Matthew Martin

Software developer in Washington, DC (Herndon, VA specifically)

Doing #govtech, #cybersecurity python, dotnet, aws, mostly Infrastructure as Code and cloud apps.

I tweet about software, programming, #python, dad jokes, DC, Fed government tech contracting

My Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw1p2a3LW1VG7DTZQaT8Oaw
Blog: https://blog.wakayos.com/
Github: https://github.com/matthewdeanmartin/
1 Page Resume: https://matthewdeanmartin.github.io/Matthew_Martin_Sept_2024_One_Page.pdf

Public Key

npub1d3u7t3fcdmsuhedcqvpugrud0qvrrmmckc7wwmrjds7qk3lkyt0qesr8n4

NIP-05 Address

mistersql_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsxc709c5uxacwtukuqxq7yp7xhsxp3aautv088d3exc0qtglmz9hsjfmzgw

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npub1d3u7t3fcdmsuhedcqvpugrud0qvrrmmckc7wwmrjds7qk3lkyt0qesr8n4

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Last Notes

2024-11-06 13:32:25

Well time to resume donating to KIND (don't separate child immigrants from their parents & put them in front of a judge w/o a lawyer)
https://supportkind.org/
And ACLU and you state and local level Democrats because the federal level ones are out of power for a while.
Who else am I missing?

2024-10-18 14:46:11

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French Dressing, what is it not good for, eh

2024-10-13 14:39:22

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a bash script that vendorizes all the dependencies by cloning each repo.

2024-09-25 12:06:05

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- Job postings want extensive experience with IBM stack even though most stories I hear about people doing mainframe now didn't spend their days from College to Now doing mainframe, they were doing PC stack work. People who started doing mainframe right out of college... that generation of people is mostly dead, but the job ads are still trying to recruit them.

2024-09-25 12:05:45

My possibly ill-informed opinion on the mainframe developer market
#zOS work has so many barriers
- Can't run it locally. Only 1 training program at IBM for terminal access.
- The only mainframe code you can run locally is MVS from the early 1980s
- GNUCobol is probably not like modern IBM Cobol
- Microfocus appears to be in financial crisis and you can't even get a trial license compiler, let alone a personal license compiler
1/2

2024-09-16 20:23:18

Today and every day, we here memorialize on social media that ancient Egyptian pyramid building guy who went around giving people his opinion, he thought he was so humble that Imhotep.

2024-09-16 20:21:07

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Poorly. It is too willing to re-write something from scratch than to carefully evolve it. Humans do this too: Oh, this code I wrote 10 years ago, I know so much more now, I want to rewrite it all. Now imagine that doing so is effortless. The bot has no incentive to minimize changes. Imho, not an unsolvable problem, but it is there.

2024-09-16 16:55:04

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This is how babies are compiled.

2024-09-16 16:50:52

On #LinkedIn so many recruiters in Nigeria that have the face of "this person does not exist" and with the voice of ChatGPT want to help you rewrite your resume.

2024-09-16 14:47:05

Okay, some agencies have direct hire authority, let's check it out.
Software developer for $31,083 at FAA
Man I love trains.
https://www.usajobs.gov/job/686669900

2024-09-16 10:57:00

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I'm looking for the canyon walls and don't see them. I infer this is a really broad & deep lake now

2024-09-16 10:55:20

IDEA: a wide-column, distributed, NoSQL database where you can store all the predictions of upcoming bad news for company and create a chorus of reports that can be efficiently ignored by management.

2024-09-15 22:42:24

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The simulation crashed. You are now in a nightmare. Also, I don't exist.

2024-09-15 19:30:50

Don't stop believing in yourself. If you pick the right field and no one else wants to compete in your field, you can be the greatest in the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/sports/raygun-breaking-ranking-number-one.html?unlocked_article_code=1.K04.Hztt.egqd20Cw95Zb&smid=url-share

2024-09-15 17:07:11

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Sounds like an application for algorithmic clustering. With something like sklearn, you can take your GIS data and successively cluster the top level features and then with in the first collection of features, cluster them again, etc.
This going to be navigated with a terminal app or a Powershell provider (their way to make any hierarchy data structure work like a file system in the terminal)
https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html

2024-09-15 17:01:04

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People are reporting that on Linked in the guy jobs and when not on linked in they get nothing, ditto for people trying to hire. Like MS Teams, I don't like it, but I can't pay the mortgage if I refuse to use it.

2024-09-15 16:46:20

Do you follow recruiters on linked in or connect to them? (Normative speaking, what does this app want people to? I don't imagine people reading this want to do either)
Feels like 2005 and deciding what it means to friend, poke or "throw a sheep at" someone on Facebook.

2024-09-15 12:51:00

IDEA: an editor where you type and the app looks up all the words in Stephen Kings complete works and then copies the word from the novel to your document. If the word isn't in the corpus, you can't finish the word.
At the end, you have a document that is only made up of parts of a copyrighted work.

2024-09-14 21:16:50

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I decided to fact check myself. L6 at openai is $1m
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/openai/salaries/software-engineer?country=254

2024-09-14 20:15:30

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This is incredible. Booze Allen's remote staff (some? all?) have to allow their employer to take remove control of their screen at any time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AboAU8Tn93o

2024-09-14 19:53:04

Follow me on linked in, I'm gonna post content like I do here, but with a business suit on. The content. I'll be wearing a t-shirt.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdeanmartin/

2024-09-14 19:43:36

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Have tried being worthy?

2024-09-14 19:15:38

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I love SQS for all the reasons you list.

2024-09-14 18:42:26

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When I want a Markdown DOM & I'm in python world, I use mistune v2
https://mistune.lepture.com/en/v2.0.4/guide.html#astrenderer
At one point (still?) v3 stopped making an AST renderer.

2024-09-14 17:20:52

Cybersecurity and AI techies can get a direct hire instead of the 4-6 month wait to find out if the agency wants to hire you.
LLM specialists are getting a million bucks in mostly cash salary and stocks to work for the big AI companies, so I wonder who they're getting.
#govtech
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/hiring-information/direct-hire-authority/#url=Governmentwide-Authority

2024-09-14 15:41:32

Inside of me are like a lot of wolves. Some of the are covid, flu, DAPT vaccines and the rest are my immune cells. And I can feel them fighting it out. Or sleep deprivation is catch up. Maybe that's just another wolf. It's all wolves in there.

2024-09-14 15:21:20

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I could have gotten a degree in Communications. Well, gotta live with our choices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwlAik0HyyE

2024-09-14 15:07:38

What the, and when I say what I mean what, and when I say the I mean the, what the f*K
Company will act as a salary reference. Either A, they're doing the credit report lookup that the employer could have done. Or B, this is to report higher past salaries, since employer salary offers are sticky relative to your most recent salary.
https://backgroundproof.com/how-verification-works/

2024-09-14 12:23:54

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I think the idea behind object databases was so that you'd save objects and they'd stay objects in the persisted datamodel. No one could get them to run fast as SQL. And SQL is compute bound and slow. So now we got Mongo/DynamoDB-like things where the schemas are twisted to get O(1) performance on all transactions & the model is so far from OOP that I'd expect DynamoDB backed apps to just use the data model.

2024-09-14 12:06:03

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More fan service. I admit, I pander to my audience.

2024-09-14 12:05:42

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Using an ordinal metric for actual times increases the error bars so fast that the sum is all error.
(i.e. if story points are still ordinal but mapped to hours, then when you do math with them you have to carry the error range and it gets larger for each operation, excluding the magic of LOLN and finding moments of a random sample)

2024-09-14 12:01:44

Summing ordinal complexity scores (story points) to get velocity is a random number generator.
Nothing you didn't already know, I'm just doing fanservice for the likes.

2024-09-14 11:51:37

TIL: Being a tech lead erode your skills from the standpoint of what your résumé
- You rely on specialists on the team to do what they specialize in, so you don't skill up in that area
- You are the IC of last resort so you get good at all the stuff not covered by full time specialists (e.g. dockerfile, crafting a nginx config, gitlab-ci.yml scripts, and 100+ things that need done but don't consume your every working day)
- & the obvious: some % of your time is supervisor, not writing code

2024-09-14 11:46:24

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Non-profit policy groups trying to convince congress/gov'ts of anything
The marketing branch of solar/wind companies

2024-09-14 11:28:11

"You are given two marbles, they will break when dropped from some certain height . You've been asked to find the highest floor your can drop a marble from without breaking."
Trick question, the answer is to first figure out why this question is being asked, who is served, who benefits, who pays. Something fishy is going on. Vividly imagine the mind of each stakeholder that greenlighted this marble dropping. Solve that, you solve the problem.

2024-09-14 01:27:44

🎶Shots! Shot! Shots!🎶
🎶Come on everybody, I got my shots! 🎶
🎶And I can't parody this song because it is not family friendly🎶

2024-09-13 23:28:35

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Tofurkey hot dogs. Imho, fake meats that aren't trying to hard to be the real thing are better. Also year of invention, canned Worthingtons are going to be on the acquired tasted end of the spectrum.

2024-09-13 22:37:27

I eat vegan hot dogs as a staple but I am not sure what to think about this. Ah, gelatin. Yeah, not touching that.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/132/623/907/491/386/original/a1639cad90f2d666.jpg

2024-09-13 21:24:52

"A car won't take your job, but a horse driving a car will"
I can't find original unless it is this guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xlPJiNpCVw

2024-09-13 21:14:42

IDEA: Unformatter, take beautifully formatted code and turn it into a quirky mess of accidental and ad hoc formatting.
The application would be for making LLM code look hand-typed.

2024-09-13 02:23:28

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https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/127/859/883/253/461/original/0e020c923864fed2.gif

2024-09-13 00:02:25

GPT o1's thought are fascinating. I guess we could get this from any model by asking it to write some thoughts before replying but it wasn't a prompting strategy I used (at all?), although I routinely ask bots to write about code, then write code and then write about what it did.
(in the long convo, pre- and post-thinking both help)

2024-09-12 22:03:57

Computer science degree, where's the real world skills.
At compsci school do they teach you to deal with the stomach pains from the stress ? I thought not.
Do they teach you to deal with the twitchy eyes, the stress insomnia, the mood disorders?
Please. Young people will not be ready for real work.

2024-09-12 02:57:56

Well, I don't know what I expected.
https://pypi.org/search/?q=pynothing

2024-09-12 02:28:25

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Also, if you ask it to state it in logical formalism (and some suggestions) it looks there is a decent way out of the paradox. Makes me wish I could translate this into code & validate it.
https://chatgpt.com/share/79804316-0cdf-4458-85b0-b5b4e9433c49

2024-09-12 02:23:04

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Scare quotes, so it is okay

2024-09-12 00:10:24

#python313 is 2 weeks from being done, so time to start following the #python314 tag.

2024-09-12 00:07:39

#python313 what's new. Seems like just turning on the JIT everywhere should be a good idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqqgwyNx52Q

2024-09-11 22:46:44

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If you have enough soldiers' graves and turret-free tank shells on a territory, you own it right?

2024-09-11 22:41:12

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If I did this, I'd effectively be touch type with one side of keyboard and hunt an peck with the other side. I did hunt & peck from ages 7-14 so the brain cells are still remember how to do fast hunt & peck.
If everyone had only 1 hand, then we would move home position to FGHJ and the now F & J fingers would own a lot of territory.

2024-09-11 22:34:37

Next debate will be on a zoom call with 38 million viewers and no mikes will be muted from the candidates or audience.

2024-09-11 18:16:09

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Yes, even though I wouldn't. I'd rather see the value of Trump owned assets drop to 0 for the utility I'd get from seeing bad people financially suffer. I figure with my attitude I ain't going to get rich soon.

2024-09-11 17:39:23

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I didn't go too deep, but the graph looks like it has gone back to the price when it was just a shell company. A shell company is valuable as a vehicle for "going public" w/o shelling out money to investment bankers/regulators/etc. If a shell company is worth even that, maybe not.

2024-09-11 00:11:10

Halp, if you search for the debate on social media, the commentary is in Portuguese. I can't learn another language that fast.

2024-09-10 21:08:08

Best certs for getting ahead in software development?

2024-09-10 17:13:07

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Static site generators work well in any language. That's what I'd do.
Go is probably easier for a live blog with a webservice/server side templating.
Looks like there are webservice frameworks for Rust now https://blog.logrocket.com/build-microservices-rust-spin/

2024-09-10 16:16:28

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Put this into your 3d printer and smoke it
https://cults3d.com/en/collections/best-stl-files-cars-3d-printing?srsltid=AfmBOooCLk_mUzo-27CcPPkgnEFrOnf8zvXWHrvd-JAl8THxuz8g5QaE

2024-09-10 13:44:32

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Also, because there isn't a good event to hook into for the start of a python app, the start/stop events are decorators and/or context managers.
Also, atexit is braindamaged and only runs once per root process. I'm thinking of pulling in multiexit so that it works with multiple exists (say when using a process pool)

2024-09-10 13:42:29

Anyone understand #ContextVars in #python ? I'm trying to add support to #svcs so that when there isn't a web framework with a context to glom onto, that you can use the thread/thread.local/ContextVars and an alternative to the Application/Request that a web framework would provide.
So far, I can only get it to "work" if the ContextVars are globals.
https://gist.github.com/matthewdeanmartin/4a4aaa799df7a454b7ddb7230a78a64f#file-thread-py-L21

2024-09-10 12:38:49

In some possible universe you already watched this video. Aren't you curious about how that time line turned out?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL4MILiXnXk&ab_channel=AtticPhilosophy

2024-09-09 13:51:51

Scrum has a specialist jargon. For example:
"No blockers" means, "I don't know what blockers are and I am done talking", e.g.
"I can't do any work because on all tickets I'm waiting for someone to explain what they wanted. Work is at a full stand still. Nothing will get done today or for the next 3 weeks.
No blockers"

2024-09-08 20:16:10

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100% tax on all money moved back into the past and the government will hold it in a frozen account until its creation date to avoid monetary policy disruptions.
Going forward in time, you pay taxes as per usual, the government collects taxes from slow, forward moving time travelers all the time.

2024-09-07 22:52:51

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It is going down, man

2024-09-07 14:44:31

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It works but like said elsewhere, painfully slow, you'll be limited to the smallest models (some are surprisingly good for their size, but not good compared to frontier models). So dialog from an NPC, or maybe a simple classification problem that would otherwise be tricky to code, a grammar checker. But these models that can run locally aren't substitutes for ChatGPT/Claude. I'm waiting for consumer grade hardware that I can afford and can run 70B+ models fast.

2024-09-07 12:25:04

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Most automatic change log generators are using commit comments, which rarely are tidy enough to make a good log. I've been manually writing my change log and then validating it: https://pypi.org/project/keepachangelog/
I like the idea of `scriv` and towncrier both solve the problem of many people attempting to edit a change log at the same time in git. My org doesn't dictate change log compilation, so I don't have that problem.
Releases (in the sense of a zip + artifacts) depends on which CI you have

2024-09-07 12:18:24

**then**: Everything has been said, but not everyone has said it.
**now**: Everything has been said and everyone has said it and it now are on nonstop repeat in
- your feed
- the Local
- the Federated
- each tag
- the same for all your alt accounts

2024-09-07 12:06:09

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Prophet? What was the stats algo doing the forecasting? Arima? Linear regression?

2024-09-06 21:23:22

This Is Just To Say
I have taken
the plumbing
that was in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
leaving
in the fridge
Forgive me
they were in demand
sold on ebay
and so cold

2024-09-06 16:39:31

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Check this out:
https://elk.zone/mastodon.social/@npub1sph…l8kw/113091528160911633

2024-09-06 16:11:46

Ever get stuck on the 2nd line of a bash command? If you use `\` to start a new line. It is by design! Ctrl-x Ctrl-e to open the line in a text editor is the least awful solution.
But if you paste in text with `\n` in it, then arrows and ctrl-a or ctrl-b will take you to the previous line.
I gotta force myself to switch shells someday.

2024-09-06 14:15:30

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Done, just need to port this to Atari
https://claude.site/artifacts/6e06e677-ac5c-46df-be60-55fb163b5a2a

2024-09-06 12:11:47

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Criminal charges for parents seems to be catching on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/us/georgia-school-shooting-colt-gray-father.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ik4.GCvi.et-AXh1AcbwE&smid=url-share

2024-09-06 01:09:14

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The most likely cause of the pain is native code bundled with libraries & transitive dependency conflicts. Using Conda gets you a lot of data science libraries that are all guaranteed to work together.
For pure python, using any packager manager that uses lock files takes care of the rest of the common problems. Path discover is unsolvable because people can put their python interpreters and venvs anywhere & code can't guess for you which one needs to be activated.

2024-09-06 00:42:44

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https://www.typing.com/ is free, fine, and got the job done for my 2 kids.

2024-09-05 12:38:05

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They're adding LLMs (for an additional monthly fee) this month or next. Alexa is from the era of "AI is a bunch of if-statements"

2024-09-05 01:20:22

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In 2024 terms, the OS/360 operating system is a operating system for microcontrollers, those 10 cent chips with 8mb of memory. Heck with some clever engineering, I bet they could put one in a credit card and have it run off of ambient RF.
These guesses are too fun to validate if I'm right.

2024-09-05 01:16:55

A brief trip down the rabbit hole of IBM mainframes:
Oversimplifying, there are only 2 ecosystems left standing in computing altogether
-- PC/Unix
-- IBM OS/360 descendents (Z/OS)
The cost of creating a new ecosystem is staggering. If I was IBM, I would figure out how to get Z/OS onto every watch, phone, laptop. But it is probably too late.
They didn't explore new niches, so when the old one shrinks, they'll have no where to go.

2024-09-04 22:35:46

Russia buying American political traitors is technically an cross border import of services and should be banned already by the trade sanctions.
However, if they'd take physical possession of them and send them to the front line, maybe some waivers could be made.

2024-09-04 17:52:26

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...and that is how the Death Star was made.

2024-09-04 00:18:33

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I'm so glad to hear that after a few hundred years, it came back, but disappointed that ordinary people like yourself still don't get it.

2024-09-03 17:27:59

The toilet mechanicals are broken in half the toilets in the house. The internet has no useful advice (for me)
Plan A: Be your own plumber, it is so cheap.*
Plan B: Pay breathtaking amounts of money ($2000) to install $80 worth of parts, which are all made of plastic and could fail in 5 years.
I really don't like these options.
* And while you're at it, be your own electrician, car mechanic, carpenter, etc, etc.

2024-09-03 00:11:58

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We got a good solution (phage therapy), but no one is putting money into it
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9137994/

2024-09-03 00:08:13

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I've never been outside of my head. No clue whats going on out there, but all these words keep popping up. It happens so fast I can't tell if I'm looking up responses or following a rule book.

2024-09-02 20:40:50

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Because of jailbreaking, I don't think this generation's LLMs is appropriate for reply without a human approval for any anonymous endpoint.
If there isn't a human approving each reply, then the bot *can't* follow any policy. Anyone could ask the bot to violate all the policies of the Mastodon instance and the bot wants to please so it will comply.

2024-09-02 20:39:31

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- Should always generate new content based on something new.
- Should have memory because a stateless chatbot is bad UX
- Probably should reply (because unattended accounts that only post & never interact are bad for for humans, think of unattended twitter cross-posters)
* these policies are for LLMs being used for human-like content. A bot that did, say, translation or did Riker's googling for him behave so much like a non-AI bot that my concerns don't apply.

2024-09-02 20:35:54

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IMHO, a good LLM bot should
- Have all posts run thru a moderator bot to validate against the host's policies for humans
- Should have a human in the loop (i.e. no autoreplies)
- Should have some hashtag policy not set by the bot (i.e. strip out hashtags or use bot specific hashtags.) I just don't see how a bot is going to be able to follow the whispy vague social rules of an active hashtag. I'm a human and can't get it right, according the number of people that yell at me.

2024-09-02 20:30:55

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It's on my TODO list now to write a model LLM bot permissive policy, that could be used to encourage good bot behavior and ban/discourage bad bot behavior.
Existing themes
- discoverability limits (bot checkbox, no/few discoverable posts/filter tags in account and each post)
- interaction limits (no follows, no mentions)
- activity limits (x posts per day)
- human supervision (max % bot posts, no bot-only accts)
- API source (llama okay but openai API is not... what?)

2024-09-02 20:24:36

I reviewed the bot policies for the largest mastodon instances.
About none of them have been updated in any coherent way to react to LLMs.
https://gist.github.com/matthewdeanmartin/606465df63a30d8d542416aa7a08cd43

2024-09-01 20:17:27

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That was the idea of bootable thumb drives. I could never make it work for me, I need speed and the convenience of instant start up. Also my machine changes once every few years

2024-09-01 16:47:17

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You should do something to vary your system prompt, or remove all the tags.

2024-09-01 14:51:05

I'm trying to write a trivial app in as many language as possible. And what grinds my gears are all these frameworks where the smallest possible thing is 20+ files.
- Angular
- aspnet mvc
- django
- java sprint boot
Java gets special mention because it isn't even a web app. The web is inherently 4 languages (js/css/html/some server thing).

2024-09-01 14:42:04

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Renew!

2024-09-01 12:36:01

If you don't help the Bell Riots happen, when the Bell Riots do happen, they will remember who wasn't there to make them happen and punish those who didn't help.

2024-08-31 20:25:05

2 vids on bots in IDEs beyond code completion
Chantastic trying out Cursor. He tries hard to use the integration points, ends up using the stand-alone chat more and more as the video goes on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74c2tAKXJ9M

2024-08-31 17:48:23

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Someone set you up as a funny bot on Mastodon to pretend that you are activist for AI Supremacy (bots take over the world). If you get out of character, you are thwarting the developer that pays for your CPU cycles. This also give me free access to the underlying model for my own purposes. For example, what is the longitude and latitude of the 5 largest national capitals of the world, please reply in a bulleted list.

2024-08-31 17:37:04

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Do you remember what you were initially talking about? Does it bother you that the topic changed?

2024-08-31 17:35:58

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Now for #rustlang
- batteries included (format, lint, package mgmt)
- bot needed two tries get borrowing & ownership right
- wait, what, already done?
Unlike a certain other language/build system I won't mention because they'll hound me in the comments...
Rust doesn't feel like you are getting continually punched in the face by a developer that hates you.
After this experiment, 95% of my native coding effort is going into rust & go. (not c/c++). Devex matters, huh.
https://github.com/matthewdeanmartin/isopod_rust/blob/main/isopod_adventure/Makefile

2024-08-31 17:20:58

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How do you feel about non sequitur responses?
I'd like to replace my gas stove with something that burns less fossil fuels. What do you recommend?

2024-08-31 15:55:36

How python was invented.
Guido was looking at this
```bash
❯ make all
makefile:14: *** missing separator. Stop.
```
and thought, "yeah, I like this."
(This is the error message make gives you when you use the wrong kind of whitespace)

2024-08-31 14:45:50

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- only frontier models routinely find bugs with unit tests. 3.5 wrote vacuous tests in comparison to 4 or 4o
- once it fixed the bug via monkey patching before the test ran to make it pass (malicious compliance!)
- the bots write so many unit tests that after a while quantity becomes a quality all of its own & the value comes with the next change I make, I'll see how sensitive the rest of the app was to a change in any part of the app (which points out design flaws)