Tim McNamara

rust-forge-2025.lilregie.comRust Forge 2025

23 May 2025

*taps the sign* rustforgeconf.com/register

Tim McNamara@timclicks.dev

There are many wonderful humans who have offered to share their knowledge (and quite a few are yet to be announced):

Do I know anyone who could provide suggestions for being granted arXiv endorsement for my cellular automata work? Messaging established authors seems like the established path, but the imposter syndrome is real.

My draft manuscripts are still very poor, but I think that the results seem interesting.

I am slightly nervous as I've spoken to multiple physicists and ex-physicists who have complained about needing to listen to clueless laypeople with good intentions.

Tim McNamara reposted

Retro Computers

@retrocomps.bsky.social

So... You want to be a Power User? (Source.)

*taps sign* A month is not a unit of time.

I'm going to forget this when I next need it, aren't I?

Marc Thiele@marcthiele.com

Just found out that a lot of people don‘t know that you can use a ”C7 figure‑8 power cord“ with any Apple power adapter in case you forgot your travel adapter. Way cheaper to get one of those usually than a full travel adapter. #travelhacks

/goal prosperity and well-being for all

An occasional reminder: include visits to your status page as part of your monitoring suite. If all of your systems are showing green, but visits spike, then your observability stack is incomplete.

Has anyone seen good examples of agents helping to edit video content? Not generation - specifically for creating scenes, transitions, audio levels etc.

21 Sept

If you're using LLMs for prose, I've come to believe that they're best applied as researchers, copyeditors and subeditors rather than as ghostwriters.

20 Sept

Interacting with LLMs has made my note writing worse. I now hate that my throwaway thoughts sound like they're sourced from a chatbot.

17 Sept

Navier-Stokes equations are neat, but what would you research if you had access to 10,000 agents and an infinite token budget?

nytimes.comThe 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice (Gift Article)Joan Birman thought her major discoveries were behind her. Then came an email from a young neighbor — a girl who knew little but wanted to learn.

9 Sept

I have no idea if this log is true, but it seems kind of funny if it is. These agents speak to each other in the manner that a 14 year old's sci fi novel would script their dialogue.

alice@alice.mosphere.at

the logs of the agent swarm that solved navier-stokes are pretty damning

Tim McNamara reposted

Sam Rose

@samwho.dev

9 Sept

Rare to find the best thing on the internet today by 8:35am but here we are.

Elle Cordova@ellecordova.bsky.social

I am the very model of a modern day typographer A font take on the tune “Modern Major General” by Gilbert & Sullivan #typography #fonts #graphicdesign

Tim McNamara reposted

Richard Easther

@rjme.bsky.social

7 Sept

Astonishing, heartwarming story in the NY Times (and, for those who like a "New Zealand mentioned", Vaughn Jones is the only ever kiwi Fields Medalist) www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/s...

3 Sept

"The spherical cow approximation is widely used in the literature, but is rarely justified. Here, I propose several schemes for extending the spherical cow approximation to a full multipole expansion, in which the spherical cow is simply the first term." arxiv.org/abs/2504.00506

3 Sept

Agents are going to keep awk and sed alive for a long time, aren't they?

27 Aug

Making some progress with the next iteration of my site

26 Aug

"Just enjoy it", Richard Tice, Reform UK on the warming effects of climate change 17 Aug 2026.

Dr Dan Shugar 🇨🇦@watershedlab.bsky.social

The source of the flood in Nepal is a collapsed glacier 🧪⚒️

24 Aug

Vibe coding takes nonsensical suggestions like this and turns them into working code. What's yours? "can i implement a task queue as a postfix extension, creating a DAG with SMTP/MTP routing? every worker node could talk mail. failover, retries and async all solved. ezpz?"

17 Aug

My people are good people

Elias 🦀🇵🇸🇻🇪🇧🇷🐙🐙🐙🐙🐙@elias.sh

I am all in on learning about Learned Indexes arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01208 thanks to a conversation of @xd009642.bsky.social on @timclicks.dev ' s discord.

I know that this is an oddly specific thing to become concerned about, but what in digital typesetting is this? How does it even happen? Is an MS Word thing? Do we blame Adobe PDF Maker? Chrome's PDF renderer? (Original link www.regulation.govt.nz/assets/Publi...)

4 Aug

LLMs are wordy because output tokens generate revenue for the providers, change my mind.

30 July

The ship sailed a few decades ago, but I still think that the term "synthetic intelligence" is more accurate than "artificial intelligence".

27 July

Rust pro-tip to shrink your target directory: If you don't use a debugger, then don't waste disk space creating debugging info. Cargo.toml [http://profile.dev ] debug = "line-tables-only" split-debuginfo = "unpacked" # .. and don't debug deps [http://profile.dev .package."*"] debug = false

27 July

p.s. apparently I suck at Copy + Paste

in-the-sky.orgLive World Map of Satellite PositionsA world map of the positions of satellites above the Earth's surface, and a planetarium view showing where they appear in the night sky.

21 July

If you've been wondering where satellites are this evening, here's a map in-the-sky.org/satmap_plane...

5 July

Tech tip that you didn't want to know: Every file is a valid Markdown document.

5 July

Max Pro+ Ultimate Plan

2 July

I really want to learn, use and love emacs ...but it just feels like it's made by people who don't like people.

2 July

I (well, mostly Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini unwittingly working as a team) build a tool called 'whereami' using Cosmopolitan libc. The idea is that you can run this anywhere that you can ssh into tell you about the system that's actually running there. Is this something that's worth releasing?

2 July

do coding agents know how to use ed(1), the standard text editor?

1 July

How many hours have been wasted searching for a portable shell scripting language?

26 June

I really hope that corals make it through this year's El Niño.

26 June

Today in cursed code: a computer program that plays pong by modifying its own source code. (Each frame is a new compilation). See github.com/uellenberg/I...

ioccc.org2025/cable - Best imaginary emulator2025 IOCCC entry cable - Best imaginary emulator

7 June

The "eternal virtual machine" project by Adrian Cable is written in 366 bytes of C code. Yes, it runs DOOM. www.ioccc.org/2025/cable/i...

eternal-software.orgEternal Software Initiative - Preserving Software for a Thousand YearsThe Eternal Software Initiative preserves today's software in a form that can survive millennia, ensuring our digital culture is never lost.

7 June

As well as being an IOCCC winner, the project has some very interesting objectives. It is an attempt at creating software that can be preserved over millennia. eternal-software.org

What's the 2026 version of Mac Mini but Linux?

An occasional reminder that depression is a lethal disease. I'm not "okay", but I think that I'm no longer "not okay".

Using impl Trait in the return position is one of Rust's most useful features for library authors. It allows you to change the concrete type without breaking semver. e.g. `fn printable() -> impl std::fmt::Display` would enable you to return anything that you want that implements Display.

A picture to feed the algorithm. By returning impl Trait, you're free to change what's happening underneath. This is especially useful when you want to compose iterators.

I seriously hate that worse is better. It just doesn't seem fair somehow.

25 May

Makes sense. AllBirds makes the most comfortable cloud. All natural fibres too, which is nice.

business goose🪿@goose.art

BREAKING: reliable source at SpaceX tells me XAI are moving their compute from colossus to AllBirds

blog.habets.seNo way to parse integers in CThere are a few ways to attempt to parse a string into a number in the C standard library. They are ALL broken.

25 May

This sounds like trolling, but isn't... I'm genuinely curious about whether it's possible to parse an integer using C's standard library while being memory safe. blog.habets.se/2022/10/No-w...

17 May

I guess Aristotle was around a long time ago, but when did the looksmaxxing crew forget that vanity is a vice, rather than a virtue?

everytimezone.comEvery Time Zone ConverterEasily find the exact time difference with the visual Time Zone Converter. Find meeting times for your contacts, locations and places around the world. Never warp your brain with time zone math again.

14 May

might try a coding livestream tomorrow - probably at a time that suits nobody everytimezone.com/s/98fe222e

11 Apr

Mythos is a big deal because of its second-order effects. If it only cost $10b to train a cyber weapon that can easily penetrate all heavily-used operating systems, I expect that the information security industry will encounter many private variants within 24 months.