What are the signs, for you, that text was generated by Artificial Intelligence? My first big run-in with this was when I was exploring GPT-4 through writing fantasy, and every other sentence included the phrase, "weaving a tapestry". ChatGPT had some kind of weird, sycophantic relationship with tapestry
A lot of people add unnecessary preambles to their LLM prompts—and that’s what this post is pushing back on. Sometimes it's a simple— "Please don't hallucinate" or... I knew someone who prepended every prompt with a 200-token manifesto: "When responding, focus
Donald Knuth is quoted as saying: Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Today we're going to chase that thread. In doing so, we're going to uncover the story of when Donald Knuth "skill-issued" Edsger Dijkstra. But first we have to figure out—
There's a new pope, and he's from Chicago! He's not just the first pope from the windy city, but, as you might've heard, he's the first North American pope, ever. LET'S GOOOOOOO 🦅🦅🦅 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅!!!!!!!!!!! No, but seriously, this marks a
SpacetimeDB is a unique "database", written in Rust, that was developed by Clockwork Labs, and a month ago made a bit of a splash with their promotional video. It's available on GitHub under a BSL 1.1 license. (This is notably not open-source, but instead source-available.
Lamenting The Enshittification of Substack The wave of enshittification has finally reached the shores of Substack in the form of Substack Reels. Yes—the attention-machine has scaled the ivory tower of our once peaceful platform, taken a big dump, and in its wake has left us with an endless supply
You Can’t Replace a Steel-Drivin’ Man "Now did the Lord say that machines ought to take place of the livin’? / And what’s a substitute for bread and beans? I ain’t seen it! / Do engines get rewarded for their steam? ... John Henry said to his captain “A
First I submitted a request to Substack’s support team (who are very hard to get a hold of!), and then I published an open letter about the lack of syntax highlighting on the platform. But the request has blown to the wayside. A few days ago, I got this
Intro: The Pokémon Company Doesn’t Miss Here’s a little something different on Slam Dunk Software—video games. But don’t worry, I’ll tie it into some open-source, linux programmer nerd stuff at the end. The Pokémon Company doesn’t miss. They’re the LeBron James of media
It’s three months into 2025—Tailwind is old news, Rails is on v8.0.2, Remix is, like, a mature framework, Ubuntu is rewriting GNU coreutils in Rust, and programmers are vibing. Let’s all just relax, and read a nice, chill blog post—we’re gonna go back
And they have a ferocious appetite!
I humbly ask; on behalf of software engineers, developers, tech writers, and any other category of person that writes on Substack using code blocks; that you provide us with syntax highlighting capabilities. The Current Solutions When writing technical blogs, whether it be programming tutorials, news or current events, deep dives,