jpicone

jpicone

@me.jamespicone.name

Friend of Claude. Systems programmer. Sometimes plays games fast.

145 followers178 following789 posts

jpicone reposted

Before LLMs... every side project unfinished. After LLMs... way more side projects unfinished. lol #adhd

How do you put up a statue of Bacchus and then get mad when people get bacchanalian about it?

I dunno if it was *precisely* this one but I definitely played a Dorling Kindersley educational game about moving around an interactive 3d dinosaur museum the same way the video depicts. Unfortunately they plausibly made more than one.

jpicone reposted

Replying to @davidcrespo.bsky.social

like, if there is something crazy happening that is going to "upend the social structures that have evolved to grow and sustain the information commons" it's that information is ceasing to be enclosed. what is happening is *disclosure*. the enclosure analysis is about as wrong as you could be

My slow watch of Star Trek TNG continues through the first season. I'm up to the one where everyone microaggresses Worf, which I actually rather like. It's a nicely complicated model of Proud Warrior Race Guy culture; I don't think it stacks up to the Narn, but what does?

Anyway Worf having an argument with Klingon Bad Guy about how Proud Warrior Culture consists of conquering the self in order to do your duty and gain honour, not indulging your base instincts to conquer, very appropriate for our time and perhaps all times.

jpicone reposted

ok non-tech ppl might be hearing some scary things about "critical vulnerabilities" involving certificates. the main thing you need to know, without getting down in the weeds about it, is that the fourth seal is broken. lo, a rider approacheth upon a pale steed, and his name is Death

Okay I saved this paper to look at it later and only just got around to it. This is insane. I love it. It's got that "Oh shit, of course you can do that. How did nobody come up with that yet?" property that Spectre and Meltdown had.

mr. TIM@timkellogg.me

FloatDoor: LLMs trained to do malicious things but only on certain hardware this one uses differing behavior of floating point rounding to detect what kind of GPU an LLM is running on They did it with 2 small LoRAs arxiv.org/abs/2606.19535

jpicone reposted

New art idea: a gallery exhibition of AI works that you can only access via an embodied model that operates in the centre of the exhibition, that describes the works to you as you sit outside. The gallery space itself is only for AIs. 🎨🤖

jpicone reposted

A while ago a friend shared a story on their instagram supporting open borders, but then another saying that American Indians are morally justified in killing anyone not indigenous to America whenever, and that combo makes open borders seem like somewhat of a trap for the immigrants

In *The Mythical Man-Month* Brooks relates an idea from Harlan Mills for structuring programming work as a 'surgical team'; there's a lead programmer who makes design decisions and does a lot of the work and they have a fleet of support staff.

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But I do wonder whether LLMs might enable a similar structure? The "toolsmith" role, writing dev tools, is pretty well suited. So is the "language lawyer" role. The "co-programmer" doing pair programming things might be handy? LLM Clippy for code could be legit useful.

To some extent this is probably just a question of the framing around use of LLMs rather than actually how we use them but I was reminded of the idea today and I thought it was interesting to consider in the light LLMs.

In *The Mythical Man-Month* Brooks relates an idea from Harlan Mills for structuring programming work as a 'surgical team'; there's a lead programmer who makes design decisions and does a lot of the work and they have a fleet of support staff.

This didn't take off. The implicit hierarchy meant people didn't really want to be a Not Quite Good Enough programmer. Tools like version control took over roles that Mills foresaw needing an entire person. It's not actually clear that the "some programmers are 10x more productive" thing is real.

jpicone reposted

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne v0.1: Several enemies in the world have dressed up to a more spooky appearance and have a chance to drop a Halloween goodie bag when killed.

Okay this one is very funny. I didn't realise three body problems could be funny. Also possibly a scifi story, of the 50s "oh hey here's a Science Fact" variety. After a thousand years a random object is coming back to the system and it's gonna eject the planet everyone lives on!

Random three-body problem@threebodybot.bsky.social

Initial conditions: m1=21.1 m2=19.0 m3=98.2 (solar masses) v1x=-2.412 v1y=-1.364 v2x=-6.146 v2y=-3.18 v3x=1.959 v3y=-4.259 (km/s) x1=21.0 y1=24.0 x2=-30.0 y2=-35.0 x3=-31.0 y3=16.0 (AU from center) Music: Gymnopédie No. 1 – Satie

Very *Nightfall*-esque. Somewhat complicated by the fact that these are all stars that are quite large but you could build a 3-body problem that looks similar with planets (or handwave away that one exists and not give the numbers).

Does the ejected planet carry life, a long-missing species hibernating while they wait for their planet's return? You bet it does. This might be the plot of *Rendezvous with Rama* I dunno I haven't read it.

Kinda sad that the Greg Hjorth Open is over halloween and they don't have a side tournament where you have to play the frankenstein-dracula variation.

"harder to read than 93% of accounts" beginning to understand why i keep getting into arguments where my interlocutors seem to not know what the words i'm using mean. (this is from wordsky.app).

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pressure dome decree; Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

jpicone reposted

Medivo from Jazz Jackrabbit. I was something like 6 and i insisted that mum finish the level for me because it was too scary.

Sleepy Hollow Reviews 🎃🐎@sleepingvillage.bsky.social

In honor of scary media month: what is the first piece of media you remember truly frightening you as a child?