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Like most folks, I’ve been using The Models 1 to write code now for the better part of a year. My process has changed over the course of the last few months, partly because the models are getting better at executing on the tasks I set them, but mostly because the gap between what the models enable and the systems for controlling context we all live in is growing, and growing at an…
It was time. I look weird. My face is very short.
✅ You open the PR. You blanch at the 10,000-line diff. You leave a fussy comment, so everyone knows you’re Paying Attention. You click Approve; the green checkmark appears. Everything keeps trundling along. The ritual is complete. The phrase “code review” flatters the practice. In most organizations it means little more than ritualized exposure to a textual delta followed by…
Well, here we go again. Let’s see if the meta fiddling has satisfied my weird yak-shaving neurosis and if I can actually write something this time. I’ve decided that I need to use Emacs, so I … use Emacs, with hugo (via ox-hugo ) and Cloudflare Workers for hosting. We’ll see if I can keep it up.
OK, So Now What I was going to try and finish this, but … naw.
How Do We Define “The OS”, Anyway? I used to get pretty stroppy about things like Pop! OS or Elementary , both of which are just re-skinned Ubuntu, but from a this blog perspective, I’ll just say that the “OS” is the stack from kernel to UI that serves as the functional basis for providing services and applications for getting things done. In that sense, I think…
First Things First The most important thing to keep in mind is that this is a desktop computer, not a laptop. I don’t like laptops – while the engineering of modern laptops is pretty remarkable, you spend so much of your engineering budget on the compromises inherent in the form factor, to enable a use case that I don’t care about (mobility). So, I’m sure this whole…
Linux, I Guess? So for reasons that defy explanation, I have decided that I need to live on Linux, or at least, make a go of it. I have been a Mac user almost exclusively for decades, but as I have aged, my asks of a computer have largely shriveled down to Emacs, and a web browser. I still appreciate the craft of a lot of the software I use on the Mac; and I still think that Apple’s hardware…
Ok, so in part one we got the first part of the first day of last year’s Advent of Code puzzle working in Haskell. This post will be an exploration of the second part. Each day of the Advent of Code has a puzzle with two parts; usually the second part will be a twist on the first part; sometimes, it’s simply a scale issue, where the first part solution was naive, and you can leave your…
I’m going to try and complete the Advent of Code puzzles this year, in Haskell, without bouncing off of those stupid interpreter problems that have always driven me away in the past. Encouraged by a fellow poster on lobste.rs , I’m going to try and blog my attempt here. I don’t have a lot of extra time, but I would like to be better at blogging, and also at Haskell, so…
I got stoned and this is my movie review. Q : Why does Mahershala Ali want to kill Alita? Q : Who is Dr Ito and why do they all like him so much? Q : The whole “get a pro contract by racing in this open and then somehow leverage that pro career into … magic beans?” plan seems like a pretty convoluted way to move the plot forward? Q : Who’s doing the productive labour in…
I didn’t really know anything about this, going in. It was tonally all over the map; the performances were good, it was competently put together. The pure aesthetics of watching Henry Golding and Blake Lively interact was pretty great; but at the end of the day, the plot was stupid, the pacing weird, and the tone veered too radically between farce and thriller to work for me. Any time you…
There is a lot that I should like about this movie: Jason Statham (including a hilariously unnecessary shot of his eight? 10? 12? pack); the strong international cast (although I can’t see Cliff Curtis and not get the residual Once Were Warriors creeps); it’s a Chinese/US coproduction, with all of the bi-cultural rah-rah silliness that that entails; the titular creature is a GIANT…
Today, in the normal course of doing my job, I encountered a situation that caused the JVM to blow up, and, being the friendly and helpful piece of software that it is, it emitted 28,092 lines of stack trace. That’s twenty-eight thousand lines, totalling 2.2 megabytes worth. But, thankfully, the JVM doesn’t do tail-call elimination, so none of those super useful stack frames could…
It never ends. Now, I’m trying a new blog generator: Athena . There is a way in which this blog is less a blog and more of bikeshedding therapy. I admit that. This new thing is nicer, because it does less, and it outputs to Tufte CSS , which definitely makes my semiliterate babbling about whatever nonsense at least look like someone cared. Otherwise, eh. I wonder if I should store my posts…
Linux = For perfectly valid reasons, I need to install Linux on my main computer. As this is a bog-standard Intel PC, of course the kernel on the latest “CentOS” distribution is too old to work. Exotica like Intel’s X99 chipset and Intel’s 5930k processor are apparently too weird for CentOS, because, software, I guess? There’s doubtless some stupid song and dance you…
I recently found myself wanting to add Canadian holidays to my (OS X) calendar. Apple doesn’t make this easy; as you have to switch your primary region to switch calendars, that’s probably a step too far for me. It’d be nice to have a curated, updated list of holidays for both the US and Canada (to be reminded to wish friends and family a happy True Thanksgiving and False…
Add to the A bucket: Babadook (also probably cracks my top ten) Add to the B bucket: ‘71 Original here .
In grade order; otherwise, not ordered (IOW, Birdman is not sorted higher than Frank in any way other than orthographically) My top five: Boyhood Whiplash Only Lovers Left Alive Calvary Under The Skin Just on the outside, looking in: Frank John Wick Guardians Of The Galaxy Ida Edge Of Tomorrow It was, in my opinion, a very, very good year. A Birdman + Blue Ruin + Boyhood + Calvary + Edge of…
So I finished The Peripheral , which took a little time to get going but really paid off in the end. I am aware that there are alternate opinions, but I am a big faan of Gibson, not just as a futurist, a calling at which he is perhaps singularly excellent, but as a prose stylist; his tight sentences and utterly ridiculous yet totally believable dialog call to mind obviously Dashiell Hammett, among…
Roko’s Basilisk 1 is a strange LessWrong belief paralleling Pascal’s Wager. As of today 2 , however, I am much less worried. Figure 1: Robots gonna robot It’s wonderfully insane ↩︎ h/t to Matt Phillips ↩︎
And this really makes me sad. It does not appear that picture quality is a driving factor in anybody’s choices in stand-alone (e.g. not projector) televisions, so the market has dictated that paying less money for better PQ is worse than paying more for crappier quality, along with “Smart Apps” and “3D” and, worst of all, 4K. I want a plasma. Technically, I want a new…
My contempt for Unix is vast, measureless, perhaps finite but certainly unbounded, but today, I hate most that basename won’t operate on stdin. That’s just … I mean, it’s … isn’t this the whole point ? I’m cooking along building up a command pipeline and some pedantic little shit decides that oh no, stdin is too pedestrian, you need to pass me arguments…
My flight this morning was bumped from a large aircraft to a smaller one; as a result, many people including myself were moved from our chosen seats to others. This annoyance (the flight is 5 1/2 hours, which is not insignificant for some but minor for others) means that I am seated at the window. I look forward to taking a slo-mo of the takeoff and landing, but I do prefer the aisle, as I am tall…
Fed up with inconsistent results, I spent the morning fiddling with my coffee apparatus. I have come to the following conclusions: Making good coffee is not difficult per se ; however, mixing imperial units of liquid volume and metric units of mass is a pain in the ass. I use a Chemex 8-cup coffee maker (with official Chemex™ filters, natch); a Capresso burr grinder ; an electric kettle and, now…
Every six months or so I get the urge to restart blogging. I am doing so yet again. We’ll see how long this urge lasts. Nothing interesting is going on in here at the moment. I’m trying to keep everything as simple as possible so I can switch to Hakyll when I’m more comfortable with arrows and comonads and whatnot. For the time being, I’m using a minimal Jekyll…
There are many blogs. This one is mine. My name is James. I live in Toronto, Ontario with my family, where I write software and play the guitar, badly (although I’m getting better!) Born in San Diego, California, I’ve moved around a lot, having put in time in Northern Virginia, the suburbs of Boston, Chicago, Minnesota, and back to California, before moving up here and becoming a…