amac

Barrel of Suck: A bot to surface relevant old Suck.com articles Finally finished up a bot for posting an article from Suck.com everyday through Mastodon and BlueSky (I would have done Threads too, but ...

Made a bot that posts an old "Suck.com" article every day. It tries to use one related to today's news.

Follow it at @barrelofsuck.bsky.social

Read about it www.bricoleur.org/2026/01/fina...

Florida #AIBillofRights meets the Blueprint for an #AIBillofRights

🤝 Safe and Effective Systems
🤝 Algorithmic Discrimination Protections
🤝 Data Privacy
🤝 Notice and Explanation

bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/ai-bill...

Public Science Call for Papers Special Issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social ScienceThe Public's Science–A New Social Contract for American Research Policy

Call for Papers! 🧵

The Public's Science–A New Social Contract for American Research Policy a Special Issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Editors: Alondra Nelson (IAS) and Jenny Reardon (UC, Santa Cruz)

Abstract Deadline: Sept 19

www.ias.edu/stsv-lab/pub...

As you may have heard, there’s an important birthday this weekend. We can only hope that people across the nation — nay, the globe — engage in tribute and fanfare proportional to the occasion. 1/

Those bits and more are some of the thoughts I wanted to get down based on a bunch of AI coding I’ve been doing.

More at:
www.bricoleur.org/2025/05/some...

4/4

And, LLMs opacity + non-deterministicness make evaluation (including human) even more important, as Lili Jiang effectively argues.

3/4

One-shots & waterfall encourage thinking of software as products not services, which is not good.

2/4

AI vibe coding best practices look a lot like waterfall development, with all of its pitfalls.

1/4

Quick blog post about a tool I wrote* to help understand Claude Code sessions.

www.bricoleur.org/2025/05/unde...

*mostly this was guiding o3 and Claude Sonnet 4.

The narrative that #AI will do all routine and we can just focus on important/strategic/big picture things works because it tell us that we are oh so smart and special. WE DO THE BIG STUFF.

Newsflash: If your big picture decisions are not grounded in real experience they are gonna end up bullshit.

GitHub - amac0/ClaudeCodeJSONLParser at main A parser for Claude Code's json logs. Contribute to amac0/ClaudeCodeJSONLParser development by creating an account on GitHub.

Claude Code logs a bunch of stuff via jsonl. The logs are a little hard to read, so I made a rough and ready parser that can also show git commits in the log timeline:

github.com/amac0/Claude...

All coded via LLM, mostly o3 & when o3 had trouble, switched to Claude 4 Sonnet (in Claude Code).

That seems wrong and typical Claude ("I found a test I don't pass, I'm going to pass by removing the test") but I don't know bandit, so I look online and find out that it is a perfectly smart thing to do and that bandit shouldn't check tests.

See bandit.readthedocs.io/en/1.7.3/con...

2/

A good example of Claude Code teaching me stuff.
Claude code says: "Let's try a different approach - instead of using a .bandit file, let's update the pre-commit config directly to skip bandit checks for tests:"
1/

Why I’m Resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress I cannot participate in systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging.

"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging."

Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council.

I wrote about my decision in TIME.

time.com/7285045/resi...

Thank you for your leadership, courage, and example!

Why I’m Resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress I cannot participate in systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging.

... What then, is the responsible course of action? For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging."

time.com/7285045/resi...

2/

Alondra Nelson (@alondra.bsky.social‬) is a beacon, as usual.

"To watch these changes unfold without naming them for what they are is to participate in a collective amnesia about how knowledge infrastructures shape power relations. ...

1/

An Oak Tree, Young Vic review: Tim Crouch’s experimental classic returns for its twentieth anniversary Starring a different celebrity each night, Tim Crouch’s experimental meditation on the nature of grief remains a thing of wonder

Saw An Oak Tree last night at the Young Vic. Most unusual play I've seen in a while and I don't really know what to think of it -- which I'm enjoying a lot. Anyhow, I'd recommend it if you get a chance to see it.
www.timeout.com/london/theat...

7) this type of coding is a bit like social media scrolling in terms of dopamine slot machine (someone at Coding AI www.oreilly.com/CodingwithAI... said this and I agree but forgot who said it)

4/

"yes the tests are important, you should still do the tests and not move on if some are failing.";
5) pay attention to Claude Code and intervene;
6) Claude Code will do better in areas that you know because you'll be able to tell when it is not doing good stuff and stop/redirect it;

3/

3) anything you would want to have at your disposal when coding, make sure Claude Code has and knows it has;
4) stop Claude Code often to point out obvious things -- "that is out of scope for this step", "mocking the test result doesn't mean you passed the test",

2/

Published a short thing on one of my Claude Code experiments.
www.bricoleur.org/2025/05/clau...
Key takeaways:
1) be prepared to throw everything out (also, learn & incorporate git);
2) make the spec and the prompts simple -- no, simpler than that;

1/

I think that's directionally right, but I'm loathe to generalize. I have been doing a bunch of programming with the models and they often are quite good on judgment-like stuff and especially so when I know what I'm doing in the area.

I do think that a lot of what passes for AI "intelligence" these days is really AI producing a bunch of results and skilled humans choosing whether it is worth using / done / needs more prompting to get a better answer. Deep knowledge can be extremely helpful for the human part of that equation.

YouTube video by freeCodeCamp.org Git and GitHub for Beginners - Crash Course

OK, learning git wasn't so bad. I used this video by Gwendolyn Faraday, which starts very basic but gets the job done:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGOj...
then this one on pre-commit:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX6w...

President Trump fires Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden President Donald Trump has abruptly fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden as the White House continues to purge the federal government of those perceived to oppose the president and his agenda

Am angry and sad about this:
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
Carla Hayden is a wonderful public servant and has been a great Librarian of Congress.

Ironically (?), I want to learn this stuff so that I can feel comfortable letting an AI coding helper remember it for me.

Thank you!

I had high expectations going into this conf and it exceeded significantly. Really good sessions. I don't know how many will be available online but will post if they are.

One sad (?) learning from this great @timoreilly.bsky.social conf on AI Coding (www.oreilly.com/CodingwithAI...) is that I finally have to really learn git and use it (including pre-commit hooks).

If anyone has good resources to suggest, please do.