@Loh

I'm not like all the other contrarians

Joined August 2009
Always wanted to travel back in time to try fighting a younger version of yourself? Software development is the career for you!
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Military families, lets have a chat... Searching Facebook today for the USS Theodore Roosevelt will bring up a plethora of posts from family members confirming their loved one deployed today. Let's look at this public group, setup specifically for the ship's family. 1/
USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) Nimitz-class aircraft carrier leaving San Diego on deployment - September 27, 2026 SRC: WarshipCam
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Elliot retweeted
I love the bit where at each airport it’s one of the 8 possible combinations, but you don’t know which, and they get exasperated when you ask
This would make airport security lines 20% more efficient overnight
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Elliot retweeted
This happened to a girl I went to high school with
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In the early part of the 20thC, the Swiss artist Hans Emmenegger began making recurrent themes of enigmatic, dark forest interiors, exploring the optical effects of light and colour. This work was painted in 1933.
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The haunted landscapes of Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009)
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Surprising lack of acknowledgement of the groundbreaking early 1980s work by Dr. Steve Martin youtu.be/yF31_bvE5ww?si=w2jj…
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When the 1971 Sylmar Earthquake struck Los Angeles, Olive Hospital sustained major damage and had to be bulldozed. This guy collected all the clocks -- most of them stuck at 6:01 (am), the moment the quake struck.
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Elliot retweeted
VIDEO: Someone Died and I Acquired His Vintage Collection!
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A wall that lets you see out, keeps the outside from seeing in, and still lets air move through without a single fan. That's a breeze block wall done right. Privacy and ventilation, at the same time, from one material. We keep building solid walls and adding AC units to fix what the wall itself could have solved.
Breeze blocks are not decoration. They're psychology built into a wall. The pattern of light and shadow they cast changes how a room feels all day, softer, alive, never static like a solid wall. In the tropics, they cool a space and let air move without anyone touching a switch. We treat them like a budget shortcut instead of what they actually are: one of the smartest tools we have for building somewhere that actually feels like home.
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This is also happening to you when you use AI to critique arguments — yours or someone else’s, but you can only spot it if you already know the domain well. Gonna call this Gell-Mann Psychosis.
I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem. As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)! I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work. It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results? 88ms => 1.5ms 150K allocs => ~500 allocs Incredible right? Nope. My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path. This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput. The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity. Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.
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Good Wikipedia page. Reading through it feels like you’re having a stroke. Row after row of words that look like things you should know but don’t. Scrolling through here places you in a strange euneirophrenia.
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Has anyone thought that instead of slowing down AI we simply accelerate safety?
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Elliot retweeted
Replying to @shauseth
to everyone under the age of 30, this is someone designing a book jacket
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Elliot retweeted
bought a mac mini for $542.04 last december and apple is buying it back from me for $565
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NeXTSTEP is such an enigma in the grand scheme of computer history. It’s like the modern equivalent of your nerdiest developers leaving to spend a decade fucking around with low level kernel drivers and UI frameworks that customers don’t understand and sales guys don’t know how to sell. They make no money for years, but they also hard launch the computer animation industry along the way by accident. Then, on the cusp of irrelevancy, they come back, immediately stop being nerds and go on to lead the greatest product led development cycle in history. Nobody ever remembers Steve Jobs as the object oriented inter-process-communication guy, but he was. He personally hired the original designer of the Mach kernel. What the hell?
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Elliot retweeted
The best entry on Petrov is in encyclopedia Brittanica which says, “He is survived by his two children, two grandchildren and the entire human race.”
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BREAKING 🚨🚨 #Riverside / #California A large fireball was seen earlier tonight in Riverside County. It appeared to be breaking up at the same time. Origins unknown.
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french is a fundamentally unserious language
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Elliot retweeted
this years watermelons have been bad.
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Replying to @BiblicalBeauty
Always find a nice yellow spot, ideally with scratches on the surface. But this years watermelon have been bad.
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