iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 5h

This is just to say I have eaten the data in your HTTP request and which you were probably expecting would go into the database Forgive me it was delicious so 200 and so OK

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 7h

I had no idea there were cool people in Ottumwa.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Q.v. the introduction to my dissertation, you twats.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

With LLM-generated code, you can now skip straight to no one understanding the code. There's great commercial pressure to do this in software, and we already know the consequences. I hope mathematics, which is under less commercial pressure, can avoid this.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It wouldn't be a stretch to say the loss of understanding was the initial cause of what ultimately became a security problem. In those cases, at least for a while, they did have someone who understood, and during that time they were in a better state.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The work of mathematics has always been understanding; producing novel results is a nice byproduct of that. I've seen how this has played out in software. Almost every case I worked when I was doing forensics involved software that nobody still with the company understood.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

You ought to be able to find a Chicago-style hot dog in ORD. That's what I usually go for when I'm there.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I wonder how "AI agent that argues with companies on your behalf" would go in practice. If the cost is negligible, I have no incentive to give up until I win, so will the result effectively be a DDOS on customer service?

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I kinda want everybody to be a surly asshole, tbf.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

What I love about this is that a senator from Missouri is being corrected by a senator from Minnesota about the name of a college team from Iowa while the chair of the committee---a senator from Iowa---sits there in silence. That is some kind of metaphor for Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Having just seen this thread (bsky.app/profile/ashe.... I wonder if it feels sinister because it's organized and there's seems to be no obvious path to opposing it. I read this and wonder, well, what should we have done instead?

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Wow, that is not the vibe I get from the software developers I talk to. What I hear is that they were barely staving off disaster before, but now are facing such a tsunami of garbage that their efforts to maintain quality feel pointless.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

API: 200 OK 👍 Me: But where is the object I made? API: lol what object

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

My grandfather was one of eight children, three of whom survived to adulthood. Two of my grandfather's three children survived to adulthood. All of his grandchildren survived to adulthood. That tells me we've improved a few things.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

We played a ton of arena duels---so much that I made a car design spreadsheet which everybody used. We played open road once, and didn't much care for it.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Press the button for the deterrent effect.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

It also doesn't help when a one-line change to a shell script can only be tested by doing a 20-minute AWS deployment. The cycle time for many of these things is absurd.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I battled this stuff for years at my previous job. The conclusion I reached is that everything is broken in its own unique way, which compounds when you're combining 30 things, and it's terribly hard to get the maintainers of any of those individual things to care about your particular combination.

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Reposted by Joel Uckelman

Grant @syncingsinking.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This is just to say I have solved the open questions that were in your paper and which you were probably saving for your phd students Forgive me they were delicious so incentive-laden and followed so readily once your postdoc's drafts mysteriously found their way into my training data

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

If this is accurate, it's hostile action by OpenAI. Why are you sending your data to third parties again?

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Oh right, social media _didn't exist_ the last time I read DoE.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

"leisure derives from celebration" is a claim that I find baffling because I have no idea how one could ever test it.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I was hoping for some mention of how this squares with declining alcohol consumption, but nada. The Guardian is always like this---they never proffer any explanation. Are we seeing more alcohol-related cancers because we've fixed so many other fatal problems?

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I try to give the bug report I would want to get myself.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Nevada, Iowa is like way. (This always confused people who thought it was pronounced like the state.)

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Saddened to hear that Tim Curry has escaped to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism... space!

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

The oldest email in my inbox is only from 2005, so that's not bad, right?

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This ends up being a problem in math because "the X" carries the implication of uniqueness and you think you've missed wherever it was proven that X is unique, but actually the author was Russian and it was supposed to be "an X".

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

GitHub being down most of the afternoon makes it hard to troubleshoot when everything you want to read is an issue on GitHub...

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

It's not the job that's too small, it's your willingness to pay them $1500 for it.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

It's even better when you know there are Traditional and Roth varieties, which sound like factions.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

// The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. unsafe { ... }

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The warning text for the plaque marking long-term nuclear waste storage would make banger code comments. Consider your reaction if you were reading a C header file and you saw this: // This message is a warning about danger. // The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Nah, that could never happen. Right?

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Congratulations! Well deserved.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Yep, going to flip the metaphorical table on this thing on Monday.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I saw someone comment that they "would rather piss glass" than use AWS Elastic Beanstalk again. Accurate! Use something else!

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Bytes gives you more space to be clever because they're smaller; u32 with only 256-bit registers is hairier. I don't have avx512 on this machine.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

If there's an AVX2 function that rotates packed words, then I suspect you could do that and compare with VPCMPEQB to see if you get hits, five times consecutively. I'm not certain that would be faster, but maybe?

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

4, 5, or 6 u32s; there are a few different places this comes up, but it's a constant number along any particular path.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

and also a SIMD operation that tells you if you have an identity matrix. Short of that, I'm not sure what else you could do. The order of the conditions probably isn't improvable, as it keeps a value in one of the registers as long as possible without needing to reload it.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

The only way I can think of to make it faster than explicitly checking `a[0] != a[1] && ... && a[4] != a[5]` is if maybe there's some SIMD operations which would be of use. Perhaph something that takes two vectors and produces a matrix where m[i,j] = 1 iff v[i] = w[j] and 0 otherwise,

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Even when I avoided allocations by reusing the hashset, brute force was 360x faster. O(n) loses to O(n^2) when n fits into a cache line.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

This is your reminder that computational complexity is swamped by cache locality when n is small. I just now benchmarked checking a six-element array for duplicates by brute force (6 choose 2 = 15 comparisons) versus using a hashset.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

It's normal for a grammar not to be regular.

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Joel Uckelman @uckelman.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Hilariously, I'm an optimist about schedules.

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