Viewing profile — badlibrarian

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It can and does and may choose to do so unprompted. That was one of my "holy shit" moments. Previously I watched it spit out nonsense to get around edge cases and avoid tests and u…

I can specifically and directly state that is false.

Ah, the classic HN "I keep Wikipedia's list of logical fallacies on my bookmark bar" retort. “No true Scotsman” would require me to redefine “senior developer” to exclude people wh…

Long bet: the NTSB will require all transportation software to be submitted for independent review, and that review process will be heavily automated by AI, within 5 years. Take it…

I've tried. It's like trying to teach squirrels how to Google. Really, you just have to figure out what works for you. You will be rewarded.

Very, very senior dev here who has never taken a shortcut in his life. Don't mean to sound like a prick but you're doing it wrong. You have to find your own path through this stuff…

I'll worry when that stops happening. Probably means I'm getting in my own way or not thinking big enough.

Might I recommend HVAC or plumbing, it's honorable work and pays well. Trim trees if you've got the body for it. I don't recommend web work, the last ten years or the next ten. Wou…

It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.

If you repaired televisions in the 70s, most of the IBM 604 trigger circuit looks completely ordinary: a couple of triodes, plate resistors, grid bias, coupling capacitors, and vol…

This represents a small part of what IT is worried about. Offer a beer and say the word "SharePoint" if you want the long version of where this could wind up. The issue isn't letti…

Evoking Gödel via GPT, with the requisite em-dash: "No sufficiently expressive formal governor can be simultaneously consistent, complete, and able to prove every relevant proposit…

I just had GPT reverse engineer, from scratch, some ancient Corel Draw documents and turn them into perfect PDFs. None of the open source libraries helped. In fact, GPT didn't make…

"The optic cortex is the biggest area of the brain by far. When everything is saturated in fluorescent light, as it is in small studios many times, the fluorescent light is going o…

Archives have not taken a consistent stance on this. Preservation, removal, restricted access, de-indexing, and “right to be forgotten” sit on a spectrum. Good archival practice ha…

From http://bbslist.textfiles.com/ Perhaps Dude is among us. 206-246-6647 White Center, VA RaT City BBS (1993-1997) Dude Renegade "Primarily a demoscene board with a vast collectio…

"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?" John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead,…

It started failing two days ago, when it suddenly couldn't access gmail threads reliably. Then it started popping up warnings that I was over quota when I wasn't. It even let me us…

Exactly. They're both very expensive and prone to surprising you. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. I'd rate them 85%, but you have to run a test because they both f…

The physical version of that magic wormhole is called a slide rule.

The first section is the good part. The later reuse of “log” across valuations, dimension, vector fields, orders of vanishing is not so good. Those may be related ideas, but each n…

This essay needs a type system. Every time it says “log” it should say: log of what, into what? It’s like audio where people say "dB" as if it answers the next question. Relative t…

If it didn't work sometimes (in other cases), we wouldn't call them sociopaths.

Andrew Carnegie funded 2,500+ public libraries and many were built with lecture halls, auditoriums, and meeting rooms on purpose. The public library was a civic institution from da…