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Today is fundraising announcement day . As is the nature of writing for a larger audience, it is a formal, safe announcement. As it should be. Writing must necessarily become impersonal at scale. But I would like to write something personal about why I am doing this. What is the goal of building exe.dev ? I am already…
This document is a summary of my personal experiences using generative models while programming over the past year. It has not been a passive process. I have intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming to learn about them. The result has been that I now regularly use LLMs while working and I consider their…
Most Unix-ish APIs, from files to sockets are a bit of a mess today. Endless poorly documented sockopts, unexpected changes in write semantics across FSs and OSes, good luck trying to figure out mtimes . But despite the mess, I can generally wrap my head around open/read/write/close. I can strace a binary and figure…
This is the second part of my ongoing self-education in how to adapt my programming experience to a world with computers that talk. The first part, How I program with LLMs , covered ways LLMs can be adapted into our existing tools (basically, autocomplete) and how careful prompting can replace traditional web search…
There is more than enough written on the mechanics of and mitigations for the recent severe RCE in log4j . On prevention, this is the most interesting widely-reshared insight I have seen:
I wrote up my experiences programming with LLMs a bit over a year ago , and updated it for the world of agents eight months ago . A lot has changed since then, so here is an update.
I started programming in the 1990s living above my parent's medical practice. We had 15 PCs for the business, and one for me. The standard OS was MS-DOS. The network started off using IPX over coax to a Novell Netware server, the fanciest software we ever owned. IPX was so much easier than TCP/IP. No DHCP and address…
This content covers my recent exploration of writing internet services, iOS apps, and macOS programs as an indie developer.
I am leery of jargon. I am as guilty of using it as the next engineer, but there comes a point where there are just too many precise, narrowly-understood terms polluting your vocabulary. The circle of people you can talk to shrinks until going to the store to buy milk feels like an exercise in speaking a foreign…
Part of the Go 2 series of language changes is a new error inspection proposal .
On Halloween this year I learned two scary things. The first is that a young toddler can go trick-or-treating in your apartment building and acquire a huge amount of candy. When they are this young they have no interest in the candy itself, so you are left having to eat it all yourself.
I had of late been lamenting the loss of the internet of the 1990s. A place where everything was obscure or new. If you saw something mainstream like a Disney princess, it was because someone had taken the time to handcraft an ASCII art portrait. Today if you type [disney] into the ubiquitous search engine , every…