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Tim McNamara

@timclicks.dev
3.6K followers 466 following 1.2K posts

Trainer and consultant on the Rust programming language. Author of Rust in Action. Team climate. Walkable neighbourhoods are nice, actually. Signal: @timclicks.01

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 20h
/goal prosperity and well-being for all
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 20h
An 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.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 23/09/2026
Has anyone seen good examples of agents helping to edit video content? Not generation - specifically for creating scenes, transitions, audio levels etc.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 21/09/2026
If 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.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 21/09/2026
Interacting with LLMs has made my note writing worse. I now hate that my throwaway thoughts sound like they're sourced from a chatbot.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 17/09/2026
Navier-Stokes equations are neat, but what would you research if you had access to 10,000 agents and an infinite token budget?
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 09/09/2026
I 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.
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Reposted by Tim McNamara
Sam Rose @samwho.dev · 09/09/2026
Rare to find the best thing on the internet today by 8:35am but here we are.
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Reposted by Tim McNamara
Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Astonishing, 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.com
The 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.
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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
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 03/09/2026
Agents are going to keep awk and sed alive for a long time, aren't they?
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 27/08/2026
Making some progress with the next iteration of my site
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 26/08/2026
"Just enjoy it", Richard Tice, Reform UK on the warming effects of climate change 17 Aug 2026.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 24/08/2026
Vibe 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?"
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 17/08/2026
My people are good people
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 17/08/2026
I 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...)
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 04/08/2026
LLMs are wordy because output tokens generate revenue for the providers, change my mind.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 30/07/2026
The ship sailed a few decades ago, but I still think that the term "synthetic intelligence" is more accurate than "artificial intelligence".
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 27/07/2026
Rust 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
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 21/07/2026
If you've been wondering where satellites are this evening, here's a map in-the-sky.org/satmap_plane...
in-the-sky.org
Live World Map of Satellite Positions
A world map of the positions of satellites above the Earth's surface, and a planetarium view showing where they appear in the night sky.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 06/07/2026
Tech tip that you didn't want to know: Every file is a valid Markdown document.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 05/07/2026
Max Pro+ Ultimate Plan
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/07/2026
I really want to learn, use and love emacs ...but it just feels like it's made by people who don't like people.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/07/2026
I (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?
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/07/2026
do coding agents know how to use ed(1), the standard text editor?
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 01/07/2026
How many hours have been wasted searching for a portable shell scripting language?
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 26/06/2026
I really hope that corals make it through this year's El Niño.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 26/06/2026
Today 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...
Animated ASCII-art pong.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 07/06/2026
The "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.org
2025/cable - Best imaginary emulator
2025 IOCCC entry cable - Best imaginary emulator
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/06/2026
What's the 2026 version of Mac Mini but Linux?
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/06/2026
An occasional reminder that depression is a lethal disease. I'm not "okay", but I think that I'm no longer "not okay".
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/06/2026
Using 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.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/06/2026
I seriously hate that worse is better. It just doesn't seem fair somehow.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 25/05/2026
Makes sense. AllBirds makes the most comfortable cloud. All natural fibres too, which is nice.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 25/05/2026
This 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.se
No way to parse integers in C
There are a few ways to attempt to parse a string into a number in the C standard library. They are ALL broken.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 17/05/2026
I guess Aristotle was around a long time ago, but when did the looksmaxxing crew forget that vanity is a vice, rather than a virtue?
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 14/05/2026
might try a coding livestream tomorrow - probably at a time that suits nobody everytimezone.com/s/98fe222e
everytimezone.com
Every Time Zone Converter
Easily 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.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 11/04/2026
Mythos 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.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 19/03/2026
Hello, 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?
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Reposted by Tim McNamara
Mara Bos @mara.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
After 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!
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Reposted by Tim McNamara
Patrick Morgan @patrickmorgan.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
It 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.social
nzherald.co.nz
Simon Wilson: Bicycles give you the freedom that car ads promise
My last Herald column: A city safe for cycling is a city fit for every good purpose.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 16/12/2025
Do 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.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 10/12/2025
Not 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...
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 08/12/2025
Prediction: 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:
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 03/12/2025
Hi 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.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/12/2025
At this point, I'm creating a Reddit bot that just adds helpful comments to threads such as "AI slop" and "Is this a bot?"
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/12/2025
Apparently the message here is that I should be uploading more ragebait.
YouTube channel analytics showing a line of this video's performance rising steeply above typical baseline. Statistics highlighted: 1.2k views, 66 watch hours, +3 subscribers.
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/12/2025
Code review: do you know why this code triggers undefined behavior? play.rust-lang.org/?version=st...
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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 30/11/2025
This 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?
Drawing of a green troll shouting "C MEM SAFE" wearing a hat with the text Fil-C embroided on it swinging a wooden club stamped with C logo at a Rust programming language logo on a cracked wooden block, suggesting attack on Rust.
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