent to have access to a language that can be:

- structurally edited, ensuring syntactic validity at all times

- annotated with metadata, so that agents can annotate the code as they go and refer back to accreted knoweledge (something Clojure can do structurally using nodepaths or annotations directly in code)

- put into any environment you might like, e.g. using ClojureScript

I haven't proven to myself this is more useful/results in better code than just writing code "the normal way" with an agent, but it sure seems interesting.

I'm working on my fourth attempt at a first novel :D

In all seriousness, I am about 10k words into a new draft I started a couple weeks ago. It's a far-future post-catastrophe sci fi type story, with some inspiration taken from Dune and a whole bunch of post-collapse fiction. Writing is tough between a full time job, a toddler, and a social life, but I've managed to squeeze in at least a few sessions a week. Hopefully this will be the one that actually lands!