As far as I know there is literally no reason for this, it is just an incredibly lucky coincidence that we get to enjoy for free

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas.bsky.social · 4mo ago

something that wrinkles my brain every time I remember it is the fact that total eclipses are only possible on earth because the moon and sun appear to be the same size in our sky, due to the insanely, astronomically unlikely fluke that the moon is 400x smaller than the sun but 400x closer to us.

trying this linkedinfluencer thing to say OCaml and Domain Specific Languages www.linkedin.com/pulse/domain...

Domain Specific Languages as AI Supervision Gates

Everyone's talking about AI agents. Autonomous this, agentic that.

linkedin.com

“Fish” can be both singular (one individual) and plural (multiple individuals of the same species.) “Fishes” is multiple species. 🐠 Fish 🐠🐠🐠 Fish 🐠🐡🐟 Fishes Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

I've been thinking a lot about how coding agents can help us write more literate programs. gvrooyen.substack.com/p/literate-a...

Literate Agents

“We don’t really have any technical documentation in the data room yet, so you can just tell us what you need,” the CTO said.

gvrooyen.substack.com

This is great - it's about time someone updated the discourse on LLM energy usage to reflect that coding agents use massively more prompts than occasional questions to ChatGPT Simon estimates that a day of coding agent usage comes out close to the energy needed to run a dishwasher

Simon P. Couch@simonpcouch.com · 7mo ago

Whenever I read discourse on AI energy/water use that focuses on the "median query," I can't help but feel misled. Coding agents like Claude Code send hundreds of longer-than-median queries every session, and I run dozens of sessions a day. On my blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01...

Please bring the card machine with you when you bring the bill. I had the pollo con spinaci, I didn't return the ring to Mordor. You don't have to split this interaction across multiple volumes.

Look folks gen AI videos are out in the wild so if you weren't already being careful about sharing rage bait videos then now is a great time to start If you can't trace a video back to a trusted source then I recommend leaving it where it is, like a slice of bologna you found on the street

Minor medical situation on the flight and it’s cool that my wife is able to jump up and help out when they ask for a licensed medical professional. One day someone will need a regular expression so I stay ready.

RIP Jane Goodall, by all accounts a wonderful woman who loved this Far Side cartoon

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

With the sad passing of Tom Lehrer, a flashback to the place where I heard one of his songs for the very 1st time more than three decades ago

Had a vampire marathon this weekend with my son: Nosferatu (1922), Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Nosferatu (2024). Highly recommended watching order 🧛🏻

have been confused for days about insane cats invading our yard and destroying the plants for no reason only to find out I have accidentally planted fucking catnip all over the place, I am this neighborhoods feline drug lord, ive devasted their society

Rereading an old fantasy novel from my youth. The protagonist names are all bouba; the villains outlandishly kiki

Ek steel hierdie en maak dit "net hoed, geen stoet"

Thorsten Ball@thorstenball.com · last yr.

Small personal update: Heard the idiom “all hat, no cattle” for the first time today and, starting now, I’m going to try to use it as much as possible.

Love using plain chat as a scratchpad where I can back-and-forth with the AI until I get what I need (I've been desperate to turn my bank's old email statements into flexible machine-readable data for DECADES) and then just ask for a prompt that I can use in future or pass along to an agent

The word “login” comes from throwing a log attached to a rope with knots overboard a ship to see how many knots go by over time (see also, knots as speed). You’d then put that info in the “log book.” You’d “log in” on a regular basis. This wasn’t from 1959, it was likely from 1689! Etymology baby!

This feels right out of Snow Crash. Read the wrong text and you might catch a serious mind-altering (or -destroying) neuro-linguistic virus. (It's thrilling! Like a new frontier still waiting to be tamed)

I'm unsure why Putin is looking so pissed about this

The Guardian@theguardian.com · last yr.

Gérard Depardieu given 18-month suspended sentence after being found guilty of sexual assault of two women – Europe live

NEW POST Even experienced developers fumble around when working with a new platform. Unmesh Joshi shows how using an LLM helped him learn how to use an unfamiliar toolset. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Building TMT Mirror Visualization with LLM: A Step-by-Step Journey

Notes from my Thoughtworks colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery

martinfowler.com

I’ve never had someone take a honk as a conversation starter before but there we are

Guy nearly hit me in traffic, so I honked at him. Next stop light, he pulls up next to me and rolls down his window. “You got somethin’ to say to me?!” “Yeah, I think you’re a shitty driver. That’s what the honk was for.”

Oblivion Remastered looks absolutely BEAUTIFUL. Can still vividly remember the anticipation 20 years ago, and the live reveal brings back all those feels

This court order is literature

The Guardian@theguardian.com · last yr.

‘Shocking to the sense of liberty Americans hold dear’: the impassioned US court order in the Ábrego García case

An astronomy professor colleague of mine once relayed trying to explain to his students why it was important that they actually write their class reports themselves. “The point is not to teach ME about neutron stars,” he said.

Sam Halpert@samhalpert.bsky.social · last yr.

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

Biggest commitment to a 3 second joke I've ever seen

Why vim uses hjkl for movement, ESC to change modes, and why ~ represents the home directory in Unix. It's all thanks to the beautiful ADM-3A terminal that was born in the same year as me! catonmat.net/why-vim-uses... #retrocomputing #vim #neovim

Here is why vim uses hjkl keys as arrow keys

I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Natu...

catonmat.net

This is terrible. The 50% (!!) US trade tariff on Lesotho, who mainly manufactures jeans for brands like Levi's and Calvin Klein, risks wiping out half of their exports. www.news24.com/fin24/econom...

Baffled Lesotho seeks to engage with US on jeans tariffs | Business

Lesotho scrambled to put together a delegation on Friday to head to Washington to engage with the US on tariffs that risk wiping out nearly half of its exports, its trade minister said, in what could ...

news24.com

The Frog and the Scorpion From a Rational Point of View existentialcomics.com/comic/596