Calum
@zootm.bsky.social
94 followers 160 following 76 posts
So far afraid to post here
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Reposted by Calum
Reposted by Calum
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glassbottommeg.bsky.social
Things were better when computer was in room. Now everywhere is computer. This is bad. Computer should never have escaped room.
yeeeerika.bsky.social
i don't want to hear your most boomer complaint. what's your most millennial complaint?
Reposted by Calum
myrrlyn.net
“c gets you close to the machine” is the kind of sentence that lands very differently after working in a factory

you’re not supposed to be close to the machine! that’s where the finger munchers are!
lucretiel.me
Whoops I got annoyed at C advocates again
Reposted by Calum
apenwarr.ca
So fun to watch programmers as they find out for the first time what happens when you employ programmers
spavel.bsky.social
UNLIMITED VELOCITY
One of the ways that LLM-authored code improves productivity is by merely SAYING it does things. It's way faster than the whole time-consuming process of actually doing things. This is real code someone sent to me for review.
A screenshot of a code editor. The line numbers are in the lefthand column, running from 121 to 125. There is a comment that says "Verify packages were created and check sizes" Then line 123 says echo Verifying Lambda packages were created... and Line 124 says echo checkmark emoji colon All Lambda packages verified successfully. There is no line in here that actually did anything.
zootm.bsky.social
I have just today discovered that podcasts can be chapterised, and that apparently @scwpod.bsky.social is painstakingly broken into chapters with often-joke names
Chapter view of a podcast app showing chapters named “pgp for encrypted email”, “fcking metadata”, “m-m-m-metadata”, “SMTP m-m-m-metadata”, and “dkim, spam”
Reposted by Calum
bryb.bsky.social
I don't know why this lad is building a subterranean city for cats, but I'm all for it.
Reposted by Calum
trysdyn.voidfox.com
"I'm gonna dump all my pent up angst and infodump material into a blog post about Itch/payment processing" I say to myself. It ends up like a million words, oops.

but well, I got it out of my brain: voidfox.com/blog/payment...
Payment Processor Fun 2025 -- Making Your Own MSP
voidfox.com
Reposted by Calum
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵
zootm.bsky.social
What even are numbers, really?
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marykgames.com
it does not matter how good you make your game’s block/parry system; I will not use it. My defense is “punch more.” I cannot be taught
zootm.bsky.social
Godspeed, I think we’re all due some plug and play at our age 😉
zootm.bsky.social
Do you still have to SET BLASTER to tell it what IRQ and so on to look for?
zootm.bsky.social
I scored 14/28 on jsdate.wtf and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

Don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed to get halfway
new Date("wtf")
How well do you know JavaScript's Date class?
jsdate.wtf
Reposted by Calum
metr.org
METR @metr.org · Jul 10
We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.
Reposted by Calum
emilyjoyallison.bsky.social
This morning I read the phrase "the nazification of grok" and I wished for an extended moment to be a medieval peasant with no knowledge of any of this. Just give me a wheelbarrow and a 40 year life expectancy
Reposted by Calum
zootm.bsky.social
I did hear someone refer to this as an amazing jazz fusion record with a free karting game included
Reposted by Calum
pixelatedboat.bsky.social
Happy 50th anniversary to the movie Jaws. This is probably the greatest line in cinema history:
Roy Scheider in Jaws saying his famous line “I hate that fucking shark! I'm going to kill it.”
Reposted by Calum
piss.beauty
stellz @piss.beauty · Jun 14
lol it was a null pointer
mofu.run
sof @mofu.run · Jun 14
incident report is out and this one is actually painful
Google Cloud Service Health
status.cloud.google.com
zootm.bsky.social
She’s being a really good sport about it but I fear this is going to end up being the white balance on her phone
Reposted by Calum
tef.bsky.social
it turned out to be a bad year to work in international freight insurance, so i am on the hunt for a new staff engineering role

tef.computer

i work in the uk, but usually remote and in american timezones. postgres and dist-sys but i can sling json into any replicated log if needed