Steve Adams

@davidebybc.bsky.social you need to resign.

youtube.comThe Case Against ‘Strategic’ Voting in BCYouTube video by Magic Sunglasses

@billyyoung.bsky.social put together an excellent overview of why strategic voting can't be the final solution for democracy in BC. We can do (and deserve) better. Well worth a listen!

The people doing the most interesting stuff I know of are all nerds who had cool ideas and are no longer time-constrained to build and prototype their ideas. It’s so fun to see. One is building a camera motion control system for borderline-microscopic videography. It’s made out of scraps and Claude

I think this is where the truly interesting and innovative stuff will happen, generally. I’m so uninterested in most of the stuff Anthropic posts about. So many LLM-driven companies are doing what we did before, but ‘with agents’. I don’t care. Show me what the nerds are up to

They never needed an LLM to have good ideas. They just needed something to break through the time barrier. That magic doesn’t come out of an LLM on its own

Me pulling up in my new roadster

Cleaning the underwater camera on Calvert and it snapped a pic of me looking cute

youtube.comThe wild diet of sea wolves | CBC Creator NetworkYouTube video by CBC British Columbia

Coastal wolves are so cool. We see how crafty and intelligent they are on Calvert Island, where they find ways to get into our monitoring equipment. They're good problem solvers, and incredibly curious

It occurred to me that good ideas I have about software are often shower-thoughty, not the result of rapid iteration. Being able to explore and prove concepts incredibly fast has immense value, but it doesn't unlock the weird 'aha' moments for me that lead to my best results

In the most recent project I worked on, I think some of the better decisions and conclusions I reached literally took months. An LLM never would have taken me there alone However, the ability to explore and experiment better than ever certainly contributed to my ability to reach those conclusions

Today I was telling someone that most code is "glue"; it just connects systems together, it's typically not very complex It occurred to me that for a lot of developers, LLMs are glue bottles I like this analogy a lot

Foggy Selkirk commute

Protesting to become the 51st state so I can get my $5000

Don’t eat this one

Dropping traps

This stuff literally keeps me up at night

LaurieWired@lauriewired.bsky.social

The boom in Linux CVEs lately should get you thinking.   Surely, given a finite codebase, there are also a finite number of bugs / unintended behavior, thus, a finite amount of vulnerabilities. Theoretically, a “solvable” problem. Right?   Well…not at all actually.

effect.websiteEffect 4.0 | Effect BlogRebuilt from the ground up, with a dependency-free core and long-term support

I’ve been mainlining the betas for quite a while and I have to say, in an age of slop, this is Really Good Software and so refreshing to use

linkedin.comI used Opus 5.5 to formally verify the Claude Agent SDK using Lean. A couple short prompts = 16 PRs fixing various bugs and race conditions. Video attached. TLA+ also works well. I sometimes comb...I used Opus 5.5 to formally verify the Claude Agent SDK using Lean. A couple short prompts = 16 PRs fixing various bugs and race conditions. Video attached. TLA+ also works well. I sometimes combine ...

The irony of asking Claude to formally verify complex software without checking its work and then carrying on and asking for an infographic is turning my brain into mush

19 Sept

Beavers are as cute as you imagined

19 Sept

I went outside and did hard things for a week at work and now I have so much energy. What a contrast. I want to do stuff. I need to go outside more often

Here’s a stream on Hecate island. I’m not sure if people have been here before. It’s remote, difficult to access, and very beautiful. We saw wolf tracks, grouse, very old and pristine bogs, and some of the gnarliest, toughest, wiry trees I’ve ever had to hike through 51.66409° N, 128.04106° W

Here’s a nice little spot in the watershed closest to our facility on Calvert Island. We have a stream-flow monitoring system right behind this frame, which is triggered by a weather station higher in the watershed.

When major rain events occur, the station immediately below the weather station dumps a specific dose of saline solution into the stream. Then, a lower station is triggered to begin measuring conductivity. Conductivity rises and falls, and we can use that to estimate how rapidly the stream flowed

Here’s the site of the weather station. It’s also the power station, set in an open bog system where there’s a lot of sun exposure on the solar panels. From here, the entire system is powered year-round.

Approaching our Ethel Island weather and radio station. This is the very south tip of the island. It’s currently surrounded by kelp, but a very steep drop off makes going ashore easier than it looks. Today we calibrated the rain gauge, fixed a camera, and added a voltage splitter

Last November we updated the firmware to be aware of when the radio is on or off, so it can toggle it according to power levels and time of day, making it draw a lot less power from the battery. This station is one of my favourites. Rivers Inlet is beautiful, and Ethel is a little paradise

Ever wondered how a rain gauge is calibrated? Here we’re draining a known volume of pure rain water through a gauge and recording the results of how the water passes through. The results can be used to make future rain measurements more accurate. We do it twice in a row, at least 10 minutes apart

The internal mechanism is simple but can be thrown off by tilt or other small but significant factors. Each knocking sound should indicate exactly 2ml of water, but there’ll always be a margin of error. This process lets us determine what that margin is and correct for it

A school of anchovies (I think), probably feeding near Hakai’s dock in Pruth Bay, Calvert Island. There were several schools, and one was visible shining and flashing under the pier from the dock to shore in a very wide shoal. You could see the water rippling and the fish shimmering

Not my best camera work. A humpback whale diving in Fitz Hugh Sound. We spotted 6 in total in around 4 hours.

A flock of what I guess are black turnstones, circling Ethel Island in Rivers Inlet

canadianaffairs.newsAs Northern cod stocks rebound, Newfoundlanders are expressing cautious optimism over a fish they nearly lostIn cod we trustAs Northern cod stocks rebound, Newfoundlanders are expressing cautious optimism over a fish they nearly lost

14 Sept

Working on BASIC code from 11 years ago that runs on real mechanical equipment in a remote coastal watershed will make you realize LLMs are still pretty useless in many contexts, and programming/debugging are still alive and well outside of the beaten paths

Steve Adams reposted

UBC Oceans

@ubcoceans.bsky.social

8 Sept

For the first time in over 30 years, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Northern cod stock has been deemed “healthy” by Ottawa. www.canadianaffairs.news/2026/09/05/i...

Steve Adams reposted

ngrok

@ngrok.com

11 Aug

Replying to @ngrok.com

Check it out ↓ ngrok.com/blog/compres...

ngrok.comCompression is prediction | ngrok blogCompression and LLMs are trying to solve the exact same problem: predicting what comes next. Learn the fundamentals of compression and how better prediction leads to better shrinkage.

2 Aug

One undeniable thing about LLMs that I can’t wrap my head around is that for the first time, we have digital systems with truly complex emergent behaviours. Not like system dynamics in the computing context, but action-oriented behaviours or constructs like j space. Absolutely bizarre

26 July

Beautiful colour and patterns. This one is from a blue dream lineage but something went askew. Lots of activity in the substrate, too

Behold

@buildthis.bisks.net pixel fishing game

youtube.comWhy Agentic Systems Need Ontologies — Frank Coyle, UC BerkeleyYouTube video by AI Engineer

25 July

There's some good stuff in here www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sir5...

maptap.gg🎯MapTap Daily Geography GamePlay MapTap - the daily geography game! Find 5 world locations on a 3D globe with historical stories. Free browser-based daily game for geography lovers.

25 July

@tatbenatar.bsky.social you gotta do the thing it's real hard come on do the map game come on www.maptap.gg July 25 91👑 93🏆 80👏 60😐 66🫢 Final score: 722

Steve Adams reposted

Al Merose

@al.merose.com

9 July

DataFusion showcase went great! Here are my slides: docs.google.com/presentation...

docs.google.comGeospatial Operations are Relational OperationsGeospatial ops are relational: An introduction to Xarray-SQL Alexander Merose | July 2026 alex.merose.com @al.merose.com

Al Merose@al.merose.com

Sneak peek: I implemented a 3 layer MLP that predicts the fashion MNIST dataset using SQL (with my own autograd impl inside the database). Apparently einsum notation is better expressed as a JOIN. github.com/xqlsystems/x...

github.comxarray-sql/benchmarks/nn.py at claude/xarray-sql-mnist-demo · xqlsystems/xarray-sqlAn experiment to query Xarray datasets with SQL. Contribute to xqlsystems/xarray-sql development by creating an account on GitHub.

project529.comMissing Bike Alert: 2018 White Yuba Spicy curryHelp find this missing bike!

10 July

Well, incredibly enough, some awesome guy named Jules spotted my bike and tipped me off by text, so I ran over to where he saw it (only ~6 blocks from my office!) and I recovered it! Uncomfortable confrontation with the thief for sure, but I'll take it. What a relief. Here's to another 12000km!

Steve Adams@steve-adams.me

I can't believe it, but my cargo bike was stolen from the bike locker at work. This thing was closing in on 12,000km traveled; it was a workhorse and like a second car to us project529.com/saddle-pump-...

Steve Adams reposted

TypeScript

@typescriptlang.org

8 July

📣 The moment is here. 📣 TypeScript 7 is officially released! 7️⃣ devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/a...

devblogs.microsoft.comAnnouncing TypeScript 7.0 - TypeScriptToday we are proud to announce the availability of TypeScript 7, a 10x faster native port of TypeScript! Since its early days, TypeScript has promised to

project529.comMissing Bike Alert: 2018 White Yuba Spicy curryHelp find this missing bike!

3 July

26 June

If I win the lottery there will be signs

Elite Grifters@elitegrifters.bsky.social

Kat Abughazaleh, who claims to be poor, posted yesterday about buying fast-casual shrimp twice in a day.

24 June

I can't believe Soylent was a thing Drink the goo and 10x your startup bro

rilldata.comRill | The fastest business intelligence tool for humans and agentsRill's Agentic Analytics goes beyond dashboards with a natural language interface that powers instant, visual, and verifiable insights.

18 June

Rill is awesome. I've started storing parquet from all over in S3 so I can look at it with Rill and stop jumping around the web, CLIs, using different DSLs to query things, etc. It's great at making AWS CE's data palatable. Just set up a routine CUR export and bob's your chopped unc

16 June

Baby CPDs joining the family. This tank is a jungle of grasses and although it seems crowded and they can’t school, they breed better than any other setup I have. They love hunting in here