We all know the saying “reduce, reuse recycle”. It’s three ways to avoid generating extra waste, in priority order. I’ve invented a similar saying for writing fault-tolerant systems: “recover, resume, retry.” Also in priority order.

Does the whole “You are a helpful assistant who…” prompt preamble actually make a difference, or is it just cargo-culted industry wide from one engineer who wrote it one time at OpenAI?.

Huge libraries of 4000+ icons are a Bad Thing in modern UI design, not a good thing. Now websites and apps have little icons next to EVERY. THING. Not everything needs a cute little icon next to it! You don’t have to vomit little icons all over your UI!.

Software engineer furiously typing, 2008: “Wow, a monster 10x coder!”. Software engineer furiously typing, 2025: “Wow, a dinosaur who still uses an ancient IDE!”. Real engineers go <TAB>, <TAB>, <TAB>, <TAB>, … now.

Startup idea: LLM chatbot naming as a service. You send us a description of your LLM, and we name it. Input: Our LLM proactively engages with customers to drive them through our sales funnel. Output: Your LLM is “Daisy”. Here's a stock photo of a smiling woman for its avatar.

Extra-spicy hot take: If you need to disallow your interview candidates from using ChatGPT during the technical interview, you’re probably asking a bad interview question.

Thank you, Apple, for making this switch statement so easy and sensical!

Unicode in variable names is pretty cool.

Ok, we don’t call it “Security” anymore. All those old movies should be updated to have the rich guy yell “Trust & Safety!!” instead.

Sigh, there was a time when I was actually good at this stuff…

OK y’all, before we jump on the idea that Stable Diffusion is the new way that video games will be written in the future, let’s remember that so far it’s good at recreating classic, existent games like DOOM and SMB3. It’s not trained to invent entirely new games.

If every time your house burned down, I told you things like “The fire department helps those who help themselves,” or “The fire department works in mysterious ways,” you would ask me if the fire department is even real.

Any information you use to train your bot (e.g., trade secrets, customer data) is information a prompt engineer can extract.

Airline transport pilot check ride passed, along with Boeing 737 type rating!

I’m super excited to announce that I’ll be one of the performers in the Fleet Week SF 2023 airshow! I’ll be performing in formation along with Memorial Squadron and the Beech Boys on October 6, 7, and 8.

Is this happening to anyone else all of a sudden or just me?

Watching a recording of a Zoom meeting is different because when the speaker says “I’m only gonna spend a few more minutes on this,” you can glance down at the play bar and see that there’s still 1.5 hours left in the meeting.

In the ’90s, I was impressed that the Star Trek computer could understand questions and give answers in natural English. Now, with ChatGPT, I am more impressed that it didn’t just hallucinate incorrect answers half the time.

So who here has `rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData` aliased to a shortcut of some kind?.

Imagine being so stubbornly beholden to x86 architecture that you call an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro a “glorified mobile phone.”