Viewing profile — reedlaw

I made https://constraint.fyi/ after getting frustrated on some of the harder Clues by Sam ( https://cluesbysam.com/ ) puzzles for which the color tags aren't enough to represent e…

What do you mean? I'm Gen X but remember all those things. It seems like a reasonable mashup of nostalgia.

Since the Renaissance got started before the printing press, maybe you mean the press fueled it? The idea that the church found printing dangerous seems like a conflation with even…

Good instinct. I did both. The script came out later.

I did the malware check using Claude, providing it with the same list ( https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA ), and it did essentially the same things as this script does to verif…

I also had an affected package installed, fortunately it was from the official repo before it was dropped and became an AUR package.

Yeah, the README looks like slop to me.

Codex is only slightly better, and that fluctuates so I switch back and forth.

I tried to create a hook that would detect when token usage was running out and write HANDOFF.md so I could switch to another agent and finish the current task. It never worked rel…

I'm skeptical skills will outperform training given that Opus 4.7 already ignores a 720-byte CLAUDE.md telling it to use tidewave (a Rails MCP server with 6 tools) for db queries. …

Why do you say HashWithIndifferentAccess shows a lack of understanding? Like many Rails features, it's a convenience that abstracts away details that some find unpleasant to work w…

Chinese omits articles, verbs aren't conjugated, and individual characters carry more meaning than English letters, but other than those differences I don't have the impression tha…

Are you saying Chinese is more concise than English? Chinese poetry is concise, but that can be true in any language. For LLMs, it depends on the tokenizer. Chinese models are of c…

I've come to the conclusion that Hacker News is the best aggregator out there. Substack knows my interests yet gives terrible recommendations. Youtube constantly recommends the sam…

Claude has trained me on the use of the word 'invariant'. I never used it before, but it makes sense as a term for a rule the system guarantees. I would have used 'validation' for …

Then I would say this is another proof that LLMs lack intellect or ability to reason about universals. See https://michaelmangialardi.substack.com/i/186405810/test-4-p...

Why is Haskell irrelevant to the argument that LLMs can't reliably permute programming knowledge from one language to another? In fact, the purity of the language and dearth of tra…

This is the second endorsement I've seen today. I gave OpenSpec a shot and was dismayed by the Explore prompt. [1] Over 1,000 words with verbose, repetitive instructions which will…

Do you have examples of the task maturation cycle? I'm not sure how it would work for tasks like extracting structured data from images. It seems it could only work for tasks that …

How do you even begin to define objective measurements of software engineering productivity? You could use DORA metrics [1] which are about how effectively software is delivered. O…

Plasma Bigscreen has been around for 6 years: https://itsfoss.com/news/plasma-bigscreen-comeback/

https://github.com/mickeynp/combobulate

Isn't this the premise behind Dilbert?

LLM-generated snippets of code are a breath of fresh air compared with much legacy code. Since models learn probability distributions they gravitate to the most common ways of doin…

Whatever agent I tried would include thousands of tokens in tool-use instruction. That would use up most available context unless running very low-spec models. I've concluded it's …