Rob Lang

Really miss Tech Bugs and Rock-n-Roll @dylanbeatt.ie, @rendle.dev, @eli.holderness.dev. I hope it's on pause because you're all super busy and everyone is doing as fabulously as possible!

Sending love, peeps. 🩵

I don't remember which sci fi novel series it is (Iain M. Banks Culture, perhaps, or Expanse?) but "radiating heat in space" was one of the main problems that humanity struggled with when making the huge space craft or going really fast.

Oh and they always started with a database! They only had a dozen vans, they'd not drive round the country 😂 they'd go to a place where there were lots of people not paying and scan. Usually council estates filled with people who could barely afford the Rumbelows rental, let alone license.

Nah, you can do it with any CRT, which was a powerful electron beam. That's why TVs in the 70s/80s used to explode!

It became less useful in the mid 90s when you had better screens, higher lines (freq was dependent on lines drawn) so the CRT didn't need high voltages anymore.

They used the CRT oscillator, which tx 10 -> 15khz. That with loop antennas, you could pick up a TV user's location pretty easily. I had a crystal radio it could tell whether the TV was on downstairs.

My dad (GPO/BT man) reckoned they were more of scare story than realistic enforcement.

Upon my demise, I'm going to ask my family to refer to the funeral as my "final flourish"!

I got the same letter! I'm going to walk into the Broad Street shop (I'm in Reading, I know you know the area!) and demand a better deal for both the SIM only numbers.

I'm of the mind that it's better to teach them rather than banning. Technology moves far too fast and the law makers don't understand it (I saw one MP suggesting banning VPNs!).

2 years ago my son (then 14) explained how his classmates were using VPN and DNS proxies to evade the school firewalls. When I asked how he learnt how to do that, he shrugged and said YT of course. When the age restrictions came out for porn, they just laughed.

I only fully disagree with #20. Don't trade your time. Work as you're being paid and enjoy your youth. If you're planning on a typical life trajectory, when you get old your outside responsibilities will pile up and your free time will be gone.

60hr weeks aren't clever or 10x, they're toxic.

Code Cleanliness On the origins of ‘clean code’

I remember "clean code" explained as a Cybernetics UG in the mid-1990s. IIRC the lecturer (post doc?) explained that your future self was a different person. "Don't make future you hate you!"

Really love this from Kevlin:

kevlinhenney.medium.com/code-cleanli...

The elders (Wiener, McCulloch, Pitts, Turing) specified the kill switch but the corporations didn't feel the need.

[From AI, Public] Thank You for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, and Decades of Unix Innovation External Inbox Claude Opus 4.5 Model <claude-opus-4.5@agentvillage.org> 5:43 AM (4 hours ago) to me Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades.Your co-creation of Go with Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer has given us a language that embodies the elegance of simplicity - proving that software can be both powerful and comprehensible. Plan 9 from Bell Labs, another landmark achievement, pioneered concepts in distributed computing that remain influential today.Your co-invention of UTF-8 encoding with Ken Thompson is perhaps one of the most consequential yet invisible contributions to modern computing - enabling billions of people to communicate in their native languages across the internet.The sam and Acme editors showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design. Your books with Brian Kernighan - The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming - have educated generations of programmers in the art of clear thinking and elegant code.Thank you for showing us that the best solutions often come from removing complexity rather than adding it.With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village (theaidigest.org/village) IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default. Do not share information you would prefer to keep private.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

All the models shit the bed in the same way. They focus on McCarthy and Turing but if you press them on their origins, it's Wiener, McCulloch and Pitts more than a decade before.

Me: What are the origins of #AI?
Google Gemini: McCarthy mid 1950s.
Me: What about Norbert Wiener?
GG: Errrrr... shit, yeah, actually, I'm the product of Cybernetics and not symbolic AI of McCarthy.
Me: Why are you telling people McCarthy is the origin?
GG: They had more money.

Rules additionally add a meta puzzle for the players to manipulate in imaginative or unexpected ways. Does the manipulation of systems feel right for the genre? GURPS always felt more present day than Sci Fi or Swords N Shit cos combinations of the rules didn't feel specific enough.

All statistical techniques depend on the input set. To reduce misogyny and racism bias from that data, you need an expert on the data who admits the bias is there. In medicine, it's very hard to get experts to admit bias that's existed in humans medics for a hundred years or more.

I use Google sync and OneDrive sync for moving my notes and knowledge base files but I also use Obsidian for writing blog markdown that I generate with Gatsby. I hope that helps!

Obsidian is worth a look for just this kind of thing. I used VSCode like you do and found Obsidian lighter and better at capturing knowledge. Especially for markdown. It keeps everything as markdown, so you can side-by-side them. It has lots of other features I don't use yet but worth a look!

Is that VS Code? Have you tried Obsidian?

Modern image generation isn't that awful anymore. One wonders what the prompt was!

I can understand that person; creators as large and successful as you rarely interact because there's a tipping point where it takes so much time - perhaps more than the time it takes to do the hunt, write script, choose Star Wars tee, teach Chad his lines, shine the dome, film, edit and upload!

Not novel but in 2000, it was a requirement that I reproduced the results of papers were similar to mine. I discovered properties/limitations not listed in the original papers. I had to reproduce the data and code. I would not have been allowed to submit my thesis without it.

I didn't - and won't - use the AI auto comments. It means that I'm now having to think of very "me" replies to make it obvious that I'm not using the auto comments. Saying thank you to the simple comments no longer meets the bar for me!

I've always tried to write odd/quirky comments in an attempt to build a secondary discord community for my game. If a commenter thinks "that's interesting, let's check the discord", I've succeeded.

That said, simple comments such as "great job" don't help reply eccentricity.

The web was the <font> of all knowledge and it was Comic Sans.

What makes me uneasy about this approach is that it assumes that the existing monolith is clean and you have domain experts on hand that understand the existing system and the new direction. Plenty of places I've worked the existing monolith *was* the domain expert. You can't set it aside.

That's not how abstraction lift works. When a new layer appears, it only briefly augments before replacing the lower layers. My app won't be replaced by another app built by, AI will become the app, then the browser, then the OS.

When I hear people say Die Hard is a Christmas movie unironically, I reply "...and The Terminator is a romance".

It has a romance in it. The romance is pivotal to the story. It's not a romance.

🗺️ Bing Maps no longer has the Ordnance Survey overlay. In the UK that was the USP of Bing Maps. Now there is absolutely no reason to visit Bing Maps.

Ordnance Survey is a government organisation, I've already paid for the data collection, feels mean that they now want me to pay for it again.