paulmooreparks

"I would walk 500 kilometers" just doesn't sound as romantic.

I think it's a generational thing. I used to mow the lawn for an elderly distant cousin, in the hot Florida summer weather. She would invite me in afterward for a snack and a 6.5oz Coca-Cola. I would guzzle mine in a couple of seconds. She would pour half of hers into a glass, over ice, and put the bottle back into the refrigerator.

Wine glasses have also gotten bigger over the years.

What I've seen in places that eliminated .01 coins is that the .05 coin begins to be the one that everyone hates. I remember walking around Amsterdam several years ago with pockets full of .05 coins, and the same thing happens now in Singapore. They tend to get dumped into self-checkout machines in grocery stores.

One reason I don't quite trust AI for OCR is that it will, on occasion, hallucinate the output.

Sadly, I wrote this article about people who are coders, whom I would expect to know that I would prefer the text rather than a screenshot.

OP here... this is priceless! True performance art. Well done.

OP here. You raised a point that I should have mentioned in the article: screenshots of web pages that don't include the URL. I'm perfectly fine with screenshots of browser windows, since the context is almost always relevant. The system I work on right now puts a lot of useful context into the URL, but it's almost never included in the initial screenshot, so I have to ask for that. Of course, I generally ask for it as text so that I don't have to try to type the whole thing without making a mistake.

OP here. My current team uses MS Teams. I've been teaching my colleagues how to create code blocks in Teams (basically, teaching them Markdown). It's there, but it's not readily discoverable.

BMI isn't a great predictor of health. Waist-to-hip ratio and body-fat percentage are probably somewhat better indicators.

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/why-you-shouldnt-rely-on-b...

XferLang, a data-transfer and configuration language to serve as an alternative to JSON.

https://xferlang.org/

Most obvious features, at first glance, are no commas and no need for escape characters. Other useful features include processing instructions, extensible data-substitution rules, and support for comments. Currently only implemented in .NET; plans are to rewrite the core in Rust and provide language wrappers around that core.

Yes, this is a problem I see more and more often. Besides the fact that it's always a good habit to spell out an acrostic or abbreviation the first time it's used in an article, there's also the fact that this is, you know, the web, and it's very easy to make a link to a Wikipedia article or something that will explain the term, if you don't want to bother adding your own explanation.

The only killer app for me, when it comes to VR headsets, would be flight sim, and I have been too busy for the last year to even sim on my 4k monitor, so I haven't taken the headset plunge yet. Still, that's the only thing I can think of that would make sense for me. Maybe there are others.

An AI interface to a point-of-sale (POS) system: https://github.com/paulmooreparks/PosKernel

I'm actually in the middle of a complete redesign of the AI layer, but there is a POC video linked from the GitHub README that demonstrates the interaction I'm going for using an earlier version. The POS is a very bare-bones system where the "kernel," as it were, is implemented in Rust. There's an MCP atop that to allow the AI and UI layers to drive the POS. Stores may be implemented as extensions that plug into the POS kernel, and that's where language, currency, item databases, and such are defined. The AI cashier knows what items are for sale, how to modify items (in a restaurant context), how to translate from other languages, how to interpret what the customer actually wants, and seamlessly lead the customer through a transaction.

The current code is quite ugly and full of a lot of unfortunate hacks, but it was a good education. The new design puts the AI much more in charge, without as much code-level orchestration. I'm applying a lot of my knowledge from the retail POS and self-service checkout domains to this, as well as learning a lot about applying AI to a "legacy" software domain.

I seem to have missed the part of the article that explains how this symbol goes back 3000 years. The earliest date mentioned is in the 1300's.

I work almost exclusively in C#, and I do a lot of reviews. I'm familiar with the syntax, and I use it. It's the assignment version that I'm talking about here.

Sorry, I would flag this in a code review. It's too easy to skip past this visually. Explicit if statements make it a lot more obvious what's going on. This is too much syntactic sugar.

It doesn't look like an "operating system." It looks like a graphical shell. I guess those terms have become a bit interchangeable, and I'm being pedantic.

You'd very likely want acoustic treatment. You'd hear the command from the direction it was given in, not bouncing around, echoing, and interfering with itself.

There's probably a practical set-design aspect to this. The acoustic tile as backdrop also makes a better sound stage, I would think.

In my very first job as a software developer, in 1989 at the tender age of 19, I had my own office, with a door, which I could and would close when I needed to concentrate. It was beautiful. I had a side chair, and other devs would drop in and discuss designs and code. I also had an office at my next job, in 1993. It wasn't until I took a contract job in 1994 that I experienced cubicle life, but the walls were high and I could do some midnight construction to add a bit of privacy. I even had an office at a Seattle startup in 2001. It was afterward that things started to slide toward the open-office morass. Fortunately, I've worked only out of my home office since 2022, and it's been beautiful.

I still miss the old days: We had offices, we actually did design before we started implementing, we didn't do stand-ups but everyone still knew what was going on. I think I'll go yell at a cloud now.

I find myself acting as a brutal code reviewer more than a collaborator when I lean too heavily on an agent. I literally just typed this into the agent's chat pane (GPT-5, in this case), after finding some less-than-optimal code for examining and importing REST API documentation.

> Testing string prefixes or file extensions is bound to fail at some point on some edge case. I'd like to see more robust discovery of formats than this. This reeks of script-kiddie code, not professional-quality code.

It's true more often than I'd like that the quality of code I see generated is script-kiddie level. If I prompt carefully beforehand or review harshly after, it generally improves, but I have to keep my guard up.

Which is a shame, because I like to share my personal projects here because I know it'll get torn to shreds by an army of super hackers (as opposed to an LLM, which will tell me, "Great idea!" no matter what I propose).

A couple of my friends created a startup called Omnibrowse in the late 1990's to do exactly this, and sold it to Microsoft shortly after. I figured this would be a commodity feature by now.

The funny thing is, the answer to:

> Why This Actually Works

isn't anything the author lists under that heading. It's actually what he says above:

> Every night, I check tomorrow’s calendar. I dump everything into the next day’s section. Scheduled items get times in front. Sub-bullets hold notes or reminders. Finished tasks? I delete them or add what happened. Still on the list? Not done yet. That’s it.

That's why it works. He can build a simple ritual around it. The medium doesn't matter. The ritual does.

I'd love to see Conway's Game of Life on this thing.

From the article:

> Providing ample power for the rovers’ many science instruments, MMRTGs are known for their longevity (the twin Voyager spacecraft have relied on RTGs since 1977). But as the plutonium decays over time, it takes longer to recharge Curiosity’s batteries, leaving less energy for science each day.

> On my M2 MacBook, the renderer process is now using 6% CPU (down from 15%), and the GPU process is now using 6% CPU and less than 1% GPU (down from 25% and 20%).

Wait, this is supposed to be an improvement? 6% CPU for a lame animation?

I know old timers who think auto-completion is a sign of a lazy programmer. The wheel keeps turning....

Yes, exactly.

Exactly this. I still "get into the weeds" without AI if I really need to dig into learning something new or if I want to explore some totally new idea (LLMs don't really do "totally new"). If I'm debugging a CRUD app, though... eh, it's sunny outside and I only have a couple more hours of daylight, so, AI it is.

I like having muscles. I hate lifting weights. I like being fit. I hate running. I like being able to play guitar and piano. I hate practicing. I like having food in my pantry. I hate grocery shopping. I like having custom software that fits my needs. I hate writing code.