Today I learned that Google Gemini can understand ASCII maps like in nethacks or other roguelikes: Route to the Stairs From your current position [@], follow these steps: 1. Move East (Right): Move one room over to a cleared room [#]. 2. Move South (Down): Move one room down to another cleared room [#]. 3. Move South (Down) again: This will take you directly to the room containing the stairs [>].
Because sometimes you need a little extra stupid in your life, the John Zone will be on today at 3PM Eastern Time on www.hkcradio.com. To listen, simply direct your media player of choice to listen.hkcradio.com:8000/hkc.m…, ask your Google smart speaker to play HKC Radio on TuneIn, or say to Alexa "ask MyTuner Radio to play HKC Radio."
Idly reflecting a bit this morning, and realizing that one of the key insights that I bring to a consulting engagement is the in-depth observation "you could write a computer program to do this"
@matt Right. "write a computer program" in contrast to "stack up a pile of brand identifiers and stickers on the back of a laptop until emergent behavior in their interactions gradually coalesces into a solution"
@matt What many fail to reflect upon is whether the amount of effort to *learn* how to use the existing solution may exceed the amount of effort required to *write* a solution. The assumption is always that learning is free, but coding is expensive.
« Il ne faut pas laisser passer cette idéologie anti flics », s’est ému le ministre de l’Intérieur après ces faits qui se sont déroulés lors d’une fête étudiante.
hey, cool. for those who use fastplay, anchor radio's in search results. now no one has a reason not to tune into my show in 20 minutes... right? hello? anyone?
I've been thinking a lot about my AI coding and why I don't particularly enjoy it. I miss the feeling of "flow" from coding by hand; with agentic coding it's more like you're fielding a bunch of Slack messages at once – it can be exhausting.
The analogy I keep coming back to is videogame minmaxxing. If you hyper-optimize a game you can "win" but it might be less fun.
BTW, like you, I've concluded that I don't actually find the ethical/environmental/etc. arguments against genAI that persuasive. I *wanted* them to be persuasive, so I could fully align with what I thought was the right tribe (yes, I admit it).
So now I have conversations with an LLM with no shame. But I still haven't seriously tried agentic coding yet. Not sure I want to, but I figure the pressure to do so will keep increasing.
@matt Yep, that was my journey. I wanted to care because it felt like something worth caring about, and I tend to identify with the kinds of people who care. But I was just never that convinced.
Your mileage will definitely vary depending on the team (tribe? 😆) you hang out with. At my work people are constantly building and sharing little AI tools so it's just way easier to pick up and be productive.
At my little bootstrapped company, the two junior developers are already using Claude Code regularly, and my non-technical cofounder (the CEO) is quite bullish about AI in general. So I would be swimming upstream if I continued to hold a hard-line anti-AI position.
@matt Environments where people are *mandated* to do it are totally counterproductive IMO. At Salesforce part of the reason I held out was exactly that – I was stubborn and tired of being proselytized all the time.
At my current gig we are not mandated at all, and I still have colleagues barely using these tools. Your experience with juniors matches mine, though – they are way more "AI-native."
OTOH I've been having fun helping my wife with her side projects. I vibe coded a Stardew Valley SQLite database so she can ask it questions like "what's more profitable: starfruit wine or grape jelly?" This is something I never would have done before because it's just too tedious. For her (a non-coder) it's absolutely revolutionary, especially because Claude can translate her English queries into SQL. (Using the SQLite MCP, it turns out, is way more reliable than having Claude read the wiki.)
Clare and I went on an impromptu tour of London infrastructure today after unexpectedly ending up at Dishoom Canary Wharf due to a power cut at the Kensington branch.
A ten-minute walk from Canary Wharf took us to the Temple Of Storms (officially the Isle Of Dogs Pumping Station), a grade II* listed building constructed in 1988. While I’m not generally into postmodern architecture, it’s refreshing to see a modern industrial building that isn’t just a metal and concrete box.
This was my first ever in-person view of the Millennium Dome (or O2 arena, as we’re meant to call it now). I was in my late teens when it first opened and I wanted to see it at the time, but my London-born parents have sworn never to return to the city as its post-Thatcher progressiveness offends their conservatism.
A few hours later we went inside to find it’s basically a fairly standard shopping centre with a rather tatty-looking umbrella on top.
Continuing the Millennium theme, we passed one of the 1400 Millennium Beacons, looking a bit worse-for-wear a quarter of a century later (a figure that made us both feel very old). Several shelducks were feeding in the former dock in the background.
On the strangely-named Goodluck Hope peninsula we spotted this former Whale Oil Extraction building, and talked about how strange it is that the industrial-scale slaughter of whales was once an economical means of producing oil.
Throughout our walk we could see the London Cable Car. While a cable car might make sense for a mountainous city, it’s a ridiculous means of transport for somewhere as flat as London, and it’s almost entirely used by tourists. So of course we had to give it a go.
Near the highest point the cable car slowed down, and with today’s windy weather it started swaying alarmingly. The views across London were spectacular, but on the approach to the Greenwich peninsula it was very visible how the Millennium Dome had failed to encourage further regeneration of the surrounding former industrial area.
Day 2 of 7 of antibiotics... probably will be extended next week. So far, reactions are that I lose most of the feeling in my fingers, and it really, really wants me to sleep. I guess it could be much worse.
Oh no ... We have all this beer (more than 20 varieties), who will help us drink it ... Come join us for awesome music, delicious drinks and cool vibes (aka blinky Lights) during #bytenight2026bytenight.brussels/ #fosdem ps. We also have loads of soft drinks as well as club mate of course.... Bring your friends and your friends friends
Why do so many "download X with curl" guides not use sane options?
-L : follow redirects! PLEASE! -O: output to the filename specified by the server -J : for `-O`, trust the content header -f: fail fast without content body on a 4xx error
And for all that is holy, quote your URL content; not every shell is bash, friends
Jonathan
in reply to NoiseBox • • •