I found out today that the location header of an HTTP redirect can be a tel:+ URI and phone's will actually ask you whether you want to call that number.
I was reminded of the US Constitution's 10th amendment and reading some of the history around it.
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Very relevant to what's going on today with National Guard and ICE deployments.
I've been exploring the origins of the 'relational turn' in psychoanalysis that began after WWII and ramped up in the 1970s. Psychoanalysis got vastly more interesting after Freud and I had no idea!
I've been trying to research drone navigation tech from what we have learned so far from the russian/ukraine war. I'm very much not a hardware guy but software by itself has been feeling kind of useless or even crueler than usual.
Published an edit today (post dated in Nov. but I've rewritten it 5x now) on my tutorial to use llama3.2:3b to generate fine tuning data to train tinyllama1.1b https://seanneilan.com/posts/fine-tuning-local-llm/ It took a while to figure out that when I made llama3.2 generate json, it didn't have enough horsepower to generate training data that was varied enough to successfully fine tune llama1.1b! Figured that out :) Something you never learn with the bigger models. Every token costs something even if it's a little bit.
I'm building in robotics. Setting up a new 3d camera today. I found that the 10m active USB C cable that I bought transfers power in both directions, but only transfers data in one direction, it turns out to be some weird video USB variant. Next I needed to plug a gripper into a modbus controller. That uses an M8 8-pole 20cm cable. The controller manufacturer recently decided to switch from male to female connector, so now the cable needs to be male-male. After searching online for hours, I believe that is impossible to find as everyone only sells male-female cables.
I'm continuously surprised by how difficult it is to plug things together and how non-descriptive cable "standards" are about the actual capabilities of cables and connectors.
I've recently been modernizing an old milling machine, and learned that for most types making your own cables is not that hard. The one painful thing is that there are a zillion tools involved for the different types of crimps and terminations.
I found out my crimson-bellied conure is laying an egg today! She's nesting in some towels now, chirping away while she works on laying it.
Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.
She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.
I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.
She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)
So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)
I'm looking into rennovating a massive agricultural machine shed ~ two stories high in the middle built some 80+ years ago using sections of spur pipeline as central upright poles to hold up some beefy jarrah trusses.
The "verandah" wings flaring out from there were bulit from flimsier timber that's rotting and the iron sheet walls are starting to peel away.
The posts are of interest as they have old markings and water fittings, tee pieces, etc.
It's not far from one of the original steam powered pumping stations that moved water through the main line.
I found out that the adhesives I've encountered from time to time that remain tacky and easily moved or removed are called "non-hardening" adhesives. This was after using E8000 glue for a headphone repair today.
I found out I can automate my 5,12kWh house battery through local-only RS485 connection, and directly setting registers using ModbusTCP from Home Assistant. I then drafted an automation with hysteresis and damping that tries to aim for Net-Zero export/import (pv surplus/grid). It appears to work!
jukebox? jeux is found by my solver, although I'm not sure Sam would include it. I'm working on a site for solving Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, Strands, etc.
What was your algorithm? Compute a bitset for every word, for each word with 7 unique letters, check against every other word if it has a subset of those letters? Surely there's a better than O(n^2) way
Start with your chosen dictionary, remove small words and all 's'es.
Then find all words with 7 unique letters, then get the unique set of letter sets. These are your valid puzzles times 7 for each selection of a center letter.
Construct a trie of your dictionary. For each letter of each puzzle, walk the trie using only the puzzle letters. When you find a word, if it used the center letter, add to list.
I’m reading Domain Driven Development and learning why so many of my projects have been tough to maintain.
I also recently learned that you can get ancient coins for very little money if you don’t care about resale value or need them to be in pristine condition. I bought some coins from kingdoms that I’d never heard of. Many are thousands of years old! It’s fun holding a piece of history like that.
The former. I didn’t realize how few of my projects have even had an intentional architecture. So often they go from feature designs to mockups to tickets to code without any real discussion about how the pieces fit together. There’s certainly never been an attempt to create a common “language” that is shared across the org. On a project half the company might refer to a catalog item as a “product”, and their definition may or may not align with what another team refers to as an “item”. I’m starting to understand that situations like that are why everything gets so complicated.
I've read the adverserial attack paper, and I'm currently implementing a captcha based on images that have masks on them so that any LLM agent with a visual model will classify it wrong.
The idea is to use something like a slider that shows different images combined with a memory task, like "find out the pair of images" and then offer maybe a text input field where the user has to write 1,2,3 or something similar with the image numbers to pass the captcha.
The tldr is that I'm abusing the famous panda image that's classified as a gibbon as a technique to build a bot captcha.
I am cleaning up some pointer arithmetic stuff for multi-dimensional C style arrays. I managed to replace the code with a std::inner_product minus a std::accumulate (to accomodate for the fact that the upper array bound is exclusive, ie one-past-the-end).
That running and taking cold showers really do make me more focused! And that i will have to be the one that fixes my life and builds my future. Deep, i know
Reading up on the history of information management, and the real killer app for paper was double-entry bookkeeping, which made Venice rich and contributed to starting the Renaissance.
Warning: opening a can of worms.
Ann Blair is a great source on general, but there are so many facets to this topic here's a list that I have read or am going to read.
* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen
* The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin
* Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by
Ann M. Blair
* Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann
* Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
* Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard M Kanare
* Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski
* A System for Writing by Bob Doto
* Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte
* Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan
* Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe
by Alberto Cevolini
* The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson
* How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens
* Filing and Database Systems by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle, Judith Scharle Greene
* Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern
* The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen
* The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul
* Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari
* Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo
* Filing by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle
* How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess
* A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham
* The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll
* The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles
* Chance Particulars by Sara Mansfield Taber, Maud Taber-Thomas
* The Great Mental Models Volume 1- General Thinking Concepts by Parrish, Shane; Beaubien, Rhiannon
* The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales
* Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper
Articulating design decisions by Tom Greever
The Card System at the Office by J Kaiser
* Systematic Indexing by J Kaiser
* Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet
* Magic and hypersystems : constructing the information-sharing library by
Harold Billings.
* The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for
Processing Information by George A. Miller
* The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither
* The Oxford Handbook of Expertise
* Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by
Jean-luc Doumont
* Applied Secretarial Practice by Rupert P. Sorelle and John Robert Gregg
* The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden
* What is a Document by Michael Buckland
* The Commonplace Book by Ann Blair
* Make Better Documents by Anil Dash
* A Core Calculus for Documents by Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi
* The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams
* Information by Anthony Grafton
* The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden
* Files: Law and Media Technology by Cornelia Vismann
* Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge by Cyrille Martraire
* Living in Information by Jorge Arango
* How to Write a Technical Paper: Structure and Style of the Epitome of your Research† by Georgios Varsamopoulos
* Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by JoAnn T. Hackos
* Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango
* Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James (jamesg.blog)
It was the killer app for personal computers as well. From Lotus123 to my family's small business in a tiny country that could only afford a computer in 92 for the business.
Indeed. That's why I am doubtful about LLMs, they just aren't doing something particularly well or solving a basic problem. No one in their right mind would let an LLM do their accounting. Just today I was looking something up and that AI summary was just so wrong. How can I trust it with anything important?
I was digging around my home state of Indiana's marriage records from the 1800s as part of my ongoing genealogy hobby when I came across the absolutely brilliant way they indexed information. The marriages were recorded sequentially, and that index number was written in special alphabetically tagged pages with the grooms surname and the page number. The brides surname was used as well.
Generally a new book was stared in each county each year.
So, even if there were an error in the indexing, generally you could find a record in 3 operations, doing an exhaustive search was quite unlikely.
Been working on sheet cutting optimization for https://measuretocut.com today and it sent me straight down the cutting‑stock / 2D bin‑packing rabbit hole. What started as “wouldn’t it be nice if the site could tell you how to cut your wood sheets optimally?” turned into reading about NP‑hard problems and flipping through old operations research papers like I was cramming for an exam.
The funny part is how far the mathematical version of the problem is from what measuretocut.com actually needs to output. In reality you have kerf, ugly offcuts, and the fact that nobody wants a cutting diagram that looks like a circuit board. We really have to take into consideration a 2nd optimization, it needs to be an output that a person in a shop can glance at and immediately understand.
That lodash-es doesn’t ESM lodash/fp, which means there is no straightforward way of using it with Vite after version 5. God help me.
I don’t even want to use it, I just want to get legacy code building on a modern version of Vite without rewriting a couple thousand lines of code. Aaaargh
I gave up on that years ago. You can find guns that work but they're rare and crazy expensive. You can make an oil gun from a grease gun that works but that bitch will oil the machine and you and the floor and the wall.
I just swapped the fittings to get rid of the zerk nipples for something I could use with a standard oil fitting.
I'm exploring writing a point and click adventure, and I've found out that they're basically just hierarchical state machines with a pretty UI. This is useful because it simplifies a lot of things.
The downside is that now I'm wondering if I could write one in SQL.
When you use a microscope to magnify something, the objective (magnifying lens) is literally taking the Fourier transform of the image. The optical system recovers up to a limiting frequency, determining the spatial resolution of the image.
Gotta say, I assumed this is some sort of virtual/imaginary thing, but it seems like there's a point in the optical system where if we placed a screen, we'd see the FT of the image coming in! And before we had digital image processing people used to place masks there to filter out low frequency or high frequency details in the image. Which is absolutely insane and I have no comprehension of how the physics works out!
234 comments
[ 23.0 ms ] story [ 449 ms ] thread> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Very relevant to what's going on today with National Guard and ICE deployments.
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/14/10th-amendment-ice-trump-il... (or please google whatever source you find reliable about the topic)
I'm continuously surprised by how difficult it is to plug things together and how non-descriptive cable "standards" are about the actual capabilities of cables and connectors.
Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.
She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.
I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.
She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)
So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfields_Water_Supply_Scheme
I'm looking into rennovating a massive agricultural machine shed ~ two stories high in the middle built some 80+ years ago using sections of spur pipeline as central upright poles to hold up some beefy jarrah trusses.
The "verandah" wings flaring out from there were bulit from flimsier timber that's rotting and the iron sheet walls are starting to peel away.
The posts are of interest as they have old markings and water fittings, tee pieces, etc.
It's not far from one of the original steam powered pumping stations that moved water through the main line.
Hoping they do it for April 1st one year.
What was your algorithm? Compute a bitset for every word, for each word with 7 unique letters, check against every other word if it has a subset of those letters? Surely there's a better than O(n^2) way
Then find all words with 7 unique letters, then get the unique set of letter sets. These are your valid puzzles times 7 for each selection of a center letter.
Construct a trie of your dictionary. For each letter of each puzzle, walk the trie using only the puzzle letters. When you find a word, if it used the center letter, add to list.
In practice it's log(n) for size of dictionary.
I also recently learned that you can get ancient coins for very little money if you don’t care about resale value or need them to be in pristine condition. I bought some coins from kingdoms that I’d never heard of. Many are thousands of years old! It’s fun holding a piece of history like that.
Because they didn't take advice from that book or because they DID take advice from that book?
The idea is to use something like a slider that shows different images combined with a memory task, like "find out the pair of images" and then offer maybe a text input field where the user has to write 1,2,3 or something similar with the image numbers to pass the captcha.
The tldr is that I'm abusing the famous panda image that's classified as a gibbon as a technique to build a bot captcha.
* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen * The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin * Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair * Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann * Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design * Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard M Kanare * Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski * A System for Writing by Bob Doto * Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte * Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan * Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini * The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson * How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens * Filing and Database Systems by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle, Judith Scharle Greene * Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern * The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen * The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul * Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari * Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo * Filing by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle * How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess * A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham * The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll * The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles * Chance Particulars by Sara Mansfield Taber, Maud Taber-Thomas * The Great Mental Models Volume 1- General Thinking Concepts by Parrish, Shane; Beaubien, Rhiannon * The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales * Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper Articulating design decisions by Tom Greever The Card System at the Office by J Kaiser * Systematic Indexing by J Kaiser * Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet * Magic and hypersystems : constructing the information-sharing library by Harold Billings. * The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information by George A. Miller * The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither * The Oxford Handbook of Expertise * Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc Doumont * Applied Secretarial Practice by Rupert P. Sorelle and John Robert Gregg * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * What is a Document by Michael Buckland * The Commonplace Book by Ann Blair * Make Better Documents by Anil Dash * A Core Calculus for Documents by Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi * The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams * Information by Anthony Grafton * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * Files: Law and Media Technology by Cornelia Vismann * Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge by Cyrille Martraire * Living in Information by Jorge Arango * How to Write a Technical Paper: Structure and Style of the Epitome of your Research† by Georgios Varsamopoulos * Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by JoAnn T. Hackos * Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango * Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James (jamesg.blog)
Geometry is more or less floating point arithmetic and trigonometry.
LLMs are very lossy text compression. Just like JPEG and MP3 it helps with distilling down the text of the entire Internet in some way.
We can even get reddit recommendations for putting glue onto pizza.
Generally a new book was stared in each county each year.
So, even if there were an error in the indexing, generally you could find a record in 3 operations, doing an exhaustive search was quite unlikely.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250215223917/https://solar.low...
The funny part is how far the mathematical version of the problem is from what measuretocut.com actually needs to output. In reality you have kerf, ugly offcuts, and the fact that nobody wants a cutting diagram that looks like a circuit board. We really have to take into consideration a 2nd optimization, it needs to be an output that a person in a shop can glance at and immediately understand.
I don’t even want to use it, I just want to get legacy code building on a modern version of Vite without rewriting a couple thousand lines of code. Aaaargh
I just swapped the fittings to get rid of the zerk nipples for something I could use with a standard oil fitting.
The downside is that now I'm wondering if I could write one in SQL.