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jfb

7,777 karma · joined August 3, 2009

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jfb··on I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
I mean that’s not abuse? That’s what mechanically checkable invariants are for! They constrain the space the model has to work in.
jfb··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
Talking one's own book is a grand and ancient American tradition!
jfb··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs (2025)
The App Store vig with no exit is, if anything, even more distorting.
jfb··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs (2025)
Absolutely true. Cook is an officer of the company, and has a responsibility to the company itself; and the current incentive structure that Apple operates in dictates a drive towards rents. Change needs to be exogenous, but there is a certain amount of pushback that even a fiduciary can use, and the evidence here is, to me, damning.
jfb··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs
I don't know that it was always the strategy; there's a difference between openness and rent seeking.
jfb··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs (2025)
The real problem, to me, isn't that Cook sold out Jobs; he sold out his customers, by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general. I'm a long time Apple user, and the idea that ads have any place in my computers is appalling, but now they're in Maps, and they're in the OS as non-dismissible upsells, and I mean, Windows is right over there, all of this is unnecessary strategy taxation on what Apple does well (hardware and software).
jfb··on New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
For specifically unified memory reasons, Apple machines are much, much better at running local LLMs.
jfb··on New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
Yeah, I have an MBP for Reasons, but it sits docked 90% of the time. I'd rather spend the engineering budget on better thermals and more ports; I always have it plugged into a fixed monitor and other peripherals.
jfb··on Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
I like that the author at least head fakes towards postage, which is how spam gets solved, for real. It's far too late for SMTP, but I don't mind folks thinking hard about it.
jfb··on Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide
You can run macOS in a VM guest on a Mac host; Apple explicitly allows this.
jfb··on Framework's 10G Ethernet module exposes USB-C's complexity
The CalDigit TS5+. It's really nice!
jfb··on Framework's 10G Ethernet module exposes USB-C's complexity
Yeah, I use DAC for the desktop and fibre between floors. It's just the Mac's desktop that uses RJ45 copper.
jfb··on Framework's 10G Ethernet module exposes USB-C's complexity
Yeah, 10Gb ethernet runs hot. I just rewired the house with 10Gb (we have 8Gb FTTP) and it's kind of upsetting how hot my Thunderbolt dock gets.
jfb··on Typst 0.15.0
It produces beautiful PDF output from org-mode!
jfb··on The Future of Email
Postage. Postage. Postage.
jfb··on The Silent Critic
Yeah there’s a sense in which the approach is a bet on the commoditization of tokens, honestly.
jfb··on The Silent Critic
Yep! There's a link in the prose, but also:

https://gitlab.com/tftio/tools

jfb··on The Silent Critic
"cost code" for chrissakes. Sigh.
jfb··on BBEdit 16
TIL! Thank you!
jfb··on The Silent Critic
Some thoughts on a world of zero-marginal code code.
jfb··on BBEdit 16
The tab key in BBEdit inserts a literal tab character, or advances to a tab stop. It doesn't indent the line, which is what I would argue it should do when writing code.
jfb··on BBEdit 16
I wonder if it will ever get emacs tabs.
jfb··on Code review process is theatre
I think about this has having two separate but related concerns; how do we build tools that focus attention on the parts of the problem where human judgement is highest leverage; and how do we build harnesses that enforce invariants such that humans trust the attention focussing part. It's a challenge!
jfb··on Code review process is theatre
Definitely.
jfb··on Code review process is theatre
Some of my personal thoughts on path dependence in the world of zero marginal cost code.
jfb··on John Bradley, author of xv, has died
Oh man. I used to use xv a lot. RIP, John.
jfb··on Astral to Join OpenAI
Don't love it. But, I'm glad the Astral folks are getting the bag.
jfb··on Jujutsu worktrees are convenient (2024)
I keep my agent workflows distinct; we have (for historic reasons) a lot of non-git controlled context that differs between branches, and moving all that around on checkouts is untenable. I use this tool:

https://github.com/tdhopper/wt

with some custom shell aliases to make it easier.

jfb··on Jujutsu worktrees are convenient (2024)
I think it shouldn't be, and the poor affordances in git have hidden this for a long time.
jfb··on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race
That the product is useful does not mean the supplier of the product has a good business; and of course, vice versa. OpenAI has a terrible business at the moment, and the question is, do they have a plausible path to a good one?
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