Mastodawn

Rich Loveland May 29, 2025

Achievement for today: got PyTorch and numpy installed on a rather old MacBook Air, but ONLY due to Claude’s help.

Would I have figured out myself that I needed to directly fetch a random wheel file from the PyTorch website while passing some random pip flag? Or how to downgrade numpy to something in 1.X to make torch actually work?

The answer is no, I would’ve closed the tab and done literally anything other than wade through Python dependency hell. But the buddy system made it not so bad!

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Rich Loveland Apr 22, 2025

Peak flowerage

Rich Loveland Apr 22, 2025

My psychospiritual take is that many people have never dealt with abusive narcissists (or they are one, or they are abusees with Stockholm syndrome) which is the only thing that explains the current situation to me feels-wise

But I guess some of them are learning that lesson in real time now. Sad that the rest of us have to pay their life skills tuition in money, suffering, etc

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Rich Loveland Mar 9, 2025

Similarly, “agents”. I get why they’re working on it: all the company boards are VCs who don’t wanna pay salaries; but I don’t feel like we’ve even really begun to explore the design space for a true “intelligent assistant” UX across various professional fields much less for general life stuff. Personally I find human augmentation and collaboration a much more interesting future direction than “Zorg industries lays you off over email in favor of an AI agent” but then again I’m not a capitalist

Rich Loveland Mar 9, 2025

Something about the software getting written “around” LLMs feels off to me. MCP? Vector search? It already has 200k context (a 500 page book)! I look at PRs at work, they aren’t modifying a 500 page book’s worth of code (nobody would review that) so I don’t understand what MCP etc are trying to solve. Like, you can just grep for stuff & directly give it the 10-100 actual code files you want to edit, they are just text and aren’t really that big. I don’t get it.

Rich Loveland Mar 4, 2025

jcoglan Mar 3, 2025

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Rich Loveland Mar 3, 2025

apple UX team really needs to stop freaking me out with these big "hello" splash modals and wifi reconnects on point upgrades

i'm always like "why doesn't it remember my wifi, oh god did it do a full re-install and lose all my stuff"

(it's always so they can push some feature i don't want)

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Rich Loveland Mar 1, 2025

“I’m Gemini and my API is this” “I’m Claude and my API is that” dude this is all a waste of time, just companies doing fire and motion (read Joel) trying to waste time and impose switching costs. I don’t care about your precious weird JSON schema bro, just get out of the way between me and the model!!!!!! IT DOES TEXT, it will figure it out !!!!!! 2000s API design please stop, just one huge POST is all I need

Rich Loveland Mar 1, 2025

AI assistant APIs are way too 2010s REST API software engineer brained with JSON for each message etc. Nah, I ain’t doing all that. Let me just push a giant blob of text including the entire message history and all file contexts into one giant string and let the model figure it out. Been experimenting with this and it seems to work fine. Btw this also seems to work for eg PDFs, I just blast a base64 into the convo and it reads it, no stupid “file attach” JSON field. I ain’t doin all that!!!!