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robertfw

924 karma · joined June 22, 2011

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robertfw··on Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab
for the future? this has already been happening for years and is a major reason we're in the predicament we're in
robertfw··on MPs moving to restrict gambling ads in Canada
> I think the online element hates Gretzky because of something about the order of Canada

I would say it has a fair bit more to do with his cozying up to Trump

robertfw··on Claude Opus 4.8
This was happening even on the `stable` branch with 4.7

I managed to get claude to create a recovery script to un-brick sessions, YMMV

https://gist.github.com/robertfw/993dbe8643c4fbdf12005dff2ec...

robertfw··on GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty
OpenAI was doing this back with GPT2, saying it was too dangerous to release
robertfw··on Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates
I was in this camp as well until recently, in the last 2-3 weeks I've been seeing problems that I wasn't seeing before, largely in line with the issues highlighted in the ticket (ownership dodging, hacky fixes, not finishing a task).
robertfw··on Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses
how utterly disconnected from reality you are
robertfw··on Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan
`uv` has per-package overrides, I imagine there may be similar in other managers
robertfw··on Anatomy of the .claude/ folder
Yeah, the moment I saw this I knew this article was not going to be very useful.

Getting claude to follow your guidance files consistently is a bit maddening.

robertfw··on Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)
I really don't get this sentiment. The only sets that I think didn't contribute like this were the bionicle stuff. Getting a few more unique parts with a set gives you more options, not less.
robertfw··on Claude Opus 4.6
I wonder if it's just: compact earlier, so there's less to compact, and more remaining context that can be used to create a more effective continuation
robertfw··on Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
I've been using a `/feedback ...` command with claude code where I give it either positive or negative feedback about some action it just did, and it'll look through the session to make some educated guesses about why it did some thing - notably, checking for "there was guidance for this, but I didn't follow it", or "there was no guidance for this".

the outcome is usually a new or tweaked skill file.

it doesn't always fix the problem, but it's definitely been making some great improvements.

robertfw··on Lego announces Smart Brick, the 'most significant evolution' in 50 years, no AI
https://www.lego.com/en-ca/product/lego-large-creative-brick...
robertfw··on Lego announces Smart Brick, the 'most significant evolution' in 50 years, no AI
I was already programming when I got into mindstorms (so very happy that my high school had an "Industrial Control Technologies" class), but the jump in complexity and the thrill of seeing my code power something physical was definitely a turning point
robertfw··on Lego announces Smart Brick, the 'most significant evolution' in 50 years, no AI
I still have my mindstorms controller + sensors, I wonder how much effort it would be to get everything up and running again
robertfw··on Lego announces Smart Brick, the 'most significant evolution' in 50 years, no AI
I feel like the special parts have eased off, it was pretty bad with the bionicle stuff (which ironically are apparently what saved lego from financial difficulties), but I'd say all of the recent sets I've got (I get one a year for Christmas) going back at least 5 years have been made up of relatively generic parts, with the odd little special bit for flair.
robertfw··on Lego announces Smart Brick, the 'most significant evolution' in 50 years, no AI
I do think that the "model" form of something recognizable (thinking mostly about the Star Wars kits here) does lend itself to kits that sit on the shelf, but no one is forcing you to keep it assembled.

With that said, one thing I remember seeing in older kits is instructions for more than one build, which could serve as a kicking off point for someone to reapproach a bundle of bricks in multiple ways.

My own guideline is that once something is built, after a little while it has to be either modified/evolved, or disassembled and put into the bucket-o-bricks for reuse (well if I'm honest, it's several very well sorted craft/hardware bins)

robertfw··on Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone
there are going to be quite a lot of places where getting a laptop is a considerable expense
robertfw··on Graphite is joining Cursor
and if your pre-commit runs fast (thank you, ruff), you can set this up as a post-edit hook in claude code
robertfw··on Hypothesis: Property-Based Testing for Python
I feel like this talk by John Hughes showed that there is real value in this approach with production systems of varying levels of complexity, with two different examples of using the approach to find very low level bugs that you'd never think to test for in traditional approaches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi0rHwfiX1Q

robertfw··on Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
You could already do these things before, you just spent much more time twiddling your thumbs waiting for lock files to be resolved
robertfw··on Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
Slow doesn't really begin to do justice, I'd have to wait for >5 minutes for pipenv to finish figuring out our lock file. uv does it in less than a second.
robertfw··on Claude Code 2.0
I don't know, I tend to agree. I feel like the number of times I've been thrown off by an out of date comment for code that could have probably been refactored to be clearer, outweigh the times a comment has helped.

Docstring comments are even worse, because it's so easy for someone to update the function and not the docstring, and it's very easy to miss in PR review

robertfw··on Claude Code 2.0
comments for me are a code smell:

- like all documentation, they are prone to code rot (going out of date)

- ideally code should be obvious; if you need a comment to explain it, perhaps it's not as simple as it could be, or perhaps we're doing something hacky that we shouldn't

robertfw··on KDE is now my favorite desktop
KDE won me over for the simple fact that it's highly configurable, and that configuration is all driven out of one UI tool. Gnome drove me nuts with molding it into the shape I wanted.
robertfw··on Things you can do with a debugger but not with print debugging
my development workflow with python often boils down to repeatedly running `pytest --ff --pdb -x`...

- run my tests, running any previous failures first - drop into the debugger when a test fails (or of course, hits a breakpoint) - end the test run after the first failure

use debugger to figure out what went wrong, fix it, wash, rinse, repeat

robertfw··on The unbearable slowness of AI coding
I've had similar cases where the fix to the test was.. delete the test. Ah, if only I'd realized that little hack earlier in my career!
robertfw··on Show HN: TokenDagger – A tokenizer faster than OpenAI's Tiktoken
Making it work can be a hacky, tech debt laden implementation. Making it right involves refactoring/rewriting with an eye towards maintainability, testability, etc etc
robertfw··on Did scientists revive an extinct animal or just breed a less stripey zebra?
Might as well put that effort towards halting the ongoing mass extinction of more animals, before worrying about bringing back facsimiles of the ones we've already eliminated
robertfw··on Vaonis Hyperia: $45k digital telescope
it's exceedingly common to use a monochromatic sensor with different filters and then combine them in post. you might use visual filters - e.g., take 3 exposures using red/green/blue filters, but it's also common to use filters for specific wavelengths e.g. hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, and then assign RGB to each filter arbitrarily

there's lots of other red flags with this product but I wouldn't care about this one

robertfw··on XTDB 2.x Early Access
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog
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