Posts on jdlms.site

Garbage Collected #1

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An irregular roundup of reading, items, and videos from around the web. My own personal vibe-check. A line dropped in the time flowing by.

The cynical fear-mongering of the US AI labs reaches a shriller pitch and becomes more of a circus each week. I recently saw a German news headline over a picture of Sam Altman at the UN that translated roughly to “Those that set the fire now want to play fire department. Something can’t be right there” and I keep thinking of this thoughtful post by Brian Cantrill: The contagion of fear. The technologist, the domain expert, has a responsibility that’s easily abused. It’s easy to shout about a deadly virus in a crowded room. He writes, “…the degree that digital systems have agency in the physical world, it is agency that we — we humans with arms and legs and brains and parents and children — permit: AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control.” What determines who bears responsibility for the actions of rouge digital “intelligence”? The sensible suggestion from Ones & Tooze: tort law.

Using Anki to learn anything

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anki is a spaced repetition tool I first learned about 9+ years ago while learning German. I was enrolled in daily language classes in Berlin where every day felt like full submersion under crashing waves of information. Everything was new, difficult to comprehend, and everything seemed equally important. I was struggling to grab hold of what was crucial to learn and remember. Crossing an ocean. Climbing an enormous mountain. This is how it feels at the start of learning anything complex, whether its memorizing German case endings, or grasping eBPF.

You can turn Claude's most annoying feature off

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Claude Code is a fun tool, but it has a small default feature that drives me bananas: the verb spinner. I do not need to see a rotating selection of whimsical gerunds popping up in response to every prompt dozens of times over the course of a day.

How bad can it be? Tolerance may vary. I’ll give you a series of words and you tell me what the sequence makes you feel. Ready?