Sean Plaice

@Engineer___X No

@splaice Are you a mason?

That feeling when your 6 yo is interested in your book about silicon transistors and you rush to get your cpu collection to show it to them.

@EmpMagiPhul Duron. Homage to the Duron i could afford then.

@splaice Is that an AMD Duron or Thunderbird?

@mualphaxi Thank you for publishing the book. I love what it celebrates and how it celebrates it.

@splaice This post makes my whole year.

It’s interesting what gets you locked in as a kid. For me it was computers. It was choose your own adventure, self documented, and it all felt unbounded, especially once i had a modem. I was always strongly aligned to the physical world though. Family of builders (sheet metal father, boutique crafts mother, family of machinists and test engineers). Life obsession with digital systems interacting with the physical world intersecting ever since.

@splaice Exactly! This was my experience with geology and space as a kid. Geology was cool because it’s tangible, and that’s how I got to meteors. I also had a knack for mechanics because I was annoyed about entropy at 8, and then got oneshot by physics and space exploration at age 9.

@AdrianDittmann And they are magic you can hold in your hand.

@splaice That’s the beautiful thing about visually appealing technology. The naturally curious mind will want to know what it is and how it works and from that can come enthusiasm, which eventually leads to an obsession that can lead to innovation.

@NewAgeRetroNerd Do it. They are amazing artifacts.

@splaice CPU collection is not something I've thought of, maybe I should start with the couple old Pentiums I have

The book is great btw, arenamag.com/archive/silico…. By @arenamagdotcom .

@rdotapps mmap from flash, sd holds a large library managed with m3u playlists. It loads the playlists to flash to play them.

@splaice Are you streaming the .mod files from SD, or keeping them in flash?

Vibe coded esp32 .mod music track player. Inspired by ScreamTracker. #claude

Actually, this could apply to just about any software project.

Is there a future model for open source where feature requests are funded through token donations to implement them?

Massive life hack / unlock discovered this morning.

I think the same dynamic exists with Claude, you don't want the code generated right before a new model is released.

There used to be common knowledge around not wanting a car assembled on a Monday or Friday because the workers were recovering from the weekend or rushing towards the weekend.

I could feel Opus 4.8 being prepared to be released yesterday. Same experience I had prior to 4.7 being released. Claude gets slow and impatient. I had a review loop between Claude and codex run 9 turns and Claude still hadn't satisfied codex requests as the reviewer.

Repo: github.com/splaice/Coldst…

Sharing, Coldstart, how I am building software with agents. It changes every week. You will probably not like it. There is no one-shot. There is not solution. You have to read and think a lot. More of a pattern than anything else.

Repo: github.com/splaice/maildb

Lazy software pattern I'm enjoying. Built maildb to give Claude SQL & semantic search over my email and attachments via MCP. Thought I'd eventually package it up nicely. Instead I run postgres on an old laptop in the garage, with tmux + claude code cli running in the git repo. Use from my phone via /remote-control. Bug, perf issue, or want new feature? I prompt Claude then and there to build it. Claude is the sysadmin: runs the ingestion pipeline (extraction + embeddings) and DB backups. No releases, no packaging. Just features that exist, features to build, and an AI sysadmin. I am not alone @rhettford told me he has a similar situation with a project of his.