Zellyn Hunter
@zellyn.com
120 followers 92 following 190 posts
He/Him. Programmer. Square. Former YouTuber. Vaguely South African. ≡𝐺𝑂 Born 331.12 ppm CO₂ hachyderm.io/@zellyn
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zellyn.com
Oh, also, I am absolutely _not_ a frontend person.

Crazy times, my programmer friends, crazy times…
zellyn.com
I'm in the process of getting Claude to write an entire fake backend system for a fairly large React web-app by intercepting the network calls with service workers (package MSW).

It's amazing.

Now, I'm using browser-use Claude to find bugs, using a prompt/instructions written by the first Claude!
zellyn.com
Came downstairs from work on Friday, and all three of my brothers were sitting in the living room! They live in Toronto, Waco, and LA, and had conspired to fly in for my 50th… 😍
zellyn.com
Why is "I'd like to restrict outbound internet connections from my project to a small allowlist, but still be able to talk to all the normal AWS/GCP things I _have_ to talk to to operate" such an infuriatingly difficult thing? It can't be uncommon…
zellyn.com
That surprising feeling when your `terraform apply` actually works, without errors! So unexpected. And it only took 9 commits in my PR…
zellyn.com
Now I want to give Claudius sub-agents whose context is stuffed with apenwarr Google housing market simulation articles and can run simulations and report back. MBA in a box! 😂
zellyn.com
Does it specify the tokenizer, or is everyone just using OpenAI's Byte Pair Encoding?
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I should mention that it was (as always) a thoroughly fascinating episode!
zellyn.com
If you have a chance to follow up, I've be very curious to hear what Josh thinks about Kotlin coroutines vs Java Lightweight Threads

He seemed bullish on both, but from what I've been able to gather, they don't love each other! At the very least, Kotlin *does* have (a bit of) function coloring…
zellyn.com
He did a pretty good job of appearing to ask a couple of tough questions while ensuring that the experience was completely friendly to Vance. Joe Rogan style!
zellyn.com
Should I listen to the Ross Douthat JD Vance interview? I mean, I know I'm going to, but at the same time wondering why I would inflict that on myself.

Then again, this might be a good day for it: I've already seen the picture of “Sam and Jony” so perhaps I've already hit rock bottom?
zellyn.com
Good news! As onsite/offsite budgets tighten, constant reorgs guarantee you'll still be able to see your coworkers!

a) "annual" team offsite
b) semi-annual reorg 2 months later
c) "clearly we need a post-reorg onsite"
zellyn.com
If you like fantasy, and murder mysteries, The Tainted Cup, and A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett are very good. It's been a while since I felt sad to end a book, wanting to hang out with the characters more. I'm glad I only found out about the series after there were already two!
zellyn.com
“Big interviews tomorrow. I'll make sure I go to bed early so I'm well-rested.“

Brain: “I love your enthusiasm, and you always bring great ideas to the table… But I was thinking: how about we lie in bed half-awake until 4am instead?”
zellyn.com
Based on my interactions with them as a job _seeker_, if you're a tech company not quite yet large enough to hire your own recruiter, you could do worse than to check out somatalent.com
zellyn.com
No joke, nothing has made me think more about distributed, anonymous government-proof communication more than listening to the Martian Revolution, and thinking about what that level of control over information dissemination would mean 🙂
zellyn.com
New "Projects" page on my website: zellyn.com/page/project...

(The old page listed things I _wanted_ to do, not things that were done or partly done.)
Projects
Zellyn's Website
zellyn.com
zellyn.com
Us computer nerds are building some really cool stuff out there!
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Interviewing is surprisingly fun. I should probably have been interviewing a little every month or two for the past decade, just to keep my hand in, and find out what interesting things people are working on. (It always felt a little dishonest to interview when not actually looking too…)
zellyn.com
So far, being in an interview is much more pleasant than waiting around between interviews.

Going well so far. Even getting to the point where I can type while being watched. Sort of.
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Nintendo just made it impossible for me to play Terraria with my kid 😔

Their new “virtual game card” system breaks the (supported, according to their docs) ability for him to use software on the main Switch while I use it on the secondary. Not even sure how to buy it twice as a fix if I wanted to…
zellyn.com
Hackernews drama, every damn time 😂
zellyn.com
Call me Chihiro was beautiful and slow and sad and you should watch it
zellyn.com
Has anyone trained an LLM on single-language documents, using only languages (or just documents) that share no linguistic roots/cognates?

Disclaimer: I want to know how infeasible the Star Trek universal translator is: can you just feed it enough new tokens and it can translate a new language? #ai