Chris Smith

loss function

f(| |) = | _

Was your top a birthday present or are you finally branching out from white-text-on-black T-shirts? 😂

love a bit of continvouclous morging

3-panel comic from Aram J French from mandatoryrollerscoaster.com: First panel: Grey hoodie guy talking to brown sweater guy: "We invented a robot that answers questions." Second panel: Grey hoodie guy (standing next to robot): "We just have to feed it 10 baby giraffes a day." Third panel: Brown sweater guy: "But it answers the questions correctly?" Grey hoodie guy (making a face as if it was obvious): "Oh my goodness, no. No no no no no"

Age verification?

My first programming language was mIRC script.

Code here: github.com/csmith/chame...

Might publish the actual articles with standard.site lexicons next, or figure out whether there's a good film review lexicon...

I don't like posting every time I make a new blog post, as it feels a bit spammy. So I've made a separate account to do the spam for me: @posts.chameth.com!

Figuring out how to poke the PDS from scratch was a bit harder than it probably should be (I'm about to close 16 different tabs...)

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

I couldn't be bothered spending 20 minutes writing some boring, personal-use-only code. So I spent 20 minutes waiting for an LLM, then another 20 minutes tidying up the slop until I was happy with it. Efficiency++

so... middlekhajiit has middlewares?

Picture of a road sign. It says "Welcome to GREAT HOCKHAM, A Wayland Village, Please drive carefully". There's a planter of pretty flowers in front of it.

Drove through two of these villages, and was not given a single reason why I should switch from X11.

This all seems pretty unbecoming of a FIFA Peace Prize winner

Kings of Leon did predict this tbf 😬

I’ve had the vague outline of a blog post about LLMs vs social contracts in my head for a while, but this doc basically covers all of my points in a much more approachable way than my rambling likely would have

Day 7: most enjoyable for me so far. Has a bit of crunch to it, but can be done surprisingly elegantly. Borrowed a few performance tricks from my now-over-optimised day 4. I misread part one and slightly overcomplicated it, but that paid dividends for part two. #adventofcode

Day 6 wasn’t what I was expecting. Overwhelming fiddly to the extent I haven’t bothered doing part two yet. Got in a fight with Rust’s borrow checker, too. I just wanted to do basic string manipulation :( #adventofcode

I tried using Claude to suggest where I can improve my Rust (as I've not got that much experience with it), and it's nearly completely useless. "That type parameter is unnecessary" (it's not), "you don't need to worry about that for Advent of Code" (but I want to), etc. #adventofcode

Some random observations now I've caught up: I like Rust's ability to nest the tests in the same file as the source code. Having a test to validate the example input is useful, but I wouldn't normally bother because there's too much overhead to set it up in other languages. #adventofcode

Day 5: feels like things are starting to get interesting, and input parsing is starting to get a bit annoying. Is this the last nice puzzle before we get hit with the only weekend puzzles this year? #adventofcode

Day 4: ah, grids, the old AoC staple. A fun problem, and I've spent far longer optimising my solution than any other day so far. Pay no attention to the number of `unsafe`s in my code! #adventofcode

Day 3: "joltage" is a great word. I like the way part two builds on part one in a way that you can write a single solution to both.

Day 2: straight forward, but my solution isn't particularly fast (~60ms, when I know some people are doing it in ~1ms). Feels like I need a different approach entirely, rather than a simple optimisation pass. Still noodling on that one. #adventofcode

Day 1: my roughest start to AoC ever. Part two was fiddly, and the example input was very lacking. I nearly threw in the towel, but eventually got a working answer, and then came back and improved my code later when I was in a better mood. #adventofcode

I'm a bit late posting, but I'm doing this year's Advent of Code in Rust! Horrible, nasty Rust to try and squeeze out every bit of performance.

My solutions are here: github.com/csmith/aoc-2...

I'll thread comments on individual days

Agree! I often wish there was just a JSON version or something like that, especially on later days where it gets more complex. The parsing isn’t challenging or fun, it’s just a slog.

🎵❄️🎵
He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you've just ate
He knows full well he's normalizing
A mass surveillance state