Andrew Walkingshaw

@simonwillison.net re simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/14/, arxiv.org/abs/2507.19457; automated prompt optimization is pretty good now

Bats is already very nearly a deck (sixteen realistic playables without trying; Deep Cavern, Starscape Cleric, Zoraline, Essence Channeler, and the 1/1 lifelinker, Ruin-Lurker Bat, is the kind of bad card which sometimes makes these decks as glue)

collectible card games, apparently

hot take; if SQL is Structured Query Language, writing prompts is Unstructured Query Language (and there's a surprising amount of overlap)

"Thing consisting entirely of fats and starches" high in fats and carbohydrate?

That's what I typically do (I don't get through bread all that fast by myself).

Yeah, these are all "a few slices at a time". Short of living entirely on toast (which tbh I could do) though, I'm struggling. Make and freeze a bunch of croutons for future soup?

Bread sauce, but you'd need an excuse to roast some poultry to go with it. French toast is bread and butter pudding with fewer steps, so that's out. Meatballs (using it to make a panade)?

the phrasing I've heard is along the lines of "in Europe a hundred miles is a long way; in America a hundred years is a long time"

It's the same in everything. Self-deception is undefeated. Chess literally has an objective rating system; a very strong club player is five standard deviations better than a social player *and still four full standard deviations worse than Magnus Carlsen* and yet, somewhere in a comments section...

“this is one of the best songs by anybody where the artist does play-by-play of the song as it is unfolding” is a highly specific genre definition but you are absolutely right

(the jury would like to submit Map Ref 41degN 93degW by Wire for consideration)

immediately becomes a consideration in Ux [[Reconfiguration Bay]] decks

"I lost the Joy Division Oven Gloves in the divorce"

on the other hand you get eight reanimation effects if you do [[zombify]] so maybe you can do something midrange-reanimatory with this

pretty sure this and Ojer Taq are just a DDOS attack on Arena

[[invasion of tolvada]] is probably the dream but again omniscience is just more powerful

there's some crossover with Elas il-Kor here, though it's not exact

On the air in the Bay now too! www.kexp.org/bayarea/

This is even better than the steel band Alberto Balsalm and that one rules

get them tomorrow! hope your drafting lane is clear and your constructed metagame call righteous.

It's definitely the census.

Aldi Nord in the US is Trader Joe's.

They don’t need to be around that long if you’re walking beside a road!

I live in a particularly walkable American city and it's still all four-lane built-for-cars roads. London (particularly with the congestion-charge and low-emission zones) is significantly cleaner. And, yes, the cars are not just smaller engines, they're lighter; tons of air pollution is tire dust.

(the air is cleaner too, because of fewer cars at lower speeds, which has to have some chance of playing a role)

Westcott House is real and theologically liberal.

Oh, look. A cold day in hell.

Something like a Digitakt or Polyend Play; the magic phrase here is "step sequencer". (Or a tracker, like Renoise on Mac or Dirtywave M8 in hardware, if you're willing to tolerate the steeper learning curve.)

Hello! You do know my current job is in a very real sense your fault, right?

... you know that explains a lot about some particularly bizarre things I never understood two decades ago.