knuckleheads

Congrats! I very much enjoyed my time at Recurse Center back when it was Hacker School and idly daydream about returning some time. Thanks for making something so great!

Did you read the article? It provided a pretty good argument against exactly this attitude.

Would you say the same about something like, say, Spacemacs?

Great post! Thanks for the write up, enjoyed reading it and the visuals.

Yeah I was surprised a while back that ChatGPT was pulling them up (I was doing some research on origins of sudoku and it was pulled up very old threads on Usenet). So now I specifically ask for it and it consistently finds me some gold. Might take a few rounds of saying do deeper research but it often works.

Something that I have started doing lately is asking ChatGPT et al to check usenet for reactions from users about events (if it is the right 80's/90's time period). Sure enough, aol.sucks on usenet had some choice words about the outage:

What does Cisco stand for?? Case's Internet System Crapped Out. That's right, Steve Case and his AOL pig fell victim to some mickey mouse networking equipment. Unfortunatly for AOL, they were the first ISP to feel real pain from using equipment made by Cisco Systems.

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/iqjd7crtPs4 https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/K75nltM31Bw https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/vVup-HvlPWM

Here's a reporter asking for comments and getting laughed at and trolled: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/mStonlu_H8E

Some more serious reactions over on comp.risks: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/30#subj2 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/31#subj3 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/41#subj3

Yesterday morning, I got a call because their mail system was backing up heavily. It took a while to discover the cause, but it turned out to be AOL. Because AOL's incoming mail from the Internet runs on relatively slow systems, and because they receive hundreds of thousands of Internet messages a day, they have 30 systems to receive incoming mail, all pointed at from the AOL.COM name. That means that any mail system trying to send mail to AOL would have to individually try all 30 addresses before giving up. Translate that to a 60 second (typical) wait for a connection timeout, and you've got a 30 minute time-in-queue for an AOL message.

nanog on seclists was an interesting read too https://seclists.org/nanog/1996/Aug/51

Flamewar over sendmail not handling outage well > Remember the AOL outage? One host built up a backlog of 2000 messages for AOL---but, because it was running qmail, it didn't even slow down. Meanwhile, sendmail users were choking on much smaller queues. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.sendmail/c/TeNdv2laT94

Shouldn't we know a better answer to these questions once Anthropic's IPO materials surface publicly? I understand, and maybe even expect, SpaceX's materials to be all over the place and skate on by any discussion of unit economics, but the nerds over at Anthropic might just be forthright enough to just tell us what their margin is on tokens as part of their IPO.

Not affiliated with them, I just found it after casting around for a while trying to find something more or less exactly like this. Looks very neat, and like they made some good choices!

I will soon! https://threeemojis.substack.com/ just downloaded digithunt (first sudoku generation program I can find evidence of, from 1989) and was playing it some last night. Had Claude decompile it and it was interesting to see how it generates sudokus.

I attended a decade ago and it was great, lots of people working and exploring a lot of cool stuff! I think what I would quibble with is that yes it is “random” what people work on, but there’s certainly themes and some people have pretty clear directions about what they are up to and want to learn. If you want to focus on That One Open Source Project for a couple months, that’s cool and encouraged.

Implementing a solver/optimizer for the Minizinc challenge in Rust! It's very fun, and maybe next year I will even try and put it into the competition properly. As well, I am working on tracking down the history of Sudoku prior to Wayne Gould's popularization of it in the 2000's, and I have found some really interesting postings on Japanese forums from the 90's about the game.

Not just the weird billing, which has been annoying the last month I've been trying it, but they have had a couple incidents lately where I feel like I got ripped off because their performance was so spotty and yet I was getting billed for it. https://status.blacksmith.sh/

Yes, correct, they both have the same capabilities, however it felt like codex was pushing me harder to use my local desktop in an annoying way, while claude code was happy to spin up a bunch of dev containers for me in the cloud.

I feel like Codex made a big push to run everything on your laptop. With Claude, I get 4 cpu's, a fair amount of ram and 30gb for every one of my dumb ideas for free in the cloud containers. Codex used to be similar, but last time I tried it just kept pushing me to run it locally on my laptop, which I really did not want to do with 20 requests going at once. That's the main advantage for me at the moment.

I remember a couple months after ChatGPT came out I was in a 1-1 with a coworker who hadn’t really played around with it much. I was very much toying around with it and was surprised at how good at stuff it was. I wanted to show him it was for real, he was skeptical, so over a half hour we had it make a bee and a flower buzz around in d3, copying and pasting between jsfiddle and ChatGPT. By the end of it, we had a nice animation and were both throughly surprised that the computers could code so well now.

I have had a similar notion, around the same time, with tui's and strace in particular. Lots of experiments, never quite good enough to publish or try to popularize. Something I've found in the last few years though, and especially the last six months, is that the impulse to make a better tui has died for me. Claude et al are going to wield these tools via cli far better than I can via tui. The built in visualization is nice for sure in tui, an embodied perspective on how to investigate something, however Claude can make a custom one for me in the moment within a few minutes. My impulse is to throw Claude at the issue with the bare linux toolbox while I do other things, not hand craft better tools that I don't have much motivation to use right now.

I've been meaning to write down my thoughts about software explicitly not being a craft for many years now and life keeps getting in the way. It's a direct response to the Etsy engineering blog, "Code As Craft". I agree that there are more code craftsmen in general than before, but by percentage there's way more software engineers. Engineering best practices to me are in many ways about robbing coding and software from the mystique of craftsmanship and turning it into a repeatable industrial process that isn't inhumane per se but doesn't depend on any particular person to make it work.

I am not joking when I say that software craftsmen lost the war when tabs vs spaces was obviated as a point of contention by CI enforced formatting and linting around broader community standards.

A craftsman's pride is an industrialist's nightmare! Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so, and the software craftsmen of all stripes understandably do not like this!

Matters of taste. I don't mind bigger files where it makes sense, and sometimes for the nature of the domain, it is nice to have more things in one file. As well, they write so many comments that 200 lines doesn't feel right to me.

Very much agreed. Something specific that has helped me a lot (beyond just automatic formatting, linting and testing) was putting a hard fail on any file with more than 1500 lines or so, with an allowlist for specific files with specific reasons for their length. I realized the agents were squirreling away code without wanting to do any sort of refactor. Every time one of these rat's nests has turned up, the codebase has been much improved with a small refactor, to the point it doesn't feel like such a pile of slop anymore.

The idea of AI going anywhere always reminds me of https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ from a decade ago.

I've been working on a newish variant of Sudoku called Binku. It combines the traditional Sudoku rules and adds the rules from a game called Binario/Takuzu (with 1-4 as one color and 5-8 as the other color).

A sample puzzle can be found here: https://sudokupad.app/23x300ggzn

It's been well received by the (very kind!) Sudoku/puzzle communities, so I'm working on throwing a nice interface on it that fits the rules a bit better. I've found about five other examples of others doing a variation of this ruleset before in one way or another, and it's been fun trying to see how hard/deep I can get this puzzle to go.

My party trick is meeting everyone in a room once and then raffling off their names a half hour later. If I was really trying, I can remember them all after a week or a month. Sometimes, I really can try and the name will come back to me after a few minutes. It's magic to some, which is true in that most magic is just lots of intense preparation and practice. So, here's all the tricks I have developed.

First, you need to put yourself in situations where you can practice learning and remembering people's names. At the start of college, I had read How to Win Friends & Influence people and it directly influenced me to try and learn how to remember people's names. This was a very good environment for this, I was constantly meeting people, and wouldn't it be nice if I made a good impression on them! Conversely, hard to practice the skill if you aren't meeting people often. It's also not a permanent skill for me, and if I fall into a routine without meeting many new people, then it's not as easy, but thankfully still comes back soon after.

The next thing was that I wasn't trying to remember somebody's name, I was habitually checking during the initial conversation to see if I had forgotten it. Depending on the culture you are in, you have about 15 minutes after meeting someone to ask them their name again, as almost certainly they have forgotten yours, people are not good at this. It's an easy way to indicate that you are interested in continuing to know them, it's social, polite and even charming at times, as why else would you want to know their name if you didn't want to contact them in the future because they're good people? So a few minutes, then ten minutes, then a half hour, you check if you know it, and ask if you don't. That's easier to remember for me, than to remember somebody's specific name.

I have kept a daily journal for most of my adult life, and it's more or less write only, I don't often go back and read it, and often cannot, my handwriting is so bad. But it's helpful on days when I need to write things out, and it's another useful habit in learning to remember names. At the end of the days when I was really training this skill, I made myself write down the names of everyone I had met that day. This was often difficult, and I remember getting headaches doing it at times, trying to write down the names of 20 or 30 people at a time. However, it helped set the expectation that I would remember everyone's names, and that reinforced the behaviors.

I did find that I developed chunking of names for lack of a better term. I would remember names in order of where I met them and maybe even which part of a room I was in. Not unlike a mind palace, but not something I really tried to do consciously. Just the idea of remembering I met Grace, Alice and Bob in that order at this party.

After that, just try and do your best for a couple months and it will improve without a doubt. People tell me they are bad at remembering names, and I ask them honestly, how hard do you try to remember them? Even a little bit of effort goes a very long way here.

What I will say is that I have difficulty learning somebody's name in two specific scenarios, beyond it being a bit harder as I get into my thirties now. If I am on zoom, it does not work at all the same. Their names are right there and so I never really feel the need to learn it and I can feel that I don't really know it. The second is that if I have to learn the name at the same as learning that it is a specific persons name, then I struggle with it. That is to say, if it's a name that is foreign to me, it's harder for me to remember, and so I have a habit of asking them to say it again right off the bat. I'm living in a different country now than before, and I can tell that I've gotten more used to the names and language with the time as it is easier for me to remember most of the people's names now. The trickiest ones for me at times are not putting together names that sound very similar together mentally but are in fact spelled and pronounced differently.

With that, that's all my tricks. I am pretty happy with it and it's served me pretty well over the years. I never turned into one of those freaks with the excel spreadsheets full of names and birthdays though ;) That's a step beyond me, and I'm just not socially diligent enough to keep that up long term yet. Good luck!

You really can’t see Trump abusing someone’s trust?

I don't think that is the issue. This article and your comment advocates that in lieu of more money, we throw more thought at it, in the name of balance. Weak! Put some thought into preventing the gaming of the system, yes, but keep the money flowing to getting the work done, not overthinking how to do the work.

Yes! "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" is not inspiring! Mamdani threw cash at the problem of snow on the streets and now, huh, suddenly there's not so much snow on the streets of NYC compared to previous blizzards, who would have thought.

Many of the solutions to these problems require money – running more buses, improving stop amenities, or upgrading signals – or the political will to take away street space for busways and transit lanes. But stop balancing can have a meaningful impact on these issues for a fraction of the price.

To me, this exemplifies a type of thinking that is endemic to policymakers in the US. We can tinker at the edges, we can use computers to optimize what we have, but the idea of using money and political will to change anything at all in a meaningful way is anathema, beyond the pale. Giving up before even getting started. Sure, optimize away, but don't expect me to be inspired by pushing papers around.

Makes sense. I started learning how to play Chess when I was ~30 and my tutors were just chess engines, game reviews on chess.com and whatever books I found interesting enough to get through. I have fun, and that's all I'll ever have, no titles or anything. The centipawn stuff makes sense now, but it took a while.

Yep, exactly. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out better ways for interpreting the evaluations of engines for https://www.schachzeit.com/en/openings/barnes-opening-with-d... and I ended up liking WDL much better than centipawns. A blunder defined in terms of decreasing your chance of winning by such and such percentage is, to me, a much better definition than a blunder losing such and such material. What does that mean? It makes sense to me now, but it took a long while.

Relatedly, there is an interesting thing that lc0 has been doing as well, where it takes the contempt concept even further, and can beat you with queens odd. https://lczero.org/blog/2024/12/the-leela-piece-odds-challen... It assumes it is better than you and that it shouldn't just give up because you might be up a knight, rook or even queen.