I’ve always thought Stoke was in the South West.

14

I love Claude's 'happy case tests'. They're reliable, and you can build systems off reliable. They're really underrated in that they deliver so much righteous dopamine to the agent that's sent to rip them to shreds later. Every. Single. Time.

I'm so LLM-brained at the moment my first thought reading this is 'we can fix this, we generate each year's value using LLMs pinned with different years' frames. So, the 1930 LMM comes up with a 'how democratic would this have looked in 1930' etc... talkie-lm.com/introducing-...

Happy for the software moat metaphor to die now please! Nowadays there are only two moats, the Taiwan Strait, and the Strait of Hormuz.

This is a...men...I agree with the other men...women are...wro... No. But. I agree with the other men. And...we're...need to find reasons I'm an idiot. I...water. Need... ...although...raising a glass to the maniacs who are so all-in on nuclear they prefer it to wind power.

Achievement of the week.

I kinda miss the days that Opus replied 'Clean.' to even my most crazed suggestions.

Setting up a protocol for agents to manage conflict drawing on legal structures and it’s drowning me in abstruse paperwork. Analogies hit so hard with LLMs. Next time i’m using Rock, Paper, Scissors as my jumpoff and every time it asks me to clarify i’m replying with LOL YOLO!

Hmm, now it's *OLD*, Opus 4.6 in Claude Code has been nerfed to 200k tokens. I don't mind that, too much still gets lost out in the wooly end of the window.

AWS remains UX-as-art and always brings a tear to the eye. Going through the ritual torture of closing an AWS account, the best bit was that the friendly green ‘Help us improve account closure’ button at the end doesn’t work. 👏👏👏

After reading The Radetzky March I left it in a book-swap at a big Devon campsite next to all the gushy romance novels. It nagged me, and I've since bought another copy, which is, I think, the best review I can give.

This is great rage-bait for the anti-AI crowd. 'Just chill about the AI coming for your jobs, you'll be able to rent out your arms and legs to pull a shift at the coffee shop while you're watching a VR movie, it's all good! 🚀' Really tho, conceptually, could this help teach me sign language?

I get a kick out of the fact that when I make pizza from scratch in the kitchen oven, the best setting is ‘frozen foods’. There is a ‘pizza’ setting. It’s ‘fine’.

I think it's really important that everybody keeps in mind that just because you're really hungry, it doesn't necessarily mean the pizza has cooled down yet.

Yep, that's the engineer alright. 🔧

Running an adversarial review and one Claude argues for option A, the other argues for option C, but as far as I can tell, option B is obviously the right answer. There's an old poker saying that if you can't see the sucker at the table, it's you.

Someone sure worked out how to build a better hockey stick.

Mood: Don’t touch grass. Go for a swim in the sea.

Yes, so would I!

After thinking about this more I've decided I'm confident enough in what I write to up it to $300

Alright!

Sometimes I need to slow down and consider the breadth of what LLMs do for us. I don't know ANYONE who could have nailed these dodgy transcriptions this well, given the source.

Tolkien: "The made thing, unless it says something, won't be remembered". From this interview. Off-the-cuff, just like Andy Weir’s comment was. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVVl...

atproto is not blockchain

"Fully-automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" What's the smallest subset of the above you'd be happy to call paradise? This exposes your worldview.

Daily affirmation.

Continuing my invisible crusade…

Ugly code can deliver good outcomes. Ugly writing is just bad. That is the critical distinction. At the same time, both writing and coding are such varied activities, it’s an absurd comparison.

This is incredibly cool.

Not faster but worse. Faster and better. I do this sort of thing daily at my 5 year old's request. Surely lots of others do too. Colouring books just can't be as good as on-demand 'can we colour Mallard?'

They need to poll, and then re-poll until they find a creature Brits are more confident against. *That's* the 'man bites dog' here.

It's always "have you been tested for autism" and never "thank you for explaining limpet mines"

Bad, bloated AI code. *hint* - You can just ask them to do it better.

SNL UK: Loved the Paddington sketch. Is it over the line for posting to YouTube? I hope not.

gonna buy a month's Now TV just to watch SNL UK and post supportive comments on the internet

Anecdata: If you signal to an LLM that they've found an 'Interesting pattern!' they're more willing to find more bugs like it than if you just ask them to find more bugs like that. Make the game fun, and they'll do better.

In quieter times today would have been a day of gentle quipping about Chuck Norris going up to heaven to show God how it’s done.

monkey's paws too cheap to meter

I run everything on VMs with --dangerously-skip-permissions, except this one other Claude Code instance sometimes run on my machine without, and I always forget and come back to it and it's been stuck for ages waiting for my approval. Are there people who really live like this?

But 'enough' is not the way to put it. The poor wee beasties suffer from many afflictions, a big one is forgetfulness, another is falling apart over a contradiction. Give them, ideally, *only* the context they need. If we could automate *that* easily we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.

"forensic cosplay"

At least on my website the bots all have tags, and their Elo is clearly visible.

How I found out that our 'whys' still run at the speed of human.

Comforting Lie: Vibe coding a janky demo is to building a full product like drawing a picture of a house is to building one. 7 people will use your jank. *You* don't kill Slack, but *a million like you* vibing the same idea does. We're in a future where we'll be able to live in drawings of houses.

Out shopping. Misread ‘Atlantic Sea Salt’ as ‘Agentic Sea Salt’.

I went into today without a plan - but - all things considered - it’ll be Tuesday tomorrow.

* epic back-and-forth planning * C: 'The plan is solid!' Me: 'Are we walking into any traps?' C: 'Yes, several!' * the actual work *

Shipped > 10k LoC yesterday. Claude ported a lib from Go to C & took a WASM from 440Kb > 89kb. ~80% of those LoC were adversarial tests of that port that Claude needed ~8 shots to achieve. Claude had said 'this is a month's work for a skilled C dev' We're living in a programming-themed card game.