You can buy very powerful handheld green laser pointers on Amazon for around 20 bucks. You absolutely shouldn't shine one into a camera sensor, ever. It says so on the box!
I'm working on a thing I'm calling TOASST, or the Tiny Open Android Smartphone-based Smart Telescope. The basic idea is to use a smartphone (often the best camera in your house) to do electronically assisted…
I was just talking about this with my partner the other day. We have an amazing retro games shop/arcade not far from our house, so I think for probably my kiddo's 5th birthday I'm going to take him to buy a Gameboy…
> XGo is a programming language that reads like plain English This is possibly the most dangerous sentence on this entire page. The hubris and ignorance of history wrapped up in this one sentence is breathtaking. We've…
Margaritaville Frozen Drink makers, specifically. A sound investment if I've ever seen one!
And they used their supposed ability to refund tariffs as justification for continuing to charge them during a court case last year, per another comment in this thread. We live in unserious times.
I was prototyping to this end the other day - what would it be like for a coding agent to have access to a language that can be: - structurally edited, ensuring syntactic validity at all times - annotated with metadata,…
I'm working on my fourth attempt at a first novel :D In all seriousness, I am about 10k words into a new draft I started a couple weeks ago. It's a far-future post-catastrophe sci fi type story, with some inspiration…
https://gabethebando.cc
I don't have anything to show for it yet, but I'm rebuilding my dotfiles from scratch with a (hopefully) reusable framework that I want to open source some day. I don't know if it'll be useful to anyone else as I have…
I had a hilarious experience the other day with an (HP) laptop that I thought might be fun to share here. I've been getting into astrophotography recently, so I went out to my local Astronomy club's dark site in…
Currently working on building my first 3D printed star tracking rig for astrophotography (via the incredible OpenAstroTracker project) and beginning to think through a 3D printed Dobsonian telescope. Also working on…
Ah yes, because more AI will solve this problem. No, what we need is for people to feel safe in public again, for them to not feel like they're constantly one questionable picture away from their lives being ruined.…
This whole thing reeks of a plant. I never heard a word about this, and I work in the entertainment industry, until this week. I'm going to assume this is manufactured attention trying to legitimize something that…
> Are they all just focused on sex, debauchery, lots of drinking today? ...As opposed to the actual medieval period, which was famously chaste, calm, and sober?
Yeah, the ethics around _training_ models that generate embeddings is still suspect to me, but the use of embeddings as a cheap, efficient way to provide semantic similarity seems very valuable. I've started dipping my…
Already contender for my favorite puzzle game of the year. I would compare it to Outer Wilds or Animal Well, but that would do all three games a disservice. Blue Prince is a thoroughly unique game that is worth your…
There's another dimension to this, that storage is so cheap that being wasteful with it isn't really disincentivized. I know for example at work of a portal that accepts uploads of large files from external clients that…
Very slowly working on a prototype for a game where you learn about a deceased relative by using their old (C64-type) computer, reading their files and playing the games they made. Because I can't fucking stop myself, I…
I can't see why this wouldn't be the case, the firmware will be open source and I have to imagine a developer mode will be part of that.
Anecdotally, Netflix is very "settle into your groove and get really good at your job" if you want it to be. There are of course folks that climb the ladder, but I also work with several L5's (Senior engineers) who have…
Sure there is. _Cut initiatives_, and exit the related staff. Don't cut staff without a corresponding cut to programs.
NOAA just fired hundreds of weather forecasters. World class ones, literally some of the best meteorologists in the world. And they knew how to interact with NOAA's systems to gather data and publish forecasts, issue…
But how much extra waste will be generated by losing the experts in these bureaucracies? Of course some of them are redundant, but some of them have the proverbial bathroom codes and are irreplaceable. These cuts are…
This is the thing that keeps making me so angry when I hear so called "budget hawks" get mad about the number of federal employees. Payroll is _not the problem_!! All of the federal payroll is something like 10-15% of…
You can buy very powerful handheld green laser pointers on Amazon for around 20 bucks. You absolutely shouldn't shine one into a camera sensor, ever. It says so on the box!
I'm working on a thing I'm calling TOASST, or the Tiny Open Android Smartphone-based Smart Telescope. The basic idea is to use a smartphone (often the best camera in your house) to do electronically assisted…
I was just talking about this with my partner the other day. We have an amazing retro games shop/arcade not far from our house, so I think for probably my kiddo's 5th birthday I'm going to take him to buy a Gameboy…
> XGo is a programming language that reads like plain English This is possibly the most dangerous sentence on this entire page. The hubris and ignorance of history wrapped up in this one sentence is breathtaking. We've…
Margaritaville Frozen Drink makers, specifically. A sound investment if I've ever seen one!
And they used their supposed ability to refund tariffs as justification for continuing to charge them during a court case last year, per another comment in this thread. We live in unserious times.
I was prototyping to this end the other day - what would it be like for a coding agent to have access to a language that can be: - structurally edited, ensuring syntactic validity at all times - annotated with metadata,…
I'm working on my fourth attempt at a first novel :D In all seriousness, I am about 10k words into a new draft I started a couple weeks ago. It's a far-future post-catastrophe sci fi type story, with some inspiration…
https://gabethebando.cc
I don't have anything to show for it yet, but I'm rebuilding my dotfiles from scratch with a (hopefully) reusable framework that I want to open source some day. I don't know if it'll be useful to anyone else as I have…
I had a hilarious experience the other day with an (HP) laptop that I thought might be fun to share here. I've been getting into astrophotography recently, so I went out to my local Astronomy club's dark site in…
Currently working on building my first 3D printed star tracking rig for astrophotography (via the incredible OpenAstroTracker project) and beginning to think through a 3D printed Dobsonian telescope. Also working on…
Ah yes, because more AI will solve this problem. No, what we need is for people to feel safe in public again, for them to not feel like they're constantly one questionable picture away from their lives being ruined.…
This whole thing reeks of a plant. I never heard a word about this, and I work in the entertainment industry, until this week. I'm going to assume this is manufactured attention trying to legitimize something that…
> Are they all just focused on sex, debauchery, lots of drinking today? ...As opposed to the actual medieval period, which was famously chaste, calm, and sober?
Yeah, the ethics around _training_ models that generate embeddings is still suspect to me, but the use of embeddings as a cheap, efficient way to provide semantic similarity seems very valuable. I've started dipping my…
Already contender for my favorite puzzle game of the year. I would compare it to Outer Wilds or Animal Well, but that would do all three games a disservice. Blue Prince is a thoroughly unique game that is worth your…
There's another dimension to this, that storage is so cheap that being wasteful with it isn't really disincentivized. I know for example at work of a portal that accepts uploads of large files from external clients that…
Very slowly working on a prototype for a game where you learn about a deceased relative by using their old (C64-type) computer, reading their files and playing the games they made. Because I can't fucking stop myself, I…
I can't see why this wouldn't be the case, the firmware will be open source and I have to imagine a developer mode will be part of that.
Anecdotally, Netflix is very "settle into your groove and get really good at your job" if you want it to be. There are of course folks that climb the ladder, but I also work with several L5's (Senior engineers) who have…
Sure there is. _Cut initiatives_, and exit the related staff. Don't cut staff without a corresponding cut to programs.
NOAA just fired hundreds of weather forecasters. World class ones, literally some of the best meteorologists in the world. And they knew how to interact with NOAA's systems to gather data and publish forecasts, issue…
But how much extra waste will be generated by losing the experts in these bureaucracies? Of course some of them are redundant, but some of them have the proverbial bathroom codes and are irreplaceable. These cuts are…
This is the thing that keeps making me so angry when I hear so called "budget hawks" get mad about the number of federal employees. Payroll is _not the problem_!! All of the federal payroll is something like 10-15% of…