I'm in Copenhagen for the foreseeable future. The weather has been great; yet the city is rather empty — apparently, Roskilde Festival is a staple of the Danish summer.
It's incredible how much I have enjoyed working. I am learning immensely — and having so much fun. And with NixOS of all things!
Life has...changed immensely. I'll probably get back at writing here, at some point — but suddenly I'm leaving the quaint little village for Copenhagen (of all places!). And I'm quite excited, because the job is *great*, and I haven't been so excited for something in a long time.
Oh! And this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZt1...
Plus, the new Adrianne Lenker live recording is terrific.
There's something really special about recorded live performances! Thanks for this! ❣️ It got me wondering what are my favorite lives — and I don't know — but lately I've had Alice Phoebe Lou's Live at the Funkhaus 2019 on repeat (and I just found out there's video!)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ycqy...
I'd suggest having a look at KoReader! Granted, I have an older Kobo model, but it provided some very needed features (like night-mode, and better highlight export) that may have already been solved on the color models.
I thought people only talked to adjacent passengers on planes in Rachel Cusk's books.
Sometimes I'll lose sight of him and worry a bit, but I'd rather not call him out in case it's only a nap.
Hereby I present hiding spot #1.
Circumstances have me catsitting at my best friend's place — for two weeks. Big whiskers is currently in the process of realizing something is up...
sometimes it's just so nice to close them all but of course one must preliminarily save all this content
...you wouldn't believe, but it had been on my mind to ask you for books on art/sketching/drawing you would recommend.
I have started to sketch for fun, and DRSB has been a good resource to learn some basics — and it has some great sidenotes, too! And Alla Prima seems interesting too.
the categories are articles health-therapy-soft-skills computers-programming politics-media-society cognition literature misc art-painting-drawing cooking-food danish environmental-urbanism history language letters-personal-writing music science technical writing zen
Just spent some good 45 minutes organizing my no-subfolders hoard of digital books into separate folders.
It feels good. I feel like I could do some very light data analysis on this, too.
Giving this a try. I can also recommend one of Bill Orcutt's troll-y releases: fakeestates.bandcamp.com/album/slow-t...
It's a bit more lively.
I am lucky to have access to unlimited 3.5 via Github Copilot — and for 10$, one can get 3.7, too.
I don't have strong evals for 3.7 other than feeling it has a much bigger context window + being more agentic w/ Cursor.
Maybe in 3/4 we'll be comfortably running these locally.
a file overview of a few files I have in my codebase, with instructions and documentation for interacting with AI models.
What I'm most interested in now is optimizing the mental modeling and mapping of the project while sitting in the backseat while Claude takes over.
The solution seems to be designing strict sets of rules and expectations for AI cooperation.
Cursor is not my ideal interface (maybe because it is VSCode-based) and Neovim's Avante still felt a bit awkward (granted, that was a few months ago).
I found a sweet-spot in Zed. It doesn't have any automatic code editing, which I suppose fits my workflow: I get to be more involved in the editing.
The moment we can run something on par with Claude 3.5 locally, this will be very transformative (this is arguably already achievable with a really powerful rig or the latest gen of Macbooks, with plenty of memory).
@simonwillison.net is our canary for this sort of thing.
I only visit X because I feel the AI-assisted developing community is much more vibrant there (they're always raving about @cursor.com.web.brid.gy, @windsurfai.bsky.social, Aider, @anthropic.com's Claude etc.
I love developing alongside AI, although it still irks me how energy wasteful it all is.
Managed to crash @zed.dev while trying to start my day of work.
However, the sun is shining and there's no sign of rain in the next few hours; and life has been good.
It is indeed sad. I wanted to send an international letter from Denmark and the PostNord clerk suggested I go to Germany instead to post it. It was really expensive.
Letters may be old-fashioned — but it's good to have the option. Postal service is a big deal.
Claude is *very* expensive. I think I notice a difference between 3.5 and 3.7 (the latter being able to handle much more context), and it is my favorite LLM to code with, but the price is really prohibitive.
Haven't yet tried Claude Code. Aider is nice, too...Cursor is sometimes a bit slow.
What I think I miss the most at this stage in my life is a solid programming community around me. Soloing everything is very difficult. Even knowing what to solo is hard if there's nobody to shoot ideas with.
Of course, there's plenty of communities in the internet...but it's not the same.
a list of a few public channels for voice and text communication in Zed (an IDE).
I am giving @zed.dev a try (after having spent the last two months mainly developing with Cursor...) and I just realized it has voice-comm and default public channels baked into it.
It seems like they're trying to bring the public closer to Zed's development. A bit funky, but could be interesting.
Yuck! Wow. It has been a while. The early 2010's had some good records — suddenly I hear Real Estate, The Drums, Best Coast...oof!
Levels is quite a fun character, but it's also a bit terrifying how his relentless pragmatism is able to *generate so much*. And I think some programmers are understandably scared, because things really seem to have sped up tremendously with AI tools.
The user is feeling overwhelmed and scattered, a common experience, especially for someone with ADHD. They have multiple competing priorities: studying for an exam, working on a coding project, and managing bills. They're also feeling a bit guilty about past choices (pizza). The core need is to get organized and feel less chaotic.
I'm bad at planning ahead, but my summer already features two (!) programming events I'm quite enthusiastic about. And both of them in Scandinavia, which is nice.
The days are getting longer, and it will be my first summer over here. Quite exciting!
an underlined printed version of 'How to build stable systems'
At the phase of life and career that I will print Medium articles, highlight them, and hopefully place them upon a programming shrine that I consult every day before getting to work.
As for dotnet, I really have no problems — I've also heard great things, and it seems like F# is quite good, etc. I just find it interesting that Microsoft has a much stronger presence in the university here than in Portugal.
Outlook, however...it's so broken.
Microsoft has been producing the most cursed enterprise software for the last ten years or so. I am so surprised by their strong influence in Denmark — my university uses it, most companies use the .NET stack —
but Outlook is so...in the way. Things just fail without justification.
I feel that one of the most yielding (addmitedly first world) QoL enhancements is to use an e-reader.
Vast availability of content, the convenience or backlight in the dark — and it makes travel so much easier.
I read in paper, and love it, but e-ink is amazing too.
