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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻

@jbranchaud.bsky.social
1.3K followers 430 following 2K posts

Free-Range Software Dev and Consultant ✨ PostgreSQL • Ruby on Rails • TypeScript • React ✨ 🏃🐈🍹🎱 (he/him) | Chicago | Work with me: visualmode.dev

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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 17h
Someone complained to me about the 128 work emails they got that they needed to triage to figure out what needed a response. I asked if they’d tried having AI triage the pile. They scoffed, “it’s just gonna hallucinate a bunch of stuff.” Idk, you gotta recheck those assumptions often.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
A couple times this week I appended this to the end of Opus 5.5 prompts about improving clunky UI elements — I’m gobsmacked by the results.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
My version of "do a breakthrough" today was asking Claude to "rework this UI element, make it as intuitive to use as possible." It improved the component in four meaningful ways and I would have only thought to prompt for one or two of those.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
lol I was in the relay pen for the chicago triathlon, at like 8am on a Sunday, and these two other guys also waiting for their legs of the event were sitting in the grass talking about claude code and agentic workflows
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I've got the rest of the month to put together a costume for "Sycophantic ChatGPT". Then I can wander around the halloween party all night telling people, "You're absolutely right!" and "Great point, you're clearly an expert in this area."
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
My personal stance on bringing an iced coffee to a job interview is that I'm sweating enough as it is, so I don't also need a beverage that is sweating everywhere.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I feel like if I’m not regularly throwing away my assumptions about how these systems work, then I’m not getting the most out of them.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The adventure continues with book four of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series — The Gate of the Feral Gods.
A black Kindle e-reader resting on the vinyl sleeve of Daft Punk’s Alive 2007, with its white, blue, and red pyramid outlines and bright blue splashes visible around the edges. The grayscale screen shows the cover of “The Gate of the Feral Gods,” Dungeon Crawler Carl Book IV by Matt Dinniman. On the cover, a giant grotesque creature’s face looms in a stormy sky above a biplane, while a muscular man in a bandana mask falls toward the viewer with arms outstretched, alongside a small figure wearing sunglasses.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I picked it up from Doug Turnbull's post "Don't classify. Hallucinate!" which Simon Willison mentioned on his blog. softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/08...
softwaredoug.com
Don’t classify. Hallucinate!
A useful pattern for LLM classification at scale is to let it hallucinate plausible, fake entities. Then resolve to real ones.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Have an LLM hallucinate tags for a piece of content and then translate those to actual tags (vocabulary) using a small in-memory model trained on those tags' embeddings — that's the technique I'm experimenting with for tagging all of my TIL posts. github.com/jbranchaud/t...
github.com
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
22/ Heaven’s River (2020) Dennis E. Taylor bsky.app/profile/jbra...
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Chicago!
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Bonus: I won today’s game with a hide time + time bonuses of 3h22m. What sealed the deal for me was a hilarious and devastating pull of the “Curse of the Lemon Phylactery” which forced them to track down lemons and tape them to themselves for the rest of my turn.
A white playing card from the Jet Lag Hide and Seek game, lying on top of a small deck on gravelly asphalt. The title reads “Curse of the Lemon Phylactery.” The card text says: “Before asking another question, the seekers must each find a lemon and affix it to the outermost layer of their clothes or skin. If, at any point, one of these lemons is no longer touching a seeker, you are awarded an extra S 30 / M 45 / L 60 minutes. This curse cannot be played during the endgame.” The S, M, and L values appear in yellow, orange, and red badges. At the bottom: “Casting cost: Discard a powerup.”
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
After binging the first 6 episodes of the current season of Jet Lag (S19, Japanorama) and playing a 3-person medium game of Jet Lag Hide & Seek in Chicago all day today, we then saw the S19 in-theater finale tonight. This is BiL’s obsession, but I have grown fond of the show.
Promotional poster for “Jet Lag: The Game – Japanorama.” The title logo sits at the top, with a red rising-sun circle forming the “O” in “Japanorama,” over an orange sunset sky with the sun glowing above the ocean horizon. Four smiling young men stand shoulder to shoulder in the foreground with the beach behind them, most wearing caps, lapel mics, and backpacks; one has sport sunglasses perched on his cap and wears a Black Diamond t-shirt. Banners near the bottom read “Season Finale” and “In theaters Oct 3rd at 7 PM,” with “Nebula Original” in small text at the base.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
It’s a spooky month which is a good time for spooky reads. I’ll be reading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
A worn paperback copy of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson lying on weathered gray wooden deck boards. The Penguin cover shows a dark, stormy sky above a sprawling gothic mansion with turrets and chimneys, its lower windows glowing. Below the house, a torn-paper edge reveals the lower half of a woman’s face with long dark hair, her lips slightly parted. A red-and-white circular badge reads “Netflix: Inspiration for the Netflix series.”
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
At this point, my top two recommendations for an RSS reader are: 1. NetNewsWire 2. use Claude Code to roll your own I’m currently using 1 and transitioning to 2.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
damn, too bad this hat is sold out
Chicago-themed running gear on a sidewalk: a navy “rnnr” cap, worn running shoes, a watch, and “CHI TOWN 26.2” stickers. A rat eats pepperoni pizza beside a pigeon, with elevated train tracks and the Chicago skyline in the background.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I find it very relatable that the GitHub web UI has the control for changing the base branch of a PR behind a button labelled 'Edit Title'. As a UI adds features and gets crowded, it can be hard to figure out where to consolidate all of that. I've run into that on a lot of projects.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
21/ Platform Decay (2026) Martha Wells bsky.app/profile/jbra...
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Yep, it’s a lot of fun. The writing isn’t spectacular, but that gets better as it goes. Entertaining from the get-go though.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I used Claude to figure out why my garbage disposal wasn't working and how to fix it, instead of having to call a repair person for what turned out to be an easy fix. Unprompted, Claude even drew a diagram for me to explain specifically what I was looking for.
Cutaway cross-section of a garbage disposal, labeled: the grinding chamber (the large upper housing), two impellers mounted on top of the flywheel plate ("swivel freely — normal"), the shredder ring fixed to the chamber wall on either side ("stationary"), the flywheel plate spanning the chamber floor ("must turn as one piece"), and a hex socket on the underside of the motor housing below ("1/4 in. Allen wrench").
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I used this RSS feed to wire up a daily-updating list of my most recent blogmarks in my github profile README that already lists my most recent TILs. github.com/jbranchaud
Screenshot of Josh Branchaud’s GitHub profile highlighting “Latest Blogmarks” in a pink rectangle below his TIL topic counts. The section links to articles on coding agents, learning, AI models, attention, and writing with an LLM, each with tags and a publication date.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I often have a couple different books that I'm in the middle of reading at the same time. I currently have myself in the middle of several substantial series and it's kind of a lot. - The Murderbot Diaries (Platform Decay) - Dungeon Crawler Carl (#3) - ACOTAR (just finished #3) - Bobiverse (#4)
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Having re-read the most recent few books in the series, I’m finally on to reading Martha Wells’ latest murderbot installment — Platform Decay.
Hardcover of Martha Wells’s “Platform Decay” (The Murderbot Diaries) on a wooden floor; the cover shows an armored figure floating head-down beside a ladder in a dark spaceship.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The high-level artifact under review, more often than not, is the web app running in staging.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Starting today, direct to your RSS reader, you can get quotes and notes on the most interesting things I'm reading. Shoutout to @jakeworth.com for recommending that I get an RSS feed set up for these. still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks
Screenshot from NetNewsWire of the RSS feed for my blogmarks from VisualMode
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
is there some setting I need to change? this really degrades the UX of the iphone keyboard.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
at some point the US/English iPhone keyboard and auto-complete suggestions stopped offering emojis as replacements when I would type things like "think" (🤔), "strong" (💪), etc. I don't know why this changed and I want it it back.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I continue to be surprised by the odd ways that long-existing SaaS products have pivoted themselves into "AI" products. I go to update my RSS feed folder structure and instead am met with "The fastest way to track emerging threats with AI."
Screenshot of the Feedly Threat Intelligence homepage. The headline reads "The fastest way to track emerging threats with AI," with a subheading describing Feedly as an AI platform for CTI teams and buttons for "Get started for free" and "Book a Demo." Below, an "Analyze" tab shows a product preview where a user asks the AI to rank three CVEs by patching priority.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Whoever at @discord.com made it so that gifs stop animating when the discord app loses focus -- thank you!! 🤩
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
What are your favorite places to engage with an "intentional internet"? My main one, which I'm not always in the habit of using, is browsing all the RSS feeds I have in the NetNewsWire app running locally on my mac. still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks/340
still.visualmode.dev
Attention is all you have | Blogmarks | VisualMode
I can tell that I've had my head in LLM research papers a lot lately because I saw the title of this post ("Attention is all you have") and thought it looked a lot like Attention Is All You Need.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I’m competing in the APA Amateur Open which is a Chicago-area qualifier for the big tournament in Vegas. There are a lot of high-level players here. I’m hoping I can string together a few strong matches.
Cryptic tournament schedule on a sheet of paper with people and pool tables in the background
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I’m reading the third book in Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl series — The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook
The kindle cover of Matt Dinniman’s The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook which shows Carl midair about to punch some muscled-up dungeon boss.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
experimenting with: "Only write code comments that cover critical and unintuitive behavior, preferring concision and clarity. A comment should have long-term durability. Skip the comment if it is only disclosing reasoning about the specifics of this change."
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
feels like a I downloaded this directly from Tim Robinson's brain
Gemini / NanoBanana prompt window for "A slice of pizza with a ton of rizz" and then an image of a greasy pizza box with a slice of pizza on top wearing a black crushed velvet fedora, circle sun glasses, and a "Rizz King" gold chain. In the background is a line of people waiting to buy pizza by the slice from a walk up 24 hour pizza shop.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
ooh, Bicep played @thelotradio.com yesterday!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9r5...
youtube.com
Bicep @TheLotRadio 09-15-2026
YouTube video by The Lot Radio
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
20/ A Court of Wings and Ruin (2017) Sarah J. Maas bsky.app/profile/jbra...
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
open.spotify.com/artist/1TIbq...
open.spotify.com
⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ
Artist · 231.6K monthly listeners.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I just noticed that @swyx.io ​links to my TIL repo in the Learn In Public article. Absolutely incredible to be listed in the same company as all these other writers and creators. Learn In Public - swyx.io/learn-in-pub... TIL repo - github.com/jbranchaud/til
the list of related links at the bottom of an article with a line highlighting the mention of me and my TIL repo
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I'm about to start Platform Decay!
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I really enjoyed the Inference Engineering Masterclass episode of latent space; it gave me way more appreciation for the crazy level of engineering and optimization that goes in to getting tokens quickly out of a model www.latent.space/p/inference-...
latent.space
The Inference Engineering Masterclass — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten
Baseten just raised a $13B Series F and is now one of the leading kings of inference engineering. We go into everything you need to know for autoregressive and diffusion engineering.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
So much of my code writing is now LLM-first. I want to try doing more of what you're describing here. I enjoy writing code and it would be nice for the LLM to be in a sidecar with useful pointers as I go.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
How do you get from a simple compression algorithm (BPE) proposed in 1994 to the underlying translation layer (vocabulary) for today's LLMs? Here are my notes from Craig Trim's 30 Year History of BPE --> still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks/326
still.visualmode.dev
The 30-Year Journey of BPE | Blogmarks | VisualMode
This article is an excellent resource for what BPE (Byte-Pair Encoding) is, what the relevant research is (and how they relate to one another), and some intuition for why BPE is a good choice when it comes to build, training, and operating LLMs.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I’m bummed that The Traitors decided to do an all-civilian season. It’s objectively better with the various factions of B and C-list celebs. I’m looking forward to it though and I bet it will still be good.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
19/ System Collapse (2023) Martha Wells bsky.app/profile/jbra...
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
We recently watched Lucky — fun spin on the heist thriller genre. Pretty good action throughout. A bit heavy-handed with the plot/writing at times. Overall really enjoyed it.
Cover photo of Lucky, an Apple TV show with Anya Taylor-Joy. She is in the foreground, burning car in the background. Lots of oranges and reds.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Sometimes I like to sass back to Claude with a little bit of "not sure your theory holds water" and concern for the "blast radius" of its changes.
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Friendly reminder that this Thomas Bangalter (of Daft Punk) and Fred again.. set exists www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfF8...
youtube.com
Fred again.. & Thomas Bangalter (USB002, Alexandra Palace, London 27 February 2026)
YouTube video by Fred again . .
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🎱 Josh Branchaud 👻 @jbranchaud.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Mango is the best la croix flavor and it’s not even close
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