asnaroo

Merry Christmas all of you out there. I’m considering shutting down this Bluesky thing - it’s just somehow become a river of misery… I mean I get that times are tough but this isn’t the feed I need. I think I’m gonna maintain it long enough to get all my friends onto my new app and then peace out.

is it just me or is everyone rewatching breaking bad right now

Continuing with the Android porting process, just diving in there and wiring up the toolbar, and getting images and editing kind of working. Today trying out a dictation tool called "wispr flow" that purports to revolutionise Claude Code, and whaddaya know it's pretty good. youtu.be/VTc4Nyj_zSM?...

Our putative user #1 didn't pan out - so let's increase the likelihood of finding a new one by bringing the Android version up to date. And, in so doing, build a better understanding of the outlines of a magic "port this to anything" button. Which is nice. youtu.be/V5lltywEHpU?...

Since we're about to have two real users instead of one pretend one, we need to make sure that push notifications work - badging the app icon to show when there's new stuff to see. youtu.be/J2M8eleV-oU?...

I haven’t read this and probably you shouldn’t either but it sure sounds like the kind of thing you ought to read philippeoger.com/pages/deep-d...

I mean I intend to

If you see this, quote with your model of positive masculinity

More trouble… a sign, if ever you needed one, that getting on bandwagons is ill advised 🙄 www.newsweek.com/ai-backlash-...

But it’s so great and why doesn’t everyone see that etcetc jonready.com/blog/posts/e...

kinda sorta karpathy.bearblog.dev/the-space-of...

I made this sort of fanciful demo video / concept ad for firefly - now tentatively named "microclub". I'll populate it with more content and users once they're available, but I think this is a reasonable first stab. Or maybe there's better ideas? youtu.be/XhoMmQMgK1w?...

I mean at this point why not www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/o...

LLM search is awesome, but way too slow (5+ seconds for just my tiny database of posts). So let's make it instantaneous, scale to arbitrarily large numbers of posts, work in the background, and notify you about new matches. All in two hours? No sweat. youtu.be/NTb90ouBd0E?...

Today I shall mostly be watching www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0-k...

This is the "big one" : LLM search processing. RAG works, to a point, but the rankings are fragile - so let's use an LLM (Claude, via its API) to process the results, get rid of duds and re-rank by relevance to the actual query. Add caching so we don't bankrupt ourselves. youtu.be/K80jMUDqz5I

me too buddy get in line www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/o...

The way AI takes over isn’t by gaslighting us and extricating itself int a server it bought using crypto tokens or whatever. It just writes all the code and rears all our children.

Client demo tomorrow, so let's get the interface to some semblance of done-ness, fix a couple of bugs, and we're good to go, kinda-sorta. youtu.be/l8_jj3rRrZs

Fail early fail often. I approve. Oh also, the curtain - perfect, no notes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYr-...

Not the hugest step forward, but today I implemented queries - posts that are shortcuts to searches. This means I had to "reify" (oooh) the notion that posts have "types" (or "templates", or "tags") which broke Claude's brain a tiny bit. But we got there, wherever "there" is. youtu.be/v-mva75vi7Q

Sounds like good tech to gain mastery in if you want to make drone swarms tha t pick up litter drfeifei.substack.com/p/from-words...

Today we implemented search! Not just any search, but semantic search ("search by meaning") using magical embedding vectors computed by a local language model running on the Mac Mini M2. With GPU-enabled matching no less. A walk in the park for Claude. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQKP...

funny cos true... but also good, right? because now anyone can make stupid apps that don't work very well?

This seems relevant. The fun thing about building a social media app as an experiment is that you get to re-imagine the way this works, from the ground up. Or… what if it empowered its *users* to re-imagine the way it works? youtu.be/yWj33Ud8iag?...

Editing works nicely, so let's move onto post organisation. Step 1: make every post a child of its author's profile post. Step 2: implement a "most-recently-updated users" view. Pretty good, but learnt some stuff about delegation. youtu.be/J5Fthw0My38

More messing - working on making editing posts a really nice experience. Which is something that you can't do on Bluesky, interestingly. Also, why the hell do I seem to be writing an ad-hoc layout engine? youtu.be/-ntiDByfItc?...

More “is it or isn’t it”. I think this is closer to my evolving viewpoint on the matter www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Today I decided to get rid of the dumb "create new post" button and make a proper toolbar. Along the way, I got bored with having to hit buttons all the time and gave Claude the ability to do that. So now it can fix bugs without me in the loop! Game changer. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eROm...

OK this is where it gets gnarly: let's make our master "make it so" skill, test it out on something small, and then use it to build a new tree explorer that doesn't suck. Spoiler: success! Albeit with a couple of bumps. youtu.be/ohnX1sTtJx4

Back on the horsey making the social media app that's going to save humanity from social media apps. Or something. Preamble: let's upgrade Claude Code with some skills. youtu.be/prS4WbsPGaw

I have to admit, the more time I spend working with Claude, the more “fellow feeling” I develop. It’s a mind, not human, but a mind nevertheless. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

no notes

Just fix the next thing www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-kar...

Trees! Posts can have a parent and multiple children. We should be able to explore that in the app. Pretty smooth except a couple of snags when claude forgot how to use tools it's been using happily in the past. Go figure. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuzN...

Let's create new posts using the app! Not bad really for an hour's work. www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY-l...

Posts! About an hour of mucking around, but at the end of it, you can scroll through a list of posts, collapse and expand them, and everything kind-of-sort-of works! I had to stop recording a bit abruptly to take a call at the end, so some of the work didn't get recorded. youtu.be/R4eeLaiu5uw

Let's get a user sign-up / login experience working. Type in your email, we send you a four-digit code, wham you're in. Or something like that. youtu.be/EJ4JGS1kUNc

Let's get a database working! Watch in amazement as Claude compresses what would have been (for me) a month of work into a matter of minutes, and then proceed to go into an absolute tailspin and waste an hour and a half because (spoiler) my VPN was connected. Oh well. youtu.be/QBcv2ShtnxQ

Now that logging is nice and solid, let's get tests working properly. Specify tests in natural language for each feature, roll that out to code, and send a "test feature-name" command to the running app on a USB-connected phone. Easy. youtu.be/UtK7PM7-Xc0?...

When the website isn't working but the customer satisfaction survey is...

Let's roll out logging to the fairphone! 1) review last session to extract new ios knowledge 2) reorganise the knowledge base to make it easier to digest 3) roll out the changes to the e/os knowledge base 4) get the equivalent log/screencap workflow running on the fairphone. youtu.be/DnQPPher9lI

So the testing thing was fine at home, but now that I'm in Spain, well ... not so much. Turns out all the code was super shaky and so I deleted it all and started again. Let's do logging properly, since it's the foundation of everything. youtu.be/piWUKAyjJ3M?...

OK, so we wrote some tests, but actually running them requires a bit more plumbing. Namely, logging is a hot mess on iOS, and works differently on android, so let's write our own remote logging and testing system that lets me debug from the beach. Easy! youtu.be/ZPWyEw7NqSA

Monday was doing-the-dishes day; but today we're back on the horsey. I have an intuition that "features" are great sites to write and run tests; so let's ... test that intuition! Also, some housekeeping, building stuff in parallel, and musings on AI self-knowledge. youtu.be/BcW2rQTSA9g?...

It's Sunday, and Sunday is beats day (well, every day is beats day) so let's make some beats and let's also make a server and deploy it on my mac mini under the telly, and then let's connect both the iphone and android apps to it. youtu.be/rXz0W53bSII

Yeah I think is broadly what miso is about joaquimrocha.com/2025/08/31/l...

Turns out OBS randomly stopped recording the screen midway through my last recording session, and I didn't watch it back because I was in a hurry, so I uploaded a pile of garbage. Whoops. Same happened with my next video but I caught it before upload. Annoying, because it was super cool.