tech, eng, builder, short-term pessimist, long-term optimist
🌍
Joined March 2018
- Tweets6.4K
- Following2.1K
- Followers1.1K
- Likes34.3K
Cosign. Today you need to know programming languages about as much as you needed to know assembly when using compilers.
I used to be a language lawyer. In the late 80s I _studied_ the ARM (Annotated Reference Manual for C++). I knew the language cold, inside and out. I could make it do backflips. I shipped a lot of code using it. A LOT.
I’ve attacked other languages with a similar intensity and depth. Until recently, that was simply the only way to become adept at building software systems.
I now consider the deep understanding of a language to be a supreme waste of time and effort. I don’t want to learn Rust, or Golang, or Typescript, or any of the thousands of other languages out there. I’ll leave that to my agents.
What I need now is to understand the high level gestalt of the system. I want to see the systems and subsystems. I don’t need to inspect the cogs. If I truly need to understand a detail at the cog level, I’ll interrogate my agents. I’m not going to pretend to be a language expert anymore.
2
112
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the majority of the recent CVEs are for code written the old-fashioned way, by hand, by humans.
Many of those humans were domain experts.
2
5
394
On the “little things Claude does for me”:
Over time, I’ve downloaded quite a few @ado1024imokenp songs from YouTube, live versions of released songs and covers that aren’t available on Spotify.
yt-dlp took care of downloading and extracting the audio, and I used Spotify Local Files to listen to them on my notebook and sync them to my phone through Spotify.
And that was as far as I went… until last week, when I casually asked Claude to scan the local files, find the corresponding videos on YouTube, fix the MP3 tags, and embed the YouTube thumbnails as cover art.
I also asked it to translate the titles. It came back with several approaches: keep the Japanese with English in parentheses, use romaji instead, or use a hybrid approach depending on title length.
Now my Spotify playlist is clean and shiny. :)
Weekend hack: HackerTube. I was annoyed with YouTube's recommendations so I had Claude filter down 43M comments over 20 years of HN to 6,454 videos that keep being recommended. *Significantly* better viewing experience, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5:
hackertube.org/
- Excellent recs without any logins (state is kept in local browser session)
- Thumbnail is a representative frame from middle of the video instead of the super duper A/B test hyper-optimized user uploads
- Underlying data from the comment analysis as one zip file, point your Claude at it and ask for your own version
- HackerTube Longs ✊
A bit more on the process:
I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac), Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I only talk to Claude and have it do everything, the only "manual work" I helped with in tandem was in the browser (reminiscent of MenuGen): 1) I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata, 2) I booted up a VPS box for serving and 3) I bought the domain name. Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, secure, harden, deploy and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing.
Many awesome projects that would have normally taken weeks/months even can now be few-shotted for breakfast. What else are we not thinking of.
1
2
182
I am learning so much about both the Americans and the Japanese from Nobunaga's posts.
I asked my Japanese friends who have visited America one question.
"When did you realize America was different?"
"A gas station clerk called me 'baby.' I am a 58-year-old man."
"A man in a Costco parking lot helped me load a TV. Then he asked if I needed help installing it at home. He was serious. He had a drill in his truck."
"Every dog owner told me the dog's name, age, and medical history. I now know a lot about one beagle's thyroid."
"In an elevator, a stranger said 'Going up?' and suddenly six people were talking about the weather like old classmates. Then the door opened, everyone said 'Have a good one,' and I never saw them again."
"Our Airbnb host left cookies, a map, and her cell number. 'Call if ANYTHING.' We called once, about the TV remote. She was there in eleven minutes. With a toolbox."
"The waiter told us his name was Tyler. He came back to check on us six times. We thought we were in trouble. We were not in trouble. Tyler just loved us."
And the last one came from the quietest friend I have.
"At the airport, going home, the officer looked at my passport. Looked at me. And said, 'Come back soon, okay?'"
"Nobody at an airport has ever wanted me to come back."
2
84
Switching between multiple account is now available in codex, but it’s basically impossible to discover without knowing it exists. When claude added it I discovered it the next time I opened Settings.
Day 26/ You can now easily switch between multiple accounts on mobile, and coming soon to desktop too. Next two days will be resets… banked… do with this what you may 👀.
help.openai.com/en/articles/…
Claudiu retweeted
We mourn the passing of Patrick Stewart, who inspired countless individuals at NASA (and beyond) to boldly go where no one has gone before.
ALT Image description: A packed, sparkling starfield captured by our Hubble telescope — with strange new worlds potentially awaiting. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, R. Cohen
Dinosaurs went extinct because they ignored their governments’ advice to stockpile a week’s worth of food and water.
Don’t be a dinosaur. Prepare!
2
78
Claudiu retweeted
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund
alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources
alzfdn.org/donate/
Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia
Dear governments, if you want us all to have emergency kits and a few days’ worth of supplies so badly, just hand them out already.
2
2
214
The test has no fingers pressing on the screen while closing it. That’s not how people always close their phones. If Apple tested it internally the same way, without accounting for this, that’s a huge oversight and could explain why it’s so fragile in real use.
1
1
92