Joy & Curiosity #16

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Years ago I was sitting in a hotel bar in Austria, drinking a beer and watching the tennis match that was on. A guy sits down next to me and, with the enthusiasm of someone who’s found a potential conversation partner, says: you a big tennis fan? I tell him: I’m a fan of sitting in hotel bars and having a beer.

Anyway: I’m sending you this from a hotel bar, where I’m sitting and writing these lines, drinking a beer, listening to the bar people, watching new people check-in, hearing the hotel people explain where the elevator is again and again, and hacking a little bit.

Here’s to hotel bars.

• The piece of the week for me: charlatans, martyrs, and hustlers. “The hustler understands that the work will never speak for itself. You must speak for it.”

• There’s much to love about lanparty.house: the house, the engine room, the wiring, the cat doors, the cat bathroom. But what I enjoyed the most was the fact that this site belongs to a rare class of internet gems: a single page, full of information with nothing held back, neatly formatted, easy to digest. Reminded me a lot of the StrongLifts website. I mean, here: a page about nothing but doing squats. Look at the size of that scroll thumb.

• Mind-bender from Austin: Mirror, “an LLM-powered programming-by-example programming language”. You provide examples of what the language looks like and then “the ‘compiler’ uses an LLM to generate JavaScript that satisfies the constraints expressed by the examples.”

• Good list about “good software development habits”. Number 8: “Don't feel too bad about moving away from something that was dear to you a while ago and something you felt proud about at the time.”

• Armin Ronacher on threads vs. async/await. It’s a good piece. Yet whenever I see get a glimpse of these discussions I have to think of the late Wittgenstein: “Wittgenstein basically thinks that traditional problems in philosophy ([…]) stem from importing words from one legitmate use of language into another one.”

• Chicago Kare, “a faithful reproduction of the bitmap version of the Chicago typeface created by Susan Kare for Apple Computer in 1984.”

• I’ve never worked at a company that used email for internal communication and whenever I read stories like this one, I wish I did: Blackberry Tales – The Story of Sumit B. Snow day for grown-ups.

• Spent the last week looking into search — embeddings, BM25, how LLMs fit into the picture, and so on — and then, surprise, this popped up on HackerNews: FastGraphRAG. I haven’t even looked at the project itself yet, because this comment tripped me up: “Hypothetical answer generation from a query using an LLM, and then using that hypothetical answer to query for embeddings works really well.” They use an LLM to generate hypothetical answers to a query and then use those answers to find relevant documents by comparing them in vector space. Don’t know how else to put it, so pardonnez mon langage, but that’s fucking nuts.

• Somewhere, someone (bless them) linked to mousehole, a why the lucky stiff project. When I started programming in Ruby, _why was already gone and I only learned about him through the Slate article, but echos of him are still ringing through the Ruby world. This project is a sweet reminder. Just look at that README. “MouseHole can either intrude completely upon your browsing experience or you can keep it off in the outskirts, for whenever you’ve got a second to duck into that little crack in the wall”

• Never really warmed up to Jeselnik, but I’ll read anything about stand-up comics and this Vulture piece about him and his new special was good: “I immediately was like, Go get the bad out of you. Do as many bad sets as you can get, get them closer to good, and never look back.”

• Read In The Dark in one evening last week (recommended to me by Patrick & now recommended to you by me) and found Altamira Studio, which specializes in short books. Neat.

• Somehow fell into a rabbit hole and kept digging and walking and ended up finding SillyTavern, a “LLM Frontend for Power Users”, which doesn’t say much yet, but then go look at these screenshots here and tell me that we don’t live in interesting times.

• Broke my rule of not looking at social media in bed this morning, but luckily found Ben’s tweet, quoting General Patton: “I don't want any messages saying 'I'm holding my position.' We're not holding a goddamned thing. We're advancing constantly and we're not interested in holding anything except the enemy's balls. We're going to hold him by his balls and we're going to kick him in the ass; twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all the time.” The punchline (you’re damn right this pun was intended) is in the follow-up quote: “When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty.” Now considering writing a book: Kicking Ass & Twisting Balls — How to Communicate to Make Your Message Stick.