Posts by cammerman@mstdn.social
(DIR) Post #Aiv5XWGFe90mWRI4WG by cammerman@mstdn.social
2024-06-14T13:35:42Z
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@futurebird It's easy for me to imagine a computer whose direct inputs and outputs are not exposed to users.I can also imagine a computer that receives a clock signal as an input. (Maybe AC itself could do in a pinch, you can always step-up the frequency.)But memory and processor seem to me to be what fundamentally makes a computer.
(DIR) Post #AivBY70NdHWgCsX5VI by cammerman@mstdn.social
2024-06-14T13:38:07Z
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@futurebird As I think about it more... Maybe the question of whether a computer needs memory comes down to whether registers count as memory? I'm inclined to say they do.
(DIR) Post #Aj3K84lYiOxAwf5SpE by cammerman@mstdn.social
2024-06-18T12:56:48Z
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@futurebird This is a great little thread. Thank you for posting. I have thought about this some, but hadn't identified debugging as a generalizable skill.Two others that I think have value for anyone are what I call "algorithmic thinking" (there is probably a better name for it) and "abstraction.By algorithmic thinking I mean thinking about instructions and processes. Their steps, inputs, and outputs, as well as loops, branches, and even variables.1/2
(DIR) Post #AjWsWHMSYfJM11CFwe by cammerman@mstdn.social
2024-07-02T19:08:49Z
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@futurebird @cykonot It's a way of covering themselves with permission to do whatever they want. Same goes with things like corrupt officials. "Sure our guy is corrupt, but *all* politicians are corrupt, so I'll take the corrupt guy who agrees with me."
(DIR) Post #AmGUgtHs2L2V8e0oWu by cammerman@mstdn.social
2024-09-22T15:02:46Z
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@futurebird The cost of borrowing money also affects how businesses behave. When rates are high they take fewer risks. Hire less, lay off more, etc. Fewer new businesses are started. More startups fail.
(DIR) Post #AmfJTnhnpQU5FWxhqq by cammerman@mstdn.social
2024-10-04T13:27:07Z
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One of the reasons for the enthusiasm for AI is because it seems to promise to all the "idea guys" that their ultimate dream is within reach: Freedom from the dreaded reliance on a "technical co-founder" and all that comes with it. One must only speak their unique and beautiful Idea into the machine, and out the other end comes an implementation. Just a little spit and polish, and then ready to sell.
(DIR) Post #AmfZUG0oBSvOJ75jG4 by cammerman@mstdn.social
2023-02-14T15:26:23Z
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It is importantTo tidy unimportant thingsSo that they remainUnimportant
(DIR) Post #AolqzY9ssnOQpstcdk by cammerman@mstdn.social
2024-12-06T13:50:06Z
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Thanks to @futurebird, TIL that "elytra" is not just a Minecraft thing (specifically wings that let your sort of fly.)They are an insect thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElytronThe more you know ðŸŒ
(DIR) Post #ArIfv5DZToy7tM3EyO by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-02-20T05:38:33Z
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@futurebird I can draw a keyboard and get most letters right, and the rest to within 1 space.I usually fix typos by rewriting the whole word.When I don't, I think it's usually a rare word that I don't have muscle memory for the whole word.Fixing those typos, and typing passwords, are the only times I think about individual letters (and may have to look at them for the passwords.)
(DIR) Post #AymRX9Bep0vWP2qdto by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-10-01T23:23:23Z
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@futurebird It would be a beautiful symmetry if there really was an extra ticket because a friend said "sorry, I gotta see about a girl."https://youtu.be/ViCfc3eIpv4?si=-MG7Bt2cHPzUzJLl
(DIR) Post #AzXQrzJjkCPILi7LW4 by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-10-24T15:27:22Z
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@futurebird I'm 99.9% sure that all of this is either hazing or superstition.The only thing I think is a reasonable caution/advice is to fan the edge of the stack that you put in facing the feeder, to try to reduce the likelihood of it grabbing multiple pages at once.
(DIR) Post #AzXRAeZL6tMBV9Jdy4 by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-10-24T15:30:46Z
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@futurebird I don't think there's any way to know which way the curve is facing inside the packaging. And also: a printer curves the page around multiple times, at least once in each direction. So I'm not sure how much it could matter.
(DIR) Post #B17bRZGWI5witT3bu4 by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-12-11T00:07:34Z
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@futurebird I would have expected "BOO-cal", like oso bucco.
(DIR) Post #B1BG2vxHTOlBcUJIzg by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-12-12T17:27:06Z
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I don't know how you can read this Yegge post and think "yes, this is what programming should be like in the future."I also don't know how you can trust the judgement of someone who says, without apparent irony or self-awareness, that the LLM (Claude in this case) "likes" something.And that goes double for someone who will ask the LLM to describe why it likes something, and then include that in their blog post in lieu of an actual explanation of why the thing is goodhttps://steve-yegge.medium.com/introducing-beads-a-coding-agent-memory-system-637d7d92514a
(DIR) Post #B1BG2x43Lhlt3mUEBk by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-12-12T17:34:27Z
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I will tell you what the AI hype sounds like to me....Data-driven UI. UI generated dynamically based on nested templates and conventions, with descriptions of content and specific arrangements stored in the database.Every now and then as a programmer you will run into someone who has discovered this idea. Or, worse, you'll end up maintaining a system built this way. And you will see what it takes to build and run and evolve such a system, and you will say "never again."
(DIR) Post #B1BG2xvw7MsBkthGAy by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-12-12T17:41:58Z
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Building a data-driven UI is not programming, but it is programming-adjacent. It allows you produce stacks and stacks of screens and forms and wizards extremely rapidly, with supreme confidence that they all "just work." And no designer ever bothers you again about icky front-end stuff.The problem is that you have to compromise on every aspect of design in order to find something that fits into the platform's model. And that gets you shitty, least-common-denominator UX.
(DIR) Post #B1BG2yXrqLDLeXRYIa by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-12-12T17:45:57Z
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This is vibe-coding, but instead of UX it's the actual code your producing. And instead of avoiding HTML and CSS, you're avoiding stuff like writing unit tests and projecting data between structures.But the drive is the same: Faster production, with less of the work you dislike doing.But the work that replaces it is, in my opinion at least, even less enjoyable or fulfilling.
(DIR) Post #B1BG2zEPIBF3mTLWbY by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-12-12T17:48:29Z
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So many senior devs lament how much time they have to spend coaching and giving feedback, and how little time they have for code.And with LLMs we see rafts of senior devs gleefully shifting their career so that all they do now is coach and provide feedback to a dumb agent that will never learn anything permanently from the process, never surpass its master, never stand on their shoulders and move on to greater things.Teaching, but without any long term ROI. What a shitty gig that sounds like
(DIR) Post #B1BG3ASHYvsQagvGG8 by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-12-12T18:04:15Z
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Hands on, 1:1 teaching and coaching is one of the things I love most about programming as a career.Making new makers. Making new lovers of making... It's not always this grand, but the times that it is carry me through when it's not.To see that job destroyed, and that labor robbed of its humanity, by taking out the learning human and replacing it with a machine (and one that can't even actually learn)... This is tragic, to me.
(DIR) Post #B1Hyy2xBgfIclN4PFA by cammerman@mstdn.social
2025-12-15T23:03:37Z
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I don't know how we ended up in a universe where "Trump Derangement Syndrome" refers to people who don't like Trump, rather than to all the batshit fucking unhinged behavior of all the people that have twisted their souls into pretzels supporting or following him.