R. Alex Anderson

R. Alex Anderson

@ralexanderson.com

He/Him • Husband • Girl Dad • Latter-day Saint • Code Poet • Hobby Chef • Spaceship Enthusiast • Serial Optimist • Determined Dreamer Living in Utah https://thoriumsim.com

1.7K followers324 following4.4K posts

I'll add: Annie is right that your concerns and complaints about less-than-ideal Democrat candidates (anti-trans, anti-Palestine, etc). are totally valid. That said, those things are better addressed at the primary election, not the general election. (This is why we need ranked choice voting)

R. Alex Anderson@ralexanderson.com

Vote, get the least-worst candidate into office, and then make your voice as a constituent heard. Annoy the heck out of them until they realize they’ll get fired in 2-6 years if they don’t shape up.

R. Alex Anderson reposted

Special birthday edition of Tupo today!* *There is actually nothing special about it. But it IS really my birthday, and Monday is a great day to start, so I'd love it if you played, or just shared it with somebody who might like it. :) playtupo.com

Andrew Reeves@andrewsshi.bsky.social

As I've said before, it's only once I became a professor that I realized the entmoot, a meeting that goes on for three days and three nights, was a professor's joke about faculty meetings.

Occam’s Razor is starting to get reeeeealy dull. (That is to say, there’s so much stuff that is either “stupid” or “evil” that it’s harder to ascribe all of it to “stupid”)

Katie Mack@astrokatie.com

It sounds like hyperbole to suggest the current administration WANTS measles to become common again but I can’t think of much they’d be doing differently if they didn’t want that. (I think some of them really are eugenicists who legit prefer disease spread to prevention; others just don’t care)

I set this up last night and immediately saw a dramatic increase in intellisense suggestions. It’s a big deal for folks like me who still write code by hand.

VoidZero@voidzero.dev

Introducing tsrs: a Rust port of the TypeScript compiler 🦀 We are not forking TypeScript! ◆ In close collab with the TypeScript team ◆ Up to 8x faster than TS 7.0 & ~70% less memory ◆ Runs in WASM (works in your browser & workers) ◆ Soon part of Oxc npx tsrs blog.cloudflare.com/typescript-r...

Feeling good about my US election ballot. I wrote out a dossier of every candidate for my sister, who shares 90% of the candidates I do. Having to articulate what I liked and didn't like about the candidates gave me confidence in who I was picking. Took about 90 minutes, so not a small commitment.

Oh, and if you live in the US, vote early! For the record, the things that I liked in my candidates: - Opposed unrestrained data center construction - Had clear AI usage policies - Healthcare/medicare expansion - Accountability in Washington (can I get an impeachment or two? As a treat?)

Downballot, I was swayed by folks who seemed like they would govern well — who were obviously knowledgable and cared about the job (county commissioner, auditor, clerk, etc.) Actually giving a crap carries a lot of weight for me. And that also applies to candidates who used AI to write for them. 🙄

Ironic that a non-deterministic system has a relatively deterministic response to a prompt asking for a non-deterministic response.

that basically explains why AI stuff blows it’s like auto-tune for ideas, like yeah you hit the note but you lose the subtlety, the richness, the soul

When it comes to activism, nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something. If staying off X isn’t one of your something’s you can do, I won’t hold it against you. But I have no compelling reason to go back, and like it here just fine.

This is part of what rubs me wrong about the EA / rationalist crowd — humans are deeply emotional beings! Yes you can talk about the perfectly rational way to spend your time and money, but that hardly feels good and right. And feelings is all we have to go off of sometimes.

Jason Lengstorf@jason.energy

a lot of the automation talk seems to assume that we are all, beneath all of the "friction" or "toil" or whatever we're calling it, rational I am NOT rational right now I want a cheeseburger. tomorrow I will not an optimistic version of myself will book the early flight. future me hates that guy

In fact, you can make The argument that everything that sets us apart from AI agents boils down to being embodied - having sensory responses that trigger chemical releases that makes us feel a certain way. I don’t think they’ve cracked how to emulate that particular idiosyncrasy.

There’s that word again. “Care.” Seems like the biggest difference between using AI and not using it, on a multitude of dimensions. Care about the result, the craft, the environment, intellectual property, your own intellect and joy, etc.

Vanilagy@vanilagy.bsky.social

I swearan, sometimes I feel like agentic coding legit slows me down because it pushes the care and emotional attachment for what I'm making near zero. Especially complex intricate algorithmic work is probably better done by hand and only reviewed by AI.i

Same can be said for hyperscalar data centers, which could be built more methodically and thoughtfully with regards to energy and water. 40% of the problems with AI are entirely because of the unscrupulous practices of the AI champions. (Disinformation is another 40%)

John Scalzi@scalzi.com

This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead

Siri AI is a bit hit-and-miss. One thing it does well is when I say "Add this to my calendar" and it creates the event for whatever is on my screen. I've done it with a hotel reservation and a JPEG of an event at my library, and it got it right the first time. Just don't have it change the event.😬

I was big into UI interface theming on MacOS 9 and the early versions of OSX. It was thrilling, time consuming, and exhausting. I think that phase smacked the desire to tweak right out of me, hence why agents don’t appeal to me. (I also have the most vanilla smart home. Home Assistant is a pain)

Jason Lengstorf@jason.energy

I imagine AI will get better and the ecosystem will evolve in ways that make it easier to build that context, but right now I still feel like AI agents are mostly for people who like tweaking their setups and don’t mind that it’s not actually faster/cheaper because they’re having fun

I’m just not convinced that I need an agent to help run my digital life. It’s got such a small interface with my irl life, and I’m not doing that much with my digital life to warrant an agent. It’s just not appealing to me to have a computer telling me what to do and doing things on my behalf.

I've been working on the same spaceship game for the past 6 years (and I was working on its predecessor for 4 years before that). Seeing it finally starting to come together is incredibly gratifying. Doing big things for a long time is great.

Jason Lengstorf@jason.energy

doing big things takes a long time, and knowing how hard you worked to achieve the result is part of what makes the big thing rewarding. don't give up. you can do this

R. Alex Anderson reposted

Replying to @hugorcd.com

For me, that means taking more photos, spending time in museums, becoming curious about unfamiliar subjects and genuinely pursuing the things that move me. It also means continuing to treat code as art: choosing what I build and giving it the time and care to become something I’m proud of.

My child has a onesie with long pants and 11 buttons, which is perfect for teaching her how to count from 0 to 10 as I button them. Except I fear I am cursing her to live with a 0 indexed mindset.

This was fun to research and write. A nice, thick problem to sink my teeth into.

Thorium@thoriumsim.com

Got nerd sniped and did some writing about how DMX lighting would be configured in the game. I'm pretty pleased with the result — objectively better in almost every way compared to the predecessor's DMX implementation. github.com/Thorium-Sim/... #gameDev #spaceship

Sleepytime Tea Ice Cream Heat 1 cup of milk — I used almond milk. Steep 4 sachets of tea for 6 minutes Remove tea bags, add ¾ cup of sugar if you want it really sweet, or adjust to taste. Refrigerate. Mix in 2 cups of cream. Churn for 15 minutes. Freeze. Delicious, floral, botanical.

Much like sync and async functions, apps built with AI have a color. Humans can try to untangle their codebase, but it's far easier to just send an AI to understand the other codebase and pull the pieces you want into your own. So maybe developers should care if it's vibe coded.

Andrew Lisowski 💻@hipstersmoothie.com

Who cares if it’s vibe coded It’s either a good app or a bad app 🙃 humans can make bad websites too @standard-reader.app is basically entirely authored by ai (it’s also the best most full featured thing I’ve ever made)

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Ignoring the "point your AI" recommendation, I dove into the codebase to try to implement this myself. Friends, it was not a good time. I was able to recreate the login flows, but as a human, understanding what I was reading was not trivial. I've seen worse codebases, but I've also seen way better.

All this to say, sure, your end users might not care. But dismissing concerns about vibe coding is really easy to do if you don't care about human _developers_. Should we care about human developers? Or is the point of open source code now just feeding it to agents?

Much like sync and async functions, apps built with AI have a color. Humans can try to untangle their codebase, but it's far easier to just send an AI to understand the other codebase and pull the pieces you want into your own. So maybe developers should care if it's vibe coded.

Andrew Lisowski 💻@hipstersmoothie.com

Who cares if it’s vibe coded It’s either a good app or a bad app 🙃 humans can make bad websites too @standard-reader.app is basically entirely authored by ai (it’s also the best most full featured thing I’ve ever made)

In his excellent blog post, @hipstersmoothie.com (the OP) outlines some great UX, but at the bottom says "If you want to copy this login flow, feel free to point your AI at the source code." A tacit admission that his codebase is not meant for humans. hipstersmoothie.com/blog/posts/d...

hipstersmoothie.comAtmospheric Login PageThe UX decisions behind my Atmosphere apps login pages — saved handles, handle autocomplete, and a 'create account' guardrail that slows people down on purpose.

Just made and ate the most amazing roasted pumpkin soup from pumpkins and sage from my garden. Creamy, savory, full of flavor — positively delicious. Having dirt to grow stuff in is a real treat.

It's unnerving how much of physics is just "statistics and probability". Thermodynamics? Statistics and probability. Chemical reactions? Statistics and probability. Quantum mechanics? Believe it or not, statistics and probability!

There's a certain satisfaction that comes from taking three things that are similar, determining the dimensions that define their differences, putting them into a 2x2 grid, and discovering a secret, likely daft, fourth thing that is distinct from the other three.