In addition to being a software developer, I'm also a little bit of a DIY handyman. Not a very good one - I'm not one to make things *look* good, just function well. But mostly, I just love tools. A while ago, I got Innocraftsman 's mini drill press . Note, this is a VERY small drill press, intended for precision work. I splurged and got the model with the brushless DC motor and the better belt.…
Huh. I've never really talked about lsim here. Strange since I'm fairly pleased with it. I made an allusion to it here , but didn't really talk about it. Hmm ... maybe it's because it's a pretty niche project - of no particular use to anybody except me. HAH! Like that's ever stopped me. LSIM Lsim is a hardware logic simulator. You specify a set of devices, like NAND gates, latches, LEDs, and…
Happy TDOV . Be an ally .
There's a ... "content creator"? That I like. He has done a lot of free stuff, like mini magazines and post cards and such. I like his sense of humor and his creativity. (I even had one of my awesome artworks in one of his awesome zines.) He lifted my and my wife's spirits when COVID was scary. This is not Internet stuff. It's actual paper. At one point, he was putting his zine into subway trains…
I'm a fan of language REPLs (Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop). These are interactive programs that let you experiment with the language. For example, running the Python REPL let's you enter Python code interactively and get immediate output. No edit/compile/run cycle. REPLs are useful for experimenting with language features, exploring APIs, reproducing bugs, etc. But I'm a C programmer, and C doesn't…
Gabriel's horn is not a paradox. The "Gabriel's horn paradox" (sometimes called "the painter's paradox") is called a paradox because the result feels contradictory. I think I can explain it in a way that is intuitive; the feeling of contradiction will disappear. This post assumes you already have an understanding of the paradox and the proof that Gabriel's horn has a finite volume and an infinite…
LLMs sure seem to reason. They'll show, step-by-step, how they reach a conclusion. However, there are two things to keep in mind: When it shows you the reasoning in a step-by-step way, that is there for your benefit. It is not a description of a linear train of thought by the LLM. LLMs typically do their analysis of input basically in one pass. Its analysis is largely pattern matching, not linear…
In my previous post , I described an experiment in which I had Claude.ai use its new web searching capability to become a news curator for me. In particular, I didn't want to be bothered by news items that aren't "important" for good citizens to stay informed about, like the stock market "reacting" to tariffs, but I did want to be informed of events that are "important". I thought it was working…
UPDATE : The experiment was a failure. I'll post an update. Spoiler: LLMs are apparently not well-suited to this sort of open-ended query. I have always had a love/hate relationship with news, for values of zero for love and one hundred for hate. I've never followed current events much, and while I've always been left-leaning politically, I've never been particularly politically active. This…
I used to be an Apple user, and I liked Apple's mail client. I also work for a company that standardized on Outlook. Over the years, I came to like Outlook just fine. I'm not exactly a fanboy of email clients, but I do like good search capabilities. Now that I've moved my personal laptop to Windows, I needed to choose an email client. Outlook was a big disappointment , and after a few false…
Even though I've never really gotten that much into online security, I found this article interesting: https://www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/issue_121_the_slow_death_of_ocsp Favorite line (emphasis mine): And just like that, OCSP, a technology that we never managed to get to work properly after twenty-five years of not really wanting to , is as good as dead.
Claude saves me time and effort on an almost daily basis. And, being human, I thank it. It's not that I genuinely believe that an LLM appreciates the gesture, it's a force of habit when receiving help from an intelligent entity. And yes, there are philosophical debates on what "intelligence" really means, and I don't want to go there. Claude acts intelligent and that's good enough to trigger my…
I'm working on a non-trivial bit of C programming, and I decided to externally modularize three parts of it as potentially reusable components: err - error-handling module. hmap - hash map module. cfg - configuration file loader module. All three are intend to be simple and small. Note that "err" has no external dependencies, "hmap" leverages "err" but includes a copy of it in its repo, and "cfg"…
My love affair with Claude.ai continues. I don't actually use it much for coding. Code is my hobby, I don't want much help doing that. (Although here's an example where I did ask it to write a function: I couldn't remember how to write variadic functions, but I wanted one for error reporting with a printf-style interface. I've done it years ago and couldn't remember how. I didn't feel like…
This should be short. I've been writing some code and decided to see if it was C99 compliant. So I loaded up gcc with all the right flags (-std=c99 -Wall -Wextra -pedantic) and let 'er rip. Huh? What do you mean strdup() is implicitly defined? I'm including string.h! Well, fancy that. Learn something new every day. The standard C library has a number of useful function, like fopen(), strlen(), and…
As my millions of readers have noticed, I like Claude.ai . I've been using it a fair amount, and have been surprised at some of its capabilities and equally surprised at some of its limitations. TWO THOUGHTS AT ONCE Yesterday, I saw a limitation that I already had a hint of. Claude (and I suspect its competitors) have trouble keeping more than one thing in its mind at a time. In this recent…
As my previous blog post indicated, I'm learning Python. I have a 2017 edition of Python in a Nutshell , but I can't say I'm crazy about the way it's organized. For one thing, I don't think learning a lot of version 2 stuff is what I need. Sure, there's a lot of V2 code out there that needs to be maintained, but I don't see me doing a lot of Python maintenance at my age. Anyway, I've been leaning…
Those who know me may want to sit down for this. It will come as a shock that I have decided to enter the 21st century and learn Python. I know, I feel like some kind of traitor. But it's time to face facts: while reports of Perl's death are greatly exaggerated; clearly, the only people writing *new* Perl code are dinosaurs like me. Anyway, this post is NOT a Perl programmer's guide to Python. It…
It's not unusual for me to create a shell script to test networking software, and to have it automatically run tcpdump in the background while the test runs. Generally I do this "just in case something gets weird," so I usually don't pay much attention to the capture. The other day I was testing my new " raw_send " tool, and my test script consisted of: INTFC=em1 tcpdump -i $INTFC -w…
I've been thinking a lot recently about code maintainability, including scripts. I write a lot of shell scripts, usually restricting myself to Bourne shell features, not GNU Bash extensions. I also write a lot of Perl scripts, mostly because I'm a thousand years old, and back then, Perl was the state of the scripting art. Anyway, it's not unusual for me to write a shell script that invokes Perl to…
This is another of those things that I've always known I should just sit down and learn but never did: what's the difference between SIGINT and SIGTERM? I knew that one of them corresponded to control-c, and the other corresponded to the kill command's default signal, but I always treated them the same, so I never learned which was which. SIGINT (2) - User interrupt signal, typically sent by…
So, my old MacBook Air finally became unusable as my primary machine (the screen backlight burned out, possibly due to my having dumped a can of Diet Coke onto it). I can still VNC to it, so it will continue life as a "headless" Mac, but I needed a new laptop. Based on my satisfaction with my work system, which is Windows and WSL2, I decided to go that route. But I didn't want to go with Office…
One of my favorite YouTubers, Tom Scott , has an email list that he posts to periodically listing things that interest him. His latest one pointed to downpour.games which makes it easy to create simple games (Tom called them "interactive story games"). Here's an example to get the idea: https://downpour.games/~holly/where-s-madeleine While the games can be played on a laptop, you need to use the…
I have always been fond of the Emerson quote, "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". So, I was a little dismayed to discover that I had been misinterpreting his statement. He was referring to temporal consistency, while I assumed spatial. Emerson thought that if I proclaim some belief or opinion today, and encounter some new information or insight tomorrow, it is small-minded of…
Sorry, if you're bored of my fascination with LLMs, you can skip this one. I've been using Claude a fair amount for non-coding Q&A, and I've noticed that it produces clever / creative phrasing more often than ChatGPT. For example, I asked it "Is there any hope to talk our way out of this racism? Or is tribalism too deeply engrained in the human psyche?" Within its response was the line: The moral…