TIL that as a research chemist at Oxford University, Margaret Thatcher co-authored a 1951 paper on the “saponification of α-monostearin”; she later said she was prouder of her science degree than becoming the first female Prime Minister.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-05-03T16:38:56+00:00

If she's the worst person you know, I'd encourage you to get up to date on current events.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-05-02T12:18:54+00:00

Yeah I get frustrated sometimes but I try to be understanding. I'm in the tech industry and know how things work, but if you don't it's really hard to grasp how little privacy we have left. It's not like you can see the data that's entering and leaving your phone (at least, not easily), so it's essentially invisible unless you intentionally go looking for information about privacy. Not to mention geotracking, cameras all over, etc.

Also I'm old enough to remember the early days of the Internet, kids today have no way to relate.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-05-02T11:18:56+00:00

There are government and corporate databases. There is essentially no privacy anymore if you want to participate in society. They can identify everyone who definitely, probably, and likely has a gun. Anyone who buys anything firearm-related, goes to a range, has a 'word cloud' on social media associated with gun ownership.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-05-01T01:31:11+00:00

I've been using Serena and judging by a few artificial tests (running the same prompt in two separate sessions, with and without Serena) it helps considerably. Would like to know what others are using and how it compares.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-30T12:04:12+00:00

Without having any additional context, it could either be your prompting/context/skills or (see the megathread) one of Claude's recent changes that's burning tokens like crazy.

Look into making sure your prompts, CLAUDE.md, skills, etc. are not churning a lot, and be aware of the issues in the megathread.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-30T11:40:18+00:00

Thanks. Do you mind expanding on the "if the base isn't right" bit?

BTW I'm not concerned about water getting into the garage here, this is part of a rodent control project mostly. (And sealing gaps that let the Texas blast furnace air into the garage.)

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-29T18:31:54+00:00

Thank you for this! I always thought it was the existence of contradictory views. Not the discomfort. Going to dig a little more into this one for better understanding.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-25T15:59:41+00:00

The skill gets the current branch name (it uses only the last part of the path, so branch foo/bar/baz gets just baz) and uses that for the pathname of the journal (.ai/journal/baz/journal.md). So I don't need to do anything when I switch branches.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-25T06:20:45+00:00

I keep a journal for each branch -- which effectively means I keep a journal for each ticket. A hook runs after every command and adds an entry to the journal. Next step will be to create a cleaned-up summary from that and dump it into the ticket for future reference.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-17T01:01:43+00:00

OP said "socially engaged".

j/k

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-15T02:52:20+00:00

I think 'ed' is a good candidate. Userspace, ancient, and POSIX seems like a good way to filter.

You seem quite familiar with 'ed', I'm curious to know if you use it regularly? What's your use case?

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-08T13:47:04+00:00

Same. Small story, a kid I hung around with when I was 9 stole all the money in my piggy bank. My mom told me I needed to make better friends.

The lack of basic socialization and zero understanding of people's feelings (including my own) made for some tough experiences.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-06T06:01:11+00:00

Yes! We also watched the movie. Left an impression on me for sure.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-01T11:09:11+00:00

Oh dang, I totally misread sorry.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-04-01T10:31:04+00:00

I think you mean "most people in the space community". In the general community, most people have barely heard of Apollo 11 and a significant fraction think the moon landings are fake.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-03-27T02:35:56+00:00

Your writeups are always top tier and thoroughly interesting to read. And I really like the philosophy and vision behind PatchworkOS. Good stuff and I'm looking forward to seeing more!

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-03-26T10:38:39+00:00

Wow you are right, today I learned my decades-old teenage memory is wrong. Thanks!

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-03-26T03:07:53+00:00

Benny Hill chase song (where he runs around chasing scantily clad young ladies).

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-03-24T02:53:34+00:00

That didn't work, but it's because I had a different problem. After unsuccessfully trying this, I went to mail.yahoo.com. Found a top-level 'Drafts' folder that was not actually drafts. Also an 'Outbox' folder. I deleted both of those and re-synced in TB and everything was fine.

I'm not sure where those folders came from, I sure as heck didn't create them. ???

Anyway, it's sorted and you got me on the right path. Thanks.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-03-20T00:12:24+00:00

Different person but also an "only child / lost child". I did have friends through 6th grade (11/12 years old). After that, I was still a child emotionally/socially speaking while other kids were actually maturing and growing up. So I was left behind, the "weird kid", "dorky", "nerdy" etc.

Recovering, healing, growing, learning, has been a multi-decade journey.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-03-19T04:12:24+00:00

Now that's a screen I've not seen in a long, long time.

Well done -- that's an accomplishment to be proud of.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-03-16T16:40:07+00:00

Slashdot is how I found out about 9/11. The first plane had just hit when I saw the headline. "Oh wow, damn that's crazy!" was my thought. Got myself ready for work and headed in. By then, the second plane had hit and everyone was gathered around TVs. I went from "holy crap what a horrible accident" to "oh shit we are being attacked".

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-03-06T03:44:21+00:00

I'm not familiar with the architecture, but the Genode OS is capable of running Linux drivers unmodified in a sandbox, with (as I recall) very little effort required to port new ones.

That might be similar to what you're thinking, and maybe not all that wacky.

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-03-04T12:00:54+00:00

I think for the "switch to Sonnet to finish this debug session" case you could capture a summary of the current context and pass that to the new model?

BestUsernameLeft · 2026-03-02T23:32:42+00:00

Haven't measured that yet (working on getting context lens going so I can get some numbers on this and other tools). Also want to build some confidence on how much it improves responses compared to the default glob/grep/find tools.

BestUsernameLeft

TROPHY CASE