Sign in

Zellyn Hunter

@zellyn.com
132 followers 92 following 242 posts

He/Him. Programmer. Square. Former YouTuber. Vaguely South African. ≡𝐺𝑂 Born 331.12 ppm CO₂ hachyderm.io/@zellyn

PostsRepliesMedia
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 04/09/2026
Uber: you know what’s better than eating the cost if we underestimated? Just wait until the user switches apps to call someone about how long they’re waiting, then when they switch back, pretend you’ve never heard of their ride, and show them a map to pick their destination!
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 02/09/2026
@mcmillen.dev btw, is SemiColin games still a thing? What are you up to these days? I've seen a couple articles lately that take it as given that Memegen determined program success at Google, which is wild, and … possibly correct?
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 02/09/2026
Wow, trying to sign up for Apple's developer program is just awful: - Safari Infinite redirect on signup link: use Chrome 🤦 - Phone cam won't focus when scanning ID (apparently common for years) 🤦 - Redirected to support at end: no support link 🤦 - Safari infinite redirect on support: use Chrome 🤦
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 15/08/2026
Wait, what? IPv8 is a thing? I need @apenwarr.ca to tell me how to feel about that…
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 20/07/2026
The folks on Pod Save America mentioned the ICE shooting in Biddeford, and it's the bit about the daughter wearing Bluey pajamas that's still wrecking me every day. Fucking monsters.
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 20/07/2026
@simonwillison.net very minor nit: "A certain vintage if Python web nerd" → s/if/of/ — I had trouble understanding this sentence reading it while tired, and briefly wondered if it had something to do with interactive fiction 😂
110
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 30/06/2026
We should standardize something akin to Unicode's rtl (right-to-left) marks, except for AI-generated text. It would carry across copy/paste operations between browsers, documents, etc. You could choose to format it differently.
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 27/05/2026
The Onion, or NYT? This could all be The Onion…
Screenshot of NYT headlines from the "Trump Administration" section:

Trump Administration to Send Americans Exposed to Ebola to Kenya
Trump Administration Wants Federal Employees to Sign Nondisclosure Agreements
U.F.C. Fight Venue Takes Shape on the White House Lawn
Trump Declares Himself in Good Health After Physical Exam at Walter Reed
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 17/04/2026
Dear makers of animated movies (and really movies in general). At some point you will have characters dancing. You will feel tempted to make them breakdance and cut the shots as "funny". It is not funny. It just makes you look like you grew up in the 80s like me (ie. old). Same for robot dance…
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 13/03/2026
@simonwillison.net AI + personal finances is 🔥🔥🔥 I highly recommend beancount + telling Claude to build a "deterministic build-type workflow to reimport and rebuild from scratch each time" for finances. Then updating classification rules becomes conversations about python code.
100
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 12/03/2026
iykyk
$ cat ~/.local/bin/gits
#!/usr/bin/env bash
[[ "$@" == "tatus" ]] && git status
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 04/03/2026
Dammit; now I have to use semicolons, properly curled curly “quotes”, and Silly Jokes™ to distinguish myself from LLMs. What will they come for next, my interrobang‽ It's not just us with a pedantic writing style and unnecessary knowledge of the Mac option-keystrokes suffering—it's everyone.
020
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 02/03/2026
I ran across this, and did some research so you don't have to. Is this real? It's easy to fake official-looking documents if some "DocumentCloud" link is all you have. Yes: You can find the policy here: www.bop.gov/PublicInfo/e... Is this evil? Yes. Claude's analysis: claude.ai/share/13caa0...
claude.ai
Federal prison policy analysis for trans inmates
Shared via Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic
100
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 01/03/2026
Glad I was at a stoplight when I hit the part of @grahamformaine.bsky.social‘s amazing interview on @podsaveamerica.crooked.com where he described having come to oppose US wars. “I know what’s it’s like when American-made high explosives interact with children” left me weeping.
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 28/02/2026
www.anthropic.com/news/stateme... It seems hard for everyone to believe that A\, and the founders in particular, simply mean what they say. I guess that's rare these days?
anthropic.com
Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
Anthropic's response to the Secretary of War and advice for customers
110
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 26/02/2026
To all my friends at Block who just got laid off today, I'll repeat what I posted in the squaremafia Slack: fwiw, after the faint buzzing in your ears and feeling of drifting unmoored through unreality wears off in a couple hours, you get to enjoy the feeling of profound relief.
110
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 22/02/2026
5 authors I've read at least 5 books by (silly answers only edition): - Theodor Seuss Geisel - "Franklin W. Dixon" - Bill Watterson - Jack Chick - Moses
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 05/01/2026
My Soham Parekh coefficient is and always will be ≤ 1, but I swear with Claude Code you could really push it if you wanted to
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 29/12/2025
@simonwillison.net since I’m going to be out of town (so can sacrifice my home network!) and just told hackernews about it, you might find trifling.org cute (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642...)
trifling.org
Trifling - Your Projects
020
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 27/12/2025
Days later, I finally finish #adventofcode day 10 part 2, using my matrix reduction library from past years, and then further searching over free variables with the smallest ranges. Imagine my surprise when I got on Reddit, and found that this is _not_ a crazy over-complicated solution! Holy heck…
070
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 06/11/2025
My modest proposal for Democrats’ messaging in upcoming elections: “Joe Biden proved conclusively that even a dead president is better for the economy than Donald Trump”
030
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 17/10/2025
@simonwillison.net suggests coding without actually typing the code Honestly, I'm surprised that anyone with an unlimited token budget is *not* doing this. I've been coding since I was 12 (in 1987), but my job is emphatically no longer typing "if" "x" ">" "3" ":" simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/...
simonwillison.net
Coding without typing the code
Last year the most useful exercise for getting a feel for how good LLMs were at writing code was vibe coding (before that name had even been coined) - seeing …
070
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 05/10/2025
I'm in the process of getting Claude to write an entire fake backend system for a fairly large React web-app by intercepting the network calls with service workers (package MSW). It's amazing. Now, I'm using browser-use Claude to find bugs, using a prompt/instructions written by the first Claude!
100
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 31/08/2025
Came downstairs from work on Friday, and all three of my brothers were sitting in the living room! They live in Toronto, Waco, and LA, and had conspired to fly in for my 50th… 😍
020
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 18/08/2025
The “Closing the Loop” images from the always-amazing @amygoodchild.bsky.social are absolutely gorgeous! www.amygoodchild.com/blog/buildin...
amygoodchild.com
Closing the Loop: Building Shapes with a Planar Graph — Amy Goodchild
There’s some fun computational geometry in my latest artwork, and in this article I’ll walk through how I take a scramble of disconnected paths and turn them into closed shapes, using half-edges and a...
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 18/08/2025
Why is "I'd like to restrict outbound internet connections from my project to a small allowlist, but still be able to talk to all the normal AWS/GCP things I _have_ to talk to to operate" such an infuriatingly difficult thing? It can't be uncommon…
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 10/07/2025
That surprising feeling when your `terraform apply` actually works, without errors! So unexpected. And it only took 9 commits in my PR…
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 21/05/2025
Should I listen to the Ross Douthat JD Vance interview? I mean, I know I'm going to, but at the same time wondering why I would inflict that on myself. Then again, this might be a good day for it: I've already seen the picture of “Sam and Jony” so perhaps I've already hit rock bottom?
130
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 20/05/2025
Good news! As onsite/offsite budgets tighten, constant reorgs guarantee you'll still be able to see your coworkers! a) "annual" team offsite b) semi-annual reorg 2 months later c) "clearly we need a post-reorg onsite"
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 14/05/2025
If you like fantasy, and murder mysteries, The Tainted Cup, and A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett are very good. It's been a while since I felt sad to end a book, wanting to hang out with the characters more. I'm glad I only found out about the series after there were already two!
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 14/05/2025
“Big interviews tomorrow. I'll make sure I go to bed early so I'm well-rested.“ Brain: “I love your enthusiasm, and you always bring great ideas to the table… But I was thinking: how about we lie in bed half-awake until 4am instead?”
020
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 08/05/2025
Based on my interactions with them as a job _seeker_, if you're a tech company not quite yet large enough to hire your own recruiter, you could do worse than to check out somatalent.com
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 07/05/2025
New "Projects" page on my website: zellyn.com/page/project... (The old page listed things I _wanted_ to do, not things that were done or partly done.)
zellyn.com
Projects
Zellyn's Website
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 07/05/2025
Interviewing is surprisingly fun. I should probably have been interviewing a little every month or two for the past decade, just to keep my hand in, and find out what interesting things people are working on. (It always felt a little dishonest to interview when not actually looking too…)
100
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 07/05/2025
So far, being in an interview is much more pleasant than waiting around between interviews. Going well so far. Even getting to the point where I can type while being watched. Sort of.
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 03/05/2025
Nintendo just made it impossible for me to play Terraria with my kid 😔 Their new “virtual game card” system breaks the (supported, according to their docs) ability for him to use software on the main Switch while I use it on the secondary. Not even sure how to buy it twice as a fix if I wanted to…
011
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 03/05/2025
Call me Chihiro was beautiful and slow and sad and you should watch it
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 02/05/2025
Has anyone trained an LLM on single-language documents, using only languages (or just documents) that share no linguistic roots/cognates? Disclaimer: I want to know how infeasible the Star Trek universal translator is: can you just feed it enough new tokens and it can translate a new language? #ai
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 30/04/2025
@apenwarr.ca @crawshaw.io Who should I talk with if I'm interested in working at Tailscale, but don't want to throw a dart at similar-but-different entries on the jobs page and would rather have a conversation to figure out where I might be useful?
110
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 29/04/2025
I spent a large chunk of the past years working on feature flags, migrating a homegrown system to a vendor. We worked with them to scale to our size. My old teammates joked they were taking bets on whether I'd write my own feature flag system after the layoff (no, but I did think about it!)
100
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 21/04/2025
If you haven't tried OpenAI image generation recently… give it a try (I'm just using the free quota). My wife's dad always says, "Keep it between the ditches", so I asked ChatGPT to make a card. Prompt in alt-text — it nailed it on the first try. I'm getting weird feels on what images _mean_ now…
The image looks like what I described in the prompt: Please create a picture for a birthday card. It's for my wife's father. He always says, "Keep it between the ditches!", so we're going to make that the theme of the card. The basic idea is an old-timey tractor driving away from the viewer, down a deeply-rutted road. I'd like it stylized watercolor. At the top, it should say "Happy Birthday", and at the bottom, "Keep it between the ditches!"
050
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 17/04/2025
Holy shit Pantheon is good. How did I only just learn about this in a Wired "35 best shows on Netflix" article? 😂
120
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 17/04/2025
You should go listen to @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social ‘s latest podcast episode now. I can’t promise you won’t end up crying in your kitchen over the sink during his opening monologue. But it’s important.
010
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 11/04/2025
User tdeck on hackernews shows us how to execute a perfect troll comment. If you can get two levels of responses joining in on the joke, followed by a comment that still thinks it's serious three levels deep, you're winning at internet! Respect. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4365...
news.ycombinator.com
You're just jealous. These guys have spun up their own RoHS and are doing a 100%... | Hacker News
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 10/04/2025
@martin.kleppmann.com do you ever do open office hours? I'd love to grab 30 minutes of your time sometime to discuss two big questions I have about CRDTs: 1) What happens if you have a bug that breaks the semilattice nature? How do you bound the damage, and how do you repair things?
100
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 08/04/2025
After many years, and a lot of expensive training, I have finally achieved Superficial General Intelligence
000
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 04/04/2025
Today, I talked with “Pam” to make a service appointment for my car. It was obviously software, but quite capable. After a couple of rounds of, “Thanks” / “You're welcome” / “Goodbye” / “Bye” / “Ok” / “Can I help you with anything else?” it became clear that “Pam” was not going to end the call…
110
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 24/03/2025
DeepSeek v3 0324 nails my SVG curve editor on the first try: #ai #deepseek
150
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 21/03/2025
@hypernode.bsky.social I see you have lots of links to point-to-point and local mesh networks. Do you know where to start to find literature on theoretical state of the art for anonymous mesh comms? Like, can you secure TOR if the NSA operates 2/3 of the exit nodes?
100
Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 21/03/2025
Hey folks who use #jujutsu (the version control tool): How do I squash a whole list of changes down into their parent? I did this yesterday by repeatedly doing: * `jj squash` * `jj edit @-` over and over again, until done. When I tried `jj squash --to xyz --from '@::xyz+` it gave conflicts 🤷‍♂️
000