danhorner

We have shorthand for this in my family: “the volleyball coach”

ie. When you take your kid who is having trouble reading to the volleyball coach, he says “she has a hitch in her serve and her foot placement is a bit off but I can fix that”

I don’t think this is malicious, just professionals who have been trained to “help” in their areas, but may not have time to think systemically and jumped to the solutions within their domain.

Dental care might be a different world. I think the industry provides training on each new machine/treatment and I don’t know where the incentive lies to track long-term outcomes

I disagree. Based on the author's other posts (https://charlesleifer.com) and OSS work -- none AI generated -- they clearly have the technical ability and discernment to use LLM coding agents effectively. This is is something else, like let's see if we can coax wild bursts of creativity out of an agent primarily optimized to assist in - let's face it - mundane or cookiecutter tasks.

It's 2026 and LLM system prompts are still full of scene-setting like "You are an expert software architect". How fun to see the author's fever-dream prompts stretch that premise to the point of breaking and try to knock Claude loose from it's load-bearing perch.

But have a look at author's other pages and work. I don't see "AI induced psychosis" or "AI slop" in this particular case

Claude can’t have lunch yet.

The book has plenty of prurient private-jet-boardgame stuff, but also deals directly with facebook's adoption in Myanmar at at time when the inflammatary online speech was directly fuelling ethnic violence against the Rohingya. It covers the inability and possible unwillingness of facebook moderation staff to intervene, including a report that one paid moderator was not effective in their work because their personal views aligned with the regime.

I tripped over the double-entendre of the teaser quote and then found it ironic that the author is a copy writer.

>> “AI agents are the future of software development. We won’t need developers anymore to slow down the progress of a business.”

> And so, to me, a copywriter, what’s happening here is that the same message is meaning two different things to two different audiences.

I couldn't tell whether to parse this as "We will be faster without those slow developers", or more cynically as "We don't need developers to slow us down; We can now be slow with ai agents". I suspect that with creeping complexity the latter reading will hold up better for large projects.

I started reading this and it gave a strong whiff of Richard Stallman’s “the right to read” - once dystopian and now a commonplace.

Then I started scrolling and thought the author was just verbose like RMS.

When it just kept going I was just mad to have fallen into the AI tarpit.

Fun idea. 5x too long. I need to calibrate my ai spidey sense better.

Ha! I remember experimenting with coins on strings as a kid in the early 90s.

What a rush when i realized it worked.

xe.com is competitive with wise rates and answers the phone. My KYC/AML journey was brief and they came through within their stated timeframe.

However all of the online companies sell the happy path and your experience will be diminished the farther you deviate from it. The right answer may be for a business to maintain a second-source in this as in all critical supplier relationships.

I live in Washington and bats occasionally wander into our cabin. As others have pointed out, there is a difference between pre-exposure (Vaccination) and post-exposure protocols.

The rabies vaccine is given pre-exposure and can be obtained at travel clinics. It's generally only given to people travelling to high-incidence areas or sometimes to those working with wild animals. I believe this is because it's only effective for a year or two. Although, there was one documented non-fatal incidence of human rabies in an individual who had been vaccinated years prior if memory serves.

The rabies post-exposure protocol is much less pleasant. It includes Immunoglobulin against the virus as soon as possible post-exposure. This needs multiple injections just to make up the volume. It's much more expensive and a little unusual, so ER visit. A child-sized dose was 4 simultaneous injections into buttocks and arms. It's followed by vaccination+booster at travel clinic, a couple of weeks apart.

If you are able to preserve the bat without touching it, local authorities can examine it. They will need to decapitate it and examine the brain tissue, so the brain needs to be intact and not frozen to get good tissue. ie. Don't put it in the freezer.

Having said that, bats are super-adorable and I've been able to move them with heavy gloves by placing a tupperware over them, sealing with a piece of paper, and relocating them outside before anybody gets close to them. We just had one borderline experience (no confirmed contact) where we felt it was better to be safe than sorry. Post-exposure protocol is criticial if there was contact with the bat because the stakes are so high.

Thanks for posting. There are many things down this rabbithole and I hadn't seen pico.sh before.

The github repo has the sources for the backend, but the services themselves are accessible over https at eg: pico.sh, prose.sh, pastes.sh, pgs.sh

Onboarding to the free stuff is easy by sshing with an existirng Identity to pico.sh, which creates subdomains for you at the various services above.

The central idea is to expose a whole bunch of simple services using SSH for auth and for tunneling, and occasionally rsync as a file-transport. While this may not be an efficient way to run high-traffic services, it's a great way to stand up simple back-of-house tools and I wish more people were doing things like this.

Love the aesthetic and the commitment to proving this out.

I came here to say this. `git gui` is nearly ubiquitous and has saved me for years from learning how to use `git add -p`. I don't use many graphical git tools but its options "stage hunk" and "stage line" are more intuitive and fine-grained than the hunk-splitting in `git add -p`

This observation seems unwarranted (and a little unkind). For a voluntary personal project - not to mention one that involves a bit of personal risk/discomfort - they can publish the data in whatever format they please and revise it at will.

This is a great presentation.

A similar project worth mentioning is Voltron, which can decorate your gdb session with accesory windows. (Use tmux for window layout).

No experience with this dashboard but looking forward to trying it.

Yes, "do the following experiment" sounds more natural. IMO, "Conduct" conveys precision and is appropriate for more formal writing.

On the contrary, this patent could now be useless even if it doesn't get invalidated:

It's expired for future use, and according to Sparkfun's response it can't be asserted against prior infringers because Huawei owned it and shipped devices without marking the patent on them.

One aspect of this defense was failure to mark: A previous owner of the patent produced processors covered by the patent but did not mark them as such.

It turns out that systematically not marking your patent on your products invalidates claims for infringement unless it occurred after the owner notified future infringers of the violation.

The striking thing about this for a patent troll is (if I understand this correctly) that it's easier to shake companies down if your patent has never been used to ship anything.

That seems odd.

I have been suspicious of their cloud config and run a docker image of the controller locally.

I'm still on version 5.14 and all of the cloud features are optional. I just ignore them. I guess now I know not to upgrade!

Thanks for the throwback. We LOVED the collect call thing as teenagers too cheap to drop a quarter into the phone:

- "You have a collect call from AtTheStationMyBusLeavesIn18Minutes. Do you wish to accept the charges?"

- "No"

Do you scan 35mm slides? It turns out a family member needs this service. If you unpause it, my email is in profile.

This is an enlightened and contrarian POV and I'm glad for it.

Previously known as EMP - the experience music project

I'd be curious to know more about this: are there specific industries or settings where it's used and valued?

+1 for synology NAS. The quality and frequency of updates has been high. I've used both rsync and Time-Machine based backups.

And I too like that it's a hardware business model: I have the sense that my purchase(s) fund development of useful features, not creepy upsell opportunities.

They had a scare several years back about a remote exploit. I think it has caused them to take security and updates seriously ever since.

I'm a little confused about the mall operator's incentive to do this.

Are they using ALPR for their own security and voluntarily sharing the reads? Is the provider giving them a discount to do so or paying to place cameras or something?

Those are all machining stations where CNC parts (likely for the instruments) would be cut. The guy in the front has a boring day ahead of him, watching the chip conveyor delivering waste material into the dumpster.

I recently implemented something like this, albeit for a research-use-only device. We used an embedded intel board with separate PCAP touchscreen connected to the LVDS+USB interface. X.org supported it out of the box. Out product runs on linux/C++ with html/js UI. There are a couple of embeddable web browsers. I've been very satisfied with a simple X11 browser based on Chromium embedded framework.

PCAP touchscreen worked well with double-gloved fingers and there are touch controllers that will reject a stray water droplet on the screen.

I'm not sure about the OS considerations for medical device use, but for linux you might consider the yocto project, which is designed for this kind of stripped down deployment. It will limit the number of moving parts you have to validate. If you're less devoted to the open source route, check out QT's boot-to-qt offering. QT ui's are common in this field and I believe there are supported boards at a range of price points.

You wouldn't want to hitch your design to Rasperry Pi or Beaglebone or such because of the short support lifetime of individual models and components. Part of what you pay for with the industrial vendors is a commitment to supply the system for 5-10 years.

If any of this is helpful, drop a note using the email in my profile.

And this is why we shop ikea backwards... walk in the warehouse door, pick up a coffee, find the thing in the catalogue, and skip the showroom altogether.