Ramblings from the REPL
This may be my favorite "Children of Time" book yet (and I really liked the first and second book).I'd say the biggest reason I enjoy science fiction is being exposed to new ideas. In book one of this series, I enjoyed imagining how a hunter spider species would evolve when imbued with a "brainiac-empathy" gene. In book two, I loved the idea of a central (Id) mind with a 8 distributed actuators…
Letterboxd There is a certain pacing here that, despite the plot having an anime level of miscommunication and stubbornness, still somehow works.When you consider how silly each individual element of this film is, you realize that it is actually masterful in how it combines its base elements into something this fun.Also, the ending. Lol. Left field ridiculous.
Damnit Google. I pay you $13.99 a month to not see ads. I have been doing this for over a decade. I have clearly indicated through every avenue that I can that I don't want to see "promoted" content from FIFA. Not only do I not care, but I consider them to be a deeply corrupt organization that I don't want to support. I have twiced ask you not to give me anything about FIFA and you just keep…
Two things really struck me from this book:I was impressed with how interested Franklin's father was in getting him into a profession that he was good at as well as suited for (enjoyed, to some degree at least). There were a lot of false starts, but Franklin was literally being asked and prodded from a very young age (8) to pick his profession. He started in grammar school, then transitioned to…
Roger Ebert once concluded that video games can't be art, later walking back (though never refuting) that claim as he admitted that he hadn't really engaged the medium.At the risk of repeating Ebert's mistake, I will Bayesian 40% go on the record as saying that LitRPG can't be art either. This is my first litRPG book.I think this is just about perfect travel reading. It is fast paced and funny, in…
Letterboxd This was quite fun.The voices in this film (especially Gaston's) are really great.It is a pre Hays Code movie and is starkly immoral next to the "coded" films that followed.The Hayes Codes were so effective that after some point you stop even thinking about the things you are not seeing in coded film. Walking back just a few years to a movie like this is striking. Tame by modern…
This was probably a lost war from the beginning. I think we did about as well as could be expected, but ultimately Sanderson taking over just didn't land.I think the biggest issue is that Sanderson's characters seem too similar. It's as if they are all siblings, with identical worldviews and internal voices. This was quite frustrating to me, as the characters are still defined by their actions,…
I picked up a Stillman & Birn 3.5" x 5.5"; small, pocketable, 48 pages.The plan is to do 4 to 6 drawings a week. At that pace, the notebook fills in 8 to 12 weeks. When it's done, I'll post the best 3 here.I'm motivated by what I see on /r/penandink, /r/urbansketchers, and to a limited degree /r/sketchdaily.I'm trying to keep this low stakes. Most of what goes in won't be good, and that's fine.…
I'm befuddled by the growing trend of minimalist/abstract book covers within sci-fi and fantasy. Many of these covers give no indication at all to the content of the book.A perusal of my local Barnes & Noble.I suppose the Foundation cover is illustrating psychohistory? Or is it just vaguely supposed to look like an atom with it's orbits? Is it just a sort of association thing because ASIMOV's name…
Note: I'm going to genericize any product that lets you pay for a trip in a self-driving car as a "Waymo" for the purpose of this article. As of this writing, Waymo is a division of Alphabet (who also own Google). Although Waymo (the company owned by Alphabet) is clearly leading in self-driving in the US, I am using the term "Waymo" to talk generically about self-summoned self-driving vehicles.I…
Letterboxd This film has some truly great setpieces, backgrounds, and design.It is in no way as endearing or charming as the original film. But the thing I appreciated the most is that this is a reflection of the environment, not the pig! Babe is just as moral, kind, and good in this film as he is in the previous. He retains his quiet dignity and kindness (and perhaps even strengthens it) despite…
Letterboxd This feels like the American inverse of "Perfect Days".The acting of the main characters is so unassumingly confident. No, that is the wrong word. It is so natural that it genuinely feels like you are watching a hidden camera of the journey. I am really impressed with both the skill of the actors as well as the eye of the director for capturing this.The other thing is the simple way the…
It is such a cool idea. But dammit, it just does not make any sense when you think about it. Or, to my mind, it only makes sense when physical reality is in some way subordinate to consciousness or something (waves hands). I think I understand that it is supposed to be in the same vibe as for instance the immense (horror?) of Cthulhu. Something that is so vast, so beyond mortal minds, that it…
Have you ever watched any of the latest "Fast & Furious" films? They are loud like this book is loud. There is so much more action, so many epic scenes, so many skin of our teeth moments. You become somewhat deafened by the cacophony of it all. Half of you appreciates that this is great cinematography (in book form), but the other half feels that it is all intense first order emotions. The…
Letterboxd So, evidently the BBC released this as 14 episodes where the first and last episodes are 60 minutes and the rest are 30 (60, 30*12, 60). Somehow though, the version I watched was condensed down to 8 episodes of 53 minutes each. So, by my math, some things must have been cut (possibly re-arranged) to make this kind of work out. I don't know, the whole thing is just deeply complicated,…
I created BoltRead as a 100% vibecoded app (I've never even looked at the code). The following is a personal retrospective on how this app development felt relative to other LLM assisted development I have done.I have tried vibe coding in at least 3 different ways.At first I wrote a system that had specs (markdown files) where there is a 1 to 1 mapping between each spec to a matching python…
tldr; The transcript of my Claude conversation.I did the Anthropic Original Performance Take Home on 2026-02-12 and succeeded in getting a runtime of 1157 cycles. I'm going to assume at this time (roughly a month later) that it is reasonable to talk about solutions to this problem. I am basically a startup-shaped programmer and have never needed to do any real performance programming, so I found…
Entirely enjoyable, though still a little bittersweet. It would have been wrong to ask Sanderson to continue the "Wheel of Time" in Jordan's style. I appreciate the quickening of the pace and the different renderings of the characters.It does feel different though. I think the best way I can state it is that Jordan feels "Third Person, over the shoulder" while Sanderson is more "First Person"…
I have used emacs for ~20 years (currently using spacemacs). Although I am very familiar with it, I have never really plumbed its depths. My "under the hood" usage of emacs does not go much beyond writing a few lines for a function to do some very specific thing I want in my editor. I would say I am one of those emacs users who principally uses emacs not because of its power, but because of its…
I did the Anthropic Original Performance Take Home last Thursday and succeeded in getting a runtime of 1157 cycles. I basically focused on optimizing/pruning the actual instructions initially, and then passed a large set of instructions to an LLM to pack and bit twiddle the actual program. I used Claude Code exclusively as an LLM.For reference, the best solution that an LLM alone is able to do was…
I did this months Jane Street Puzzle with LLM assistance (my name is on the list). It took just a smidgen more than 2 hours.About 25% of my time was spent just getting Claude to actually understand how to view the table. Vision models still don't seem good enough to make sense of tabular data (especially as an image). I had to hint it that the puzzle was 13x13, and that the example puzzle at the…
I have done two small vibecoding projects recently, and after reviewing the code that was generated for both of them I am struck by a single thought... I've never seen (human) code like this!I feel like LLMs tend to generate code that is locally good but has no coherent narrative or larger abstractions. It (mostly) gets the idea of encapsulating things in functions, but I almost feel like it does…
Letterboxd The film itself is great, I just don't care for the characters.The problem is I kind of know this guys shtick. I know that he likes characters that resort or revolve around murder; he just loves the idea. I just don't take any real pleasure watching characters explore "dark impulses" that much, I find it kinda boring.It kind of frustrates me, as I can clearly see that he has the skill…
Letterboxd This is no beekeeper.My main issue with this is the sound design was weak and the action just lacked kinetic energy. It tried to kind of do the nightclub scene from collateral, but just wasn't up to it.I'd say the biggest miss here is that no one acted as the straight man in our two main character's relationship. It might have been slightly more interesting if the young girl gets to act…
Letterboxd I think I may have overhyped this in my head upon seeing the preview, but I still enjoyed it. It was good, but it was kind of more of a reflection on Enlightenment than Grace, and I though this might be a film about the later.I really want to support small vignette stories like this. Some of the scenery was great.
If you told me this was one player's attempt to make a single work of fiction out of a few year D&D campaign, I would completely believe you. I'm not sure why it kind of works honestly. Perhaps it is just that it is so earnest and unabashedly straightforward in its definition of good vs evil? In the plot driving power of radiation and the mutations they engender? In the "hidden powers" of the…
My childhood gaming group has been playing (but has not completed) Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader.We noticed that the items mentioned on public facing wikis often seem outdated or just incorrect. So two of us, Warren and myself, decided to see if we could use a free weekend to vibecode a wiki derived directly from the game.In total, it took us about 5 hours to put together our own item wiki almost…
Ok, not really 5 stars (I rate that as "nothing could be improved", and this isn't perfect), but 5 stars if you have been following along and largely enjoying the series.The last 2 books have been a bit rough in my mind. I was simply floored by just how little happened in the previous book. Contrasted with this book, which had so many great scenes... it is just weird. I wish he had largely elided…
Letterboxd I left after the first act. Wasn't terrible, but I felt that I had effectively read the first 100 pages and decided I didn't want to finish this book.
It's interesting, because the actual physical detail (characters, surroundings, buildings, etc) are so bare that your mind's eye only visualizes the players most of the time. Kind of like one of those plays with no props, set pieces or character costumes. In a weird way, this let's you focus on just the personalities, without spending too much time thinking about the environment. I appreciate this…
Letterboxd It is just so dreadfully dark and dull. And the last act seems to last forever. I love the idea of focusing on the villains rather than batman, but although the acting is inspired, the actual character's core feels hollow.Have to give it credit to the sound design for including the labored breathing of the Penguing though, that was inspired.
Letterboxd Disney is really scraping bottom here. The writing in this film is just bad. This remind me of late term Daniel Craig Bond films, where he just goes from one random setpiece to another because some flimsy evidence connects the two.I think I (and I assume most of the audience) predicted basically the entire plot of this film in the first 5 minutes of it's runtime. Maybe they revealed too…
Letterboxd In some sense, it is really his wife that is the main driver in this film.I mean, maybe I am making too much of it, but it seems that she is the principal agent of the entire film.
Letterboxd I couldn't quite say why, but this movie felt a whole lot like "The Tree of Life (2011)". I guess it is another exploration (to some degree) of the notion of Grace. Interestingly, Grace in this film is embodied in a sort of naturalism/witchcraft.I also thought the mixing of a sort of magical surrealism into the story was well done.
Letterboxd I'm currently in St. Louis and so thought it would be fun to watch this. The musical numbers were good, and I was surprised that both "Clang Clang Clang goes the Trolley" (The Trolley Song) and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (of the same name) were from this film. Which I thought was fun.Weirdest parts:Also, Grandpa seemed to be the only fully functional/formed adult in the…
I just finished an entire book and I genuinely think almost nothing happened in it. I am now reading the reviews and noticing that many people say it is best to just skip this one entirely. I am too much of a completionist to do so, but in recommending this series I would advise anyone else to skip this and just read the online summaries for this one. It is almost entirely a book of just world…
This book perfectly hits what it aims for. It is a bit too "let's take a 90's New York cop show and set it fantasyland" for my taste, but you have to admit, it did a pretty damn good job of it.The packaging was very familiar to anyone watching broadcast tv in the 90's. Clean, efficient writing. Pacing was good. I was genuinely entertained and would certainly consider reading the next in this…
Letterboxd I wish I had someone with me who deeply appreciated this series. Watching it solo, I thought it had some surprisingly prescient things to say about the disconnect from reality, the multiple versions of yourself online, and the loss of humanity that might occur as people join the Wired (internet).I got these insights through my own experience, but I have been told that to (really) get…
Letterboxd This is one of those movies that I largely enjoyed because I think it might be reflective of a culture or lifestyle (Shanghai, single mother) that is very foreign to me.China, more than many places, is a country that is very difficult to get a "everyman on the street" read on. I think maybe something comes through in works like this, though maybe that is like judging American culture…
I genuinely wonder how Robert Jordan sketched out this book? The next book evidently runs concurrently to this one. So when he wrote this one did he do so as a basic "background material" for the next book? Did he plan to do this ahead of time or did he make the decision to do so when he realized he had a bunch of B plots that he needed to partially resolve before he got to the "big action" end of…
Letterboxd The soundtrack and some of the special effects are the only redeeming thing about this film. If I had to point a finger I would say the editor/cinematographer are most to blame. It's hard to describe a visual medium as noisy, but it is all I can think to describe this. Slow motion scenes to excess, character arcs that just occur with no explanation, plot holes that you could drive a…
I notice how much cleaner and professional most writing is becoming on the internet. I've also noticed that the average articles seems to have ballooned in size. Seems like every writer suddenly fell in love with emojied bulleted list.I suspect that the reason for this is that more and more people are using AI to guide their writting. I'm not criticing anyone for doing so, the LLM can almost…
Letterboxd A tight 90 minute thriller with no car chases and minimal action. Actually, there weren't even necessarily any "bad guys" in this film, depending on how much your adhere to Realpolitiks. Not to say that there weren't abhorrent characters, but they seemed to all be guided by differerrent interpretations of their reality.And the movie, despite being very short, actually gave you enough…
Letterboxd Felt like Napoleon Dynamite meets Sicario. Also kind of reminded me of Taken in the sense that things are being done that are so high visibility, and yet the world as a whole does not seem to react to them (just like in Taken's evidently lawless France).A kind of gross movie about boring people doing nonsensical things.I think the only character I actually liked was Benicio Del Toro's,…
If I did not love these characters like family, I would admit to myself that this is just not a very good book. For one thing, it is Mat'less, which is weak.We spend a whole whole lot of time in Egwen's power struggle as Amyrlin, which has it's moments. And I wonder if the notion of a ruler taking extraordinary wartime powers felt like a fresh idea at the time? I don't know, seems so common these…
I went to the Yasukuni Jinja Yushukan museum in Chiyoda City, Tokyo. Roughly (if I remember correctly) 1/2 of the exhibit is on pre WWI excursions, with the last 2 being WW1 and WW2.It is also a rather interesting museum if you want to hear the "other" view on the geopolitics leading to WWII. Unfortunately, these are not the sorts of conversations that are even remotely worth having on the…
Letterboxd I was in a bit of a mood in Shinjuku and just wanted something to relax to. I saw it at the 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku, which was a luxury theater on I believe the 17th floor of a tower. It was an interesting experience as people actually seemed to be hanging out in the lounge before the film. Popcorn and drinks were included (with refills) up to the start of the movie. I'm curious if…
I've read this before (twice), but this is genuinely a great book. I think few authors are as observant, critical, and yet still forgiving of human foibles as Jane Austen was. I probably last read this something like 15 years ago. One thing that I didn't remember from the book (relative to the film) was how long the scene at the end where Darcy and Elizabeth discuss their misunderstandings is. I…
I am actually relatively new to drinking coffee (I'm a tea man). With that said, I quite enjoyed Austin's coffee culture. I like the energy from having other people around you who are focused. I enjoy the pleasure of listening (ok, evesdropping) when two friends catch up. I appreciate the education of watching two businessman negotiate a preliminary deal.It has been more than a decade since I…
Letterboxd I.. I did not love this film.It is odd, I feel like the individual pieces (even up to entire scenes) are quite good. However, the whole is just less than its parts. What was our character's growth here? Who sacrificed what for whom? What big emotions were at play?I don't know man. I just couldn't figure out what Luthor's motivation even was here? Why was he so bent on this? Something…