Tom VanAntwerp 🔵

This summarizes the current discourse around AI so well.

It's been hours—reverting a website change shouldn't take this long, especially for something so straightforward.

As a constituent of @beyer.house.gov @kaine.senate.gov @markwarner.bsky.social, I hope they will look into how this happened and get it fixed!

Had to check this for myself and they for real did…

constitution.congress.gov/constitution/

Exactly. A difference that makes no difference isn't a difference.

I'll definitely vote for her over the Republican. But what I've seen of her messaging is just the same bland generalities that the most disappointing Democrats use. I couldn't tell you a single concrete plan she's got.

a colorful painting of a rainbow colored landscape Alt: Mario and friends driving recklessly on Rainbow Road.

My desire for more traffic calming is conflicting with my love of pretty colors.

Maybe with enough koopa shells and banana peels we can reach a reasonable compromise?

Hey food idiots, would you try morphine potatoes?

I've looked into how LLMs work. As impressive as they can be, they are ultimately just predicting the next bit of text. They aren't alive. They don't think. There is no sense of self in there. They don't know you, or have any feelings about you. It's all just text prediction.

There's a wretched troll who frequents the alxnow comments who regularly says "well somebody was able to afford the $2.5 million house, therefore it's affordable—not sure why the rest of you are complaining".

He also once suggested that people murder their neighbors dogs if annoyed by them...

Not only is this true, but it increasingly feels like video games are the only "reality" where there's a linear relationship between doing the work and getting a payoff.

a red spider with a skull on its head is hanging from a rope . Alt: a red spider with a skull on its head is hanging from a rope .

It looks like a spider with a human skull for a head.

Beer museum in Prague.

"Gift shop" did not disappoint.

Modern Video Games Are Giving Kids Unrealistic Standards For How Many Swords They Can Carry At One Time

I blame video games.

He sold his previous car to buy the Bronco, but I guess he missed it too much because he just bought another car just like it—paint and all.

A Ford Bronco covered in Trump stickers and Punisher stickers, plus the Punisher skull painted on the side. The license plate reads ALL MAGA.

Check out the 500 block of E Glendale in Del Ray for the hillbilly version of this...

Mercedes-Benz’s new $60,000 luxury sedan lets your boss watch you drive during Microsoft Teams meetings. The video stream won’t be visible to a driver in motion, but they will still be able to use many new Team features on the car’s central display

When I gather up links for my newsletter, I categorize them under a taxonomy of UX sins. But I'm honestly at a loss when it comes to this bullshit, because it ticks so many boxes at once.

It's a little early for a rant, but I hope you'll oblige me.

Gandalf reading primary sources in the library of Minas Tirith for 17 years until he discovers a secret that can identify the One Ring.

Saruman being told to "just trust me bro" by a disembodied malevolent entity.

Actually learning stuff vs "I asked ChatGPT"

An older Chinese man in a patterned shirt and cargo shorts with blue and yellow crocs, walking a bike down the side of an urban street in Kowloon. There is a large office printer strapped to the back of the bike.

Reminds me of this random dude I saw in Hong Kong in early June. I was very impressed! I think he was just confused why I cared.

Mentally adding this to my mercifully short list of "historic markers for things that I'd normally scoff at except this time it's infamously justified".

The a/c in the Y leaves a lot to be desired...

I think the correct solution to this very specific example is "learn to appreciate the default formatting and give up on your aesthetic preferences".

Not that I've ever accepted such answers...

(I found sort of two solutions, the built-in dotnet format and a third party library called CSharpier. Neither will do all of the things, so I've got this bastardized system of running one and then the other in a specific order to actually get the formatting I want. So lame...)

Oh yeah, it'll write example code in crappy ways all the time. Thankfully I'm senior enough to guess when it's doing that, even if I know know the language that well.

The things where I was surprised to get "no that's not done here" were more like "what do you mean there's no Prettier equivalent?".

Of course I usually double-checked against documentation, but it was super helpful to at least have some function name or term to search for. This was especially true any time the LLM said "actually nobody does this in C#" and I called bullshit and I was usually wrong.

AI is also a great tutor for learning new languages. I had to pick up C# last year, and I spent a lot of time asking ChatGPT "Hey, here's a thing I know how to do in TypeScript like *this*, now show me the C# equivalent." Really helped me get a handle on how things differed, good and bad.

I'm a "computer guy" in a film. I'm equally good at all aspects of electronic technology, from hacking to AI. All computer code makes sense the first time I see it, and everything I write without pausing to think runs the first time without errors. I wear a hoodie and live in a basement.

I sorta support making it look bad in the case of rogue lawn and garden care. It sends a message: if you don't want it to be crappy, then {{ whomever is actually responsible }} should do their job.

Kind of like how people in less-responsive localities will spray paint penises inside potholes.

A "color changing orb" that you put in your yard.

Aldi knows what I want.

Like a MAMIL, but punk rock?

I would especially love to read the second one!