Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 20hAn occasional reminder: include visits to your status page as part of your monitoring suite. If all of your systems are showing green, but visits spike, then your observability stack is incomplete. 1916
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 23/09/2026Has anyone seen good examples of agents helping to edit video content? Not generation - specifically for creating scenes, transitions, audio levels etc. 000
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 21/09/2026If you're using LLMs for prose, I've come to believe that they're best applied as researchers, copyeditors and subeditors rather than as ghostwriters. 1211
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 21/09/2026Interacting with LLMs has made my note writing worse. I now hate that my throwaway thoughts sound like they're sourced from a chatbot. 030
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 17/09/2026Navier-Stokes equations are neat, but what would you research if you had access to 10,000 agents and an infinite token budget? 620
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 09/09/2026I have no idea if this log is true, but it seems kind of funny if it is. These agents speak to each other in the manner that a 14 year old's sci fi novel would script their dialogue. 150
Reposted by Tim McNamaraSam Rose @samwho.dev · 09/09/2026Rare to find the best thing on the internet today by 8:35am but here we are. 3315
Reposted by Tim McNamaraRichard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 07/09/2026Astonishing, heartwarming story in the NY Times (and, for those who like a "New Zealand mentioned", Vaughn Jones is the only ever kiwi Fields Medalist) www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/s...nytimes.comThe 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice (Gift Article)Joan Birman thought her major discoveries were behind her. Then came an email from a young neighbor — a girl who knew little but wanted to learn. 32415
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 03/09/2026"The spherical cow approximation is widely used in the literature, but is rarely justified. Here, I propose several schemes for extending the spherical cow approximation to a full multipole expansion, in which the spherical cow is simply the first term." arxiv.org/abs/2504.00506 060
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 03/09/2026Agents are going to keep awk and sed alive for a long time, aren't they? 2100
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 26/08/2026"Just enjoy it", Richard Tice, Reform UK on the warming effects of climate change 17 Aug 2026. 050
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 24/08/2026Vibe coding takes nonsensical suggestions like this and turns them into working code. What's yours? "can i implement a task queue as a postfix extension, creating a DAG with SMTP/MTP routing? every worker node could talk mail. failover, retries and async all solved. ezpz?" 170
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 17/08/2026I know that this is an oddly specific thing to become concerned about, but what in digital typesetting is this? How does it even happen? Is an MS Word thing? Do we blame Adobe PDF Maker? Chrome's PDF renderer? (Original link www.regulation.govt.nz/assets/Publi...) 330
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 04/08/2026LLMs are wordy because output tokens generate revenue for the providers, change my mind. 2111
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 30/07/2026The ship sailed a few decades ago, but I still think that the term "synthetic intelligence" is more accurate than "artificial intelligence". 2111
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 27/07/2026Rust pro-tip to shrink your target directory: If you don't use a debugger, then don't waste disk space creating debugging info. Cargo.toml [profile.dev ] debug = "line-tables-only" split-debuginfo = "unpacked" # .. and don't debug deps [profile.dev .package."*"] debug = false 4564
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 21/07/2026If you've been wondering where satellites are this evening, here's a map in-the-sky.org/satmap_plane...in-the-sky.orgLive World Map of Satellite PositionsA world map of the positions of satellites above the Earth's surface, and a planetarium view showing where they appear in the night sky. 031
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 06/07/2026Tech tip that you didn't want to know: Every file is a valid Markdown document. 040
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/07/2026I really want to learn, use and love emacs ...but it just feels like it's made by people who don't like people. 6140
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/07/2026I (well, mostly Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini unwittingly working as a team) build a tool called 'whereami' using Cosmopolitan libc. The idea is that you can run this anywhere that you can ssh into tell you about the system that's actually running there. Is this something that's worth releasing? 010
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/07/2026do coding agents know how to use ed(1), the standard text editor? 100
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 01/07/2026How many hours have been wasted searching for a portable shell scripting language? 490
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 26/06/2026I really hope that corals make it through this year's El Niño. 050
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 26/06/2026Today in cursed code: a computer program that plays pong by modifying its own source code. (Each frame is a new compilation). See github.com/uellenberg/I... 040
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 07/06/2026The "eternal virtual machine" project by Adrian Cable is written in 366 bytes of C code. Yes, it runs DOOM. www.ioccc.org/2025/cable/i...ioccc.org2025/cable - Best imaginary emulator2025 IOCCC entry cable - Best imaginary emulator 270
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/06/2026An occasional reminder that depression is a lethal disease. I'm not "okay", but I think that I'm no longer "not okay". 0230
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/06/2026Using impl Trait in the return position is one of Rust's most useful features for library authors. It allows you to change the concrete type without breaking semver. e.g. `fn printable() -> impl std::fmt::Display` would enable you to return anything that you want that implements Display. 1190
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/06/2026I seriously hate that worse is better. It just doesn't seem fair somehow. 030
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 25/05/2026Makes sense. AllBirds makes the most comfortable cloud. All natural fibres too, which is nice. 160
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 25/05/2026This sounds like trolling, but isn't... I'm genuinely curious about whether it's possible to parse an integer using C's standard library while being memory safe. blog.habets.se/2022/10/No-w...blog.habets.seNo way to parse integers in CThere are a few ways to attempt to parse a string into a number in the C standard library. They are ALL broken. 1171
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 17/05/2026I guess Aristotle was around a long time ago, but when did the looksmaxxing crew forget that vanity is a vice, rather than a virtue? 140
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 14/05/2026might try a coding livestream tomorrow - probably at a time that suits nobody everytimezone.com/s/98fe222eeverytimezone.comEvery Time Zone ConverterEasily find the exact time difference with the visual Time Zone Converter. Find meeting times for your contacts, locations and places around the world. Never warp your brain with time zone math again. 260
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 11/04/2026Mythos is a big deal because of its second-order effects. If it only cost $10b to train a cyber weapon that can easily penetrate all heavily-used operating systems, I expect that the information security industry will encounter many private variants within 24 months. 1120
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 19/03/2026Hello, Internet. Sorry that I haven't been here for a while. It turns out that burnout can get as bad as they say. How are you doing? 6640
Reposted by Tim McNamaraMara Bos @mara.bsky.social · 16/02/2026After carefully reading and ranking a record number of 185 submissions from 148 speakers, we finally finished the talk selection for RustWeek 2026! I'm *really* excited about the lineup! Check it out here: 2026.rustweek.org/blog/2026-02... Don't forget to buy your ticket! See you in Utrecht! 0435
Reposted by Tim McNamaraPatrick Morgan @patrickmorgan.bsky.social · 17/12/2025It is a truth universally acknowledged, bicycles give you the freedom that car ads promise. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/the-joy-o... @tomflood.bsky.social @cyclingactionnz.bsky.social @nzherald.bsky.socialnzherald.co.nzSimon Wilson: Bicycles give you the freedom that car ads promiseMy last Herald column: A city safe for cycling is a city fit for every good purpose. 18918
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 16/12/2025Do you have any examples of instructional tech videos that you really like? I'm looking it at increasing the quality of mine and would love to know examples of formats that work well. 1272
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 10/12/2025Not all safe Rust code is equally safe. Here's what that means and why I argue that Rust has a spectrum of safety rather than one that's binary as indicated by the unsafe keyword. Notes from "Pointer Poker" and more: Levels of safety beyond the safe/unsafe dichotomy www.patreon.com/posts/14555... 130
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 08/12/2025Prediction: the next wave of programming languages will just be AI prompts. Someone's just released ai_bindgen (github.com/germangb/ai...) into the Rust ecosystem, which allows annotation to create functionality with natural language: 3100
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 03/12/2025Hi pocket friends 👋, I have been thinking about offering something that people could expense with their training budget (while also learning a lot, obviously!).. Idea: monthly 30-90min deep dive to people on a paid tier of my Patreon. 110
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/12/2025At this point, I'm creating a Reddit bot that just adds helpful comments to threads such as "AI slop" and "Is this a bot?" 150
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/12/2025Apparently the message here is that I should be uploading more ragebait. 2100
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/12/2025Code review: do you know why this code triggers undefined behavior? play.rust-lang.org/?version=st... 3101
Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 30/11/2025This doesn't feel particularly "timClicks" (I've tried very hard to steer away from engagement bait).. but I also sort of feel the need to respond to the idea that Fil-C is a better Rust. Should I make the video? If so, use this thumbnail or something less antagonistic? 1120