marshallyount

Carnival. Nice, France (2024)

I’m out of the USA for two short years and the advances in Peep technology while I was gone are truly mind blowing.

nighttime fountains at Versailles

jellyfish, Miami aquarium #sealife

Ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall #streetart #barcelona

FANTA$IA #streetart #copenhagen

I think this means someone is having a bad day.

Korbel, sleeping (2015). The vet techs used to call him "dog in a cat suit."

Christmas Carnival in Spandau, 2023 #berlin

Designpanoptikum, surreal museum for industrial objects #berlin

“Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see.”

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. #berlin #streetart

What light through yonder window breaks? Maybe just an Apple Store? #berlin

#berlin #streetart

Having a little fun on NYE

A Döner Kebab spit being held up at knifepoint by a ... giraffe? WTF is that? #berlin #streetart

@allenholub Most devs have never had the priviledge of working on a well-factored, thoughtfully tested application. They don't know what they are missing. Good testing requires skills that are best learned from patient pairing with a craftsman. Can't pick it up from Stack Overflow.

Why is there so much resistance to testing? On average, my tests are two or three lines long, and they take less time to write than it would to do the same test manually in a debugger. Unlike the ad-hoc debugger tests, they're repeatable and give me some assurance that, when I refactor, I haven't broken anything. Nonetheless, I read people complaining about "excessive" or "unnecessary" tests. I just don't get it. Am I missing something?

This is such an amazing talk from Dr. Erik Meijer (@headinthebox, famous for his work on Visual Basic, C#, LINQ, Hack), on how LLMs upended his research, and are changing coding and what developers do. I've clipped some of my fave parts of his talk: - His team found that the specialized models they built to do codegen, and find/fix bugs at Meta were completely outclassed by ChatGPT. They were surprised that ChatGPT could write Hack code, despite it not being used widely outside of Facebook. (@DynamicWebPaige has talked about the phenomenon of Gemini and general-purpose frontier models outperforming and replacing older/smaller specialized models built over the years throughout Google.) Source: youtube.com/watch?v=SsJqmV…

@citydays_global your Dublin experience is broken. The final answer should be Barnardos, as spelled on the plaque. Your system requires Barnados instead. Very frustrating.

1/4 Additional new bits of advice I wished I had known earlier (not in my book), as my gift on my 73 birthday: • The best way to criticize something is to make something better. • Admitting that “I don’t know” at least once a day will make you a better person. • Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years. • Aim to be effective, but unpredictable. That is, you want to act in a way that AIs have trouble modeling or imitating. That makes you irreplaceable. • Whenever you hug someone, be the last to let go. • Don’t save up the good stuff (fancy wine, or china) for that rare occasion that will never happen; instead use them whenever you can. • The best gardening advice: find what you can grow well and grow lots and lots of it. • Never hesitate to invest in yourself—to pay for a class, a course, a new skill. These modest expenditures pay outsized dividends. • Try to define yourself by what you love and embrace, rather than what you hate and refuse. • Read a lot of history so you can understand how weird the past was; that way you will be comfortable with how weird the future will be. • To make a room luxurious, remove things, rather than add things. •  your parents while they are still alive. Keep asking questions while you record. You’ll learn amazing things. Or hire someone to make their story into an oral history, or documentary, or book. This will be a tremendous gift to them and to your family. • If you think someone is normal, you don’t know them very well. Normalcy is a fiction. Your job is to discover their weird genius. • When shopping for anything physical (souvenirs, furniture, books, tools, shoes, equipment), ask yourself: where will this go? Don’t buy it unless there is a place it can live. Something may need to leave in order for something else to come in. • You owe everyone a second chance, but not a third. • When someone texts you they are running late, double the time they give you. If they say they’ll be there in 5, make that 10; if 10, it’ll be 20; if 20, count on 40. • Multitasking is a myth. Don’t text while walking, running, biking or driving. Nobody will miss you if you just stop for a minute. • You can become the world’s best in something primarily by caring more about it than anyone else. • Asking “what-if?” about your past is a waste of time; asking “what-if?” about your future is tremendously productive. • Try to make the kind of art and things that will inspire others to make art and things. • Once a month take a different route home, enter your house by a different door, and sit in a different chair at dinner. No ruts. • Where you live—what city, what country—has more impact on your well being than any other factor. Where you live is one of the few things in your life you can choose and change. • Every now and then throw a memorable party. The price will be steep, but long afterwards you will remember the party, whereas you won’t remember how much is in your checking account. • Most arguments are not really about the argument, so most arguments can’t be won by arguing. • The surest way to be successful is to invent your own definition of success. Shoot your arrows first and then paint a bull’s eye around where they land. You’re the winner!