Yeah I was surprised a while back that ChatGPT was pulling them up (I was doing some research on origins of sudoku and it was pulled up very old threads on Usenet). So now I specifically ask for it and it consistently finds me some gold. Might take a few rounds of saying do deeper research but it often works.
Something that I have started doing lately is asking ChatGPT et al to check usenet for reactions from users about events (if it is the right 80's/90's time period). Sure enough, aol.sucks on usenet had some choice words about the outage:
>What does Cisco stand for?? Case's Internet System Crapped Out. That's right, Steve Case and his AOL pig fell victim to some mickey
mouse networking equipment. Unfortunatly for AOL, they were the first
ISP to feel real pain from using equipment made by Cisco Systems.
>Yesterday morning, I got a call because their mail system was backing
up heavily. It took a while to discover the cause, but it turned
out to be AOL. Because AOL's incoming mail from the Internet runs on
relatively slow systems, and because they receive hundreds of thousands of
Internet messages a day, they have 30 systems to receive incoming mail, all
pointed at from the AOL.COM name. That means that any mail system trying
to send mail to AOL would have to individually try all 30 addresses before
giving up. Translate that to a 60 second (typical) wait for a connection
timeout, and you've got a 30 minute time-in-queue for an AOL message.
Flamewar over sendmail not handling outage well
> Remember the AOL outage? One host built up a backlog of 2000 messages
for AOL---but, because it was running qmail, it didn't even slow down.
Meanwhile, sendmail users were choking on much smaller queues.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.sendmail/c/TeNdv2laT94
Shouldn't we know a better answer to these questions once Anthropic's IPO materials surface publicly? I understand, and maybe even expect, SpaceX's materials to be all over the place and skate on by any discussion of unit economics, but the nerds over at Anthropic might just be forthright enough to just tell us what their margin is on tokens as part of their IPO.
Not affiliated with them, I just found it after casting around for a while trying to find something more or less exactly like this. Looks very neat, and like they made some good choices!
I will soon! https://threeemojis.substack.com/ just downloaded digithunt (first sudoku generation program I can find evidence of, from 1989) and was playing it some last night. Had Claude decompile it and it was interesting to see how it generates sudokus.
I attended a decade ago and it was great, lots of people working and exploring a lot of cool stuff! I think what I would quibble with is that yes it is “random” what people work on, but there’s certainly themes and some people have pretty clear directions about what they are up to and want to learn. If you want to focus on That One Open Source Project for a couple months, that’s cool and encouraged.
Implementing a solver/optimizer for the Minizinc challenge in Rust! It's very fun, and maybe next year I will even try and put it into the competition properly. As well, I am working on tracking down the history of Sudoku prior to Wayne Gould's popularization of it in the 2000's, and I have found some really interesting postings on Japanese forums from the 90's about the game.
Not just the weird billing, which has been annoying the last month I've been trying it, but they have had a couple incidents lately where I feel like I got ripped off because their performance was so spotty and yet I was getting billed for it. https://status.blacksmith.sh/
Yes, correct, they both have the same capabilities, however it felt like codex was pushing me harder to use my local desktop in an annoying way, while claude code was happy to spin up a bunch of dev containers for me in the cloud.
I feel like Codex made a big push to run everything on your laptop. With Claude, I get 4 cpu's, a fair amount of ram and 30gb for every one of my dumb ideas for free in the cloud containers. Codex used to be similar, but last time I tried it just kept pushing me to run it locally on my laptop, which I really did not want to do with 20 requests going at once. That's the main advantage for me at the moment.
I remember a couple months after ChatGPT came out I was in a 1-1 with a coworker who hadn’t really played around with it much. I was very much toying around with it and was surprised at how good at stuff it was. I wanted to show him it was for real, he was skeptical, so over a half hour we had it make a bee and a flower buzz around in d3, copying and pasting between jsfiddle and ChatGPT. By the end of it, we had a nice animation and were both throughly surprised that the computers could code so well now.
I have had a similar notion, around the same time, with tui's and strace in particular. Lots of experiments, never quite good enough to publish or try to popularize. Something I've found in the last few years though, and especially the last six months, is that the impulse to make a better tui has died for me. Claude et al are going to wield these tools via cli far better than I can via tui. The built in visualization is nice for sure in tui, an embodied perspective on how to investigate something, however Claude can make a custom one for me in the moment within a few minutes. My impulse is to throw Claude at the issue with the bare linux toolbox while I do other things, not hand craft better tools that I don't have much motivation to use right now.
I've been meaning to write down my thoughts about software explicitly not being a craft for many years now and life keeps getting in the way. It's a direct response to the Etsy engineering blog, "Code As Craft". I agree that there are more code craftsmen in general than before, but by percentage there's way more software engineers. Engineering best practices to me are in many ways about robbing coding and software from the mystique of craftsmanship and turning it into a repeatable industrial process that isn't inhumane per se but doesn't depend on any particular person to make it work.
I am not joking when I say that software craftsmen lost the war when tabs vs spaces was obviated as a point of contention by CI enforced formatting and linting around broader community standards.
A craftsman's pride is an industrialist's nightmare! Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so, and the software craftsmen of all stripes understandably do not like this!
Matters of taste. I don't mind bigger files where it makes sense, and sometimes for the nature of the domain, it is nice to have more things in one file. As well, they write so many comments that 200 lines doesn't feel right to me.
Very much agreed. Something specific that has helped me a lot (beyond just automatic formatting, linting and testing) was putting a hard fail on any file with more than 1500 lines or so, with an allowlist for specific files with specific reasons for their length. I realized the agents were squirreling away code without wanting to do any sort of refactor. Every time one of these rat's nests has turned up, the codebase has been much improved with a small refactor, to the point it doesn't feel like such a pile of slop anymore.