Sam Stokes

Sam Stokes

@five-eights.com

Immigrant, mixologist, engineer. Interested in feedback loops, abstractions, nuance. ex LaunchDarkly, Honeycomb, LinkedIn.

82 followers343 following36 posts

Six hours in and my main learning is that the GrowSF voter guide this year appears to be 97% AI-generated, which is disappointing but perhaps not surprising. Fortunately SPUR and the Chronicle cover the moderate position decently. (I use several voter guides as well as doing my own research.)

Why did nobody tell me you can have tastes at ice cream shops

Laurie Voss@seldo.com

Tasting at ice cream shops should not be allowed. Getting the wrong flavor of ice cream is not a high stakes enough decision to justify multiple swings at it. Pick a flavor.

Sam Stokes reposted

#til Apparently when donating to a campaign via ActBlue, providing a phone number is optional and not part of the payment process? That would have been good to know. (Insight unlocked after responding "stop" to 30 separate text threads.)

Sam Stokes reposted

Replying to @colin-fraser.net

I also continue to believe that my mental model is the best one, which does not conceptualize the “agents” as discrete entities, but rather as the protagonists in a story that the LLM has been trained to write about a cool little guy who goes on hacker adventures.

Coding agents reduce software development to a simple matter of: * specifying requirements * verifying correctness and quality * maintaining and operating software you didn't write As we all know, those have always been the easiest, most well-understood parts of the craft, so everything is fine!

What is the best option right now for a "serverless homelab"? I want a machine I can ssh into, with persistent storage, and that can run cron jobs, but I don't want to have to install OS updates or manage a firewall. Seems like this must be a thing in the Year of Our Agent Lord 2026.

Control Resonant is frenetic and fun, visually imaginative, but it seems much harder than its predecessor. I've never seen the reload screen so many times in the opening levels of a game.

Sam Stokes reposted

You know that poem about "the widening gyre" / "things fall apart" that is so evocative of … all this? #til W.B. Yeats, who wrote it, was an enthusiastic (albeit temporary) supporter of fascist movements and disapproved of democracy. Gonna have to think about that next time I quote it.

Sam Stokes reposted

My human left this out for me. I am going on a ADVENTURE. I think it will be like going to a Vet but fun instead of bad and pokey. My sister can't come because she is not Fluffy enough.

This was my second attempt at this project, and although I'm happy with the first one too, it's really satisfying to be able to directly compare how much my skills have improved. Leveled up my hand planing, sawing accuracy, detoured into building a shooting board, and learned how to shoot end grain.

I went on a media diet when I left Twitter, and stepping onto Bluesky reminds me how exhausting The Discourse can get - dunk of the week etc. Does anyone have tips for healthy Bluesky consumption? Is there an analog of Mastodon's ability to set keyword blocklists that hide posts behind a drawer?

"Muted words" seems to completely hide matching posts, so you don't even know they happened. I want the *option* to read and engage, just it to be opt in, so I can moderate myself and stop if I find myself doomscrolling.

Sam Stokes reposted

Replying to @prisonculture.bsky.social

Yeah, a thing I am trying to educate folks on within the industry is that tbe early Internet technologies (the tech itself, not companies or apps) were not advertised at *all*, and in fact big companies fought them and were overtly skeptical? And they succeeded anyway. It’s the opposite of AI.

Sam Stokes reposted

Listen, if you’re not happy single, you won’t be happy in a relationship either, happiness comes from picking a new hobby and then buying all the things to start that hobby then finding the perfect little storage container for those things and then putting that storage container in the spare room

It does justice to the process of how to communicate with no common language, frame of reference, number system, or even assuming they have the same senses you do. The process of building layers on layers from the most primitive starting points really feels earned.

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