niccl

In some book by P G Wodehouse (inventor of Jeeves the butler), one character says (out of nowhere) that all the humans on the planet could fit in a cubic hole 1/2 mile on each side. It took me a little while to convince myself that was true. It still is, apparently

and the luxury to laugh when it's completely off the rails

FWIW Pangram [0] "We believe that this entire text is human-written."

I've only just discovered pangram, but I've seen it referred to a few times in HN recently wit nothing obviously pejorative about it. Take it with all required grains of salt, though

0: https://www.pangram.com/dashboard

I'd love to see some sort of histogram of different styles of AI usage for coding: how many people just use Chat v Claude v something fancy that I don't know about v something even fancier that I don't know about v ...

And if there were a dimension of day-job v personal use, I'd be even happier

Does anyone know if such a thing exists

> Over the last three years I have been doing a focussed investigation of a lot of different programming languages and styles

I don't know what your invesitgation covers, but a long time ago (2009) someone [0] did an interesting visual comparison of languages. sadly now it seems it's only available at archive.org [1], but I've often gone back to it, partly because it's such an elegant way of looking at some aspects of different languages.

0: http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20100412073334/http://blog.gmarc...

There is a problem with the over-under method use for long cables. If you then grab the wrong end through the centre hole you end up with a cable with a bunch of overhand knots in, which I find much more tedious to deal with than just using normal looping of cables and making sure to add the twist each time.

Back many years when I was touring with bands, at the end of the night you'd see all the lighting crew walking around the stage coiling the long cables, with one end trailing after them, to make sure the twists were correct. That was much more useful than generic over-under for all cables.

over-under has its place, but I don't use it everywhere.

any specifics on what you did?

I find them almost unintelligible. I'm a native English speaker. I read a lot, so I think my comprehension should be at least OK. I'm not even particularly stupid. Yet when faced with things like below (a direct copy/paste from a handoff document in a long running vibe-coding session), I have no real idea of what it's trying to tell me. Is it important? Do I need to do anything?

I think that spending all day trying to parse stuff like this is why a long session is so exhausting

> Worth stating because four documents now assert it. The console freeze was recorded in exactly one place with exactly one justification — a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back — and handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording is that 4.4's review page "could not break the console, but the downside of being wrong is that half day". No second reason. Checked, not recalled.

This recalls a time I was driving the Desert Road in Aotearoa/NZ at dawn. As I got to the top of the hill the sun came up in line with all the power lines and they glowed like golden spider webs off into the distance. I'd never thought that power lines could ever be breathtakingly lovely. This was one time they managed it

nit pick: _So Long_ and thanks for all the fish

I'm really sorry about that, but it jarred my ASD-ness

They mention 'breaking rapport' a few times. I'd really appreciate if someone could explain to an ASD person what that looks like. Genuine question

IIRC, at one time, in Aotearoa/New Zealand at least, Coca Cola Amatil (or whoever it is) had trademarked 'Always'. It may have been some other word, but it was definitely a common word. And it wasn't the particular branding, just the word

It seems that management in most organisations can't believe something unless they've paid vast sums for it. So they can't believe their own staff if they say X, even if it's right, because they haven't paid enough for it. Then the consultant comes along, interviews the staff, finds they say X, tell the client, charge buckets for it, and are believed. Weird human behaviour...

disclaimer: ex management consultant

> For instance, Shakespeare’s characters call one another “cuz,”

Calling someone 'cuz' is quite common in Aotearoa/NZ.

No. I got from the article that he's saying that the purchase is sunk cost, so any sale is 100% profit. So it's correct

> Factory workers soaked the skins in a orange-coloured solution containing mercuric nitrate; a process called 'carroting'. Vapours from the mercury poisoned the workers' nervous systems, making them prone to tremors, irritability, depression, paranoia, dementia and worse.

This is where the Mad Hatter in Alice Through the Looking-Glass comes from.

I agree with this in general but I think there's a nuance. 'dumb' prompts can get the result, but require more back-and-forth with the model and more token usage when compared to a crafted prompt

and reader-mode doesn't show the text

yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.

Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...

Thank you for posting this. I thought I knew a bit about what was going on with audio sampling and reproduction, but I learned a surprising amount from this well presented introduction

Darwin Award recipients!

until quite recently I dealt with a machine that had uptime in excess of 16,000 days. Before anyone panics, it was on a closed network. It was a second hand machine and we were very worried that if it was shut down the disk wouldn't recover, hence just not touching it. It was in a hut in the back of beyond so exceedingly tedious to replace if we needed to.

and the comment there about using emacs for the different shells in different modes possibly explains the un-resolved nit in TFA about proportional and monospaced fonts in different areas

I think it's more like the old adage 'the first 50% of the job takes the first 90% of the time, and the other 50% of the job takes the other 90%'.

Except that with vibe-coded AI stuff it's more like there's yet another 50% of the job to deal with the edge cases that takes yet another 90% of the time

There's much more information in the linked github repo at https://github.com/krauseler/muxcard

It even includes an eInk display as well as the battery.Insane, but really impressive.

Having associations with Aotearoa/NZ, I read it as w-eh-roh, which is part of the traditional Maori greeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(M%C4%81ori)

That wouldn't work (for me, at least). As soon as I figured out the pattern, I'd know I had a week after the 'deadline' and then the pressure is off until that week is passed/nearly up

How about Bill Gates as US's Benevolent Dictator For Life?

Sturgeon's Law (2026): 99% of everything is crap or slop

Another anecdatum: it definitely seems better to me in the last few days.

Thanks again to you and tomhow for all your stellar work on keeping the site as close to its original intent as practical these days