Derick Winkworth

Network Engineering and Software Development. Opinions are my own.

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

I built a memory system that periodically analyzes my interactions, breaks it down into conversation threads, and saves those threads to disk. When I load claude, it loads those conversation threads.. They are summarized every 200k tokens or so, but the threads remain available so no detail is actually lost.

[Tanay Mehta @serious_mehta]

Every time I start a new session, my agent has to re-learn what everything in my project it from scratch. This is such a repetitive waste of tokens. AGENTS [dot] md doesn't solve this either because it's hard to keep it up to date and still burns tokens.

Any proper solutions?

[Computer Science @CompSciFact]

'It has long been my personal view that the separation of practical and theoretical work is artificial and injurious.' -- Christopher Strachey

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

There should be zero inheritance tax. The tax on that money was already paid and if I give it to my children, even if they are adults, it should be tax free.

[FOX Business @FoxBusiness]

United Airlines CEO calls for national wealth tax, inheritance taxes approaching 100% https://t.co/ZuaBpyUNY6

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

Everything I've seen or read makes me not want to watch it. It just doesn't look interesting to me at all.

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

You Can See Everything is a great film but I'm going to need people to stop telling me that it "the best movie I've ever seen"

This is starting to feel kinda culty

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

You know what is a great resource for muscling through these? Claude.

[Ratul Mahajan @ratulm]

Why I dread reading cellular networking papers:

A paper I'm reading has:

- 77 abbreviations, 30 of which are never expanded. WTF is UPF?
- Abbreviations account for 20% of nouns and 8% of all words.
- 20% of sentences contain 3+ abbreviations.

[Ratul Mahajan @ratulm]

Why I dread reading cellular networking papers:

A paper I'm reading has:

- 77 abbreviations, 30 of which are never expanded. WTF is UPF?
- Abbreviations account for 20% of nouns and 8% of all words.
- 20% of sentences contain 3+ abbreviations.

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

Which is why just training models on what we know now and burning all the books or deleting all the archives is the wrong answer, actually.

[Hank Yeomans @HankYeomans]

@haider1 Throughout history everyone thought there would be no more things to solve. Humans have proven that wrong. I don’t really subscribe to the idea of a “solved” world. Seems too utopian. Massive progress? yes absolutely.

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

There is a person on Facebook marketplace selling the complete 120 issue collection of BYTE magazine, all shrink-wrapped in mint condition, for 1400 bucks.

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

I lived through XSLT.

[zack @zack_overflow]

Basically anyone who says they dislike a programming language for aesthetic syntax reasons (e.g. Rust) just needs to update their taste in languages

Spend time writing/reading a Lisp variant and this will remodel how you view/value syntactical aesthetics

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

It's the second most valuable skill, but yes. John is largely correct.

The first skill is to generate ideas. Good, bad, mediocre... just have ideas. Then articulate them.

[John Crickett @johncrickett]

So everyone's excited about this "research", but it's not research.

It's an opinion piece from an investment firm.

And the big conclusion is that software engineers need to become software engineers:

"The most valuable skill is no longer writing code efficiently but articulating tasks with sufficient clarity, context, and constraints..."

That's always been the most valuable skill.

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

"Be as adverse to uncertainty as the situation will allow."

I like this, I mean as some kind of axiom, with respect to network engineering.

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

It will always be Lake Ontario. Native Americans called it that long before the colonies. The name has nothing to do with the province or Canada.

This is stupid. Thank for you for your time.

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

yeah. Makes me sad. So far so good with Grok Build though.

[Ramon 🎹 @rvm0n_]

claude opus 5 is the worst fucking model ever

what the fuck is this

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

"x.y.z = foo" in a long list was the height of perfection for configuration files and we have all dishonored the Gods for turning away from it.

[Jeff Fritz @csharpfritz]

I’m having a real problem: why is TOML a thing? Someone decided to reinvent INI files from the 1980s and discard all of the reasons we moved on from them over the last 40 years

Why would I choose TOML over JSON, XML, or even YAML?

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

@HankYeomans If your stuffed, blow out those sinuses with some oxymetazoline, some ashgawanda (or however you spell that), some l-theanine and sleep. Oh and electrolytes. Loads of those.

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

@mattwridley wrote two whole books about this topic.

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

Hey @grok, how much of science has been rooted in engineering? It has always been my understanding that they have been intertwined.

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

And neither of them is science.

[Derick Winkworth @cloudtoad]

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[avery @codeshaunted]

“Simplicity was an important design criterion for C++”

-Bjarne Stroustrup, 1991

💀💀💀

[Scott F. Robohn @scottrobohn]

@cloudtoad #NetworkingNeedsNetworkers