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jonstewart

3,749 karma · joined December 9, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/jonstewart; my proof: https://keybase.io/jonstewart/sigs/K9JLQMMOlAgjvlg-HZoZIle_xarkvo7BuvZBBcgvDT0 ]
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jonstewart··on Sshole
What is dead can never die. All blueteamers are ironborn these days.
jonstewart··on Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power
I know it’s just a way people grieve, but it’s obviously a fallacy to conflate the character with the actor.
jonstewart··on Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4
No doubt because the LLM said it was ready to pass Jepsen.
jonstewart··on Init – a Rust agent harness that recompiles and hot-swaps its own core mid-task
“A Root it can never touch can undo any change.”

This is the sort of nonsense up with which I shall not put!

jonstewart··on The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)
All I gotta see is “utexas.edu” and “(197X)” and I know it’ll be a banger that’s still relevant today.
jonstewart··on Superlite: A Faster Alternatie to Superpowers
Superpowers has stopped working the past six months, to the point where it’s actively harmful. The main problem is the Writing Plans skill — its directives emphasize that the plan must be written for agents that cannot be trusted. What happens is the agent then writes all the code and the steps become “Copy this code block into foo.rs”. Meanwhile the review skill specifies that the code must follow the plan exactly; but now that it’s at the level of copying code, which hasn’t been tested and compiled*, the reviewer always freaks out about a stray & or comma, launching fixer agents and whatnot.

The last straw was two weeks ago when I discovered on a run Fable accounted for this problem in by first writing all the code in a scratch git repo and running unit tests, before copying that code into the plan. Since then I’ve been back to vibing. I lose overnight runs but gain sanity.

jonstewart··on Apple HomeView
The product film is triggering.
jonstewart··on Apple/macOS silently removed from official Unix registry
Xnu’s Not Unix!
jonstewart··on Margaret Hamilton has died
The Apollo Guidance Computer had 4KB of RAM and 16KB of ROM. Can you write a scheduler that would execute 8 programs related to landing on the moon in 4KB?
jonstewart··on What I did at Recurse Center
The Reagan years were a golden age but not the 90s?
jonstewart··on Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
Quake party!!!!
jonstewart··on How GLM built its own inference infrastructure
Necessity is the mother of invention. The shortsighted protections put on chips, etc., by the US has forced Chinese AI industry to adapt or die. Guess what their response to this fitness function has been? Kudos to Z.ai on their inventions and excellent write-up, which reads like humans wrote it.
jonstewart··on Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout
I intellectually understand the retailpocalypse replaced by online shopping, but I will always want to try on clothes before buying them, and that goes double for shoes. After trying out New Balance for a year or two in adulthood I ended up going back to Nike running shoes (I still remember my pair of Air Icarus from high school, so light), just seemed to fit my feet better.

But now I wear Hokas. Nike’s loss.

jonstewart··on She Also Found It at the Movies
Because she was smart, and her reviews will make you think.
jonstewart··on South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones
Too bad. I get mine from the small town butcher/locker when I’m in the Midwest in summer, and the neighborhood farmer’s market on the east coast the rest of the year. A couple of ribeyes a year and I’m good, so I see them as an affordable luxury where I can pay for good prime meat from a short supply chain.
jonstewart··on South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones
Hopefully most people here getting ribeyes aren’t getting them from the same factory farms that supply McDonald’s and sell other cheap kinds of beef. A ribeye is an occasional luxury and best bought from the farmer.
jonstewart··on South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones
So lab grown diamonds are good and cheap enough I can finally buy my wife of 21 years a diamond ring?
jonstewart··on The revolt of the reader
AI slop really needs to be auto-flagged. It’s been like 20% of front page links I click on lately.
jonstewart··on Product Backlog Problems: Why Your Hierarchy Is Broken
A strong whiff of AI writing.
jonstewart··on Show HN: FrontierHarness Eval – 9 harness, same model, cost per pass varies 17x
Forgive my stupidity but how do you run Claude Code with non-Anthropic models?
jonstewart··on Poisson Disk Sampling
Oh, that’s rather a different sort of disk sampling than I imagined.
jonstewart··on Hacking IKEA Furniture
I hadn’t been to IKEA in a decade or more but went this weekend to get new furniture for our kids. Today I put together a “vanity” for my daughter, and couldn’t help but think of the vanity I had in my room as a teenager that my mom had I inherited from some other family member, solid wood with beautiful birds-eye maple veneer. “Simulacrum” was the word I kept muttering to myself as I thought about what this next year in AI coding will bring.
jonstewart··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
Pondering this one night last week, I realized that because LLMs can only reason with written language, what we might be seeing emerge with Opus’s load-bearing mumbo jumbo is its own creole for structural reasoning. Not only are our brains wide, our senses are, too. I slow down to a crawl when I have to read actual math in a CS paper, but show me diagrams and I can reason about whatever sort of data structure or algorithm, no problem. Opus by and large can’t and its adaptation has been to adopt metaphor for structural reasoning. So while it may be exceedingly annoying to chat with, I sort of wonder whether this metaphorical-reasoning behavior has been selected for precisely because it leads to better coding outcomes.
jonstewart··on The German Mittelstand
> Advancing the precedent set by Alfred, generations of Krupps would continue to develop the region through various private and public works, for almost a century into the 1920s. > > With their basic needs addressed and the workforce inculcated with the “Kruppianer spirit,” the firm crossed the fifth ring. They forged an empire that, by the late 1950s,

<insert Goose meme> “What did Krupp make in the 1930s?”

This was kind of an interesting article but could have been a great deal shorter and wasn’t particularly insightful.

jonstewart··on Protopia
Imagine writing several paragraphs defining “utopia” and not mentioning Thomas More.
jonstewart··on The Beam Engine
If you enjoyed this and haven’t been, you need to plan a trip to Paris to spend a day at Musée des Arts et Métiers.
jonstewart··on The kids with phones are alright
This essay extends one anecdote involving 16+ year old teenagers to the unsupported conclusion that kids should have phones and those who wish to restrict that are all wealthy 1% right wing authoritarians. Then with the personal note it seems clear that the core of the essay stems from the author's own personal trauma/experience.

I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.

jonstewart··on Regular expressions that work "everywhere"
Then there’s not just the issue of whether the engine supports a particular syntactical feature but the issue of matching semantics. Perl/PCRE’s semantics are far different from POSIX’s and some implementations different semantics altogether (and quite reasonably).
jonstewart··on Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
I’ve got a 15 year old workstation that I’m breathing new life into, but fortunately starting from a higher baseline. 24GB of RAM is going to 96GB, and it turns out it should be able to use an NVMe drive, so have a card and an M2 drive on the way. The annoying thing is that the GTX 460 is no longer supported by the Nvidia driver so I’m back to nouveau. That might get replaced with something more modern. I had an old Mint installed and decided to blow it away with stock Debian, and Claude’s setting up nix VMs for itself to run in. It has been crazy how $4k in 2011 for an SR-2 system has yielded a long productive life for this box.
jonstewart··on Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
Citation? I’m sure he’s fine but $100M?
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