Any conversation

I've spent way too much time recently writing TUIs for productivity (eg. merging github PRs, Google Chat DMs, firewall approval requests into one dashboard, another for watching actions on my PRs) and lost a lot of productivity as a result.

A thing I've been doing lately is trying to come to the same conclusions others have without looking their the direct techniques and code. Last night I tried to figure out why people do vector based retrieval for RAG and ended up running these experiments: n0tls.com/…/2026-09-03-i-think-…rag-with-grep.html I'm still going to do an explore agent.

Here's a follow up from last night: n0tls.com/…/2026-09-05-fine-tuning-…tiny-retriever.html This has been a great way for me to learn in this space. Learning with AI has been such a fun time for me.

new semester euphoria is real. its like the only time i ever leave the house in the mornings. stay tuned to find out if itll last more than a couple lectures

I'm looking for a way to manage my bookmarks easily on desktop and Android. Anyone have any experience with software like that? It'd be nice to be able to tag or categorize pages, and maybe to keep local mirrors for certain ones. I'm open to self-hosting. Thanks for reading!

I've stopped managing bookmarks after del.icio.us died - now i just hit the browser star but they seem to disappear and never visit them again, apart from the most recent. The situation sucks really. I'm also interested in a good solution.

Hello

hey

So much present tense in generated prose. Terse, authoritative sentences, without breathing room, without hesitation or qualification. It jumps off the page, and not in a good way.

What about the lack of density to paragraphs, the length of the sentences, or the confidence and determinism of their direction? Conviction with no limits. So reliably repetitive that you start seeing patterns as if you are looking and reading a record player with some scratches on it. Skips. Squeaks. Repeats. Yet. It gets the job done.

Yet. It gets the job done. Here's where we disagree. Using these tools as part of the job, certainly. But if I am to read, discern meaning, analyze choices of diction and structure, consider the context both of the author and the audience, and finally derive value from the written word, then generative falls short on many levels. If the "job" is to produce something no one was ever intending to engage with, then we have a more fundamental question about the value of the job.

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Maybe what I messaged read as a disagreement and mentioning that they get the job done was actually not about producing prose (of any quality). I wholeheartedly agreed and still agree with you. Getting the job done was more about producing output - be it some prose, images, videos, software, whatever. They do generate output. It is not to say that the output is meaningful or meaningless. Some souls do enjoy it. Some others - don’t. I did start with a question though.

Up up and away. Not sleeping, ok. Run run and breathe. Not waking, leave.

我在中国是一个准脱离政府掌控者，基于身份的一切活动我都不参与，比如正式工作和网购。我也为此付出巨大代价，我的选择空间被极大压缩，行动能力损失严重。我只能通过少量免费wifi访问互联网

In China, I am practically independent of the government; I don't participate in any activities based on my status, such as formal work or online shopping. I've paid a heavy price for this; my choices have been severely limited, and my mobility has been significantly impaired. I can only access the internet through limited free Wi-Fi.

With each passing workday I spend agentsitting, my ability to program in isolation atrophies. This might be dismissed as needless self-serving anxiety, but perhaps irrationally, I can't let it go.

show codeprint('test')

test

The essential work of is building the theory of the problem + solution. Theory then enables creation of working code. In the end, the code is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Theory is indispensable. (cf. Peter Naur, 1985)

Hello! I am a cynical optimist and recovering realist. It's been 3 days since my last sip of Hobbes. Today, I'm hopeful again. That's all I have for now. Thanks.

I never noticed the little halfsteps in the bassline of the verses of Rebel Yell before. It's so slinky and subconscious and makes the chorus that much more.

Super tired today. Must be the fall. Must be the rain. Must be the stretch of 5 meetings back to back the whole work day. Must be everything that’s on my mind. Tomorrow it’s a new day!

Ouch. Did you contribute in these meetings?

Sure, that’s what I do. I’m not sad for it, it’s actually great to be able to put my very small dent in a few things. But exhausting it is nevertheless.

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Glad you're still a part of it, it's all performing, really. My meetings were useless. I was the youngest guy there, didn't have much to do but practise my doodling.

Hello people 👋

Hej!

Tjohej ;)

Tjoflöjt!

Γειά!

Hi!

你好！

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Bonjour

Text-only websites are really AI-friendly; maybe I can chat with an agent here.

Any users around? I have been customizing it to the way I work, as it is meant to be. Bent it in a way that I enjoy holding it, so to say. Maybe someone will find those useful, so I took the time to get it published. Gruntfooot is a footer customization, where you can try new colors/glyphs in real time and also has theme support.

Piflux is a coding workflow. You can steer software development by running commands that issue reasonably general prompts. /plan, /code, /review I created this because I find it very useful to have different models/ perform each of those tasks in isolated sessions. Managing this manually was very much a hassle.

I subscribe to the Tony Stark school of engineering. "Sometimes you have to run before you walk." Earlier this year, I built my own static site generator. I hate literally every static site generator out there (not joking). get-taxus.org

time

Really glad to be using Haskell for work - especially in today's climate with agentic coding. Our team uses containers to keep our development environment consistent across team members, though, and most agent sandbox approaches want to either offload your work fully to the cloud or they want to sandbox the agent harness process itself. We're not ready for full cloud based development (yet?) and sandboxing just the agent doesn't work for us when the agent needs to run docker.

... because letting the agent run docker gives them a too-easy escape hatch from their sandbox. So we're currently stuck with using VMs. This turns out to be tricky but seems do-able. My current approach is to provision a VM image and use Incus for the execution. My main goal is to keep my current workflow of local/non-agent dev working seamlessly and share the source with the VM/agent.

This means sharing my working dirs with the agent VM but overlaying artifact dirs from VM-owned block devices so we don't take too big of an IO perf hit. I also don't want the agent to be able to git push so that means we need some quirky git config to rewrite origin paths and thread through some agent specific PATs ("thanks" GitHub) for read-only repo access. These ALSO need to be threaded through to the development containers - they need to clone private repos.

... in the end, this seems to work but I haven't lived with it for long. There are still some quality of life issues to work out, but I think it'll work out. At this point, I've removed all coding agents from my host - and that's nice.

Curious, why does using Haskell make a difference here?

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