@tqbf

Don't look at me sideways. Don't even look me straight on.

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sockpuppet.org/me
Joined October 2007
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DOWNVOTES IMPRISONING ME ALL THAT I SEE ABSOLUTE HORROR I CANNOT LIVE I CANNOT DIE TRAPPED IN THIS THREAD COMMENTS MY HOLDING CELL – at Austin, Chicago
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OK, fuck it. AI data centers are drinking all the water. I'm negatively polarized back to that belief. HN comments to come.
Andy Masley
@AndyMasley
Sep 26
Yeah I think I have like 20 shows I like max. It's a bad medium.
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Today I'm parting ways with Fly.io. It's been a privilege. I'm off to tilt at a big old windmill with Kurt, again. sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/…
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I will, for combinatorial-y reasons, be spending a bunch of time in SFBA in October and November (I'm into what we're doing next to miss the best 2 Chicago months), looking forward to meeting back up with my Bay Area friends.
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Kurt's mad at me for not doing another 1500 words on technical stuff and the problems we're trying to solve and all that but I think there's never once been a good "I'm leaving X to go do Y" post, you just gotta cough that hairball out fast and move past it.
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Represent represent!
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Motherfuckers out there saying "I'm old" with fucking Breath of the Wild on their board. GTFO.
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Ok, calling it: decorative gourd season has begun.
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Thomas H. Ptacek retweeted
Chris Peikert@ChrisPeikert
Sep 20
The bots and I made a little thing for my cryptography class: the one-way function transform lab. Interactively write security proofs (reductions + analysis) and attacks, both correct and wrong, for a variety of natural function transforms. web.eecs.umich.edu/~cpeikert…
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40dab494d5f3bc867c8fd333dd9ed4be0e5fb82231c4086c9ed18b0cbff51cd3 (You don't care, just registering something.)
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You know you guys are all "liking" a deadly boring claim about Chicagoland suburban local politics, right?
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Thomas H. Ptacek retweeted
Manish@ManishEarth
Sep 19
Replying to @tqbf
fwiw my friend @sunshowers6 recently tried asking LLMs to produce technical prose in "Williams style" and just that made the output much much more readable and stopped the effect of peoples' eyes glazing over LLM text
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The most common pushback I'm getting to this post is that taking this kind of feedback from an LLM is going to bleach out your style just like having the model generate the text, because models can't be trusted with "style". No.
Thomas H. Ptacek@tqbf
Sep 17
I wrote a thing about this. sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/…

How To Write With An LLM

Two rules keep an LLM from pasteurizing your writing: never take a word it suggests, and never let it encourage you. Then hand it all the tedious work.

sockpuppet.org
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Also like 4 different people on the HN thread are convinced I literally had an LLM write this post because the term "load-bearing" occurred in it. I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddlesome nerds!
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What makes me uncomfortable about all of this is that I know I'm not a great writer (it takes me 1000 words to say what a good writer can say in 300). But I can tell "objectively bad" from "reasonable", and I want the objectively bad scrubbed out of my work.
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