I've largely got out of the habit of posting on social media to make number go up, but it feels somewhere between appropriate and darkly ironic to do that for my review of @add-hawk.bsky.social's new book, "The Score". drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-be-...

Many LM applications may be formulated as text generation conditional on some (Boolean) constraint. Generate a… - Python program that passes a test suite. - PDDL plan that satisfies a goal. - CoT trajectory that yields a positive reward. The list goes on… How can we efficiently satisfy these? 🧵👇

Post a photo you took with no context to bring some zen to the timeline

Shrinkray has very sensible rules that apply well to languages it has no specific knowledge of -- we make a *lot* of use of this and it's brilliant! -- and it scales near-linearly to the number of cores. If you need a reducer, I highly recommend it! Thanks @drmaciver.bsky.social!

I wrote some notes on how LLMs work, aimed at non-programmers, that you might find interesting. notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2025-0... Feedback, corrections, and follow-on questions very welcome.

Every time you wonder how something in Hypothesis works, you can usually reverse engineer it from the following design logic: 1. What's the obvious, natural, way to do it. 2. What are the problems with that? 3. Can those be fixed? Not without doing something ridiculous and unreasonable. 4. Do that.

@defenderofbasic.bsky.social I think that (possibly in a few minutes) this message is going to show up in your search.

Something I very much enjoy on discord is when one of us memes the others into trying ridiculous exercises. e.g. a while back we had a conversation about whether it was easy to stand on one leg with your eyes closed (it's not) and we had like a dozen people going "Surely it is..." and trying it.

I enjoyed the last threadapalooza I did, so I think I'll do another one or two in December. They're a good way of drawing out thoughts about topics, and I've got a couple of concepts that I'm trying to figure out how to articulate better. Current candidate threadapalooza topics:

Are there any academics you're completionist about reading their papers? e.g. you've got a google scholar alert that tells you when they've got a new paper out and always read it when they do.

I thought I was pretty good at self massage, but I'm sortof blown away at how effective this really simple technique that I didn't know is at relaxing me. www.youtube.com/shorts/3fxEU...

Absolutely go fuck yourself, duo.

x.com/DRMacIver/st... This one isn't my top tweet of all time, it's only my tenth most quoted tweet of all time, but it probably is my best tweet of all time.

I posted this on discord and now we're all talking about how great animals are and all the animal species we like.

Korea Expert here. I’ll explain what’s going on over there because the Orient can be confusing to Westerners. In Korea, there is a concept known as “the law.” (법) This is a set of rules which are enforced to encourage prosocial behavior and ensure stability which leaders aren’t allowed to break.

One peril of too much philosophy is that if someone asks "Do you know X?" it's very easy to get into a spiral of "What even is knowledge??"

When an astute observation becomes a named law, it ceases to be a good observation.

If I had a nickel for every time I've invented a genuine improvement to binary search (for a specific application) I'd... Have two nickels. But it's weird that it's happened twice. notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2024-1... notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2019-0...

Bluesky really needs a per-account "turn off reposts from this account" feature like Twitter has. Or does it have one and I'm missing it?

Right, it's December 1st, and I said I'd do a 100 post thread on here instead of Twitter for Threadapalooza this year... but also it's late and I don't have much energy left, so here's the start of one: 1. This will be a thread about running an Internet community.

Tentatively I think I will be doing my threadapalooza thread on running communities on the internet.

You've probably seen it in the screenshot internet because everyone has at this point. My brother was complaining that his friends keep posting it on Facebook. x.com/DRMacIver/st...

The point is that I'm suspicious of the people who present this as an obvious issue. I tend to think of them as extremists. I particularly don't like the ones who ascribe sinister motivations to people on the other extreme, yet ignore the rest of us entirely.

I feel conflicted about it. Don't you? When I'm working from home there's a lot that's gained, and there's a lot that's lost. There are bits of my job that work as well or better remotely, there are bits that suck when done remotely...

drmaciver.substack.com/p/meditation... I guess if I'm here I might as well post newsletters here as I write them. This one's weird. It's of that rambling type where probably either people will really like it or it doesn't make sense to anyone but me.

threadapalooza 2024: not just for twitter dot com! do 100-tweet length thread on a website near U in December!

OK one thing that might keep me here for a bit is that @tasshin.com wants me to do threadapalooza and I don't want to do it on Twitter this year, so I'll commit to doing it here.

It's interesting how little an idea you can have of what someone looks like from photos (he says from behind his fuzzy blanket). People who I haven't met look totally different every time their profile pic changes. In contrast, if we've met in person every picture looks like a picture of you.

Hello

Humanities people should really learn at least one STEM subject so that they can actually properly grasp that abstraction depth is a thing that really exists and not everything is about near-universal human experiences.

the problem i have with "humanities teaches you empathy, unlike stem" is that i live in the uk i'm ruled by a bunch of landlords who can't use a computer, sure, but they sure can quote the classics in the original latin

Babe, is everything ok? You’ve hardly posted on your 9 different social media accounts where you are mutuals with the exact same 200 people

I think I'd like to try using bluesky as well as mastodon, but I need to figure out some way to segment by topic so I don't end up having massive "oh no where do I poast??". The natural split seems to be that tech twitter have moved to mastodon and unhinged therapy twitter to here.

TBH even though I dislike it significantly more on a technical level, I'm probably going to end up mostly on Mastodon rather than here if I don't abandon the entire format.

It felt appropriate to screenshot this and post it somewhere, so here you go.

Substack Notes has a really amazingly good feature that I've not seen anywhere else and want everyone else in this space to copy, which is that it gives you a feed of the posts of people who follow you as well as one of those you follow.

Twitter is really bad at the moment and everyone seems to be getting their account suspended, so I guess I'm going to give this place another try. I'm not really wildly optimistic though, I do think maybe Twitter-likes have run their course.

Your job as a staff+ engineer is to help the earlier-in-career engineers make funnier mistakes than you did.

Anyway, I haven't really figured out what to post here, but past experience is that the easiest way to figure that out is to start conversations with other people. (Last time I did this I think I accidentally started/accelerated a scene)

Apparently bluesky doesn't have one of the most important Twitter features: The ability to turn off reposts from an account. This means I'll be way more aggressive about unfollowing here. Sorry.

Hello? Testing, testing, is this thing on?