One of the ways that LLM-authored code improves productivity is by merely SAYING it does things. It's way faster than the whole time-consuming process of actually doing things. This is real code someone sent to me for review.

Hi @mkennedy, @brianokken - this uv setting looks like it might be worth a mention on Python Bytes in its own right: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/reference/settings/#override-dependencies I suspect the annoyance of a package pinning its upper bound too low is almost universal, especially if you […]

@carlton thank you for joining us this evening Carlton and donating some of your Saturday evening, it's really greatly appreciated.

hot take: jira's data model is actually pretty great, it's extremely close to what I would build, but it is hidden under a thick layer of full-screen overlays and 5-second animated interstitials and focus-stealing tab-ordering bugs that make it impossible to do zero-look data entry, so the data […]

#Mastodon is there to help

I occasionally shoot terminal tips back and forth with someone on another network. Their latest is this, which I found really cool. Take the terms of service for services you sign up to. Commit them to a git repo. Set up updates, if you like. Then you can use diff to spot changes as they happen.

if you are under 30 years old and picking a font size for something other people need to read, not just yourself: that’s too small. still too small. A LITTLE BIGGER #accessibility #ux #typography

I think the one thing that really climbs up my arse and spreads its roots about Microsoft products is the way they'll suddenly just completely forget who you are, or that they've been living comfortably on your device for years, and suddenly go all "WELCOME TO WINDOWS! BEFORE YOU GET STARTED […]

I am inordinately proud of this pun, from a Bluesky conversation (the context is irrelevant to the joke).

No as a service https://naas.isalman.dev/no #devops #api #naas #noasaservice

People are saying we should write jumble words to mess up the training of AIs; I say we should just write sentences like those of the length Jane Austen would write, that have such non-local structure and nested clauses that, what with the drift of attention and the window of tokens, the LLMs […]

A small PSA, mainly for myself - #PyMongo surprised me today by adding a key to the input dictionary I supplied the insert_one method: https://kimvanwyk.co.za/til_250420_1/

I never understood why so many men associate with imagery of predatory animals. My idealized version of my own masculinity is best represented by a tree. Patient. Immensely endurant. Self-sufficient. Unbothered by trivial, ephemereal affairs. Innately kind to the world around it. I don't want […]

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I forget where I first saw this analogy, but describing LLMs as a broken clock just makes so much sense. You cannot scale up or improve LLMs to address fundamental limitations with the technology any more than you can make a hyperscale broken-clock data center to more accurately tell time.

"Chat GPT told me that it *can't* alter its data set but it did say it could simulate what it would be like if it altered it's data set" NO. It has no idea if it's telling the truth or not and when it says "I can simulate what this would be like" This guy is pretty sharp about philosophy but […]

Aaargh - Confluence's context menu used to offer useful things like italics and the like. Now that stuff is harder to find in favour of the magic make-it-up bullshit machine which is as likely to improve my writing as me asking my 6 year old nephew. Confluence […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

That's the most brilliant alert I've ever come across: "Your 'Status' page is receiving way more page views than usual" Even if your other monitoring didn't catch it, the fact that a whole bunch of users are checking to see if the system is down is a pretty darn good canary.

No Outlook, "Not Interested" is not nearly as strong a phrase as I'll need to tell you I don't want this. There are tools i Microsoft's own suite for video making and sharing if they're needed, I don't want them in my text-based email program where I and the […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

My corporate #confluence has just emailed me a wrap of 2024 - 3 weeks too late and with as strong a tragic whiff of trying to be cool as me going to a nightclub tonight and pretending I know *anything* about any music of the last 20 years. Confluence is a tool for professional use in […]

I may be the last person on earth to figure this out, but in case I'm not: AWS cloudwatch logs can be monitored with the AWS cli: aws logs tail GROUP_NAME This is a lot more pleasant an experience than the web console for cloudwatch, which will (in my SSO based work experience) log you out if […]

A PSA for my fellow braaiers (presumably mainly South Africans) - the next time you expect to have space on the braai, get some baby marrows and/or baby gem squashes and/or pattypans, trim the ends and split down the middle to expose the inner flesh. Microwave for 4 mins or so to parcook […]

As good a day as any to remind myself that the way most of us has been taught the size of countries is misleading as hell.

Hack: you can put "-ai" in your search and reduce the likelihood you'll get shown AI gunk results, or hit "Web" after the search to focus on links only without AI overview.

Something I learned this week that many other people probably figured out ages ago - browser dev tools can be very handy in figuring out why AWS configuration instructions return an error: https://kimvanwyk.co.za/til_241018_1/

Just remembered working at a company making COMINT gear where the engineers were using NTP to keep all nodes in the system in time sync but were frustrated that it refused to work. Turned out that, as electronic engineers and not sysadmins, they missed that NTP is hierarchical, with a primary […]

@mkennedy on the topic of reaching kids to code I can recommend @davidcampey as an excellent followup guest. He's deeply into the topic and has given fantastic talks on it - for EG: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sH4NvrxalWg

Sunrise over the Umgeni river mouth this morning from Blue Lagoon, eThekwini.

I was reminded today of this very impressive birthday cake my wife arranged for my 40th completely without my knowledge, conspiring with my parents to recreate the details of a cake I would have had at a birthday party about 35 years before.

@claymore in the spirit of amazing photos from your park runs, here's the Indian ocean and some of Durban from the uShaka area pier during the Durban Point park run today:

It turns out Google Chrome ships a default, hidden extension that allows code on `*.google.com` access to private APIs, including your current CPU usage You can test it out by pasting the following into your Chrome DevTools console on any Google page: chrome.runtime.sendMessage( […]

I was reminded recently of when I was the president of the Student Engineering Council at the then-University of Natal (i.e. 2 decades ago), as the merger with the University of Durban-Westville was approaching. I was in one of the faculty meetings when some of the shortlisted names for the new […]

@danie10 Hi Danie, are you aware of any virtual credit card providers in SA that one can use an arbitrary real card with? I use a Woolworths card as my credit card and I can't get a virtual card through them directly and although it's ABSA backed, I can't do it through ABSA. I

Some unusual but excellent advice my father gave me years ago - if you have a gas braai (or barbecue if you're not South African) with a tray underneath the grill and flames to catch grease and fat, line the tray with cat litter. The litter won't burn or smell but will soak up the grease and fat…