Darrell Taylor

Screenshot of a GitHub Codespaces VS Code interface showing a README.md file for codespaces-llm repository. The file describes a GitHub Codespaces environment with LLM, Python 3.13, uv and the GitHub Copilot VS Code extension. It has a "Launch Codespace" button. Below shows a terminal tab with the command "llm 'Fun facts about pelicans'" which has generated output listing 5 pelican facts: 1. **Huge Beaks:** about their enormous beaks and throat pouches for scooping fish and water, some over a foot long; 2. **Fishing Technique:** about working together to herd fish into shallow water; 3. **Great Fliers:** about being strong fliers that migrate great distances and soar on thermals; 4. **Buoyant Bodies:** about having air sacs beneath skin and bones making them extra buoyant; 5. **Dive Bombing:** about Brown Pelicans diving dramatically from air into water to catch fish.

GitHub Codespaces provides a free web-based development environment backed by a Linux container... and it turns out it also includes a GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable that provides free API access to the GitHub Models collection of LLMs

... here it's running my LLM CLI utility

Engineering is the intersection of Curiosity and Capability

When your curiosity outstrips your capability, you expand your capability and grow

When your capability expands, it allows you to see farther and grows your curiosity

Don't allow your tools take away both your Curiosity and Capability

So you can think really big thoughts and the leverage of having those big thoughts has just suddenly expanded enormously. I had this tweet two years ago where I said "90% of my skills just went to zero dollars and 10% of my skills just went up 1000x". And this is exactly what I'm talking about - having a vision, being able to set milestones towards that vision, keeping track of a design to maintain or control the levels of complexity as you go forward. Those are hugely leveraged skills now compared to knowing where to put the amperands and the stars and the brackets in Rust. — Kent Beck, interview with Gergely Orosz

I like this take by @kentbeck.com on how AI-assisted programming changes the balance of which skills are most important

From this interview with @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tdd-ai-age...

Ukraine's Massive Drone Attack Was Powered by Open Source Software Ukraine used ArduPilot to help it wipe out Russian targets. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.

Ukraine's Massive Drone Attack Was Powered by Open Source Software

🔗 www.404media.co/ukraines-mas...

AI-SEO
AI-SEO
AI-SEO
And Bingo was his name-o

YouTube video by LBC LBC caller impresses James O'Brien with her take on the state of the West

@mrjamesob.bsky.social i am so grateful to you and the team at @lbc.co.uk for talking to me yesterday. I'm astounding at the reaction the video has received. It's quite overwhelming. ❤️
youtu.be/thwpvsnzTj8?...

$70 Million in 60 Seconds: How Insider Information Helped Someone 28x Their Money On April 9, 2025, someone risked about $2.5 million—and walked away with more than $70 million in under an hour. The trade was simple, but bold: buy a specific kind of option tied to SPY, the exchang...

In which I explain how someone turned $2.5 million into $70 million in 60 seconds.

Either they're the luckiest person on earth or people were trading on insider knowledge about Trump changing his tariff policy.

My second newsletter post.

data-and-politics.ghost.io/70-million-i...

Pretty sure I have wood and nails in the garage that I collected around about that time because "they would come in handy" 😎

Still one of my biggest regrets not buying ARM shares when they spun off from Acorn. I still have a slightly wonky ARM mug that they were giving away as swag at (I think) an Acorn User show just after the announcement.

Watch seismic waves from the M7.7 earthquake in Myanmar ripple across North America.

This animation, called a Ground Motion Visualization (GMV), shows how the ground moved as detected by seismometers across the continent.

Python Developer Tooling Handbook

👋🏻

In the last 10 years, I’ve had a growing interest in making Python development more effective. I’ve learned that a lot of teams don’t make the best use of the tooling available to use.

This has culminated with writing an ebook on developer tooling I’m excited to share with you.

pydevtools.com

Migrate your old tweets into your Bluesky #atproto account!

@cyd.social is available today as an open source tool that runs on your computer & moves (& optionally deletes) tweets from your old account, and preserves them in your account here.

Pay for premium features to support the project!

You can just hack on ATProto Building a lightweight Go app on the Jetstream

ATProto makes programming fun again. Here's a side project I did over the holidays, a small app that surfaces the 10 latest links to GitHub repos from the network. I learned a ton, including Go, Javascript, and a lot about websockets

vickiboykis.com/2025/01/23/y...

GitHub - d4rr3ll/adventofcode: My solutions for the advent of code My solutions for the advent of code. Contribute to d4rr3ll/adventofcode development by creating an account on GitHub.

Anyone doing #adventofcode this year? I'm a bit behind but my solutions will be catalogued here: github.com/d4rr3ll/adve...

Nerd post! 🤓

Quick write up of how I finally got an eye animation working on the little round display I've had for a while.

www.darrelltaylor.com/article/roun...

#arduino #roundyfi #gadget

Yeah, good point. I was trying to think back to the early days of the bird platform and some of the cool things that were done then, struggling though.

A yellow smiley beach ball next to a swimming pool

Right then, first post on the new thing. This is a picture from earlier this year in Spain, we had a great time!

I've seen this mentioned elsewhere, but this really does feel like the old bird based platform. I'm already reading the API docs and wondering what I could build 🔧🔨🤓