I used Codex to build out a real project, a dictionary generator for Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s also generically, mostly, usable on all fandom wikis. I tried not touching any code, just interacting with Codex. I even had it write a little case study for me: https://jmcguire.github.io/dungeon-crawler-carl-dict/case-study/ If you like Dungeon Crawler Carl, or want to build a custom eBook dictionary for your own favorite fandom, check it out.

Still don’t like Python’s "separator".join(my_variable) v my_variable.split("separator"). Every time I walk away from Python for a year and come back, I reforget this. I know why it’s like this, but I still don’t like it.

Found this in a 2023 image folder, back when I was programming in Rust. I think it’s from the Safari Browser start page.

I’ve had a smidge of extra time with my recent unemployment, so to stay sharp and learn a few new things I followed Seiya Nuta’s guide to building an Operating System in 1,000 Lines. I’m not an OS programmer, my life is normally spent at high-level application programming. (The closest I come to the CPU is the week I spent trying to internalize the flow of those crazy speculative execution hacks.) Assembler is easy enough to write, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was when I encountered problems. My years of debugging application-level code has led to a pile of instincts that just failed me when debugging assembler-level bugs. ...

(Note: This post was written by ChatGPT, based on my initial rough notes. I, a human, wrote my own version of this post here: How my application programmer instincts failed when debugging assembler. I’m posting them both because it’s fun.) This post is about two bugs that stopped me cold. They were not clever bugs. They were basic mistakes that took far too long to understand. Each one forced me to confront how much of my programming intuition depends on abstraction, and how little of that intuition survives when you step into kernel code and assembly. ...

Twice I’ve been asked “do I need JWTs”. Twice I’ve given the same answer. Which means it’s time to document/automate my answer before I get asked a third time. The first part of my answer is that a better question would be, “do I need stateless auth?” JWTs are technically just a message format that are designed to be used with stateless auth, and that’s what you really want to ask yourself. ...

In 2010 Elif Batuman wrote Get A Real Degree. Ostensibly a book review, it gave her space to unload on an era that produced a writing glut. This quote stuck out to me. That’s the torture of walking into a bookshop these days: it’s not that you think the books will all be terrible; it’s that you know they’ll all have a certain degree of competent workmanship, that most will have about three genuinely beautiful or interesting sentences and no really bad ones, that many will have at least one convincing, well-observed character, and that nearly all will be bound up in a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about. All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! Who, indeed, has time to read them? ...

(I missed that this story was posted on Hacker News a month ago, but I had this post rolling around my brain anyways, so I’m writing it here instead of in a comment on a basically-ancient submission.) Sometimes science fiction gives a peek into a possible future. Not enough people are talking about this old classic short story “Profession” by Isaac Asimov* and what it can teach us about our AI-and-prompt-engineering-powered future. ...

The old Perl usenet newsgroup at comp.lang.perl.misc was partially for discussion, but was also for answers, and it was extremely hostile to beginners. It had a large FAQ, and the regulars regularly yelled at anyone who asked a question that was already answered. Understandable, because no one likes repeating themselves. But beginners are the ones least able to grok that whole thing, and beginners are the most likely to need help. The newsgroup set themselves up to be not helpful to the people who most needed help. ...