LouisSayers

It's a Roman mailbox.

Paper was rolled into scrolls, and that's why you find them everywhere, because just like today people communicated with one another.

If you need to leave a message you write it on a scroll and insert in a hole. You could have different sized holes for different sized messages / documents.

You could basically leave the mailbox on your desk and have people put messages there for you to read (or the other way around)

The bits on the corners simply keep it a bit off of the surface - important incase of any moisture, spills etc.

What's the reason behind the sudden uptick in people being detained? Customs seem really trigger happy, almost as if they've got some quota to meet ...

... or just buy silicone ones from the pharmacy (the ones for swimmers).

I keep some of these on me at all times in case I end up next to any loud speakers.

Who says the two are mutually exclusive?

As someone that's happily on the Pro plan (I got a deal at $17 per month) I'm a bit confused seeing people pay $100+ per month ... like what benefits are you getting over the cheaper plan?

When coding with Claude I cherry pick code context, examples etc to provide for tasks so I'm curious to hear what other's workflows are like and what benefits you feel you get using Claude Code or the more expensive plans?

I also haven't run into limits for quite some time now.

This actually sounds like a fun-ish project.

Has anyone done this yet (AI handled dynamic API that calls into a bunch of systems)?

> wanted an 80/20 equity split in his favor

I would have been tempted to take the idea, partner with someone else and run hard with it in spite.

I can't stand people with this mindset, and it's fair game if that's the cards they want to play.

The problem I'm mentioning isn't about the fidelity of the sample, but of the samples themselves.

There are an infinite number of frequencies between two points - point 'a' and point 'b'. What I'm talking about are the "steps" you hear as you move across the frequency range.

I have no doubt that if you sample a sound at high enough fidelity that you won't hear a difference.

My comment around digital vs analog is more of an analogy around producing sounds rather than playing back samples though.

There's a Masterclass with Joel Zimmerman (DeadMau5) where he explains the stepping effect when it comes to his music production. Perhaps he just needs a software upgrade, but there was a lesson where he showed the stepping effect which was audibly noticeable when comparing digital vs analog equipment.

What you're mentioning is like the difference between digital vs analog music.

For generic stuff you probably can't tell the difference, but once you move to the edges you start to hear the steps in digital vs the smooth transition of analog.

In the same way, AI runs on bits and bytes, and there's only so much detail you can fit into that.

You can approximate reality, but it'll never quite be reality.

I'd be much more concerned with growing organic brains in a lab. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that people are covertly working on that.

I haven't presented for a while, but one thing I do is try to anticipate the questions people may have.

Then if I'm really prepared I'll have extra slides (if showing slides) that delves into the answers for those questions.

If you find people ask the "what should I be asking" question, you can make it a little humourous by having a slide prepared with that exact wording and delving into something you'd like to talk about.

Nice work! It's quite cool.

Feedback:

  - It'd be great to be able to move the map around, zoom in / out - staying in one place feels a bit restricting.
  - For some smaller countries you can't actually see where they were once the ring is put over them
  - Once a country has been identified it'd be handy to see their neighbouring countries to add some more context to where a country is.
  - It'd also be nice to learn a bit more about a country (e.g. unique things about it) that may help further cement the idea of a country so that it's more than just a name on a map.

> What would YOU do in my situation to break the cycle?

  1. Get a laptop (Buy or Borrow)
  2. Get a gym membership (i.e. shower, keep up fitness)
  3. Apply for local dev jobs (work out of the library)

The main thing for me would be to maintain cleanliness and to find work in an office. An office job solves many issues in your case (don't need to find clients, they usually supply computer gear, a place to eat breakfast, lunch etc).

If you have a plan but can't afford e.g. a gym membership or laptop, then use gofundme or equivalent to get help from others to execute on your plan.

I mean, you could even just visit local tech meetups and tell them what you need, I'm sure there'll be some people that can help you out.

Grandma was clearly German. They have the best children's stories.

They should copy the Synology Diskstation - "iCloud - your personal cloud"

Not only does it allow you to backup all your files, but it has all sorts of apps that you can install. You can have your own Dropbox, Google Drive, run your own webserver, docker containers etc

I bought one this week and it is very cool. I realise Apple have their own "backup to the cloud" etc, but if they had some guts they could sell soo many of these things and create a whole new app marketplace.

Given the amount of content people create these days we have a big need for storage, and storage in the cloud is too slow - it really doesn't cut it.

If they did something like this, they'd sell a whole heap of hardware, PLUS app store revenue, PLUS more subscriptions to their cloud as an additional backup. It'd probably be relatively easy for them to do as well.

I agree, if you can communicate effectively AI is a huge productivity jump.

Another thing I've found is to actually engineer a solution - all the basic coding principles come into play, keeping code clean, cohesive and designing it to make testing easy. The human part of this is essential as AI has no barometer on when it's gone too far with abstraction or not far enough.

When code is broken up into good abstractions then the AI part of filling in the gaps is where you see a lot of the productivity increases. It's like filling water into an ice tray.

I'm not too concerned short to medium term. I feel there are just too many edge cases and nuances that are going to be missed by AI systems.

For example, systems don't always work in the way they're documented to. How is an AI going to differentiate cases where there's a bug in a service vs a bug in its own code? How will an AI even learn that the bug exists in the first place? How will an AI differentiate between someone reporting a bug and a hacker attempting to break into a system?

The world is a complex place and without ACTUAL artificial intelligence we're going to need people to at least guide AI in these tricky situations.

My advice would be to get familiar with using AI and new AI tools and how they fit into our usual workflows.

Others may disagree, but I don't think software engineers (at least ones the good ones) are going anywhere.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of the Model Context Protocol!

For anyone interested - you can extend Claude's functionality by allowing it to run commands via a local "MCP server" (e.g. make code commits, create files, retrieve third party library code etc).

Then when you're running Claude it asks for permission to run a specific tool inside your usual Claude UI.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers

Could you tell us a bit about the coding tools you use and how you go about interacting with Claude?

I assume you had a comprehensive test suite?

Awesome work, Claude is amazingly good at writing code that is pretty much plug and play.

Could you speak at all about potential IDE integrations? An integration into Jetbrains IDEs would be super useful - I imagine being able to highlight a bit of code and having a plugin check the code graph to see dependencies, tests etc that might be affected by a change.

Copying and pasting code constantly is starting to seem a bit primitive.

Have you tried a rice bucket?

I had some upper forearm pain (likely from pullups, but perhaps coding as well) for around 6 months last year, and after a long break from pullups and trying the rice bucket it seems that the pain has subsided.

Could be worth a try anyway!

https://www.reddit.com/r/kettlebell/comments/1759tyo/elbow_t...

Serious question: Has anyone proficient in Photoshop given GIMP a proper go and come out the other side wanting to use it?

A big problem with current AI is a simple one - we don't document our thought processes that go into building solutions, at least not in enough detail.

Without the thousands of micro decisions that go into building even the simplest of solutions, it doesn't matter how large your context window is. It's not about holding a system in your mind - it's about what you do with it, what decisions you make to move towards your goal.

At least that's my take on current LLMs and their limitations.

It helped me get a visa for Italy (I took part in a startup accelerator program).

Other than that not much else... I mean you learn things, but you could also learn things from watching YouTube, doing courses and reading books!

I've also seen people do PhD's and from the outside it seems like a lot of them did it just for the title - one of my friends though seems to love Academia and is now a professor.

I'm no lawyer, but the law is nuanced when it comes to copyright.

Fair use exists which permits usage of copyrighted content in certain situations.

I'm not saying that they aren't in violation, just that copyright doesn't automatically ban others from using your material - it typically (laws are different in every country) depends on how (and how much of) your material is used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

"ask about", not "ask for"

Exactly, try to ask Claude about photos of Hitler and it will also refuse to help

The irony is that the CEO is essentially blaming the employees in this case without listening and figuring out what the actual problem is.

> the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded

This may be the case for many things, but I would add that a lot of things suck because of conflicting incentives. Whether it's laziness or even because they are actually getting paid MORE to do the sucky thing.

As an example, where I live a running joke is about the number of road cones whenever work is being done. They don't need THAT many road cones, but they put them there... why? I have no evidence, but I suspect someone is getting paid to add extra road cones - OR potentially another incentive is at play.

The biggest one that gets me is traffic lights within roundabouts... how anyone thinks that is a good idea.... arghh #sigh :(