thom

15 ms·

181.
by thom 1y ago
This is, almost canonically, the subject of Joel Spolsky's architecture astronauts essay.
182.
by thom 1y ago
I struggle to believe that any API in history has been improved by the developer more faithfully following REST’s strictures. The closest we’ve come to actually decoupled, self describing APIs is MCP, and that required inventing actual AIs
183.
by thom 1y ago
Been following development of this! The game looks great, and the work you've put into the simulation side really seems like it's paying off. If it's not too nosy to ask, how are wishlists etc going?
184.
by thom 1y ago
Can’t have an EverQuest thread without mentioning its greatest hero: https://www.notacult.com/fansythefamous.htm
185.
by thom 1y ago
I was once invited to an event at Downing Street, pitched beside the Ada Lovelace portrait, contributed to a roundtable with Grant Schapps, but it’s stroking Larry that I remember most fondly.
186.
by thom 1y ago
Definitely one of my favourite machines of all time (until the plastic started falling off).
187.
by thom 1y ago
Why do you keep what is clearly critical project documentation in your personal notes though?
188.
by thom 1y ago
XSLT was many people’s first foray into functional programming (usually unwilling, because their company got a Google Search Appliance or something). I can’t imagine ever reaching for it again personally, but it was useful and somewhat mind
189.
by thom 1y ago
This is one of those junior engineer moments where they technically did perceive a problem and solve it, but you wish they had just come and asked for some advice first.
190.
by thom 1y ago
I guess it's at least some comfort that Banks didn't have to live to see a world where a white man couldn't publish a series about gender-bending space communists.
191.
by thom 1y ago
See also: "let's build data centres in space, it's cold up there!"
192.
by thom 1y ago
Every vim/tmux user has created an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, admittedly probably quite fast implementation of half of Emacs.
193.
by thom 1y ago
Just thought about this for a second and it made me sad: I haven't SSH'd into a machine in at least a couple of years at this point. Everything works through web frontends, git, CI/CD, Terraform etc. Actually editing a file o
194.
by thom 1y ago
I assume you're joking, but hopefully everyone will be aware that Ian (M) Banks was woke as fuck, and Neil Stevenson and Peter F Hamilton continue the noble struggle of publishing through such minor imprints as HarperCollins and Random
195.
by thom 1y ago
For whatever it’s worth, I’ve worked at places that have a policy that if someone starts looking elsewhere, they’re unhappy and are going to end up moving anyway, so they’ll just assume you’re handing in your notice. I don’t like this minds
196.
by thom 1y ago
Kinda hoped that's what I wrote, but clearly not. For what it's worth, I'm already working out how I can give the same treatment to my Atari Lynx when it conks out.
197.
by thom 1y ago
You can buy a kit that comes with a practice movement: https://sutcliffehansen.com/pages/tool-kits
198.
by thom 1y ago
Part of me wants to believe this is sacrilege: these are incredible machines, and the magic is in not just seeing _how_ they work, but that they continue to work reliably for decades, and when they don't it's magic seeing them fix
199.
by thom 1y ago
It takes freshly deployed humans a while to master, and only then with fairly high bandwidth training data, so I wouldn’t feel too bad about the complexity of implementing it in software.
200.
by thom 1y ago
Can be easy depending on your setup - you can basically just write high level functional tests matching use cases of your API, but as prompts to a system with some sort of tool access, ideally MCP. You want to see those tests pass, but you
201.
by thom 1y ago
Yes, I've never met anyone who stated they have "strong opinions, weakly held" who wasn't A) some kind of arsehole and B) lying.
202.
by thom 1y ago
The Singularitarians were breathlessly worrying 20+ years ago, when AI was absolute dogshit - Eliezer once stated that Doug Lenat was incautious in launching Eurisko because it could've gone through a hard takeoff. I don't think i
203.
by thom 1y ago
Yeah, I've started to think AI smoke tests for cognitive complexity should be a fundamental part of API/schema design now. Even if you think the LLMs are dumb, Stupidity as a Service is genuinely useful.
204.
by thom 1y ago
Mine just magically worked the whole time. In fact just last week I noticed I still had CD scratch artefacts in one of my tunes on Apple Music which I must have ripped 20-25 years ago (and went and redownloaded it from Apple instead).
205.
by thom 1y ago
Fastmail adds a header to every email with any sort of unsubscribe link. I send those to their own folder (except ones I add to contacts). My main inbox is basically 100% things I expect to see there at this point. I view the mailing list s
206.
by thom 1y ago
`uv pip install torch` just works, set your default device to `mps:0`, enjoy the RAM. Depends what you're doing though - some stuff isn't implemented, so if you're trying to fit a Gamma/Beta/Student-T distribution y
207.
by thom 1y ago
TiVo was one of the most delightful products I ever owned. It had near-perfect UX, including the audio effects: to this day my wife and I still talk about "be-bipping" through video when we want to fast-forward. Now I can watch an
208.
by thom 1y ago
This was more or less universal in the days of Usenet.
209.
by thom 1y ago
It's hard to defend Fischer because he was a massive weirdo. Magnus has had far more skin in the game long term though, so I'm generally willing to hear him out.
210.
by thom 1y ago
Yeah, I agree logic and symbolic reasoning have to be _applications_ of intelligence, not the actual substrate. My gut feel is that intelligence is almost definitionally chaotic and opaque. If one thing prevents superhuman AGI, I suspect it

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