MattGrommes

Look at the history of art. Lots of people used the same paint that had always been used and the same brushes, and came up with wildly different uses for those tools. Until there are literally no people involved, we'll always be using the tools in new ways.

I just watched this great mini-documentary about a local landline system in Bellingham WA. Well worth a couple of minutes.

https://youtu.be/UhVi3smmvTs?si=ow6zw_xTKo22WpLZ

People can call each other but also businesses have 4-digit phone numbers that are shortened versions of the business name, like GUIT for the guitar shop.

I'm also seeing companies looking at only hiring juniors from overseas because they're using the same generative tools as US-based juniors but cost even less.

A related book I've been thinking about in terms of LLMs is "Working Effectively With Legacy Code". I'd love to be able to work a lot of that advice into some kind of Skill or customized agent to help with big refactors.

There's already BMAD - Breakthrough Method of Agile Agent Driven Development

Basically, it's Waterfall for Agents. Lots of Capitalized Words to signify something.

Also they constantly call it the BMAD Method, even though the M already stands for method.

One of my favorite additions to this phrase is Merlin Mann's use of "double turns out". This is useful for stuff like

"X is bad for you."

"Turns out X is actually great for you and it was Big Y spreading misinformation."

"Actually, turns out X is only terrible for dogs but nobody remembers that part of the story."

Mine is 98% for reading comics and 2% learning to draw on Procreate. Most everything else I find awkward to do on it.

Defense is a much more fitting name for an organization that does a million more things than just prosecute wars. War is just the favorite part of their mission for these wannabe toughguys.

This administration has shown no qualms about enacting retribution against people who speak out against them, no matter how powerless or seemingly irrelevant the person is.

Yeah, I have no idea what this guy is talking about. I still get Make magazine full of people making projects every month. My youtube feed is similarly full of people making stuff and sharing it with the community.

Check out the Maker Project Lab weekly video showcasing awesome stuff from the maker community, it's inspiring and fun to see. https://www.youtube.com/@MakerProjectLab

I wonder if they have a policy about not accepting ideas / replying to people don't think their idea was stolen. I know TV shows have that policy so nobody can accuse them of plagiarizing their script idea.

Not sure why people are downvoting this, it's absolutely true. I watch a lot of youtube on my TV and I can tell in milliseconds if it's logged me out and I'm seeing the default feed. It's fully insane and inane.

The problem we have is that there are a ton of sites all asking for $5+. With PBS people can choose to give once at whatever they're comfortable with and aren't dealing with an ever increasing number of $5 charges. Some guy's Medium blog probably isn't worth $5 just like I wouldn't pay $5 for any random show on PBS. But donating to PBS once makes me feel like I'm supporting Frontline, Ken Burns, lots of people I like.

I took this to mean more like not jumping right on OpenClaw, but wait a quarter or so to give it at least a little time to shake out. There are so many new tools coming out I think it's beneficial not to be the guinea pig.

This is what I've been saying. We're not so much learning that LLMs are intelligent, we're learning that a lot of what we think of as intelligence is actually just pattern matching.

Everything was obviously DOA after it dies. I also thought it wouldn't last but it wouldn't be the first or last tech company initiative that lived on long after people thought it would die. Weird things happen. "Obviously" isn't a good filter.

The comment I read about this that I liked was that they want to push the idea of starting with an Issue and a discussion before going straight to a PR. That way you can build reputation by contributing to a discussion first. Maybe you could "earn" a temporary Vouch like this that lets you start submitting. Still open to attack but the attack is at least more difficult.

The origins of the word utopia are exactly that idea. The original books about utopias almost all showed the negative heart at the center of the idea.

That's the big difference for me. I use Github Copilot because I want to see the output and work with it. For people who are fine just shooting a prompt out and getting code back, I'm sure Claude Code is better.

If your neighbor kept baking and giving you cookies, to the point where you were wrapping and reselling them at the market, don't you think you should do something for them in return?

They're also heavier, which is a concern for use cases like cars.

There's a good video I just watched that addresses the sodium battery industry and differences with current batteries: https://youtu.be/nrTCgZmUFCY

Here's the Slo Mo Guys teardown. Very impressive tech.

https://youtu.be/jW7M8H99x7Y?si=9xjafT2tCresYC9l

What was fun for me was the fact that when this thing came out everybody I knew thought it worked by shooting red lasers at your eyes. There was very little internet to use to look it up either so I was shocked when this video showed how it really worked.

There's a similar feeling story in a later League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book* where it's a history of England in that universe. The part that really stuck with me was the description of the government from 1984 as just another strange period in history. Eventually, Big Brother just falls and the next government takes over. Compared with how the system in 1984 feels hopeless and eternal it gives me a strange kind of hope.

* The Black Dossier

In blacksmithing there's the concept of an "anvil shaped object". That is, something that looks like an anvil but is hollow or made of ceramic or something. It might stand up to tapping on for making jewelry or something but should never be worked like a real anvil for fear of hurting someone or wrecking the thing you're working on when it breaks.

I feel like a lot of the AI articles and experiments like this one are producing "app shaped objects" that look okay for making content (and indeed are fine for making earrings) but fall apart when pounded on by the real world.

Oh boy do I wish I was nearly as cool as Dean Kamen. :)

Just a small correction, the founder of Segway is Dean Kamen who is still alive. It was the then-owner of the company who died.

I always like to point people to Simple Wikipedia - https://simple.wikipedia.org/. You can also change the (lang).wikipedia.org URL to simple.wikipedia.org and a lot of the time you get a great, simple language explanation that's better for a quick overview of a topic than the regular page.

Not everyone who uses ChatGPT gets advice on harming or killing themselves, but some people sure do. And some act on it.

Just as we don't necessarily want to eliminate a technology because of a small percentage of bad cases, we shouldn't push a technology just because of a small percentage of good anecdotes.

This genie isn't going back in the bottle but I sure hope it ends up more useful than harmful. Which now that I write it down is kind of the motto of modern LLM companies.

I'm not an embedded systems guy (besides using esp32 boards) so this might be a dumb question but does something like this open up the possibility of programming an esp32/arduino board with Javascript, like Micro/Circuit Python?

I was also wondering if the GPUs that die and need to be replaced actually become inert blocks of fused silicon or do they work at half speed or something? A data center full of half speed GPUs is still a lot of computing power waiting for somebody to use.