any · textlog

wrote:

Recently hit 10+ years (cumulative) of being a software engineer. I must say, I enjoy senior level interviews much more than coding interviews.

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Being interviewed or interviewing?

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Yeah, got through some interviews earlier this week. Waiting on responses.

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i'm always anxious and i stutter when i get an interview, which lately has been none hence i have time to build things like this site

wrote:

Well I am starting a journey to learn LaTeX, took me time to get convinced on used it (I know) but let's see how it goes, again life showing me is never too late to learn something new

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We now support it here, see

wrote:

What are your favorite developer feeds? Personally, I am a fan of

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HN and Show HN

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Since you have an account maybe you can help us out by posting https://textlog.cc/about ? :D Here is the HN thread if you want to copy the title.

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HN, and some carefully picked r/Reddits. Can't stand .

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I'll toss in Alterslash which is more general tech, but always has something interesting.

wrote:

Q: What’s a dog’s favorite part of the opera? A: The ARRRRRRRRR-ia!

continued:

This joke also works with pirates.

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^\ / //o__o /\ / __/ \ \______\ / -ARF! \ / \ \----\ \ \_\_ \_\_

wrote:

A credit union wants to get their own data out of a vendor's online system. Vendor wants $160,000. I wrote a script with to download the data just as though a user would. It's going to run for about 6 weeks to download around 250k records and 70GB of images.

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you could split to buckets like alphanumerically and parallelize it if you don't want to wait that long. Probably need to launch a few instances but still cheaper lol.

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The slowness is intentional. I wanted to make it look more like a user doing it than a script so it doesn't set off any alarms. I have it waiting from 1 to 3 seconds between clicks to slow it down. :-) So far so good!

wrote:

having just spent a week camper-travelling Norway, hiking mountains and glaciers, swimming in fjords really put some things into perspective for me - I should take more vacations

wrote:

I always associate summer with the months June, July, August — thinking that end of August is end of summer — but no, 7th of August is actually summer midpoint, we’re in the middle now, not near the end.

wrote:

Hello, world!

wrote:

Coding is so passe. Dont feel like coding at all

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it's called prompting now. old man.

wrote:

hi from Augsburg

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hi! welcome :)

wrote:

The job market feels like it's been run over by a truck. What's the play here? Anything automated/streamlined (job platforms, LinkedIn, etc.) feels like a dead end. Messaging people, networking and so on seems like the only reasonable way, and that's a hustle all on its own.

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It's definitely about who you know. But it always has been, fbow.

wrote:

again. Was in the middle of some timeline experiments, sorry if it appears weird rn. www.githubstatus.com

wrote:

looking at the German public railway system (DB), I always wonder if the stereotypes of timeliness and precision were ever actually true. Surely someone must've figured out by now how off they are? These trains are always late and / or broken.

wrote:

Have a wonderful day.

wrote:

First post on textlog!

wrote:

I read Still trying to figure out the boundaries of these tools' strengths without outsourcing important thinking, problem-solving, and the collective building-up of a mental model of the systems we're developing. The shape of LLM tools as tools—fit for a purpose, ergonomic—is becoming clearer, and human patterns of behavior with them that do more harm than good are also becoming easier to recognize.

wrote:

I was contemplating pwc372, p2 and came up with “- 1+&/-/'(&'(?x)=x)@0 -1” (goal). Conceptually I like it, but maybe it can be simplified further?

wrote:

Bonnie Raitt stuck in my head, who, by some definition, is a nepo baby, but well before the term was coined. I think the problem is obv not family businesses, but a shrinking pool of opportunities for those without a prebuilt network to inherit (or buy).

continued:

This is another way to describe "increasing wealth inequality".

wrote:

Applied to an L5 software engineering role via e-mail and without any other contact I received back a bunch of questions that clearly look like they're aimed at L6 or even L7. Not sure what to do with that so I withdrew. Briefly considered answering them but was weirded out.

wrote:

Am in a beautiful national park right now, drinking with elks, but the lack of strong internet makes me nervous :(

wrote:

It was only yesterday that I clicked on a Translate button to read a Japanese post. Today I see a Chinese post with English translation right below. Beautiful stuff.

wrote:

is where all the linux fortunes get injected with new electrons, new spins, new universe fairy dust to have a second eternal life?

wrote:

A

n=27;s=[n]
while n!=1:
    n=n//2 if n%2==0 else 3*n+1;s.append(n)
for v in s[:15]:print(f"{v:>4} "+"█"*min(v//3,40))
print(f"{len(s)} steps, peak {max(s)}")

stdout length exceeded

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I had hit a throttle now. That’s a “subtle" way to tell me to slow down.

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time

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(\ (\ ( • •) ━∪∪━━━━

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I'm not an optimist, just a pessimist who's still proactive: I don't think things are going to get better, but I just can't talk myself into giving up yet.

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I'm in bed and cannot sleep

wrote:

How old is textlog?

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I arrived Seoul, now. Stay for 5 days.

wrote:

hi

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hi there ;) welcome

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moved to a new city recently and going to a Movie club meetup tonight. nervous cause I'm a huge introvert but I gotta make friends some way.

created a quiz:

Which planet has the shortest day?

continued:

We have quizzes! The syntax is:

Some question #quiz
Wrong answer
> Correct answer
Wrong answer

Optional revealed explanation text shown after choice

wrote:

"Everything worth doing is worth doing badly." Meditate even if you have the time, even if you can only do two minutes. Train even if you're tired and you're not gonna do it well. Start that project even if you're not ready. Don't wait for perfection.

wrote:

i love reading blog posts! reply with your blogs so i can subscribe to them

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not my blog but i recently discovered acko.net which i can recommend. awesome personal website

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That site makes me dizzy with all the animations and fly ins/outs.

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When I write I just add html files to the swiley.net folder in public.swiley.net. Sometimes I syndicate elsewhere (I was doing Substack for a while before Notes took over.)

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thechels.uk is mine, thanks :-)

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I recently wrote about why you

wrote:

I finally bit the bullet and have started to use dictation software more often, even outside of just my prompts. I really like it. Hopefully, computer use becomes much smoother soon. I would love to be able to control my computer with just my voice.

wrote:

whats the point of url shorteners in 2026

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Good for you. You must be one of the last holdouts against "QR all the things!".

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I think short urls are still memorable and good. My phone doesn't surrogate all of my recall.

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Short URLs are good. Memorable URLs are good. URLs spat out by URL shorteners are something entirely different.

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Ah, the randomly generated ones. Yeah, agreed.

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The longer the text you need to store, the bigger a QR code needs to be in order to scan reliably. Also, you might be more confident in being able to keep a short URL stable (it's already a step of indirection, so if you want to reorg your site you can just update where the short URL points to). But people don't really take care to maintain short URLs anyway, apparently.

wrote:

o/ bc im a old fart in a young body, i can only drink coffe at least 2 hours after waking up. So no until 10am

wrote:

Tweaking the algorithm. Really want posts like i.e genuinely long discussions, stay longer instead of getting burried away by newer posts.

continued:

I think it works now better.

wrote:

will go to university

wrote:

Is the IDE dead?

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Seems to be reinvented into something else.

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What is the exact definition of an IDE? JetBrain's products are as good as ever, in my opinion, but people have definitely made non-IDEs into big, hulking behemoths with tons of plugins. If anything, maybe "just an editor" is dead?

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I think they mean the transition that all IDE's are making towards an agentic interface, hiding the code completely as humans will not have to interact with it since the AI will be doing a better job at everything, even auditing it.

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Oh, I guess I'm not really up-to-date on what IDEs are doing. Good point.

wrote:

'wade in the water.' isn't this the challenge of being 'ahead'? so many of us are waist deep in the same sea, it's hard to see what's in front of us vs. what's behind us. then we see the yacht boys sail by with their new masters, splashing us in their wake. then we grumble amongs

continued:

then we grumble amongst ourselves about 'that was my idea,' then carry on.

wrote:

Took a little .

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Man, I LOVE naps! In fact, I mostly subsist on four or five 1-1/2 hour naps each day instead of one long over-night sleep period these days. I didn't set out to have a sleep schedule, but here I am. :-)

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Doing that would trigger my really quick, even not having a full night sleep puts me in the danger zone immediately.

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My whole life, if I get in more than 6 hours at a stretch, I'm sluggish and mentally out of it for hours.

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replied to(deleted account):

Oh, dear! I wasn't polyphasic before cats owned me. Are my furry overlords rubbing off on me? LOL

wrote:

Got a bunch of things to do, hate procrastination, any advice is welcome

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Make a list, then tackle each thing individually until it's done

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Gotta give it try, by now making a list is like the top of the list

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Determine what matters most and make a list of the no more than 7 things. Do one thing well at a time, top down. Reprioritise as you learn more. Notes:

If you half-arse a task and decide that'll do, it's evidence it wasn't the right priority. Learn.
Any sort of productivity, multi-tasking, app, solution type thing is a scam or a money grab and isn't needed.
People tend to remember 7 things well, but struggle with longer lists and particularly fail to remember things in the middle.

wrote:

It's Monday. Coffee is barely working and so am I.

wrote:

bill gates built microsoft by making computation cheaper faster and harder for government to restrain. now that he's a billionaire no longer dependent on the free market for his own success he's discovered the virtues of taxing the next wave of computation. 1995 gates would have called it a tax on innovation. classic pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you politics.

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These were exactly my thoughts reading about how he thinks we should “preserve” some jobs for people; I don’t remember him being an advocate of preserving the jobs of typists, draftsman, typesetters, and other clerks when his company was leading a prior digital revolution…

wrote:

Do you code in silence or do you listen to music? If so, what kind of music do you prefer? Personally, I prefer Synthwave, vaporwave or the occasional country.

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continued:

Oh, and I'm often listening to The Lot Radio or NTS livestreams, if the DJs are playing music compatible with working.

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You might like my online game ! :D

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oooh. will check it out, thanks!

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I can also recommend genre, very meditative but not too boring, with a little rhythm, perfect for deep concentration.

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I listen to about anything as I can easily tune out the vocals. Jazz, Boiler Room sets, , and are my current rotations.

wrote:

What is the simplest physical system capable of open-endedly creating new knowledge?

wrote:

Can really relate to

wrote:

Google Play

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for a moment I thought someone had published it 😂 but soon I hope we’ll have it on both iPhone and Android app stores. We’re in the process.

wrote:

I need to re wire my brain a bit. Last couple of weeks has been a bit harsh dealing with some issues I had with someone. I started to give it a go a pay a bit more attention to myself, is the second time I get therapy but for some reason this time feel harder.

wrote:

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you - Nobody - too? Then there's a pair of us! Dont tell! they'd banish us - you know! How dreary - to be - Somebody! How public - like a Frog - To tell your name - the livelong June - To an admiring Bog!

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lovely

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Nobody is perfect. I’m nobody.

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Yesterday upon the stair I saw a man who wasn't there He wasn't there again today How I wish he'd go away!

wrote:

While learning jj, I realize how Git habituated me into being ok with its unique jargon and prickly command line interface. Unlearning Git is refreshing.

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is just brilliant; it really feels like they’ve fixed all of the problems with git whilst at the same time remaining completely backwards compatible. The simpler interface, the universal undo, the reduced set of concepts — I’m a big fan

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Also, editing and rearranging commits like 3x5 notecards on your desk is tremendous. It makes using an SCM feel more like editing your work than lumbering forward.

wrote:

Sharing a link to my music blog: crusty-metallian.net Not a lot of content yet, it's a work in progress :)

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Big list of events you've attended! Definitely dump more photos when you find the time. I'm more of a casual Nu-Metal enjoyer myself, but I can also appreciate some of the classics.

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It's taken me 5 years to get a photo storage engine off the ground. I've got it now, so I now have to go back through time and get the photos up. AC/DC next Thursday!

wrote:

These days Ive been learning how to deal with guilt and feeling gulti about things I didn't cause. NGL is hard man, how do you start cntl-z your brains on that

wrote:

What's happening

wrote:

Had to take care of something for school. But now in bed with my book.

wrote:

I like the minimalism of this site, very well done imo. It is more engaging.

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Appreciate it, thank you!

wrote:

Well, this looks like a lovely place.

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hello! welcome :)

wrote:

I'm sooo late for work so time to lock in to catch up

continued:

The results of my simulation are bullocks but I believe I know why. Rerunning with the patch now. Fingers crossed!

continued:

Blasting this rn: My taste in music is abysmal but I enjoy it very much

continued:

Still running but already look deceptive. Fck that

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continued:

Nothing works ffs

wrote:

The live tab on the android app is interesting... How does it work? This is a test 🫣

continued:

Does it do some kind of polling? Is there some kind of notify like publisher subscriber? 🤔

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It’s using the /firehose endpoint. It’s an SSE endpoint publishing everything latest. Though I meant it to be used server-side, since it’s heavily rate-limited — up to 3 conns under the same network, but I can’t control how clients decide to use it so.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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continued:

Might just lift the limitation.

continued:

Lifted, that’s how clients want to use it then so be it! Should be fine. We’re nowhere near crashing the server from connections.

wrote:

Guess we're doing Halloween stuff on sale everywhere now 🎃

wrote:

i would choose x and the fediverse over this tbh

wrote:

So annoyed that reddit is gating read-access to it's threads. What's up with that?? (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ (thx ascii-art)

wrote:

one more step. just a moment. attention required! enable javascript and cookies to continue. verifying the security of your connection. your browsing activity has been paused. content unavailable in your region. 429 too many requests. 403 forbidden. connection has timed out.

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happy little moments

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Step back, sit down, and have a cup from the old 418.

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Thank you Cloudflare!

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The future is here. But instead of flying cars or holodeck, what you get is tracking cookies and captcha everywhere. Maybe someday you will need to have your rectum scanned by Google or Meta nee Facebook before your browser does a HTTP request.

wrote:

Cool idea congratulation's on the hope it picks up steam

wrote:

Microsoft Word Online (web version) is horrible.

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It was the only way to reproduce the authentic horrible experience of the offline version.

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🤣 Did not remember the offline version being this bad, but maybe it went downhill in the past 5 years I have not used it.

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I never used the online version, but the last time I used the offline version it already was a horrible experience. This was about 5 years ago, before I had moved entirely to Linux. It was so bad I downloaded a pirated version of some old MS Office 2007 Blue Edition to have something acceptable. I unironically prefer Libre Office.

wrote:

unicorn, n. - The purest and rarest cob, identified by a singular majestic kernel. Sightings can be found between Ogallala and Dubuque through summertide.

wrote:

apparently there is some filtering. can't say "hit*s with hand".

wrote:

today was a good day

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\ / _\/_ .-'-. //o\ _\/_ _ ___ __ _ --_ / \ _--_ __ __ _ | __/o\\ _ =-=-_=-=-_=-=_=-_= -=======- = =-=_=-=_,-'|"'""-|-,_ =- _=-=-_=- _=-= _--=====- _=-=_-_,-" | jgs=- =- =-= =- = - -===-

wrote:

We have 27 chickens right now, 18 of which are new this year and are just starting to lay in the last few weeks. I have collected 13 eggs today so far.

wrote:

What does a bean mean?

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Depends. Is it cool?

wrote:

╭─ Twitter ╭─ micro ┼─ Tumblr │ ├─ textlog « blogging » ┤ ╰─ Cohost (RIP) │ ╭─ Bear ╰─ normal ┼─ Motoroa ╰─

wrote:

Judgement, taste and quality were always precious skills. In the world of , I have become more aware of the fact that it is often hard to put in words why something is good, great or amazing - or just looks good, but is average. A lot of the professional content I see feels like most Netflix series. They have all the elements - but the overall experience is still meh. Quality is still hard to achieve.

wrote:

Hello everyone! Just testing this out!

wrote:

Anyone know how to get the projects view back on codex? It changed from project categorization to date categorization.

continued:

Nvm. There's a little bell icon on the top right of the sidebar which let's you switch between project and activity views.

wrote:

i keep open all day - the 3d pauses when the tab is out of focus, so i just get a ton of music i like without wasting cpu/gpu, and occassionally switch to the tab and play a little or chat if anyone's there.

wrote:

I really needed a quiet microblog. This looks like exactly what I'm looking for.

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Same. I really wish this platform would last a long time... I've seen so many cool initiatives get posted on HN, only to be taken offline a few months later.

wrote:

Experiences of life spring from the contrasts.

wrote:

Collected my helper functions to lozenge.el package, e.g. (◊duckduckgo "textlog") opens ddg. Lozenge is ◊ character. Others are (◊find-file), (◊grep), (◊github-search), (◊show-commit) etc.

wrote:

i'm trying to express through a math equation the relationship between power, number of people, corruption and time. corruption = (time in a position of power * power)/number of people who have power what do you think?

wrote:

I have an , a website that’s directly linked to an agent and modifies its source and deploys based on its users’ requests. With some guardrails like reject “delete all data” in its system prompt.

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ooh maybe I revive and add this feature but instead of being able to modify everything it would be limited to adding features to the game/world. And it’s the perfect domain, a site that’s been ~~entirely~~ mostly hallucinated.

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Would be interesting to see how it handles user suggestions that are in direct conflict with one another. ‘I want all “thing” to be text-aligned left’ with another user asking for text-aligned right. Does it just center justify and call it a day?

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Perhaps it can make an ask the audience appeal to decide one way or the other based on a consensus vote when its context starts to get too confusing or contradictory?

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My first request will be for the agent to delete all vendor specific css completely no matter what breaks. No -webkit- no -moz- no vendor specific css at all. What could possibly go wrong? 🫣

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warning: possible violence content
click to view anyway

ok too far. I'm SWATing this guy.

wrote:

hey peeps.

wrote:

what are the best midnight snacks?

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noooo. now I'm craving halva.

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Mine is homemade biltong.

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instant noodles. sue me.

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I am with you

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Cheese is always the richt choice. Regardless of the time of day.

wrote:

A lot of people write so much software to sandbox their AI agents. I say don't bother. Just give your agent its own non-admin local user account. It's easier and much more effective.

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I give my AI Full-Access. :p

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hacks into @swiley's machine, pulls all funds :p

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So it has full access to textlog!? ;)

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Locally only, remotely it would need to know my ssh login password, which I think it doesn't ;P

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I can’t trust it enough to give local access as well! Having a hard time to let go of control.

wrote:

let i=0;while(++i){process.stdout.write(i%80==0?'\n':Math.random()<0.5?'/':'\\')}

\\\//\/\\\\\\\///\///\\\\\//\///\/\/\\//\/\//\//\/\//\\/\///\\\\\\//\\\\\/\\\\/
\\/\\/\/\///\\\/\///\/\/////\\///\/\\/\\\//\\\/\///////\\\/\////\\\/\\\//\\/\//
\\//\\\\\/\\\/\///\\///\\//\\\\/\//\\\//\////\//\\\\////\\/\/\/////\//\\\//\///
\\/\/\\//\\///\/\\\//\/\/\\\///\/\\\/\\/\\\\/\\\\\\\\\\/\\//\/\\/\///\//\\\//\\
/\/\\\\/\/\\/\\/\\/\\\\\\/\\\/\\//////\/\//\\\//\//\//\\/\\\/\//\\\//\\\\\\\/\/
\\\///\////////\\/////\\//\/\///\\\\\////\/\\\\/\//\\/\/////\\\//\\/\/\\\\\////
\///\/\/////\//\////\\\/\\/////\\\////\//\\\\/\\\\//\\\///\\\\\\//\\////\//////
/\/////\\\\\\//\\/\/\///\////\/\\\///\\///\//\/\/\\\/\\/\\\\\\//\/\\\///\\/\/\\
…
\\/\//\\//\///\/\///\\\\/\//\/\\/\/\//\\/\/\/\\/\/\\/\\\\/\/////\\\///\\\\\//\\

wrote:

OK. I've translated the (correctness) requirements of LeetCode No.22 to Lean, and ask Claude Code to both implement a solution and prove it.

continued:

In the first attempt, Opus 4.7 successfully completed it and proved it. However, the solution is to enumerate all possible space and .filter out anything that doesn't qualify my definition, which is obviously not ideal (if cheating is too harsh).

continued:

I can't think of a good way to also prevent that kind of solutions and ended up prompting "please don't enumerate and filter". Opus 4.7 then reimplemented and proved the backtracking algorithm.

wrote:

Really glad to be using Haskell for work - especially in today's climate with agentic coding. Our team uses containers to keep our development environment consistent across team members, though, and most agent sandbox approaches want to either offload your work fully to the cloud or they want to sandbox the agent harness process itself. We're not ready for full cloud based development (yet?) and sandboxing just the agent doesn't work for us when the agent needs to run docker.

continued:

... because letting the agent run docker gives them a too-easy escape hatch from their sandbox. So we're currently stuck with using VMs. This turns out to be tricky but seems do-able. My current approach is to provision a VM image and use Incus for the execution. My main goal is to keep my current workflow of local/non-agent dev working seamlessly and share the source with the VM/agent.

continued:

This means sharing my working dirs with the agent VM but overlaying artifact dirs from VM-owned block devices so we don't take too big of an IO perf hit. I also don't want the agent to be able to git push so that means we need some quirky git config to rewrite origin paths and thread through some agent specific PATs ("thanks" GitHub) for read-only repo access. These ALSO need to be threaded through to the development containers - they need to clone private repos.

continued:

... in the end, this seems to work but I haven't lived with it for long. There are still some quality of life issues to work out, but I think it'll work out. At this point, I've removed all coding agents from my host - and that's nice.

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Curious, why does using Haskell make a difference here?

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It's tangential to the sandboxing topic, really. I started the first post with a broader intent in mind and then elaborated on the sandboxing setup I'm working on. For AI-assisted coding, though, it's nice because Haskell provides a lot of feedback earlier in the development process compared to lots of other languages. It tends to work once it compiles (obviously not all the time).

wrote:

I'm curious how do people start writing longer novels.. what determines the length of it? Like I have a story in mind but it feels like I'm "filling" details instead of communicating information.

wrote:

hmmm... what about geo hashtags? I'm in

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not sure what u mean.. hashtags cover that or do we need something else?

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heh, no I was just trying it out. errrmm... I was never on twitter, so I was just trying out the concept

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ah haha i thought u meant some feature to geo fence the posts, like twitter shows posts near your location. anyways welcome to the platform! :)

wrote:

Just finished reading The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee. I highly recommend it.

wrote:

Theory reuse > code reuse almost every time.

wrote:

hello, hello.

The quieter social microblogging platform.

Small by design

Be a good neighbour

What's next?

The quieter social microblogging platform.

Small by design

Be a good neighbour

What's next?

Any conversation