Laurent Stanevich

Doesn’t matter which one you’re thinking of — if I’m on it, you can find me under the exact same handle. If I’m there, I’m LairBob.

@NasheCeezet_zw No shit the office was stressful. It’s apparently the kind of place where people _STALK_ you just because you need to be alone for a bit. What sane person wouldn’t want to sit in their car and freak out for an hour a day, if that’s who they’re dealing with at work.

This lady from Accounting at work would vanish around 1-2:30 every day. Her phone would be off, her teams offline. She would come back sweaty in winter, ate nothing and declined lunch invites. Theories at worked mentioned secret boyfriend, crypto trading and some even said nap club. She never changed clothes, always had her work badge on. I finally followed her, not proud.She wasn't going to the gym all this time she was in her car.

@_chenglou So here’s a really specific use case, that _seems_ like it could reduce to the equivalent of a rounding error for Pretext — overlapping text labels in charts. One of the biggest blockers for complex vizzes in Plotly, etc., is label overlap. Could this not help?

Fun glossary of demos. Some useful, some purely showing off: chenglou.me/pretext/ somnai-dreams.github.io/pretext-demos/ Will keep adding more!

My dear front-end developers (and anyone who’s interested in the future of interfaces): I have crawled through depths of hell to bring you, for the foreseeable years, one of the more important foundational pieces of UI engineering (if not in implementation then certainly at least in concept): Fast, accurate and comprehensive userland text measurement algorithm in pure TypeScript, usable for laying out entire web pages without CSS, bypassing DOM measurements and reflow

@jnack @JeffDean He was indeed a legend, but that photo has apparently been misrepresented: nytimes.com/athletic/69977…

@JeffDean Truly a Notre Dame football legend! ☘️ More should know his name.

Fun! Fact: when I was in middle school we lived in Minneapolis, a block from Alan Page, a recently retired famous football player. He was a runner, as was my dad. My dad told me about him. He had just finished law school and was now starting his second career as a lawyer eventually becoming a Minnesota Supreme Court justice. Both of them would run in the dead of winter in Minneapolis, and my dad said he cared about people, so this photo doesn't surprise me. You can read more about Alan Page here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Page (Excerpt below) Thank you, Alan Page.

@0xnfrith @trq212 It’s both. It creates a new, isolated snapshot of your current context.

@trq212 the phrasing in the documentation is ambiguous. it says for step 1 a new isolated context is created. and in the article it says "Setting context: fork spins off a subagent which has all of your current context." Which one is it?

@botaniyya You understand there’s a backstory there, right?

im not completely certain but i dont think calling an american person a yank is the scathing pejorative that many people in the uk seem to think it is

@nayshins We’re all just spinning our wheels, waiting for them to canonicalize the patterns that — like this: x.com/trq212/status/…

everyone showing off their crazy vibe coded claude orchestrators

@trq212 Wow.

@jnack Seriously, though — this takes me right back to the ACOM days, when we could tell prospective clients “I bet you can tell me the SVP behind every link in your global nav.”

You can guess the number of PMs working on a product by the sheer amount of irrelevant crap that pops up while you just try to do your job. Example: I'm trying to open a PDF, and Acrobat hits me with ~15 screens like this:

@Falliblemusings You’re just a coward.

I used to think Sapiens was a great book. Sweeping, provocative, the kind of book that makes you feel like you finally understand the big picture of human history. It's on every CEO's bookshelf, assigned in universities, praised as a masterwork of synthesis. Yuval Noah Harari is treated as one of the serious thinkers of our time. But something nagged at me. Some passages felt off. Claims that human rights are just figments of our collective imagination, not real things, just stories we tell ourselves. That nations, laws, money, justice, doesn't exist outside our heads. That meaning itself is a delusion we've invented to cope. That we're far more powerful than ever before but not happier. That hunter-gatherers had it better because they had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no nappies to change, no bills to pay. That sounded depressing to me, but was perhaps just the realistic scientific worldview? What it meant to see the world clearly, without comforting illusions. Then I read The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf. Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design. After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity. Some examples: On meaning: "Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion." On human rights: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." On free will: "Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that's over." On progress: "We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed." The Agricultural Revolution? "History's biggest fraud." We didn't domesticate wheat, "it domesticated us." On our cosmic significance: "If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed." On the future: "Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new 'useless class.'" Homo sapiens will likely "disappear in a century or two." This is bad philosophy. It tells us our problems are cosmically insignificant, our solutions are illusions, and that progress is neither desirable nor within our control. It's also perfect nonsense. No one would ever go back to being hunter-gatherers. Would you rather worry about your kid spending too much time on Roblox, or face the 50% chance she won't reach puberty? And our so-called "fictions"? They ended slavery. They gave women equal rights. They solved hunger. They eradicated smallpox. They turned sand into computer chips. They got us to the moon, and hopefully soon, to Mars and beyond. These "fictions" are already reshaping the universe, and over time they may become the most potent force in it. Now compare Deutsch: "Humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature." "Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow." "Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved." "We are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else. If unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be." Where Harari sees a species of deluded apes stumbling toward obsolescence, Deutsch sees universal explainers, the only entities we know of capable of creating explanatory knowledge, solving problems, and potentially seeding the universe with intelligence. The difference isn't academic. Ideas shape action. If you believe life is meaningless, progress is a trap, and humans are hackable animals with no free will, how does that affect what you build? What you fight for? What you teach your children? Harari's books sell because they flatter a fashionable pessimism. They let readers feel sophisticated for seeing through the "delusions" everyone else lives by. That smug cynicism is corrosive. And it's everywhere: in schools, in media, in bestselling books. More than half of young adults now say they feel little to no purpose or meaning in life. This is what happens when you teach an entire generation bad philosophy. Less progress, less health, less wealth. Less flourishing. And ultimately, a higher chance that civilization and consciousness go extinct. Fortunately, there's another equally well-written, but much truer, account of homo sapiens, appropriately titled 'The Beginning of Infinity'. And this one smuggles no despair in by the backdoor. But let's give Harari credit where it's due. He is right about one thing: if planet Earth blew up tomorrow, we wouldn't be missed. Because there'd be no one left to miss us, just a careless universe, blindly obeying physical laws. We are the only ones who can miss, but we're not going to. We're going to aim, hit, and keep going. Full credit for the amazing meme to @Ben__Jeff

@intellectronica @ph_singer “Pretty consistently”, though. That’s the problem.

@ph_singer Actually I get it to run pretty consistently using uv run / uvx with minimal instructions in CLAUDE / SKILL .md

Forcing Claude Code to always use "uv run" is sheer impossible. Regardless of how many times I put it in CLAUDE.md, skills, prompts, it will always fall back to running raw python with pip. Too overfit on it.

@jnack You got the “Repo Man” UX.

That thing where your Adobe subscription spontaneously ends & turns the app into abstract art. 👀

hungry ghost trapped in a jar

@getjonwithit As a 60-yo who devoured “GEB” as a teenager — this stuff is so awesome.

For anyone curious to see an example of an "alien mathematics": here is one of an infinite class of "logic-like" systems, with axioms similar (but not equivalent) to those of the NAND operator, and theorems just as rich. On the right is an example of a "logic-like" theorem.

@ObjRandom @getjonwithit Omginorite?!

@getjonwithit Next, you'll tell us there are uncountably many such self-consistent (but alien and thus far, totally useless) logic-like systems out there.

@jnack @DynamicWebPaige @GoogleAIStudio It can’t…but it’ll still _tell_ you it did. ;)

@DynamicWebPaige @GoogleAIStudio Cool, but can it redesign our non-Euclidean hospital? 🙃

Multimodal spatial reasoning + code execution = 🤯 Watch Gemini 3.0 Flash in @GoogleAIStudio analyze this architectural diagram. It uses Thinking to plan a strategy—actually creating image crops to verify the tiny "WC" labels—and then uses Code Execution to draw precise bounding boxes. 📐✨ The utility for engineering and design workflows is huge:

@jnack @KevinGoldsmith What you’re saying is definitely worth consideration, but in a lot of deep ways it’s really a reversion to form.

@jnack @KevinGoldsmith In all seriousness, though, we live in an extraordinary window of history where it’s simply _expected_ that we (or some of us) understand “how things work”. For most of human history, we weren’t even sure _what_ worked, let alone _how_.

The adversarial approach is a long-established pattern in machine learning to produce better results. I’m leaning a lot more on it to tame the quantum-like nature of LLM outputs.

@jnack @KevinGoldsmith I’m not trying to argue that it’s all necessarily a net positive. I’m just saying that the nature of what we understand about what the f-ck we’re doing has always been marginal, and complicated.

@jnack @KevinGoldsmith (You caught me over morning coffee…) Then we entered a window where we’d begun figuring out _what_ worked, then _how_ it worked. Now we’re in a position on many fronts, like drugs, where we can simply _decide_ how we want them to work, and make _that_ happen.