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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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And they have a ferocious appetite!
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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,
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(It's not something your Ai can do)