daotoad

If you're using a university to get credentials that are necessary to open the doors you need to reach your goals, then sure, that's what they are for. That's more or less how I thought of them before I went to college.

And that perspective isn't entirely wrong--for some people that's all they will ever be. It's just that they do more than that.

Universities exist to provide the resources academic researchers need to work. Whether they are studying physics, sociology, or creative writing. The buildings, the meeting spaces, the people they gather who share interests, they people with cross-cutting or even opposing interests are also a resource.

Universities exist to provide the resources students need to learn skills that are difficult to obtain otherwise. It's not practical for most people to be self taught operators of gas chromatography systems, confocal microscopes, or research reactors. The physical stuff isn't the only thing. Having a collection of experts on different topics clustered together means that as a student you have access to a massive resource if you are smart enough to engage with it. These are all people who can teach you, guide you, and make introductions for you.

Of course, I am kind of dumb and didn't really realize this stuff until after I graduated and was navigating the world as an adult. Relationships I built in college helped me land several jobs early in my career. I don't think my bachelor's degree did anything for me beyond my first job. People rapidly stopped asking about it.

The writer is quite elegant in her description of how LLMs are corrosive to the social aspect of university.

Rakulang has you covered.

It is aggressive in its unicode support. You want to use vulgar fractions? Or Mayan numerals? They'll work. You want to use mathematical notation like ∈? It works.

You can literally do this:

`my $var = ⅒ + 2 + Ⅻ;`

https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii

Stoked to see this.

I've long felt that something like this was the way but have never gotten around to working on it.

I've seen some interesting new robotics advances, but few have become viable products yet. An example that keeps coming up is laundry robots.

Here's one, https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-0, a $4000 static laundry folding robot. Of course it's only available in California and some unspecified percentage of folding will be completed via teleoperation.

Same company claims they will soon start selling an $8000 mobile maid bot that tidies and folds laundry.

IDK, it looks like it needs lots of work. If it was actually able to pick up my crap and fold my laundry, I'd be tempted, but it would also need to not phone home with camera data, the audio or other content of conversations. I'd also want an easy way to shut it down in an emergency.

When you can replace human sewing machine operators in garment factories, that's when you'll see widespread adoption of robots across the economy. Managing big pieces of fabric is hard.

I think we've still got a long way to go before we get jetsons style robot maids.

Apple still sells Filemaker.

https://www.claris.com/filemaker/

I think the home automation market is waiting on things that most people really want and a lower barrier to entry.

Alfred North Whitehead famously noted that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

What has household automation really given us so far? Dimmable lights? Whatever. If I cared, I'd already have rheostats on all my light switches. Thermostat? My digital thermostat is already good enough.

The thing that would sell like crazy is a robot valet.

In other words, the ability to navigate carelessly through your home, dropping items when you are no longer interested in them and have them "magically" return to their proper homes.

Such a thing would need to be able to roam around your home and pick things up and store them, and then retrieve them when appropriate (when asked or based on schedules and other automations). Maybe even do a little light dusting.

If you can make it take out the trash, fold laundry, and empty the dishwasher, you're looking at a ridiculously popular system. Even if it costs thousands of dollars.

Thing is, the tech isn't really ready to give us a household robot that can pick your jacket up off the couch and put it away. When we can do that, it will be huge.

Once we are there, we've grown so used to the idea of an adversarial relationship with the businesses that provide our services, that we are being spied on and our data sold, would we even trust the systems that would be needed to enable such products?

1. Starting from scratch is rarely a good idea. 2. It always sounds like a better idea than it actually is. 3. Item 2 is true even if you think you've accounted for item 1.

Is there something specific that you want that cannot be implemented reasonably on existing systems?

Unless you have a specific compelling benefit that only a rewrite can grant, focused narrow rewrites are the way.

The gap between quality work and baseline LLM output is precisely the understanding.

If it can be validated by automation, the bot will do it. But no automation suite is complete or perfect.

What concerns me is that building software using the LLMs gives a distance that inhibits the formation of the sort of understanding I need to "just know" a code base intuitively. So when product asks for a feature, my ability to be sufficiently pedantic about the 6 different non-obvious things this impacts is less effective. And when I need to choose abstractions and try to form an effective ontology, my intuition is less effective. I believe I can still grind out an effective solution, but I start farther from the finish line.

Does the LLM's ability to "answer questions" about the codebase make up for my lack of intuition? Does my apparent ability to run faster make up for the fact that I am starting farther from the end of the race?

I don't know yet.

RFC 3514 perhaps?

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt

I really, really want that to be true, but my experience trying to adopt it has been really painful.

Even selecting things in the UI has sucked. I went in and increased the selection radius or whatever, that helped. But really, should I need to do this as a new user?

Getting the constraints to behave is like pulling teeth.

It also kind of sucks that you have to have really sparse sketches that only contain one closed figure. I gather you can create a "master sketch" and selectively project geometry into other sketches. But the last few times I've tried the app, I haven't gotten far enough into my sketches before rage quitting to validate the technique.

Right now I am back F360 with their hobby license wanting to escape their regular messing with the terms and conditions.

It's a kind of crappy slide deck, not a proper home page. Even worse, the link drops you into the middle of the deck. (TBF, it wouldn't be so bad if you know that it's a slide deck when you load the page.)

Try using the arrow keys to navigate. It took me multiple tries to get it figured out.

Use up/down to navigate within a chapter/topic. Use left/right to switch between topics.

I lost a nuke to a phalanx in Civ 1. Still salty about that _decades_ later.

Anecdata:

I'm a Civ3 hater, give me 2 or 4 any day. 3 is my least favorite version of the game.

But, OTOH, my wife is ride or die for Civ3.

What I really want to know is, is it mighty mighty? And does it let it all hang out?

The problem is most people won't take that attitude. For most homeowners, the home is the largest asset.

This is a Catch 22 for elected officials. We must reduce housing costs dramatically if we do so, we will devalue significant assets of a large number of active voters and political contributors.

I'd love to see some ideas on how to pull this off, because we need them.

For a motivated learner with access to good materials, schools provide two important things besides that very important piece of paper:

1. contacts - these come in the form of peers who are interested in the same things and in the form of experts in their fields of study. Talking to these people and developing relationships will help you learn faster, and teach you how to have professional collegial relationships. These people can open doors for you long after graduation.

2. facilities - ever want to play with an electron microscope or work with dangerous chemicals safely? Different schools have different facilities available for students in different fields. If you want to study nuclear physics, you might want to go to a school with a research reactor; it's not a good idea to build your own.

Naming comments are useful when someone catches something like:

1. you are violating a previously agreed upon standard for naming things

2. inconsistent naming, eg some places you use "catalog ID" and other places you use "item ID" (using separate words and spaces here because case is irrelevant).

3. the name you chose makes it easy to conflate two or more concepts in your system

4. the name you chose calls into question whether you correctly understood the problem domain you are addressing

I'm sure there are other good naming comments, but this is a reasonable representation of the kinds of things a good comment will address.

However, most naming comments are just bike shedding.

US states are, in some ways, less independent than UK countries.

Wales can no more disavow the PM than California can disavow POTUS. So this separate status is limited.

The big counter to this is the idea that US states have their own militaries. States may have militias, but they can be subsumed by the federal government pretty easily, as we saw in California in 2025. They are not truly independent armed forces.

OTOH, states are not allowed to leave the US, we had a war about this a while ago. Meanwhile Scotland had a referendum on leaving the UK a few years ago.

Love it or hate it, we are Americans first before we are New Yorkers or Mississipians and so forth. This is especially true when it comes to international relations; that's handled on a federal level and most people in the world couldn't tell a Nebraskan from an Alaskan.

Do you like your cursor at the beginning or end of words?

Most of the time it doesn't really matter. But if you know you want to append to a word you can hit that target immediately by using `e` (`ea`). Or if you want to prepend, you can use `wi`.

Note that `i` and `a` have a similar pairing to `w` and `e`.

Motions can be inclusive or exclusive. It works like the different ways of annotating ranges: [0,1] and (0,1).

Consider the command `d` (delete) combined with the motions for `"`.

First we have `da"`, it deletes the everything between the pair of `"` characters that surround my cursor. Next, `di"` deletes the contents of the `"` pair.

The movement `a"` is inclusive (think 'a quote') and `i"` is exclusive (think 'inside quote'). Combined with the command you get "delete a quote" and "delete inside quote" when the mnemonics are spelled out.

https://vimhelp.org/motion.txt.html#exclusive

This usage is a double misunderstanding, it gets both the phonetics of homing and the mechanics of sharpening a blade wrong.

It’s like calling someone a “stropping young lad”.

Off topic and doesn't impact the validity (or lack thereof) of the post. Just reactionary whining really...

For the love of all that is good, "exacerbated" and "exasperated" are different words.

We've already screwed up "home in on" by allowing the horrid "hone in" to horn in our lexicons. On a side note, watch out for those honing pigeons, they've got very sharp beaks.

In my experience, what works best is having QA and a tech writer assigned to a few teams. That way there is an ongoing, close relationship that makes interactions go smoothly.

In a larger org, it may also make sense to have a separate QA group that handles tasks across all teams and focuses on the product as a unified whole.

That's because we don't value QA in the way that matters.

If you're a talented SDET, you're probably also, at least, a good SDE.

If you'll make more money and have more opportunity as an SDE, which career path will you follow?

I was about to say "Obsidian is free as long as you don't use it for work."

But it turns out that that is no longer the case. https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/

Obsidian is now actually free for everyone.

Rereading TFM can be quite illuminating.

Robert Preston, is that you?

The real trick is getting just enough meaning into the name to be helpful, while keeping it distinct. SQLAlchemy is a great example.

I called by zsh bookmark tool `tutu`, my idea was to make it sound like what it does.

- It helps you go TO places - The main command is `tu` because it is short, a homophone of "to", and wasn't already taken - Additional commands `tutu` (which does a `pushd` instead of `cd`) and `untu` (which is just a wrapper around `popd`) are short, memorable, and pronouncable.

All of those naming decisions were made with ergonomics in mind.

Was I successful? I like it. A few other people are using it and seem to like it, too.

To the extent that I was, I think it's because the name is meaningful enough while remaining distinct.

https://github.com/daotoad/tutu

> whereas all humans typically use the standard hyphen-minus character (U+002D).

I made it a point to learn to type the em dash—only to have it stolen by the bots; it's forced me to become reacquainted with my long lost friend, the semicolon.

Between perlbrew and cpanm it's pretty easy to have multiple perl installs with different versions and quite simple to manage your dependencies.

Carton (manage and bundle your perl modules based on lock files) and Pinto (easily run your own private CPAN) provided the icing on the cake that made things really powerful.

I miss working in Perl, but the job market has pulled me in other directions.