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russ

@qqrs.us
103 followers 107 following 274 posts

RC W'13

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russ @qqrs.us · 01/09/2026
Rest in peace Wendell Berry
Text of the Mad Farmer manifesto
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russ @qqrs.us · 30/08/2026
Sewing practice I want to be able to repair things
Back stitch with white thread in a pair of old jeans
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russ @qqrs.us · 03/08/2026
"proof indigestion" -> "PR indigestion"
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russ @qqrs.us · 03/08/2026
"natural friction" that prompts the reader to slow down and pay attention
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russ @qqrs.us · 03/06/2026
The state of software development in 2026
iTerm2 Software Update prompt
- Fix a number of bugs that caused crashes.
- Update AI models.
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russ @qqrs.us · 04/05/2026
Screenshot of article
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russ @qqrs.us · 09/04/2026
FreeTaxUSA 4 life 🤘
FreeTaxUSA logo
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russ @qqrs.us · 09/04/2026
meaningalignment.substack.com/p/designing-...
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russ @qqrs.us · 21/03/2026
Vinay Gupta's simple critical infrastructure maps myhopeforthe.world
SCIM diagram showing six quadrants: illness, injury, too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst
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russ @qqrs.us · 20/03/2026
Prompted myself into a description of what I'm looking for in my next role
example of prompting the LLM with what I've been doing lately that may inform my career pathexamples of response, the parts that resonated
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russ @qqrs.us · 12/02/2026
Screenshot of post
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russ @qqrs.us · 12/02/2026
substack.com/home/post/p-...
Screenshot of post
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russ @qqrs.us · 10/01/2026
The YouTube Music app works fine while offline, and has some pretty darn thoughtful download settings
Screenshot of YouTube Music settings page - Downloads & Storage
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russ @qqrs.us · 08/01/2026
TIL: Diátaxis framework for software documentation diataxis.fr
Diataxis framework 2x2
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russ @qqrs.us · 16/12/2025
Super cool ferrofluid standing wave modulator at ITP Winter Show Artist is Matthew Blanco
Device with blobbly black liquid, knobs, buttons, and speaker
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russ @qqrs.us · 16/12/2025
vajra kitties goodwill find
artwork of two cats
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russ @qqrs.us · 15/12/2025
"The children are alright. They are also incomprehensible. These two facts are not contradictory."
beginning of articleending of article
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russ @qqrs.us · 15/12/2025
20th century - "dictated but not read" 21st century - "prompted but not thought about"
old letter from 1943, after the signature says "Dictated but not read by Mr Wallace"
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russ @qqrs.us · 12/12/2025
Then I checked out Zola and it’s a breath of fresh air. - simple, to the point - assumes the reader knows what an ssg is and is making an informed choice - quickstart docs use precise language and feed you information in the order you need it
Getzola.org home page
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russ @qqrs.us · 12/12/2025
c'est fini
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russ @qqrs.us · 22/11/2025
Hard to overstate how nice a communal lab space is for one-off projects testing an output pin… oh, there’s a resistor I can use as a pulldown trying to guess what size screw will fit the servo… oh, there’s a kit of M2-M4 sizes
lab tabletop with oscilloscope, resistors, etclab tabletop with soldering iron, machine screw assortment kit, etc
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russ @qqrs.us · 18/11/2025
it's alive ⚡️
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russ @qqrs.us · 11/11/2025
more doorbot
progress notes
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russ @qqrs.us · 24/10/2025
doorbot port feature complete
progress notes
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russ @qqrs.us · 24/10/2025
#embedded
winnie the pooh image macro meme template
regular bear: "reboot on hard fault"
tuxedo bear: "watchdog restore to steady state"
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russ @qqrs.us · 22/10/2025
fil-c previous memory models
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russ @qqrs.us · 15/10/2025
this week's progress
this week's progress notes
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russ @qqrs.us · 15/10/2025
www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...
Screenshot of Money Stuff newsletter
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russ @qqrs.us · 09/10/2025
more doorbot
more progress notes
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russ @qqrs.us · 01/10/2025
Working on porting doorbot to the RP2350 microcontroller again
progress notes
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russ @qqrs.us · 18/09/2025
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russ @qqrs.us · 18/09/2025
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russ @qqrs.us · 30/07/2025
did a crossword puzzle for the first time in years I always felt like... what's the point? I'd rather program a computer to solve it and now it's exactly the opposite
solved crossword
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russ @qqrs.us · 17/07/2025
Big news, Section 174 got fixed Monumentally stupid it ever came into effect newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-...
Text of article Text of article
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russ @qqrs.us · 13/07/2025
thanks, IKEA!
“This room setup isn’t just for looks! We’re aiming to reflect your lifestyle and provide solutions to enhance your daily life at home.”
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russ @qqrs.us · 13/07/2025
IKEA realistic NYC apt layout
IKEA showroom with single bed, dresser, small desk, bare walls
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russ @qqrs.us · 09/06/2025
www.jonstokes.com/p/did-claude...
No, the second time around with the Markdown chunker, I did all the AI stuff wrong.

I had settled into a comfortable groove with the bot, and I had subtly started changing the way I used it. I wasn’t paying nearly as close attention, and I had the sense in my sessions that the bot was drifting and degrading in performance, but in hindsight, it was I who was doing most of the drifting and degrading.

Somewhere in the previous few weeks, I had started to relate to the bot as a junior programmer that I had a sort of mind-meld with, where I could speak to it in shorthand and not spell everything out. And as I began to relate to Claude Code this way, I started to relax my vigilance, take shortcuts, skip steps, and generally abandon the process that had worked so well early on.

I was unintentionally giving the bot bigger and bigger bites to chew on, with less and less active direction and focused oversight. And as I was slowly slipping into this mode with Claude, I was getting more and more frustrated with the output.

When all of this started to come together for me, I went back to Claude Code for a new feature and fully engaged the earlier process that I had described in my previous posts, i.e. start with exploration and Markdown descriptions of the work, break everything up into small bites, do a little at a time, closely monitor all proposed code changes, manage the context window so that it stays “cool”, etc.

Needless to say, the quality of the output jumped all the way back up again. Maybe there really was some model drift in there that degraded the results — I have no way of verifying this. But in hindsight, I’m convinced that 90% of the problem was user error. I had gotten comfortable, lazy, and overconfident in the model’s capabilities, and as I did that, the output quality started to collapse.

This combination of narrowing the RAG inputs via tagging and sub-draft-level instructions keeps the context window focused. The idea is to help you with dividing up a large text artifact, like a multi-section newsletter, into smaller bites that are easy for the model to nail on the first try.

In general, one of the primary things we’re trying to do at Symbolic is to structure the tools so that they encourage you to do the right thing. We want to nudge you into breaking up the work in a way that will tend to lead to more consistently better results.

It’s early days with this kind of work, but it’s going to be needed for the foreseeable future, at least as long as we’re working within the limitations of the current autoregressive LLM paradigm. Commentators and investors who aren’t trying to do real work with these models daily often claim large context windows or some other advancement will eliminate the need to focus the models on bite-sized chunks of work, but these people are all wrong.

I think the returns to good UX are massively increasing relative to the returns to effort and quality in most other layers of the software stack. But that’s a topic for another day.
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russ @qqrs.us · 31/05/2025
Goodwill find
artwork of the Voyager probe golden record cover
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russ @qqrs.us · 30/05/2025
solving advent of code day 1
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russ @qqrs.us · 30/05/2025
Borland Turbo C on the T3100e
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russ @qqrs.us · 29/05/2025
highlights from articlehighlights from articlehighlights from article
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russ @qqrs.us · 25/05/2025
my speaker notes
speaker notes from discussion session
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russ @qqrs.us · 25/05/2025
I ran an AI & consciousness discussion session at @recursecenter.bsky.social alumni week very happy with how it turned out, about 20 people came the questions raised could have easily seeded a dozen more sessions!
Event description

AI & Consciousness (NGW Edition)
This is a hybrid event.

Description
A discussion on AI & consciousness. We'll start with a brief presentation so we have common language, then explore a few questions together.
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russ @qqrs.us · 23/05/2025
BASIC code from new book The Magic of Code by Samuel Arbesman
one line of QuickBasic codestill shot of generated maze
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russ @qqrs.us · 23/05/2025
1988-era Toshiba T3100e “luggable” computer
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russ @qqrs.us · 03/05/2025
if you see this post your getaway vehicle
train cresting a hill, sunshine looking on, style of R Crumb
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russ @qqrs.us · 13/04/2025
scorching 😆
The RIFF specification attempts to be a formal specification, but its formalism lacks the precision seen in other tagged formats.
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russ @qqrs.us · 05/04/2025
Thornton Wilder: I suspect that all writers have some didactic intention.
That starts the motor. Or let us say: many of the things we eat are cooked over a gas stove, but there is no taste of gas in the food.
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russ @qqrs.us · 04/04/2025
All this talk about vibe coding calls up the Programming as Theory Building paper for me web.archive.org/web/20160206...
A main claim of the Theory Building View of programming is that an essential part of any program, the theory of it, is something that could not conceivably be expressed, but is inextricably bound to human beings.

During the program life a programmer team possessing its theory remains in active control of the program, and in particular retains control over all modifications. The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved. A dead program may continue to be used for execution in a computer and to produce useful results. The actual state of death becomes visible when demands for modifications of the program cannot be intelligently answered.
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russ @qqrs.us · 04/04/2025
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