What is this website facade of a "release". Just release a torrent already.

This looks like a pretty neat inference ready machine vision camera, and which isn't horrendously expensive. Not cheap, but also not "contact us for a price". shop.luxonis.com/products/oak...

today was frustrating 5 hours of debugging where in the system is preventing my LED strip from lighting up. and the answer from that 5 hours is, everything looks correct, and i have no idea.

why is every platform adding games. like netflix has games, reddit has games, and now even fucking linkedin has games. like who goes "i want to play a game" and then thinks, oh, I know, I'll expose myself the soul destruction of opening linkedin?

You know, I bitch a lot LLMs for coding. Yet, occassionally it's brilliant. It's a very different mode to coding, instead it's being an ADHD manager with a tight feedback loop.

God damn the obsession with companies spamming their brand and logo on products but not showing it on product images.

A dragonfly came in to investigate my project

Are you fucking kidding me google?

A reasonably good summary of OpenAI deals which have caused RAM module pricing to explode www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-alt...

May have to do Ombudsman complaint about the road-side saliva drug testing roll out. Driving impaired is a crime and bad news. Don't do it! But these tests detect historical presence and don't have enough specificity to be anything but population-level surveillance of drug use.

I find I'm spending a lot more time on Bluesky. The only downside is it's very exposed to US politics, but it's easy to mute. Facebook is full of idiots and the website is completely unusuable. Reddit's signal has plunged off a cliff recently. X is dead to me.

I sure do love when I wake up ready to get back into something I was in the middle of doing, only to find Windows 11 has updated and nuked my desktop context.

And lest people think I just complain - after my refactor, it helped me pinpoint a non-trivial bug I introduced! They are great at being a kick in the pants when you get stuck due to your own preconceptions about code behaviour.

Instead of generative models, we need destructive models.

Unravelling the mess of another LLM experiment. I would probably fire someone that regularly shipped code like what Codex 5.1 produces. Now refactoring it into something that is more reusable, more understandable, and crucially, deletes about 80% of the slop code.

I was once CTO of startup where someone deleted the production database over Christmas. We restored from a backup and later bolted on access control even though the DB at the time didn't support it.

Browser/js is fun for a prototype, but would be non-trivial for interacting with the embedded library, so I made an SDL app. This links against the code that would run embedded and is a closer simulation to the hardware.

Coding with cutting edge LLMs is like a constant yoyo between "wait, it can actually do that?" and "why the fuck am arguing with an idiot instead of writing code?"

I got a second hand drill press from a friend, so I decided to make a trolley stand from left over shed framing material.

I sometimes wonder if some of the unhinged anti-AI people are actually bots by Elon to keep AI researchers on X.

Apps and sites that use one-off emailed sign in codes are so annoying. It makes a single-click sign-on with password manager into a clicky clicky adventure... when what I really want is to just sign in and do thing I wanted to sign in for.

I would just like to say that this is a remarkably useful and well designed tool. It is a staple remover. Yes pliers, flat head screw drivers, etc all work, but this just does the thing so easily - and lumber yards have a tendency to cover everything with staples.

Prashant Singh in the lab of Tina Iverson at Vanderbilt published this image of the bacterial 🦠flagellar motor, a detailed molecular model made possibly by CryoEM 🔬. The similarity to mechanical motors are strong enough we can use terms like stator, rotor, rod & gearing to describe it.

Every now and then I forget that people on the internet are mostly not real and far more to be LLMs now, and wonder "why am I arguing with a bot?" And then I walk away from my computer.

Okay, since my last name alliterates with this, I'm coining it: we have past the AGI minima of Pitt's Parabola Law.

pyramid🔺4040

I wish there was a global OS/phone setting for "go away with your pretending to be helpful popups".

I love these kinds of software systems talks by @bcantrill.bsky.social "The Complexity of Simplicity" www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cum5...

Given how much Amodei is worried about China having AI, this is poetic.

Building an art installation thing with 4040 aluminium extrusion - it's like giant Meccano.

Prime example of ensloppification of UI Designers are even manage to fuck up calculators. No longer are trig functions one click away in scientific mode. They are two clicks for every time you want to use them. Have the people that did this ever used a calculator?

Does anyone know why the US govt accounts disappeared from clearsky stats?

New Zealand has debt to GDP ratio of ~50%. This is less than half the OECD average and roughly comparable to Australia. Despite this, National supporters keep thinking we are horrendously in debt and need all the austerity cuts that National has done.

Apparently Sam Altman dunked on Tesla, and Elon rebutted it. But because Elon has hidden replies unless you log in to X, he has hidden his rebuttals to anyone - like me - who is not on X. 😂 www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-re...

Note that Goldman needs to project the bubble further out, that's how to make money from the plebs. If the bubble fails too early, they are left holding the bag instead of pension funds.

For a industry as regulated as electricity supply, I'm surprised there is no New Zealand regulation requiring electricity companies to actually transparently show the prices on all their plans. I'm also surprised they can get away with conflating cost vs usage.

I’ve joked before that Rationalism is to Silicon Valley as Scientology is to Hollywood. And that’s… not a joke, actually. The rationalist community is very influential and more than a little cult like. Eliezer Yudkowsky is the L. Ron Hubbard of rationalism. This book is his Battlefield Earth

2-days until I've finished downloading a copy of pre-LLM reddit for the archive.

Sneaky Blue Owl hiding datacenter loans in infrastructure bonds and labelling them A+, so then they get bought by pension funds.

Poolside to buy $950 million of Nvidia GPUs.

"We reach our limits with technology when we feel we’re out of control, and that feeds a lot of these negative cycles with technology." So much of tech design is about removing control from the user and creating forced helplessness. distressedscientists.substack.com/p/the-digita...

Is it possible to build good software that enhances life in the modern world? Or is it just all investment-seeking engagement slop now?

Staircase walls panelled up and handrail installed.

Alternate headline - Nvidia blind to impending bubble pop

It does feel like companies have weaponised UX to make it impossible to get refunds for claims for items not received.

Man, remember when this was the zeitgeist

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

I would posit that instant text messaging is one of those things that is actually very tolerant of latency. Unlike video/audio streaming, realtime control systems, gaming, any number of things that actually require near zero latency.

In my 20s I could grind, but honestly I was just creating slop and learning how things work. Took until my 30s to realise that rest -> innovation. You don't come up with great solutions if you are constantly sitting at a desk and have no space to let your subconscious work on the problem.

I'll cautiously say I've noticed more skepticism about AI in the corporate world and it's mostly because people's coworkers are creating extra work for them. They don't have the vocabulary to describe it yet but it's basically the "Why should I read what you couldn't be bothered to write" thing