mikepurvis

I would definitely encourage folks to seek out community theatre where you are. Not that I don't enjoy a full on broadway-style blowout every now and then, but it's also been shocking to me how much of the difference between a $40 seat and a $150 seat is pyrotechnics and spectacle that don't really make the experience for me.

The words and the performances, the chemistry and creativity of the actors, that's the real priceless stuff.

“Being an adult is staring at medium screens all day to come home and stare at a little screen while a big screen is on in the background”

https://x.com/andlikelaura/status/1392091221032460291

I kind of agree, and it's interesting how Nebula and Spotify (at least their video efforts) have been based on elevating and funding those ultra-budget YouTube creators. Like I watch Lindsay Ellis and Practical Engineering and SkillUp all on non-YouTube platforms now, despite YouTube being the recommendation algorithm that originally brought me there.

It's really the opposite model of the "major" streaming players who fund tentpole releases in the conventional Hollywood way, and then have a long tail of niche content (cooking reality shows and the like) that are clearly on a much tighter budget, but still basically modeled on being a cheaper version of a cable show rather than a much better funded version of a YouTube comedy troupe.

GPUs, wifi, power/thermal management, firmware. Especially in portable computing there is still a huge amount of hardware support surface area to contend with.

Game consoles worked a lot like this until around the PS3 era, where the disc/cartridge the game came on was shipping binaries for everything including all the hardware support.

This led to some hilarious implementation shenanigans for the Wii as a transitional console, where the Home button pause screen is not in fact a task switch to some underlying console OS but rather a piece of the SDK that is separately-delivered from each individual game.

ref. https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/wii/

Obviously they tried it multiple ways have brought receipts, but nonetheless it seems surprising that it wouldn't be of benefit to bring as much of that kind of metadata to the model as possible. You'd think depth and segmentation in particular would basically just be a straight shortcut without which the model spends its own time and effort re-deriving that stuff.

I'd also be interested in how post-processing fits in with this. Like if you've got weather effects, film grain, tone mapping, etc, I would have thought the model would do better working on the image before those processes.

You would think so, right? But as with others in the thread, I'd found directing the agent itself to prepare the handoff does deliver much better continuity.

I assume Anthropic & friends have noticed this as well and will change how they handle long running sessions, so the gap will likely close over time, but this is definitely where things stand today.

This is what I've been working toward as well. It's interesting how having the agent do its own reasoning about what it thinks is the most relevant knowledge to carry forward into the next pieces of work is vastly more effective (and even fast sometimes) than whatever the mystery-meat "compaction" process is.

Mentioned by the author in a recent HN thread, I'm also experimenting with automating this through a tiny issue tracker called epiq [1] that basically lets the agent sessions themselves file tickets with the follow-on tasks and relevant handoff right in them, and then a dispatcher automatically launches those tickets into new agent sessions.

[1]: https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/

canada.ca is the Canadian government's equivalent, as far as a web 1.0-style portal/index into many other sites and resources.

Neither the UK or CA versions have "here's an LLM you can make general inquiries to" though; at least for now that appears to be unique to america.gov. Unclear to me why this required a separate domain with all this branding on it vs just being one of those "let our chatbot help you out!!!" popup widgets on the existing usa.gov.

I've recently gotten religion on the workflow that is many (relatively) short-lived agent sessions passing planning/handoff docs between themselves. It's better for my own task tracking, better for handling "oh btw I noticed XXXX", and better as a clear review point. Overall it just feels like it takes a lot of the formerly implicit context that was whatever we happened to have talked about and turns it into a much more explicit "this is what you need to know, now go".

Currently looking for a framework for managing this in a more formal way, and I think it's probably beads, but interested to hear from others.

Cinemania 97 was a big part of this era for me too, though it was far less widespread than Encarta. Fantastic resource for classic film, and into the 80s and 90s, though it was bit quirky watching it get further and further out of date, like the big 1999 films that defined my youth (The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, etc) all completely unknown to it of course.

I believe the Orin AGX is in a similar position. It does a UEFI boot but you absolutely have to supply a correct dtb and if you don't then key peripherals like USB and ethernet can just completely not work, or in one case I experienced, subtly malfunction in a way that appears to be fine but throws off a bunch of extra radiation that fails a certification test.

I'm just storing my passkeys in 1password, which means they're synced across my two computers and phone and also means I gave up any kind of hardware security.

Oh well.

Surely it's a pretty easy pitch to average Joe: Using a passkey takes the place of typing in a code they sent by text or email.

That's a pain point in everyone's day that should make the benefit easy to understand.

Yeah no we're aligned; I have some raspis that I'm interested in doing long term battery stuff with (remote sensing and the like) and it definitely does seem like connectivity is the huge battery killer, like even if you wake up only periodically to take a reading or update an epaper display, the cost in battery just to negotiate a wifi connection and do tcpip and http things is awful.

And then you're stuck with a device that can only be communicated with when it chooses to wake up, whereas with BLE it seems you can listen for a remote OTA wake much more cheaply.

Thanks for speaking to the battery question; I'm very interested in how to run this kind of thing (the display portion at least) cordlessly too, especially when lipo pouches in that range are so dirt cheap.

Dave's old portfolio/blog is gone though: http://www.mezzoblue.com

The Bright Creative site is also AWOL.

Too bad neither is set up to redirect to the current https://daveshea.com/

Hope he's doing well. Guys like him, Doug Bowman, Jeffrey Zeldman... all a huge influence on teenaged-me hacking away on my little blog and thinking of going to SXSW someday.

EDIT: He's just left after being at Shopify for six years: https://lnkd.in/p/dcYBvQfq

ChatGPT has been doing that for a long time, like "by the way, can I just say it's funny how xxxxxxx". Always an invitation to continue engaging, which with a human conversation partner you would feel obligated to respond to or at the very least acknowledge.

With a clanker though, no such obligation exists and the "hey also" content (like any other part of the response) can simply be ignored.

Will file that away as well, seems like it could be useful in various professional contexts.

The Square One commentary on the AlphaZero v Stockfish game from 2017 is pretty entertaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnVDUQksIDk

In other videos he's called out the influence that this and similar games have had on human players in recent years, particularly around square denial and thorn pawn strategies.

True, though I wonder if 2026's "Claude make me a minecraft plugin" is 2006's "View Source" button.

Web development took a long time to gain respect in part due to the accessibility of it. When everyone had a nephew who "makes websites" and anyone could get started with a $5/mo Dreamhost account, it was harder to see why a consultant was worth $200/hr to do the job properly.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, particularly accounting for bots continuing to get smarter and smarter. Is the "craft" of software engineering dying before our eyes? Or will this be like webdev, where there's an explosion of access and ideas for a time and then it settles back down into being a thing that normal people mostly leave to the nerds.

I remember fifteen years ago I would tell people leaving my house "oh yeah, ignore your GPS that tells you to go that way, just down the road here and left turn; that'll get you on the highway much faster."

Nowadays obviously Google Maps gets it right, but it was interesting that period where you had to actively preempt everyone's instinct to just rely on the little table hanging off their dashboard.

I can see how the situation is annoying there; I've had a similar frustration when doing manual code review for someone's obviously AI-slop PR only to have their bot auto-respond to my comments. There's an asymmetry of effort that feels unfair. Like, don't ask for manual review of something that contains lots of things that your own manual review should have caught first, and if I provide human feedback, I expect human responses.

That said, I wouldn't necessarily take it at face value that the person you were working with trusted the bot more than you— at the end of the day, the bot was doing all the implementation anyway, so all the interactions between her and the bot were probably framed in language like "what if we" or "I think it would be better if", so her saying "my programmer colleague thinks X" would naturally generate that "yeah your colleague is right, let's go that direction, makes sense" that she passed back to you, probably thinking it was a complement.

Maybe the real frustration is her not understanding the value-add that still exists there when someone with real expertise and more context can step in and provide that nudge in the right direction.

Transporting and handling cash is absolutely not free, and unlike joe sixpack taking out $20k in a stack of benjamins that one time to buy a motorcycle with cash, it's much worse when

a. a lot of it is coins, so it's heavy and bulky, and

b. it becomes a regular thing that everyone on the street observes you doing over and over

The Square One Chess channel on youtube turns this kind of exploration/commentary into quite digestible content, though the thumbnails are, like everything else these days, a little clickbaity.

It's been fun viewing for me and my chess-interested 9-year-old.

Agree. The comparison to a passport is ludicrous since a passport can be curled around your leg when it's in a pocket where this obviously cannot.

I switched off my 13 Mini this year to go to a Pixel 10 for the better Pebble support. I still miss it, it really was the last perfectly-sized phone.

I mean, cash is also expensive in its own way. It has to be handled and insured, coins may need to be rolled before being taken to the bank, a register is a mechanical device to power and maintain, petty theft by employees is a concern.

It's not really that hard to see why a business charging $5-20 per transaction from people who all have phones and credit cards anyway might choose not to accept cash.

> For most users who only use a single platform

Also depends if your "platform" extends beyond just the OS. If platform includes IDE/editor/terminal, then a lot of users are juggling multiple keyboard schemes from different eras (ctrl-C has entered the chat).