Automation

I wrote my first Clojure program in anger a few months ago. Only, it’s not accurate to say that I wrote it; AI did most of the writing, and I directed it on what my design goals were and why. Architecturally, you could call it was a stateless anti-corruption layer, yapping between some REST endpoints and some ancient proprietary serialization. I had never written a Clojure program of nontrivial size before. Indeed I had barely touched any Lisp at all since working through SICP during a high school summer vacation, over a decade ago. That didn’t matter. Much more important was emphasizing certain invariants from the start, like the aforementioned statelessness, which made it very easy to unit and integration test, which was the true challenge. ...

I have a suspicion - and let me be clear, that’s all this is, a suspicion, I am taking my own claims even more lightly than usual here - that Claude Code makes most people’s lives better, but it makes the lives of those who struggle with executive function much better. When I have a problem to solve nowadays, I type c, then Enter. This alias opens up a fresh tmux window with 4 separate instances of Claude Code. Then I just… pick one and describe the problem I’m thinking about, and hit Enter again. The loop begins, and suddenly I am collaborating alongside the closest thing to an IRL deus ex machina I’ve ever seen, for the cost of a few keystrokes. ...

Quoth “How to Become a Hacker”: 2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there. Much more at the original post, including preemptive rebuttals to what I’m about to describe. This post is entirely about cataloguing my own error. I took this maxim, perhaps, a little too close to heart when I was starting out as a software guy, 15-odd years ago. This is my apology to past me. Past me, I apologize. ...

Did you know Vim has a client-server model baked in? Of course it does. If you run 1 vim --servername LOVE , then in another terminal something like 1 vim --servername LOVE --remote-send "<Cmd>colorscheme peachpuff<CR>" , you’ll find your Vim terminal switch to the creamy default theme all true gangsters love - without you actually having to do anything. I frequently flip between a US- and Finnish-based keyboard while doing my language studies. I already had a tiny shell script in place which plays a seventh major chord every time they switch, courtesy of Sway WM: ...

As a nerdy, working-class kid who grew up in the 1990s, knowing what time it actually was was a luxury I rarely had access to before I was 12 or so and my parents finally got an Internet connection with its attendant link to the Network Time Protocol. If you had told me I could have not just a watch but an entire machine that Never lost the time, Did what I wanted, how I wanted it, and Could be programmed to do what I want, how I want it on a schedule, I would have had to substantially revise my Christmas wishlist. ...

Before I moved to Finland, I spent some time in the Hobbesian war of all against all that is Wisconsin1. Men were men back in that less civilized age, and “cybersecurity” a ninny-word dreamt up by social harmony types who honestly thought they had anything worth stealing in their servers. For those of us doing real work, which I must emphasize you should never do, we had Expect. And to SSH automatically into servers where we didn’t have fancy accoutrements like “keys” or “audit requirements”, we did stuff like ...

First get a working script. “Hey GPT-4, write me a ChatGPT script that does .” Manually check over the script and iterate until it’s giving me what I want. “Now wrap the script into a click command-line interface.” I almost always specify to use an --input flag and an --output flag. If the data it’s working with is human-readable, “Make it so that if --input is not specified, it reads data from stdin.” If the data it’s writing is human-readable, “Make it so that if --output is not specified, it emits data to stdout.” If the script is complicated enough that error logging is warranted: “Add logging and colorlog. Ensure all error messages are written to stderr so that it does not clash with output.” This advice is optimized for small Python scripts, usually under 200 lines in total, for automating semi-mundane tasks like ...

It would have to be finstem, a simple command-line program I wrote to reduce Finnish words down to their root form. Finnish is a lot like Latin or Russian in that its words often become lumbering behemoths of rewritten consonants, suffixes upon suffixes, and this makes it hard to look up in a dictionary – that is, until you factor in its very regular orthography and the phenomenal efforts of the Finnish programming industry: finstem is basically a very specialized UI for the OpenOffice spell checker, and I have no shame in admitting that. ...

I am, emphatically, not the language learning type. I’ve done enough of it over my life to know this. It’s certainly one of the better hobbies out there: You can do it for free (in principle), you can sink as many hours as you care to into it, and if you get good enough at it you get to reap some unique cultural and economic1 benefits. But there’s a reason I picked up Python when 14 year old me decided he wanted to get ahead in life instead of (say) German. ...

Imagine you had the Most Complicated Program On Earth (MCPOE), with 1,000,000 dependencies. Every dependency must be build correctly exactly right or the MCPOE will fail to compile. MCPOE’s 10x dev team chose their packages so that each dependency has only a 1/1,000,000 chance of having something go wrong when you’re installing them - maybe a whitespace character snuck into the wrong build script, maybe solar wind hit the build computer. What are the chances that you will install MCPOE correctly? ...