zaphar.bsky.social

Slides for my #monktoberfest talk today, "Execution in the Kingdom of Agents: Reflections on Abstraction and Complexity"; video to come! speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/ex...

If someone has written their own personal spreadsheet software does that make me a "Spreadsheet Person"? Asking for a friend.

One of my daughters has taken it as a personal challenge to get as good at my recipes as I am. She just recently texted me that she has succeeded in making stuffed peppers that taste as good as mine. I am absurdly proud of this as a father...

Really important question... What is the agent equivalent of the Ballmer Peak?

I have embodied the grandma's recipe problem for my children now. I'm having to measure as I cook so I can give them amounts so they can cook. The problem being I almost never measure when I cook. I do the add ingredient, wait, taste loop until it's correct. #cooking #recipe #children

current status: Listening to Cowboy Bebop (Original Soundtrack) by Seatbelts - 1998 and furiously hitting thumbs up on every track...

Felt a very small bit of ground shaking this morning in western north Carolina. #earthquake?

Serious question: How do you tell why a tool isn't getting used by your llm agent graph? These things seem entirely inscrutable and undebuggable to me.

You know how sometimes you are like... this should work why isn't it working. And you just automatically suspect the tool because "It's TLS, there be dragons" and then you realize you were just looking at the wrong callsite the whole time? Yeah.....

Some people when they have a security problem think "I know! I'll use a regex!" Now they have "Internet Scale" problems. www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/gs...

When your syntax sugar creates ambiguity in the semantics of your language it may not always be pulling it's weight.

Lately due to the state of our current politics in the US I've been craving examples of extreme competence. Like, piano virtuosos, incredible builds by craftsmen, and so on. It's nice to be reminded that there are still people out there who have real talent and are capable of good decision making.

Something I like about the Rust `impl TraitName for TypeName` syntax as opposed to the more traditional `class Name: IInterface` syntax is that you know exactly why a given method is there in the `impl` block. It is there to satisfy the trait requirements.

I once inspired this meme while using unique_ptr in a C++ codbase. To this day I and several other much better C++ devs than me do not fully understood how I introduced the bug. This is why people get so excited about the promise of Rust.

Anyone out there doing a #neovim #jujutsu plugin? Along the lines of Neogit maybe?

Periodic reminder that both Major parties are racing each other to the bottom of corrupt and power hungry so you should probably find a third party you like and see if you can help them replace a major party. #SaveAmerica #VoteThirdParty

If for some reason you started following me because of my spreadsheet project then I just added some user documentation: github.com/zaphar/sheet... Bug reports encountered are much appreciated.

Turkey is in the smoker. The #thanksgiving cooking marathon has begun.

Dear #Devops community, You do not have to template yaml in the year 2024. There are better alternatives. The pain can stop. You just have to take that first step and admit you have a problem.

I voted third-party again this time around. Until we stop investing in and clinging to the, what I believe are Evil, Major Parties in this nation we deserve what we have been getting out of government. #vote #third-party

Why does every single appliance at the local Loews have wifi? Can you even buy an appliance without wifi? Do people actually *use* wifi on their appliances? So confused.

So what always ends up bugging me about exceptions as a standard error handling mechanism is that I keep running into places where I needed to add a `catch {} finally {}` stanza in places I didn't think or expect I would need one because nothing told me I was going to need one.

Hey Guys! Ratatui is an astonishingly productive TUI toolkit for console development. Took me less than 30 minutes to render a tab with a table in it on the console. docs.rs/ratatui/late...

If your open source work produces O($100M) of value, and you can capture only 1%… great! Hire a couple folks, pay yourself well, prosper. No need to try to make it 10% in order to run a bigger company. If someone else captures 5% without contributing as much… 🤷‍♂️ you’re still doing great!

Why do cellphone network emergency alerts suck so bad? The phone seems to have no notion of "I just showed this alert 30 secs ago".

You can always count on vendors to make you wonder: "Just how bad would it be if we wrote it ourselves?"

Sometimes I think about doing a talk series entitled "Sharing my misery. Showing how could things could be" Alternative titles: * "I can't unsee it so now you can't either" * "But why!!!???"

Okay, So hear me out. * A presidential debate. * But on Hot Ones.

Don't want either of these clowns. Can a real serious person please run for president sometime?

Alaskan Rain Forest #moss Taken while on a hike in Juneau, Alaska.

Me: ChatGPT, If you were a german inventing a word for when a cargo cult practice becomes mainstream religion instead of a cult, what would it be? ChatGPT: Kultnormalisierung

Well crap...