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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

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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 05/09/2026
My brother and met Shakespeare's neighbor once. We were looking at Shakespeare's house, and had to move over a bit to let his neighbor into his driveway when they returned from grocery shopping.
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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!
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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?
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 02/09/2026
Massocheichei Doesn’t sound right to me Makkakoko That’s way too many K’s
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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 🤦
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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…
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 09/08/2026
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 04/08/2026
Willing to bet Emacs has some arcane tramp or other filepath syntax that can pull files out of a binary… I know I've opened tar and zip files in emacs and dug down into individual files.
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 04/08/2026
To be fair, I sometimes also read apenwarr posts—like the thundersnap one—and think, "wtf did I just read? I don't understand the shape of this at all" but trust that there's something deep I'm missing until I get a chance to read it a couple more times!
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 04/08/2026
I ran across the Rob Pike / Tim Bray references to Yegge's posts, and was expecting something even more unhinged than usual. Imagine my surprise and disquiet when I found them making sense to me.
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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.
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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 😂
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 18/07/2026
I continue to hold that when it comes to AI, the _opposite_ of hackernews comment consensus is always closer to reality.
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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.
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 24/06/2026
Software Developer?
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 20/06/2026
I think politics is like a 1-axis or few-axis PCA of a complicated multi-dimensional set of beliefs and feelings. The parties tend to ossify one or two axes, then get really surprised when the vectors keep shifting and have big exciting realignments
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 31/05/2026
How many startups do you think he’s funding and advising that will subject people to reading the kind of AI-produced slop he’s complaining about?
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 31/05/2026
Then again, that one might have been in trouble too. We _heard_ that the mom came back that evening, but that might have been a kind fiction to avoid upsetting all the kids that were concerned about it…
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 31/05/2026
I’m no expert but I thought the foals sometimes stayed put in the grass all day while mom forages. They are camouflaged and relatively odorless. We once had one lying all day beside a roadside tuft of grass near our holiday place, with the whole community carefully taking photos
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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
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 24/05/2026
Yeah, yt-dlp is a treasure. IIUC, the good folks at youtube-dl finally tired of the Sisyphean struggle of trying to keep up the adversarial fight with YouTube, and yt-dlp took over. Or something like that 🙂
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 23/05/2026
I used Claude Code to write me a script that uses yt-dlp to download metadata for every video on a channel (and transcripts, but you probably don’t need that)
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 20/05/2026
Maniac Mansion vibes…
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 26/04/2026
I think the rust folks are concentrating on the best theoretical performance—hence GPU rendering—but it’s possible QT has rust bindings. The stuff Raph Levien et al are doing with linebender is very, very cool, but not ready yet 🙂
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 26/04/2026
caffeinate -disu It’s built in
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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…
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 13/03/2026
I asked it to build a fastapi backend that gives me a dashboard showing my subscriptions over the past year. It took about 30s. I had to ask it once to include a bar chart and sort by ascending time, not descending. Crazy. Even did an amazon data export and made it pull that in…
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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.
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 12/03/2026
iykyk
$ cat ~/.local/bin/gits
#!/usr/bin/env bash
[[ "$@" == "tatus" ]] && git status
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 08/03/2026
Is “Zulu choir” similarly sloppy?
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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.
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 02/03/2026
I think my questions to Claude would be considered “leading” rather than neutral, but those are the questions I had 🤷‍♂️ I don't feel neutral about this. Life is difficult, and our time is so brief. I cannot fathom why you would go out of your way to make things harder and inflict suffering on people.
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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
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 02/03/2026
Out of curiosity, what system are you using for the diagrams? They're really pretty!
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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.
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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
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 26/02/2026
These layoffs made no sense: one of the people I know who got laid off was absolutely killing it with AI, performing massive migrations across hundreds of apps.
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 26/02/2026
Getting laid off in March of last year was one of the best things that has happened to me.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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…
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 12/12/2025
Last I knew, Square (payments) only licensed the use of the domain…
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 06/11/2025
(It also triggers a recursion limit bug in CC after an hour or two, but I've reported that 🙂)
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 06/11/2025
Do you have trouble getting Claude not to stop? I eventually created a stop hook that tells it (kindly) to keep going, and to ask sub-agents if it needs advice/help. Every hour or so, it tells it to ask subagents to review code and look for architecture/refactor opportunities. Seems to work ok…
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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”
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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 …
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Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 05/10/2025
Oh, also, I am absolutely _not_ a frontend person. Crazy times, my programmer friends, crazy times…
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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!
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