Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 11/05/2025When I was getting my BMath people would ask “oh, what will you do with that, teach?” and I’m jealous of people taking math now who can come back with “yeah that or pope”. 0393
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 30/04/2025It just dynamically reads the date, touches the file in case it doesn't exist, and opens it up. It also opens the directory as the workspace so that I can see past notes in the sidebar. 070
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 04/04/2025Always nice getting surprise #ptpx mail! Bottom left is @verytiredrobot.bsky.social’s exploration of latent space of a facial autoencoder. Top and right, Daniel Catt’s work using a stamp with a plotter, and a nice photo booklet of the process! 171
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 08/03/2025The encoding works by mapping ASCII characters to Unicode codepoints. By subtracting 917776 (space), it's really getting the ASCII offset from the space character. E.g. the first character 'f' is 917846. Minus 917776 is 70. ASCII character 70 is... 'F'! 110
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 08/03/2025Then, it observes that there are multiple instances of 917776, so subtracts that from everything. The result effectively decodes the message enough to interpret it (FUNINTHESUN vs. "fun in the sun"). That's not supposed to work, but it does! 110
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 08/03/2025It immediately detects some unusual tokens, but can't process them directly. It starts by creating a REPL using a tool I gave it (shameless plug: forevervm.com), and prints the ordinal value of the characters. I've annotated the output it actually saw with the hidden message, "fun in the sun" 100
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 20/02/2025TIL Berkshire Hathaway is a trillion dollar Fortune 5 company because Buffet bought it for revenge in 1965. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshi... 080
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 14/02/2025Someone asked me about the difference between UTF-8 and Unicode, here's my explanation in case others find it helpful. 14511
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 13/02/2025After my post on smuggling arbitrary messages through unicode, some people asked me if AI could decode it. Gemini Flash is pretty fast at it! Have had good luck with Claude too. So far no dice with OpenAI models. This uses block.github.io/goose/ and forevervm.com 1143
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 12/02/2025People now trying to use it to get DeepSeek to give up secrets on meth making, I love putting new things into the world. 081
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 30/01/2025Two nice updates to foreverVM today thanks to @jakelazaroff.com: - charts! If a Python call returns a matplotlib chart, we render it. - new example buttons on forevervm.com 291
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 28/01/2025The hardest part of working with model context protocol server is counseling Claude through his learned helplessness. 2181
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 26/01/2025You can hide arbitrary messages in one emoji character by abusing unicode variation selectors emoji.paulbutler.org 3305
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 13/01/2025A little peek at something we're working on at @jamsocket.com 092
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 05/01/2025I like how they lock some of the levels until you complete missions. 2252
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 14/12/2024The next door apartment is blasting music and when you open up Spotify you see this, what’s your move? 240
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 13/12/2024oh I missed that update. This is why we should have caught up in London 😆 150
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 06/12/2024AI is rapidly approaching the level of a junior developer: it can now stubbornly introduce its own favorite language to the codebase without being asked to. 3312
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 03/12/2024Here's the matching algorithm, if anyone is curious. add_cons comes from russcip, and adds a constraint to the model. Essentially: x[i][i] = 0 x[i][j] + x[j][i] <= 1 sum(x[i][..]) <= max_cards[i] sum(x[i][..]) = sum(x[..][i]) Where x[i][j] = 1 iff participant i sends a card to participant j 020
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 03/12/2024One of the things I've learned about creating things on the internet is that when you get comments like this, don't picture what 354 people in a room would look like. 050
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 03/12/2024I wasn't going to beg for Product Hunt upvotes on here but we (Y-Sweet / @jamsocket.com) are tied with a friggin web3 thing so if you can find it in your heart I don't want to lose this one. 192
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 30/11/2024Treeverse now supports recursively loading more posts. Here's a post that goes exceptionally deep to try it with: treeverse.app/profile/dust... 2184
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 30/11/2024Here's a quick count of countries of #ptpx participants this year. 160
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 26/11/2024Treeverse.app now shows the conversation thread as you mouse around. Nice way to navigate deep threaded conversations on here. It doesn't have a way to load more than what the initial API call returns, yet. Other than that, I think it's now at parity with the old Twitter version. 34211
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 26/11/2024Some progress on porting treeverse.app to Bluesky: - zooming and panning works - landing page where you can paste a link (replacing bsky.app with treeverse.app in the URL bar also works) - code is now open & MIT Up next: - better handling of “wide” trees - see post content as you navigate 1192
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 24/11/2024You can try it! Replace "bsky.app" with "fantastic-lebkuchen-fe5724.netlify.app" in a Bluesky post URL. E.g. bsky.app/profile/paul... becomes fantastic-lebkuchen-fe5724.netlify.app/profile/paul... Very WIP right now, expect bugs. 061
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 24/11/2024Uh oh, now I've been nerd sniped, this is how it starts. The good news is that the atproto API is much friendly than Twitter, even pre-Elon! 1100
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 22/11/2024If you need AWS to ship something just get @chris.blue to write a blog post 😀 0141
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 17/11/2024I jotted down some ideas I’d love to see Democrats prioritize as they look ahead to the midterms. 5202
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 12/11/2024Our Local Thirst events in NYC and SF were a hit, so we're bringing it to 🇬🇧London🇬🇧 with help from our friends at @tldraw.bsky.social December 5th, see you there! lu.ma/localthirst-... 094
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 09/11/2024It feels like “unserious” as a common insult entered the lexicon fairly recently, and the google trend backs that up. Does Succession deserve the credit for this, or something else? 050
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 05/11/2024If you're in NYC, join us on Thursday for talks on deploying AI into production. lu.ma/aiinprod 061
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 27/10/2024TIL that the building that powers the cable cars in SF is also a free museum. You can just walk in from the street watch the machines that pull the cables in action. 3361
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 02/08/2023I’m cracking up because someone on reddit called non-electric bikes acoustic as a joke and they are treating it like the downfall of society. 210
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 05/07/2023Apparently there’s some wild stuff going down in NFT markets and I’m sorry but I can’t read any of it with a straight face. It’s like if you took the Markets page from a newspaper and had a 7-year old replace the company games Mad Libs-style. 120
Paul Butler @paulbutler.org · 14/05/2023This Amazon illustration for an adhesive magnet goes way harder than it needs to. 020
![In 1962, Warren Buffett began buying Berkshire Hathaway stock for his investment fund, Buffett Partnership Ltd., at $7.50 per share, anticipating that as the company liquidated textile mills there would come a tender offer when he could sell the shares at a profit. A year later, Buffett's fund owned 7% of the company.[17] In 1964, Buffett offered to sell his shares back to the company for $11.50 each.[17] Seabury Stanton, the manager of Berkshire Hathaway, told Buffett orally that he had a deal.[17] A few weeks later, Warren Buffett received the tender offer in writing, but the tender offer was for only $11.375 per share. Buffett later admitted that this lower, undercutting offer made him angry.[18] Instead of selling at the slightly lower price, Buffett bought more of the stock at an even higher price to take control of the company and fire Stanton; Stanton and his son resigned in 1965.[19] However, this left Buffett's fund with a major interest in a declining textile business.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2wwie4puaidgfvivtkpdgyzt/bafkreihgxeg2xwwa5kqtvdl573xwibnkr2dt7hchfaqgwf43g54x7gpprq)
