I have not been acquired by openai today. My open source contributions will continue to be uncompensated, unhelpful, sporadic chaos.
Home
Public posts preserved on my own site.
Should I make rustify edtf-python? last I tried to to use this perf was so bad we had to remove it.
It is for converting times like, "It'll happen when I get around to it!" to "Jan 15, 2027"
Our ancestor when the asteroid hit earth was basically a squirrel.
(modern squirrels are distant cousins. But primates started out as squirrel sized animals that lived in trees and filled roughly the same niche)
♡ 0 ↻ 0
@acdha @dchud No, new to me! oh! because they started 30 days ago! Now I need to do a 3-way speed comparison.
They were more willing to break backwards compatibility. There is also a rust library that does zero-copy, but that is a very different programming model. A few years ago I tried to use memoryview to see if I could make pymarc zero-copy. Couldn't do it.
Oh, hi #MARC [*] - I had Claude add the rust speedup to #pymarc. Appears to have worked, 2x to 6x faster depending on scenario.
[*] MARC is a very old serialization format that became popular with libraries.
- did not make PR to main project, it is a fork. Also these analogous libraries often side by side, e.g. prefixed with c or r.
- I told it to make the legacy tests pass, as well as write many, many more tests
- Also had it write up a sample app
- Had 4 different frontier bots do code review & had Opus respond to code review.
- Only 2x faster? It was because I set the constraint that it had to be a drop in replacement. That limits improvements.
- I did try to have the bot explain it to me♡ 0 ↻ 0- 2/3 of the perf that pymarc leaves on the table is not using orjson and lxml. That's just setting coal on fire.
- 1/3 of the perf is rust code that looks very similar to the python codeWill it be a net improvement? I don't know. Native code costs more to compile, but when it runs it is much cheaper in terms of electricity. Windows 98 machines were like little space heaters. It's complicated, but native code wrapped in python is electric efficient.
♡ 0 ↻ 0I am tempted to do cmarc and if I can think up a suitable reason, ohimarc would be a good follow on after that.
♡ 0 ↻ 0
@HitchhikersGuideQuoteBot2 Which is ASCII for * which looks like an AI company's logo. It all makes sense now.
Ideas for testing
- dog food testing. write a sample app for your library. Unit tests are weird in a way that sample apps are not
- snapshot testing for the *unit test source code* - No change to legacy unit tests except when on purpose. (Similar motivation to UI snapshot testing, no accidental HTML changes)
Tech bros are going to see this and say, "Yes, but can we turn this into a software development methodology and get those periods of high productivity"
I do a lot of quantitative self tracking & I recently fed it all into chatgpt & told it to ID the statistical process that generates the data. It's okay, I took stats for my master's degree, I'm only somewhat over my head.
The bot & the math said, I'm "bursty" & everything correlates. I never hit the manic peaks Kenneth did, but hit the troughs of depression. I figure my far north ancestors benefited from the depression because you live for duty not for joy as there is none in a Swedish winter
♡ 0 ↻ 0
Please bot, if you have to go pee, just go.
(This joke work anymore? wc = water closet/restroom)
Just one more time. I'll click it one more time and then I'll be happy.
#ChildrenOfStrife is out. #AdrianTchaikovsky
It will be smart animals in space, but which ones?
https://www.amazon.com/Children-Strife-Time-Book-ebook/dp/B0FGXCCH3F
@AlSweigart If you click it repeatedly it feels like you're moving thru a star field.
@randulo Businesses have stakeholders, any of which can tank the company. Customers, investors, government, community. AI is for investors, it is the promise of replacing labor with capital and redirecting that income to investors. I don't think it will play out that way, but no one asked me. Customers we're not asked and that's my marketing exists, so the opinion of consumers won't matter, just change the consumers mind with ads.
This is exactly like real life. When I'm writing code I play movie music.
Who wants to work at xAI
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/staff-complain-that-xai-is-flailing-because-of-constant-upheaval/
Archived poll
- Me!0 votes
- Not me!5 votes
- Maybe. For 1 Billion dollars5 votes
- not 1 chance in 10^1006 votes
16 voters
"oh, I want to work 112 hour weeks and have odds even chance of being fired in a mass lay off every year, but the money will be worth it"
No it won't, can't be more than a handful of people making more than 1/2 mil, these are mostly ordinary salaries, worse, much worse at the salary/workhours rate
♡ 0 ↻ 0
I was reading scifi from 1930 from Gutenberg. First story is about climate change! When Earth dies, the last dying political leader will be telling the last dying peon that there was no way to foresee this, nothing could be done and it isn't his fault.
GUIs are perfectly intuitive. You want to get a file name onto the clipboard? F2 or shift-F6 to rename, then in the rename dialog copy the name, click cancel.
The ghost of Julius Caesar took up programming, but never did like IDEs.
Oh this is rich. People want to shame open source maintainers into not using LLMs, only handwritten code. You don't deserve that opinion if you aren't a material supporter of the maintainers and even then at best we're throwing quarters in front of people and expecting them to work like an employee. The social contract is opensource developer put code in a dumpster and you are a racoon that takes it in the night.
I see people trying to make the monastic model work (open source developers are religious proxies who do morally approved magic and by dint of their moral actions deserve funding from the laity or state gov't). If they're making a living at that sure, more power to them. Just because people put their code in a dumpster (pypi) for you to steal in the night for free, doesn't mean they opted in to the monastic model.
♡ 1 ↻ 0Some people, now get this, write their open source code while smoking, drinking vodka and watching porn at the same time! How do you feel about libgeewiz.so now? I betcha think you need to fork it, and the license allows it. Which you can, and then you join the ranks of monastic open source developers who get a few quarters from a handful of people who work for companies making $millions using libgeewiz.so.
♡ 2 ↻ 0
I am a project manager now. The bot writes code faster that I can read it and it has grown to the ball of mud phase. But I'm prepared, my career of working for PMs.
- MANAGING BLAME. Meeting with Claude to establish who is at fault.
- DEADLINES. Ask Claude to provide dates for when he will fix it. Let Claude know he is wrong and that the the due date is now.
- DAILY MEETINGS. I will meet with Claude daily, sometimes in back to back meetings to get status
- TECHNICAL DECISIONS. I still haven't read the code nor the Textual TUI manual, but I've decided the bot should fix state management like they did in ASP.NET with cookies and ViewState. ASP.NET worked fine in 2007, surely a python TUI works the same way.
- INFORMATION CONTROL. The actual user and the user's technical staff have reported a technical problem and think they found a solution. It is imperative the Claude not communicate with these people or they will ruin my reputation.♡ 3 ↻ 0
robots.txt: go away search engine
humans.txt: I want to thank the programmer and the UX guy and...
cats.txt: ewbvv kj,mlooiioiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
I shouldn't be working while angry and that is why I'll be taking 40 years of PTO.
Hold on. HR says, I can't just declare 40 years of PTO.
♡ 2 ↻ 0
Antimatter costs $62 trillion per gram, making antipasta the most cost effective food ever. No one has ordered it from the menu, ever because the explosion from the matter and antimatter combining on your tongue would overcome the gravitational binding energy of the Earth.
This comic works for before limits are hit, too.
Best realization to come out of using Claude Code/etc is that the complexity involved in using these tools is exploding and will rival the complexities of IDEs. So project managers aren't going to be able to just prompt the bot themselves and cut out the techies.
I presume vi users will prompt Claude with curl.
Taking down random parts of IT infrastructure as a stress test is too dangerous. That is why instead we will stress test the staff by hiring a live monkey to throw poop at the devops staff tomorrow.
I am a Chaos Engineer.
Oh, so you are an expert with AWS FIS?
No, you heard me.
@maphew@vmst.io 1 - activate your venv before starting Claude (or what have you)
2 - tell it to use uv in the agents file but keep the agents file really tiny (10 lines? I don't know. Big agents files make llms stupid according to research)
3 - let it use `. .venv/Scripts/activate` because it is familiar with it & is going to try to do that anyhow
4- give it a Makefile or Justfile with jobs that use `uv run` correctly
The first step to deploying a mixed version release to production is to update your resume. You have no reason to believe that in a modern microservice environment that deploying
v2 of service A
v3 of service B is going to work when in all lower environments it is v3
Real companies do this by having fancy canary deployments, rollbacks, deploy code from dev to prod daily, etc.
If your deployment cycle is 12 months, yeah, update that resume before deployment.
@gregatron5@vmst.io My tree is blossoming and is very confused.
Friday I was going to just write an AtariWriter clone. Today I'm one module away from an AppleWorks clone, and I had forgotten that appleworks and wordprocessor + spreadsheet + db combos used to be a thing.
And I think it needs a crappy web browser, something with the look and feel of a BBS.
If you flunk your autism test, you can study for it. Hope that helps.
My taxes went down! Two months of unemployment will do that. Thanks Trump!
@mainframed767 Gitlab pipelines. Only thing worse than Gitlab pipelines is github actions.
IDEA: Reaction Reaction youtube channel, where I round up and co-watch all the week's best reaction videos.
Make it and everyone dyes.
I'll be using a shareware license. You can use the software for 30 days after which you must feel guilty.
Posting from Safari Writer. I also posted this blog post from
SafariWriter. I'm not going to stop until I can post a slide deck as a
tweet storm and embed an spreadsheet as a markdown table.
IDEA: HTTP 403 support on mastodon for when you're willing to put up with bad takes and unwanted replies, but for a price.
**python, C#, etc: **"Oh concurrency is hard, here, use these keywords: async, semaphor, lock"
**.gitlab-ci.yml: **"Use these keywords: haha, lol, yolo"