Lost And Founding

14 Jan 2025

Going to dip my toe into @ziglang today. And, for almost entirely poetic reasons, I'm going to do it with Zed. Zzzz

9 Jan 2025

Messing around with some D3 animation stuff today and came across a really nice recording approach from @adamrpearce which means I don't need to faff around with screen recorders. Still a novice when it comes to D3 though! Baby steps.

9 Jan 2025

Approach I'm referencing is here... roadtolarissa.com/d3-mp4/

9 Jan 2025

Is it true that @Nespresso don't publish exact caffeine content for their pods? Surely this information must be available somewhere? Sub-text: Feel so alive this morning. Smashing out code and assuming it's something to do with the new pod...

Hot Take: Embrace the micro-plastics. Ingest as many as possible. Become the 3D Printer you always wanted to be.

1/6 Out of 155 followers, 90+ were bots! Pretty annoying. They're gone now and I have a clean slate to start from. What really shocked me is how easy it was to identify them. Seriously, a few simple heuristics would capture almost 100% of cases. Is this something @XEng can help with? 🧵👇

5/6 Lastly, I dealt with the impersonator type bots i.e. those who had taken a real account and varied the username by a few characters. These are harder to automate and, clearly, they do dupe a lot more people as they had a large number of followers in some cases.

6/6 Bottom line, I think something like a Bot Score would really help here. Similar to how @XEng has added the "Probably Spam" to replies, it would be good to have a "Probable Bot" or "Bot Rating: High" or something so that we could define our own thresholds for removing them

3/6 If I then go a bit deeper, and look at accounts with a Following:Follower ratio of about 50:1 without a single Post or Reply on their account, I'd have caught another ~25%

4/6 If they weren't already filtered by the above, I just looked at anyone with a female profile pic and a lack of Posts/Replies. That found a bunch more. There is definitely something in common with these PFPs. I can't articulate it but I'm sure a simple ML classifier could do it.

2/6 For example, by just looking at the usernames e.g. "bO9yMtn63I4Y8kA" and filtering all those with a high percentage of digits, I catch about 50% of cases straight away.

Spotted some weird activity in terms of follower-count this morning - dug a little deeper Didn't realise a lot of bots will unfollow after a few days of not receiving a reciprocal-follow-back. It's apparently a bot evasion technique to stop the following/follower ratio getting too out of line.

5 Jan 2025

My @Jetbrains subscription just expired, and I'm torn on renewing. VSCode doesn't quite do it for me, and whilst I enjoy @Neovim, it hasn't matched the productivity boost I get from Webstorm or Pycharm. Most likely, I'm probably just gonna renew and call it a Christmas gift to myself.

5 Jan 2025

If you want to mix things up a bit, adjust your favourite LLM prompt to answer you in Yoda-styled language. "Hmmmm. Clean the npm cache first, you must. If fail it does, then node_modules AND package-lock.json, delete together you shall. Only a Sith Lord deletes package-lock.json alone, yes, mmmm."

My wife has suggested we get rid of our Roomba as we never use it, it's very old and it's quite damaged. I know the responsible thing to do is to sell or donate it but I just really, really, really want to hack the software/firmware and turn it into a battle-bot to guard our apartment.

Thinking of launching BritGPT, exactly like ChatGPT except: • Apologises for every response • Adds 'with all due respect' before each correction • Calls every runtime error 'a bit of a pickle' • Weather complaints in all error logs • Adds the letter 'u' to words generously Who's with me?

It's kinda wild how little time people spend crafting good prompts as a percentage of their overall AI usage. It takes like ~1 hour to skim through, say, the @AnthropicAI prompt engineering guides and ROI on that time is insanely high.

Pull request count by programming language 2012-2024. Now 2024 is over, I thought it would be fun to look back over the Github archives and see how many PRs have been raised in each language bsky has a 60s limit on video so I've linked to the full version here for now ... x.com/LostAndFound...

open.substack.comIdeas Are Free (Execution Sold Separately)Adventures in the Space Between Ideas and Implementation

29 Nov 2024

Ending the week with Issue 2 of Lost And Founding. Happy weekend folks!

29 Nov 2024

Reason I'm getting so much from @bsky.app is that it's a fresh start & chance to connect with folks working on things I'm interested in - not a time-suck of political controversy Not saying it will _never_ happen but I'm trying to curate my feed in favour of doers rather than political commentators

handlehawk.comUsername Monitoring & Brand Protection for X and Bluesky | Handle HawkGet instantly notified when your desired X (Twitter) or Bluesky handle becomes available. Protect your brand from impersonation with 24/7 username monitoring. Free signup available.

28 Nov 2024

Felt like it was only right to add Bluesky username monitoring to handlehawk.com! And, I had a spare afternoon so why not? Could be useful for anyone who wasn't able to get the username they wanted first time around.