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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming

@peterb.bsky.social
269 followers 176 following 2.4K posts

effort + coffee = software. See also @peterb@mathstodon.xyz

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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
But this reaction is provoked by motte-and-bailey nonsense from people like Bentham's Whatshisface (cannot be arsed to care about his name) proposing that current AIs are conscious and then retreating to "Oh so you're saying NO MACHINE can EVER be conscious? ARE YOU SURE?"
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
candlelight and Dubonnet on ice
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Also the average teenager had "more compute than the entire space race" in approximately 1995.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
My prejudice here - and I will admit that I'm guessing - is that this proposal came now as a way to route around Innamorato specifically, and if someone less left-coded was county executive it would have mysteriously not been proposed.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Who proposed the change? That seems relevant to understanding the motivations behind it.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
hey @erinkpgh.bsky.social @chrisbriem.bsky.social I need an explainer for this: www.lwvpgh.org/content.aspx...
lwvpgh.org
Read background on the ballot question for voters in Allegheny County in the 2026 General Election - League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Chapter 7 of Rustlings is all about structures. I complain more about Rust. What a complainer! Thumbnail painting: Heads Landscape (1928) by Francis Picabia youtu.be/aGU_3i5BYVg
youtu.be
Rust for Dilettantes 7 - Structures
YouTube video by Tea Leaves
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Me: "I don't think there's a realistic nightmare scenario where AI takes over (or destroys) the world. The ACTUAL risk is that incredibly dumb humans just read what it says and uncritically implement its worst suggestions." The world:
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This is a man who may have never read a single comic book.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Wait, I want to make sure I attribute correctly: I was blocked by @mikedavis.bsky.social not the OP. Phew. No great loss.
bsky.app
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
He blocked me for pointing out that “actually, all the best Batman comics have ‘Batman is clearly insane’” as their premise.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Literally the best Batman stories reduce to "It is painfully obvious that Bruce is only doing this because he's mentally ill."
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Martin Amis once wrote "It was...a symmetrical convenience—for Stalin—that a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander of the Soviet Union." So anyway this is a subtweet about the EA / AI community in the Bay Area.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I know that you know the answer is that he knows what side his bread is buttered on.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The entire problem with monads - the WHOLE ISSUE - is that it's a dumb name, and I'm tired of pretending it isn't. If they were called "sequenceables" everyone would understand them immediately.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I'm already prepared to start asking you for features (I'd like to be able to hear these words pronounced in-tool...) This is awesome. What did you use to implement it?
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Some magnificent bastard basically made Haskell but for Proto-Indo-European.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
How is it possible that Slapp Happy's _Casablanca Moon_ hasn't made it into a TV or movie soundtrack yet? www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppq9...
youtube.com
Slapp Happy - Casablanca Moon
YouTube video by shutalo
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
is is that good or bad
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Average AI dude on social media this weekend. IYKYK.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
A thing that virtually keeps me up at night: how many decades will it take to convince talented people to return to government and public service? What smart, talented young person would be foolish enough to devote their career to public service now, after seeing a generation kicked to the curb?
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The "kneel before zod" thing is in a continuum with the dumb Star Wars "Two there always are, a master and a student" thing that the Sith get - a one-off line written without any real consideration, and then every writer afterwards has to Work it Into The Lore even when it's dumb.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
man I'm RIGHT HERE.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I don't think this is tautological. It sets a constraint on what "better" or "worse" means: something is ONLY better or worse if it affects a person. That's why it's "narrow person-affecting" - it means you can't say "The end of all human life is better because it improves life for bugs."
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I remember an Old Alan King routine where he's talking to a lawyer who says "But Alan, don't you know that if you die without a will, you will die intestate?!?" Later he goes and looks up intestate which, of course, means "dying without a will."
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Matt just shut up and add the utils using first-grade arithmetic and compare magnitudes, the justification is [waves hand lazily] "it's obvious".
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I'm in another thread in another place with multiple someones who refuse to accept the idea that a utility function might be nonlinear. This does not make me think rationalists are particularly good at math.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
6502 Opcodes in Lean! I continue porting my NES emulator from #Haskell to #Lean. In this edited (and much shorter) version of the 4-hour livestream, I muse about syntax and my philosophy of programming. The thumbnail painting is Gisele (1908) by Kees Van Dongen www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuYn...
youtube.com
6502 Opcodes in Lean
YouTube video by Tea Leaves
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
also, could I have crammed any more typos into my message?
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
People who believe they it's meaningless authoritarianism to say people can't bring an iced coffee to a job interview are going to lose their minds when they learn about what the "no brown M&M's" rider was for.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Reddit allegedly found the affidavit: htv-prod-media.s3.amazonaws.com/files/md-377... (Real talk: kinda drives me nuts that news organizations don't link to source documents.)
htv-prod-media.s3.amazonaws.com
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I'm sure venting feels nice to you but it's not really parseable as having any semantic content. You take care now.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
You're in a thread where Will explicitly said he wasn't saying machines are conscious, and your posts seem to focus on the question "Is it conscious?" Someone is indeed conflating things here, and it seems to be you.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I feel like you are arguing against a Will who doesn't exist that is saying "these machines are conscious" when I read the actual Will as merely saying that we need to discuss our terminology because it's inadequate, which it unquestionably is.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Do not stare directly at the _mens rea_.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
"Pffft PittGirl is overreacting again, this sounds like normal Pittsburgh politics, it couldn't possibly be as bad as she is sayiJUMPIN' JEHOSEPHAT WHAT? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Reading "text elemental" as the description of an LLM is a real Oscar Wilde "I wish I had said that" moment.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Those aren't pen lines. Those are freaking BRUSH LINES.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
This is absolutely the dynamic in rationalist and EA-adjacent spaces. Do they just not teach Pascal's wager at school anymore or....?
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
This latest "EA's are determined to prove they understand neither altruism nor being effective" discourse about insects is an example of Kurt Vonnegut's advice from the book Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
What city were the Midway City exterior scenes filmed at? #Lanterns @jamesgunn.bsky.social
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
FACT CHECK: true.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Tired: "What's your p(doom)?" Wired: "What are the assumptions and probabilities that go into calculating your p(doom)? Show your work."
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The other aspect of using LLMs in concert with Haskell is that, for most situations, it completely solves / lets you ignore the utter nonsense that is the Haskell build+package system. If the ONLY THING you use it for is "ugh, resolve these dependency conflicts for me", it's a huge win.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
ChipWits was a 1984 Mac programming game recently remade for Mac+Windows. In Chipwits Worlds, you program bots directly in 6502 assembly language. Let's check it out. Thumbnail image: A still from Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHLB... (@snell.zone probably cares...)
youtube.com
6502 Forever: Chipwits Worlds
YouTube video by Tea Leaves
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The mad would-be autocrat was elected in large part because the people thought the competent president who delivered an effective progressive agenda was responsible for a terrible economy that didn't exist.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Every single fact I have learned about effective altruists has been against my will, so at least their practices are consistent.
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
@tbsky.app domo arigato, mr. roboto
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Gamers, Just Let People Enjoy Things Challenge (level: impossible)
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peterb from Tea Leaves Programming @peterb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
ML Researchers: we added an input to the system that introduces randomness. LLM: [does something unpredicted] ML Researchers:
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