Tom Darby

Oh no

Cancer treatments. Ohhhhh my goodness. Herceptin. Perjeta. Enhertu. Vastly better scans. VATS surgery. mRNA on the horizon. It’s been 14 years since my wife got her stage 2 BC diagnosis, 6 since stage 4. She’s definitely beating the odds today; shift this even 20 years into the past… …yeah.

How Cancer Takes So Much Time from the People Who Have the Least johannarothman.substack.com/p/how-cancer... #Cancer

I'll trade you a four for all your nines

Incredible

If you drop the “s” from https:// you can immediately and fully avoid using any compromised intermediate certificate 👍

Some solid results on my DeepSeek testing: DeepSeek (max) was able to generate code that passed an Opus reviewer 21 out of 23 times on a range of challenges, with 13 of those passing on the first round. In terms of cost, Deepseek runs ~30-50x cheaper than Sonnet/Opus for the same work. Not bad!

I’m sorry to have to be the bad guy here but we need to recognize that we live in a compressed air thrusters world now. If you’re not finding ways to teach the critical use of compressed air thrusters in your classroom, you’re setting your students up to fail when you could be setting them up to fly

Tie Me Up Tie Me Down For Tax Purposes

Y’all I just finished my first truly successful end-to-end webapp build in the web-based “agentic coding for non-coders” thing I’m building and I am SO EXCITED right now It actually WORKS!

For much of my life as a programmer, the tooling wasn’t clever enough to catch assignment operations in conditional statements—the old “oh you used `=` when you should have used `==`, but that’s still valid code.” These could be absolute DEMONS to find, and there was zero satisfaction in doing so.

rip to one of the coolest software engineers who ever lived

When people talk about AI making us think less, I immediately wonder what they’re doing with AI that makes them draw that conclusion

Sad news everyone. Our beloved friend the computer has now become a hated enemy

People asked for me to upload the Bitter Lesson video from this piece to YouTube, so here you are: youtu.be/OAwat51S_Sk

Side project time! This is a WIP space MOBA/strategy game inspired by two of my old faves, Subspace and Allegiance. It may not look like much yet, but everything is being done on the server. All the client does is send inputs and render the data it gets back. <24h with Opus 5.5, no LoC touched.

So in a genuinely rare “I don’t get kids these days” moment, I just leaned that my kiddo—who has been studying diligently and effectively—has three separate “X hours of silence interrupted occasionally by Y sounds” videos running in the background: cruise ship horn, Hamilton clips, and meme clips 😶

Gonna date myself here: COMBAT! Probably my earliest memory of playing a video game. It taught me at an early age how to exploit game mechanics to my advantage 😅

Hot take: the thing that’ll have the longest staying power wrt Jev is the definition of the “noul” data type

We have officially left the “hand transcribed by monks” era of software.

Only six tracks into Bonobo’s new album and it already has its hooks deep in me, this thing has *texture* bonobomusic.com

Very firmly in camp 1

Yes, Google, great job picking an image for that query

The thing that really made aphantasia click in my head was realizing that i can *hear* entire songs in my head, on demand, as if they were playing through internal headphones. I assume that this is what “picturing something in your mind” is like for most people, and it all makes a bit more sense.

It’s been a tough week.

I remain impressed and excited by the combination of frontier models and 3D printing. Literally just tell the computer what you want in plain language, wait a few minutes, and boom—there’s your model. Today it’s a self-draining soap dish to fit in a specific spot.

So I learned in the past few weeks that I’m aphantasic, and it’s still amazing to me that people actually visualize things in their mind. I’d always thought “picture this” and “in your mind’s eye” were just turns of phrase that meant “think about this thing”, not actually *seeing* it in your head.

The biggest lesson I’ve been taking from building an agentic-driven software development system for non-technical audiences is that agents give you speed and *incredible* breadth of knowledge, but without solid long-term memory and rigorous SDLC practices, that just makes your work collapse faster.

I have questions

Yeah, the emulator *has* had a long day, hasn't it, Claude

Yes, but did I really *learn* how to keep my app up-to-date with Google Play’s incessant stream of mandatory API version updates and permissions changes if I used AI to do it?

Working with Opus 5 is like trying to have a conversation with an over-caffeinated Jeff Goldblum wannabe

I mean even *two years ago* I would've been blown away by this kind of interaction with a machine

We live in a time where the really, really dumb idea you had at lunchtime is reality in under two hours

“The most important skill in prompting is expertise in the domain you’re prompting for.”

Oh, Claude, you trickster.

Film you've watched more than 6 times, with a gif. Hard Mode: No Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli.

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn’t Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, or Alice In Chains