Steve Blackwell

Developer by day, programmer by night

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@Zhuinden @romxdev A lot of CS teaching (even beginner books) has the tone of "these guys know more than you, don't try to do this yourself". That gets applied to OOP, memory management, graphics, inheritance, generics, text parsing, list sorting, etc, etc. Hence the left-pad library

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@12phosphene @mrsteyk1 @valigo My own goal had been to run Android programs without loading the jvm

It might be technically possible since Android OS calls are all IPC, and you could create your own Binder interface, but that's very fragile, probably changing between versions, and maybe between vendors

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@mrsteyk1 @valigo NativeActivity is good for getting you to a basic C program, but you're limited to just game features (graphics, input, etc) and still can't do app-like things (get GPS, launch another app, etc) without the JNI

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@BakedBoons @Flightless @KyleTrainEmoji Except he used contractions twice. So maybe it is Lore?

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@a1gardener @tenobrus This happens all the time with Claude Code

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@84Aleha There are so many things good about this one, from the movement of the snow to the precise color of the sky to the subtle details of the windows

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@midnucas @CharlesCMann This is the actual answer. LLMs are a sophisticated statistical model of text. The Google AI judged that "1974" was the most likely word to show up next in that sequence. This is subtly different from getting "confused" with another source, as some mentioned.

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@RetroTechDreams Sure it's 1999? The version of Netscape you're downloading (cc32d479.exe) is from 2001

[vicki @vboykis]

Something happens to my brain after agentic coding that I can’t describe. It’s like cognitive offloading which folks have already written about, but even more. It feels like I can’t think through problems anymore. Like a fog. Using agentic but losing my hard-won agency.

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@johnkrausphotos @zone_astronomy Reminds me of flying around in the Outer Wilds lol

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@1ovthafew I read somewhere that modern advertising is often less direct, communicating what they want you to believe about a product/brand. Eg, you might understand that a BMW is a luxury car without having been inside one, or even knowing anyone who has.

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@trndytrndy @hoseokite The first half was fine. Harambe was the turning point

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@josephkerkhof OK, but that's for accidental disasters.

If you tell the Junior Engineer: "Don't go looking around for credentials", "Don't log into prod", and "You must ask for permission before ever running `rm -rf`", and then he goes and does exactly those things, then he kinda is to blame.

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@M_Cottone @corgoration Funny you put it this way because the UX is the same as a slot machine:
- Low barrier to entry: type text and go ("pull the lever" )
- Build anticipation: wait for the "thinking"
- Surprise outcome: mixed results, sometimes great, sometimes terrible

[Vjekoslav Krajačić @vkrajacic]

So prompt engineers learned English is imprecise for coding and started using stricter syntax. I wonder how long it will take before they come full circle and land back at programming languages again.

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@KelseyTuoc @benbawan This chart doesn't show the full trend. The One Child Policy was gradually relaxed during the 2010s, so there are a couple of bumps there around 2013 and 2016. But after that it kinda picked up where it would've left off.

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@riskylew The prank is pretending Taiwan is a provence of China?

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@AdsoOfBelk We can't. We've forgotten how

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@beginbot The chef may try to toss food directly into your mouth. It's a fun game for most people, but if you're a seal and you miss, your fired

[Steve Blackwell @teamloomis]

@Forord If I were Greek, I would simply spell it δισκω