jasonjei

Many sci-fi writers really dislike LLM for various reasons, whether it is the generative works they produce, or for allegations of copyright infringement due to LLM training on their works. Some have taken such a negative attitude towards LLM that they actively refuse to use Claude or GPT even for coding projects. John Scalzi and Catherine Asaro come to mind boycotting any LLM use…

I think for me the biggest problem is what we understand about physics and FTL and causality. For FTL to happen, I can’t seem to get around the fact that to an observer a ball is thrown before it actually is thrown. So it’s very difficult for me to do sci-fi…

Strange and hypothetical thought: could Bill purchase a US or international model of the iPhone with US or international iCloud account capable of ADP to activate ADP? Would this allow somebody living or working in the UK the ability to use ADP?

No information on Olympic Club. I’m a member. Let me know if you need info for filling the gaps there.

Jk

Google is the new Microsoft. Gemini is its Zune.

I don't care to build a ledger or build an ETL system. I don't care to spend my time debugging IaC terraform systems. GPT allowed me to focus on the core functionality of my code instead of investing hours of my time on ancillary support systems that are well understood. Terraform is notoriously difficult even for the most skilled among us. It helped me manage and tune my Cloud Tasks queue for processing from the microservice scraping data into the main app.

The cool thing is that I was able to let an agent manage this while I did the human task of steering it to work. Some of this work is novel, yet much of this work includes well-understood software patterns, such as scatter-gather and so on.

I absolutely do not enjoy using JavaScript or TypeScript at all. So it was a huge relief when I was able to get AI to help with UI work on Next.js and React Native/Expo.

I've gotten it to help with a cross-cloud cross-region setup on Terraform with shared secrets on AWS and GCP with GHA workflows for sandbox, staging, and prod promotion deployments. And I have no background as a DevOps guy.

Again, it didn't propose the exact shape of my system design. But chatting with it really allowed me to form the shape. It really is a bicycle for your brain. It helped me look at the tradeoffs of different products (PubSub vs Cloud Tasks, or AWS equivalents).

It's not perfect, but to give you an example, I needed to create a proxy broker to manage proxies for scraping data. GPT built me a broker to manage my fleet/inventory of proxies and buy bandwidth or new proxies as needed as well as maintain the proxy ledger for proxy health, while I was able to work on the core product.

It helped me with developing a scoring system (for example, I gather slot data for restaurants to see how scarce they are) to rank restaurants (higher score being harder to book) to determine signals of busyness. It also helped me build a backlog system to make snapshots of every restaurant's slot availability on 3 different providers (OpenTable, Tock, Resy).

Maybe I misspoke, I’m not saying the code it wrote is perfect. But the code produced by GPT-5.5 frontier model is easily miles better than a junior developer. But it is very competent. Perfectly competent was maybe more hyperbole, but I still drive the point.

I’m not using AI to eliminate thinking but to free me from the rote mundane code writing. AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented.

I do write initial proof of concept crude prototypes (not commented, hardcoded variables, etc), and AI does the productionizing of them. It has really allowed me to command a team of agents instead of keeping track of a bunch of humans of varying work ethic, skill, and ability to maintain high code quality. And often AI is very good at maintaining patterns used in the code base or even keeping them to industry best practices.

When using AI you will no longer be writing so much in programming languages—English or whatever language you talk to the LLM will be the main language.

Not trying to encourage anybody to do this, but same-day cancelable award tickets are an option too…

I love my La Marzocco Linea Micra. It’s exceptionally well-built and feels like an Apple product in its simplicity. The only downside is the app you have to use to use the programmed automated backflush.

But the user experience is remarkably simple. Turn the knob left to start the flow of water, turn the other way to stop. Move the dial to steam/froth milk. Fantastic default water pressure and even better tasting coffee. It’s a machine that will last a decade if not longer.

That’s fine, but you don’t have to be a deist to appreciate the title. Moby named one of his songs “God Moving Over the Face of the Water.” The author chose to use a metaphor many of us are familiar with, and even some atheists connote “God” to the mysterious existence of the universe, symbolic to the many collisions of stars that led us here.

Yes, TCC is what I meant, but my understanding is TCC is a platform wide sandboxing system?

I was building a lightweight imitation of OpenClaw. Just a Claude.md and iMessage watcher. I had to play around with Privacy a lot to be able to read my iMessages database, and do a lot of iTerm restarting.

The problem with Mac’s sandbox system is that it’s giving me some PTSD of Windows UAC. It’s inventing a solution to a problem that might exist in small doses, but instead gives users permission fatigue.

I personally think the traditional *nix model has served us quite well, and elective sandboxing using containers (à la Docker and so on) is quite good. The Mac sandbox model is probably ok for most normal users, but for power users is infuriating at times. Multiple restarts of Mac and various processes (and when you realize not enough scopes have been granted, another subsequent restart). I think Mac forcing all users into its sandbox system has been one of my least favorite impacts since upgrading macOS, leading to the enshittification of macOS.

The craziest thing is background processes started by Terminal/iTerm (such as tmux) can inherit Terminal or iTerm’s elevated status even when Terminal or iTerm are no longer running, dead, or killed. So you’ll have a bunch of elevated processes without the elevated parent or grandparent process running—it makes me feel the whole permissions scheme is more performative than actually useful.

I started learning how to make croissants. I bought a Japanese hand crank sheeter, and tried different butters and convection ovens. Definitely put me through a rabbit hole.

Thanks for the heads up! In all fairness, I'd probably run away from writing any more desktop apps!

It’s been a long time since I had to touch Windows development. If I had to do it over again, I would use React Native for Windows UI where possible and low-level Win32-React Native module bridges for user space code.

The last time I had to do Windows development was about 15 years ago. I used a library called WTL (I think a couple comments here mention it). I couldn’t use any of the newer stuff that Windows 8-10 were pushing because it needed backward compatibility. It seemed way less bloated than MFC, but not as annoying to use as ATL or rawdogging Win32 APIs.

Ironically, I was developing a Win32 app to build a cloud bridge to a Rails app (talking to Quickbooks COM API which was hell on Earth, with XML and XML definitions) on Mac, using VMware on Mac to talk to Quickbooks Windows. I was so annoyed with Win32 development I used the Chrome Embedded Framework library to build the UI for the Win32 app so I wouldn’t have to wrestle WTL for UI and just have browser-based views to drive UI.

I think it was very tempting to drop C/C++ development for .NET code, but I didn’t want to drop off user adoption by requesting users to download a huge .NET runtime if their computer didn’t already have it.

This was when I was building Levion, a Quickbooks Windows to Cloud Rails app…

I was personally creeped out by it at the handful of Whole Foods I saw this. I’d rather tap and pay or pay by QR code.

I have PTSD from Google Protobufs. Sometimes the cost of a less-efficient protocol or traditional REST is worth it over an overengineered solution. Protobufs can be fine, but it's largely overkill. Debugging with protobuf was the price we paid for an "efficient" protocol

The funny thing about references to Traditional Chinese (HK and Taiwan) and Simplified Chinese is that there’s even more shade in Chinese…

簡體字（简体字）Simplified characters

繁體字（繁体字）Complicated characters

Yes… It’s even crazier with bread baking. While cakes and cookies are generally the same everywhere with the exception of high altitude baking, bread baking is some of the trickiest skills to master.

For example, hydration of the dough will dictate the final outcome of the bake. Every flour hydrates differently depending on protein, ash content, milling, and so on. So even if a recipe calls for generally 70% hydration, it may be more or less depending on the “feel” of the dough if you switch flours. Croissant dough detrempes need to be hydrated at a very low percent, generally under 60%. The flakiest croissants tend to be made with a very dry stiff dough hydrated at 50%.

And beyond the choice of flour—temperature (proofing, desired dough temperature), climate, kneading/mixing, yeast or wild starters, salt will drastically change the substance of the bread.

We haven’t even talked about gluten formation (especially with regard to autolyse and dough folding) and fermentation techniques… and how the raw dough is loaded into an oven and at what temperatures (deck, convection or fan-assisted, with humidity, Dutch oven, etc).

I am not sure if there’s evidence. But reading more about physics and the cosmos and the events of the universe happening 13.8 billion years ago only increases my faith that there is more to our “random” existence.

Too little science leads away from God, while too much science leads back to Him". So said Louis Pasteur.

“Hell’s Kitchen”

Everyone’s definition of overprotective parenting is different. But we do know the harms of smartphones. Many of us have decided to curb it as much as we can, just as we want to mitigate pre-adult drinking and marijuana consumption (or at least demonstrate an environment that produces the least harms).

For me I don’t mind her running around in a forest school or climbing on trees. Modern playgrounds are surprisingly sterile and overly safe.

I’m grateful I have that choice to send her to a Waldorf school and I want more parents to have more options.

I had a computer growing up. It wasn’t always connected to the Internet. I had dial up occasionally. But I cannot imagine my child growing up with social media is a good thing. Facebook, MySpace, Instagram, TikTok didn’t exist when I was a kid.

And while the genie is out of the bottle, I want to minimize the exposure of social media. The smartphone experience is shrouded in social media. I want to do everything in my power to put her in an environment with other parents who have agreed to modify their environment. We’re looking at San Francisco Waldorf School. They even have a “computer lab” with designated screen time in the later grades.

I think many of the comments in opposition to this are coming from people that do not have children. Many of those in support do. I speak as a parent of a child, and I think “parent brain” will affect your thoughts on this. Having said that, I grew up on dial up and very low tech HTML. Not social media which is an entirely different beast.

There is a book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. NYU Prof. Jonathan Haidt argues that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting have led to a "rewiring" of childhood and a rise in mental illness. Suicides for both teenage girls and boys are up.

I’m choosing to send my kids to a school whose parents have also agreed to remove or drastically curb the use of social media. Not eliminate the creative sense of electronic tinkering.

Do you have kids? I have a 4-year old girl. And while parenting is so much harder without iPad and iPhone, my daughter is genuinely more interested in the world and imagination play than looking at screens. At age 2, was curious about the other kids with iPads, but now she shows no interest in screens. And we’re doing fine with static or minimally electronic toys. She has a whole adolescent/adult life ahead of her of screens.

This is about a developing child’s mind and the precautionary principle of knowing with the evidence we have now that social media is extremely harmful to mental health, especially to adolescent girls. This is not the same as outlawing alcohol to grown adults.

One of them was looking at my old AP US History tests. I don’t have the exam question right in front of me, but I remember getting the answer wrong. I found the correct answer on Google pretty quickly. It was on an obscure fact of some former president. I didn’t find the answer in the first several search result pages. I remember getting the answer within the first 3-4 results when I had looked up why I got it wrong 22 years ago.