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Tom

@erispoe.bsky.social

251 followers 835 following 565 posts

Founder. I make machines do useful things. Effect. Public transit geek. Berlin based. Being afraid of immigrants is weak af.

Posts Replies Media

Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Or French

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Poster for Ridicule, a 1996 French historical satire directed by Patrice Leconte and set at the court of Louis XVI. A man in black 18th-century dress kneels on the grass and bows deeply at the feet of a standing woman in an elaborate cream-and-gold gown, suggesting the exaggerated etiquette and humiliating social games of Versailles that drive the film’s story. Other courtiers appear blurred in the background. “Sélection Officielle Cannes 96” is printed across the top. The large dark-red title Ridicule appears below the image, followed by the tagline “Il n’épargne personne” (“It spares no one”).

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Colin Robinson, the energy vampire played by Mark Proksch in What We Do in the Shadows, peers through an office doorway in his trademark glasses, tan cardigan, shirt, and tie, looking every bit the dull, unassuming coworker he uses as cover while draining people’s energy through tedious conversation.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Ursula von der Leyen and Mark Carney, reimagined in the roles of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The image references the famous photograph of Reagan and Thatcher walking together at Camp David, with von der Leyen taking Reagan’s place and Carney accompanying her in Thatcher’s. A familiar image of the transatlantic relationship, recast for a different era.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Walter White, bald with a reddish goatee and glasses, sits shaken in a Denny's booth wearing a brown Kenny Rogers t-shirt, staring down. Across the table, seen from behind, Jesse Pinkman reaches for a glass of syrup beside a plate of pancakes. Backlit diner windows behind them. From Breaking Bad, season 4 episode 1 ("Box Cutter"), the diner scene after Victor's murder, radiating Walt's stunned "Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?" energy.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

This is the French nuclear deterrence doctrine

Film still from Dune: Part Two (2024). Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalet, stands bruised and dust-covered in layered desert robes inside a dim, amber-lit room on Arrakis. He addresses an out-of-focus figure, Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, as a large crowd of pale-robed Fremen watches behind him. The subtitle reads: “If the Great Houses attack, our atomics will obliterate all spice fields.” The scene shows his threat to destroy Arrakis’s spice production if the Great Houses invade.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

It sucks even when you pay, if you don’t force it to make an effort. I asked Opus a culture culture question, on mobile with high effort. It made no research and answered from memory. And made up an example. When I asked it to verify it corrected its previous answer.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

#F1 pundits: make zero effort to understand energy recovery and deployment #F1 pundits trying to explain the difference in pace between George and Kimi:

Four-panel “confused math lady” meme showing close-ups of a blonde woman staring off with a puzzled, suspicious expression while mathematical formulas, geometric diagrams, graphs, and equations are overlaid around her face. The meme is commonly used to represent someone trying to process confusing information, mentally calculate something, or make sense of a situation that doesn’t add up.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Hate the new thinking level selector in ChatGPT. Vibes over specificity. Also completely inconsistent between web and mobile app.

Screenshot of a ChatGPT interface showing an expanded settings control labeled “Extra High.” A horizontal slider beneath it is set near the high end, with several unlabeled points along the scale and an “Advanced” option below.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Radicalized against AI

Screenshot of a Google search for “What is the fattiest pastry in the world?” The AI Overview shows three photos of golden-brown kouign-amann pastries and states that kouign-amann is widely known as the world’s fattiest pastry, made with approximately 30% butter, 30% sugar, and 40% flour.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Trade what now

Three-panel black-and-white comic, known as the “No Take, Only Throw” meme. A floppy-eared dog holds a ball in its mouth and looks hopeful beneath the words “Pls throw??” In the second panel, a person reaches toward the ball; the dog lowers its eyebrows and protests, “NO TAKE!!” The final close-up shows the dog still gripping the ball and insisting, “ONLY THROW.” The joke is the dog’s impossible demand that the ball be thrown without anyone first taking it from its mouth.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Still from the 1984 Computer Chronicles episode “Artificial Intelligence.” John McCarthy, identified by the on-screen caption as a professor of computer science at Stanford University, sits in a television studio wearing dark-framed glasses, a beige suit, white shirt, and dark tie. He has thick white hair and a long pointed white beard. Yellow-green text across the lower half reads: “JOHN McCARTHY, Prof. of Computer Science, Stanford University.”

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Summer reading ready Cat Hicks’s aka @grimalkina.bsky.social The Psychology of Software Teams Bought on shesaid.buchhandlung.de/shop/article... so I can read it however I want and support my local queer bookstore.

A hand holds a black Kobo e-reader in a lush balcony garden, surrounded by potted fruit trees with dense green leaves and several small, unripe fruits. The screen displays Cat Hicks’s The Psychology of Software Teams, whose grayscale cover combines layered mountain photographs with overlapping statistical ridgeline curves. A white residential building and red rooftops appear softly blurred in the background beneath an overcast sky.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

A screenshot of a tweet by James Kirkpatrick, username @James_Kpatrick. The tweet says, “These two books contain the sum total of all human knowledge.” Below the text are two book covers side by side. On the left is What They Teach You at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton. On the right is Mark H. McCormack’s What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School: Notes from a Street-smart Executive.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

A cropped black terminal screenshot from the user showing Claude Code praising its own output. The visible text reads: “Outstanding rigor, single best document…”. The joke is that the coding agent appears to be evaluating its own work and giving itself high praise.

A meme image known as “Obama awards Obama a medal.” It shows a doctored awards ceremony where Barack Obama appears twice: one Obama places a medal around the neck of another smiling Obama. The meme is commonly used to mock or joke about someone congratulating themselves, taking credit, or giving themselves an award.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

A surreal photorealistic variation on the “Laughing Men in Suits” meme, the famous Oval Office image of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Walter Cronkite, and other suited men laughing together after Cronkite’s 1981 interview with Reagan. In this altered version, every man has been replaced by an anthropomorphic leopard wearing a dark business suit, white shirt, and tie. The leopards stand tightly grouped in the same party-like arrangement, holding wine glasses and napkins while laughing with open mouths and squinting eyes. One leopard bends forward in the foreground with a drink in hand, echoing the original meme’s central laughing figure. The cream walls, dark doorway, gilded frame, and warm reception lighting preserve the formal political-photo setting, turning the familiar image of powerful men laughing into a strange leopard cocktail-party scene.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

The story of that piece is amazing too. Having to unmount Jay Defeo’s apartment facade to take it out. Spent decades walled in. The rediscovered and restored. It’s so present.

Close-up detail of Jay DeFeo’s The Rose, showing thick, sculptural ridges of layered beige, gray, and black paint. The surface looks almost geological, with dense slabs, cracks, scraped edges, and rough cavities that emphasize the painting’s heavy, built-up texture.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

A large ASCII diagram titled “Two cycles at once in imperial China” shows how the broad dynastic cycle contains a smaller court-succession cycle. The outer box represents the dynasty-level cycle: a new ruling house rises, claims the Mandate of Heaven, rebuilds order through laws, taxes, grain systems, roads, and bureaucracy, reaches a stable imperial phase, then begins to weaken through palace politics, structural strain, famine, raids, corruption, warlordism, rebellion, and collapse. At the bottom, the diagram loops back to the beginning as a new house claims Heaven’s Mandate and starts the cycle again.

Inside the outer dynastic loop is a smaller repeated palace cycle. It begins with a minor emperor inheriting the throne. An empress dowager rules as regent, and her consort clan gains power. When the emperor grows up, he tries to take control, often by allying with eunuchs. The eunuchs help purge the consort clan, then dominate access to the court. Scholar-officials protest through memorials and factional resistance. The emperor then dies, often leaving another weak or young heir, causing the inner loop to repeat. The diagram shows that repeated palace succession crises can weaken the dynasty from within, pushing it toward the larger dynastic crisis and eventual reset.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

A honest day of work at the code factory.

Claude Code screenshot with white monospaced text on a black background reading “STATUS: EXECUTION_COMPLETE” and, below it, “* Cogitated for 10h 42m 5s.”

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Screenshot from Claude Code showing a single bullet point in a dark terminal-style interface reading: “The deslop agents are still working.”

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Asked Claude to summarize my setup 😁

PreToolUse is the policy engine. Three separate hooks gate three tool categories:
Bash (pre-tool-bash.ts) runs a layered check. First, regex patterns catch non-recoverable operations on the raw command string before parsing: rm -rf /, dd of=/dev/*, fork bombs, npm unpublish, git history purge, cloud resource deletion. Then the command gets tokenized and validated against an allowlist of known executables (SAFE_BASES). Unknown base = deny. Guards enforce project root boundaries, block dangerous env vars (LD_PRELOAD, PATH, NODE_OPTIONS), restrict output redirections, and sandbox command substitutions to pure-read commands with no pipes or chaining. Specialized handlers add per-tool rules: pnpm add must use catalog:, Docker blocks privilege escalation flags, claude blocks --dangerously-skip-permissions.

Edit (pre-tool-edit.ts) blocks edits outside the project root, blocks shell script modifications, and prevents package.json dependency mutations (it simulates the edit, diffs the dependency fields, and denies if they changed). Two migration guards prevent modifying migrations that exist on origin/main and creating a second migration file per branch.
MCP (pre-tool-mcp.ts) validates server identity and parameters. Unknown MCP servers are denied. The codex tool gets a parameter allowlist (only prompt). Context7 allows two specific tools. Unknown server = deny.

PostToolUse (post-tool-check.ts) runs ESLint on touched files plus full tsc after every edit. If the check fails and the errors mention files the LLM just touched, it blocks. If the errors are in untouched files (pre-existing baseline), it continues with an informational message. The LLM must fix its own regressions but is not blocked by legacy debt.

Nudges
Every deny carries concrete recovery instructions. When the bash hook blocks npx some-tool, the nudge says “Use pnpm exec some-tool instead.” The LLM reads this as its “why it was blocked” feedback and retries correctly. No human needed.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Didn’t even have to change any setting.

Screenshot of a ChatGPT 5.2 conversation on an iPhone. The user asks, “I need to get my car washed but the car wash is only 300 meters away. Should I walk or drive to the car wash.” ChatGPT replies that 300 meters is a 3 to 4 minute walk at about 5 km/h, citing standard pedestrian speed estimates, and begins outlining considerations, including that if the car is parked at home and needs to be brought there, you would have to drive.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

A second Claude Max plan was subscribed to.

A photograph showing a man leaning in to quietly speak into the ear of former U.S. President George W. Bush, who is sitting and looking forward with a serious expression. The setting appears to be a classroom with children’s artwork in the background. The image is widely shared as the moment Bush was informed a second plane struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

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Tom @erispoe.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Come join us for the second edition of the Effect Berlin Meetup, on Thursday, Jan 29 at 6pm. Effect is the missing standard library for Typescript, and makes writing functional and production-grade code easier. Come learn more or share your experience! luma.com/xdpn0t7a @effect-ts.bsky.social

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