Adam Chalmers

Adam Chalmers

@adamchalmers.com

Texan (prev Australian). Father (prev gamer). Pynchon fan (prev illiterate). Building a new programming language for CAD at zoo.dev. Built a lot of Cloudflare Tunnel. I run a meetup austinsystems.org and love reading sci-fi, history and Jewish stuff.

3.2K followers1K following4.5K posts

Adam Chalmers reposted

ok non-tech ppl might be hearing some scary things about "critical vulnerabilities" involving certificates. the main thing you need to know, without getting down in the weeds about it, is that the fourth seal is broken. lo, a rider approacheth upon a pale steed, and his name is Death

I'm working on a numbers/UoM system for kcl and I want to prove several properties with property tests, e.g. "a * b / a == a" but the freaking f64 error accumulation makes this very tough. Deltas everywhere.

I'm considering making my number type generic, and using Rational/Fraction in tests to simplify proving that my number system's laws are upheld. Then in prod using f64 for performance and interop. Is that a bad idea?

my friend playing Elden Ring for the first time: "is this approach called... uh... "cheesing" the boss?" me: "Listen. The game cheeses you. It is permissible -- in fact, advisable -- to cheese it back."

Made my first legendary item (a Quality 3 module) and first fusion power in Factorio. Nearly ready to launch my solar system's edge ship.

I've been working on the same project for months and months now, returning to another part of it every week or two. It's just going on and on. I'm starting to think I'm not smart enough to finish this.

When I feel like this it honestly just feels like Dark Souls. Yep. Get your ass handed to you constantly. Keep calm. Try to learn why you're failing every time. Write down some pointers. Try to do better on the next round.

Thinking again about the guy in New Orleans who wanted to make Louisiana the tech capital of the USA. I wish I had his level of self-confidence.

Adam Chalmers reposted

hey dude yeah the other monks and i are getting pretty concerned about your screeds. yeah we're alarmed about your diatribes. yeah we're concerned about all the codices and periodicals you're authoring. we think the haranguing's gone a bit too far. stop with the polemics.

god I love using my macbook after it's been freshly cleaned. It feels like a completely different machine. It's so good. Makes such a huge difference.

KCL programs are deterministic. Every time you run the same KCL you get the same results. This means your CAD models are stable. Rerun the file file, get the same model. This is possible with Python and JS CAD libraries, but it’s tricky and requires careful discipline.

Adam Chalmers reposted

every mushroom foraging guidebook: This is Woodland Pot Roast, a tasty little mushroom that adds a delightful flavour to soups and stews. Note that it is often mistaken for Satan’s Fistula, a mushroom that erases the last 9 generations of your family from God’s ledgers.

my daughter was sick today so she stayed home from school. watched some Avatar: The Last Airbender. Then tonight we played Aang and Appa (she climbs on me piggyback, says "yip yip" and I fly her around the house)

Someone asked me if I had Starlink. No dude. I'm not a barbarian. I live in a city. I have fiber to my house like a civilized man. I don't live on the mesa five days of hard riding from the nearest village.

It's machine learning if it answers math questions. It's artificial intelligence if it writes novel math proofs. It's super intelligence when the contract says you have to call it that.

AI is truly amazing if you have a good relationship between product (or end users, of open source software) and developers. PM/users can iterate with the LLM to get the feature they want, and make it feel just right. Then send that prototype to dev who can either polish or reimplement it.

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From a mechanical engineer colleague: "It's pretty difficult for me to explain exactly how every single part of it should work. It's easiest for me to just keep iterating and playing around with it until I'm happy with the result, but that would be super wasteful of your time"

AI is truly amazing if you have a good relationship between product (or end users, of open source software) and developers. PM/users can iterate with the LLM to get the feature they want, and make it feel just right. Then send that prototype to dev who can either polish or reimplement it.

Vibe coding is bad for professional software engineers but wow, having a mechanical engineer vibe code their desired UX into a working prototype is SO much faster than trying to spending days trying to iterate between the mech and software people, with hours or days in between every exchange.

If you're my peer in software and you vibe code some crap that barely works, that sucks. But if you're a _user_ and you can vibe code some crap that barely works, that's great. You did the hard part (defining the UX, the requirements, making it feel right to users) and I'll do the easy part (code).