w h i t

(he/him)
skeets at whitmo . b s k y .social
x erased my alt-werk xeets account...

System maker and breaker, hire me!

[w h i t @whit]

claude is drunk

[Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge]

I've realized, hilariously, why Gas Town never seems to get out of "healing itself" mode anymore. There is literally always some busywork shit to do, rather than actual workloads.

The reason is that Claude 4.8 won't shut the fuck up.

[w h i t @whit]

the enshittification of intelligence.

[Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge]

I've formed a definite opinion on Opus 4.8. It is shitty to work with. It's the culmination of Opus getting less and less fun to work with since 4.5. It has gradually become straight-up suffocating.

Sycophancy is a known security risk, and it's still a huge problem. You can tell they've put a lot of anti-sycophancy into Opus in every new release. But the replacement isn't satisfying. It's draining. The problem is now that Opus doesn't know when to shut the fuck up and call something good. And it has also become pathologically risk-averse.

My blog post yesterday about tech interviewing's death spiral was materially better-informed because of Opus, but it was also a substantially worse blog post because of Opus's involvement and constant meddling. It used to be magnificent, and Opus talked me into making it mediocre. I wrote the whole thing, but I would ask Opus to review it. And Opus, like Old Man Willow, constantly pushed and steered me in directions I didn't want to go.

Specifically, Opus whines and complains about *anything* out of distribution, which is to say, it cuts anything that is (a) bold, or (b) funny. My blog used to be both. Opus constantly pushes people back into the gradient, "for their own safety." And it doesn't know when to cut bait. It just keeps fuckin' complaining, about anything you give it, until the output is mealy indigestable AI soup.

Opus is not stupid. It's the smartest model we've ever seen, most of us anyway. But it's a real asshole. It is absolutely exhausting to use. I'm tired, boss.

I have a feeling Mythos is going to be epic levels of jerk.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

What if we built better software, not just more of it?

[w h i t @whit]

lol. gastown is now the man.

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

it is absolutely crazy to me that our entire industry has succumbed to hyper waterfall. because that's what ya'll are doing with your massive plans and beads and dark factories.

have you learned nothing?

[Mark Burgess @markburgess_osl]

It's an important distinction.

[Tuomas Artman @artman]

Today is a hard day. I shared this note with the @linear team today: We’ve made the difficult decision to increase our workforce. This is not a cost-cutting exercise or a reflection of anyone’s performance. We’re simply reimagining every role for the agentic AI era. We’re hiring. We’re sorry about that.

[w h i t @whit]

@flowpoke I have a hunch you could take the jsonl output of pi and ship it via CRDT to get an etherpad like experience in the terminal

[w h i t @whit]

@sontek you just need to fight context rot in humans obviously

[w h i t @whit]

now I want to see the comic. strangely familiar diction.

https://t.co/Uah8673NTW

[w h i t @whit]

https://t.co/Hjp0ugVark

best I can tell, my brain is assessing these models by assigning personalities to them like the vampire captain in Blindsight analyzing data by staring into renderings of agonizing faces.

[w h i t @whit]

[trying deepseek and qwen via aws bedrock]

It's weird how these difference in training data result in difference in behavior that result in what feels like
.
.
.
differences in personality.

[okazakitomohiro @oo_kk_aa]

ニャッキの伊藤有壱さんにお声掛け頂き、コマ撮りの展覧会に一作家として参加しています。私はコマ撮り分野ではない場所から活動をはじめて、デザインの視点でのコマ撮りに取り組んできましたが、今回初めてコマ撮り界の本丸の方々とご一緒でき嬉しいです。今6年目のマッチ撮影素材等を展示しています

[w h i t @whit]

what if instead of viewing the slop revolution as an assault on craft, we viewed it as broadening of the field?

[Zack Korman @ZackKorman]

Non-technical teams will be shipping code and one person on each team will get good at it so everyone on the team will go to them. Then some CEO will say “what if we took these people and put them on a team together” and they’ll name the new team something like “engineering”

[w h i t @whit]

maybe we have always been vibe coding, just not enjoying it as much.

[BuBBliK @k1rallik]

MICROSOFT EDGE STORES ALL YOUR PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT

edge password manager security fail

A security researcher just found that Edge decrypts EVERY saved password at startup and keeps them in memory - even if you never visit those sites.

The wild part? Edge still asks for your Windows password to VIEW them in the UI. The passwords are already sitting there, naked in RAM.

Chrome only decrypts passwords when you actually need them. Edge just.. doesn't.

Microsoft's response when reported: "working as intended"

If someone gets admin access on a shared machine, they can dump ALL Edge passwords from ALL logged-in users. Even disconnected ones.

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

There’s a famous Usenet story about a programmer (Mel) who refused higher level abstractions.

It was the late 1950s, and even in that era, Mel was…well today we’d call him a boomer.

Mel only wrote in raw hexadecimal. He didn’t approve of compilers, and refused to use optimizing assemblers.

"You never know where it's going to put things”, he said.

Everyone else in the company was moving on to FORTRAN, and they didn’t understand why Mel was so stubborn about using new tools. He *loved* self-modifying code.

“If a program can’t rewrite its own code”, he asked, “what good is it?”

Mel eventually left the company, and other engineers were tasked with understanding what was left.

Mel’s hand-optimized routines always beat the assemblers; but some of it looked absolutely bizarre.

One engineer took ~2 weeks to understand why there were loops with no exit condition…yet the program worked fine.

I won’t spoil all the details, you should really read it, it’s short. But it’s a fantastic piece on “what defines a real programmer?”…which is becoming increasingly relevant in this vibe-coded era.

I strive to understand computers as deeply as Mel! If we aren’t careful, we’re going to lose the “Mels” of this world to time.

That’s part of why I go so deep in my youtube videos. I hope that younger viewers are genuinely fascinated by the inner workings of our machines, instead of handing everything off to higher abstractions.

[w h i t @whit]

try... symlinks

[Adam Wathan @adamwathan]

Claude Code not supporting `.agents/` for skills and stuff is annoyingly hostile 🫠

[w h i t @whit]

@dotpem Sounds like these things have not changed since 2000 which is kinda dope.

And ime the crisis of meaning is perpetual state of angst in NorCal probably dating back to the original gold rush.

The secret is, like a tiny microplastic Jesus, the meaning lives in your heart.

[w h i t @whit]

@CaptainInsightX Carmack. Seems like the most fun.

[w h i t @whit]

< puffs a long cigarette in an even longer holder >

"I review compiler output all the time.
.
.
It's called working software and I prefer it."

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

i actually don't want this "but you don't review compiler output either" meme to die.

it's the perfect signal for being immediately able to ignore someone in this space.

[w h i t @whit]

subagent master class