Never been one to let the carrier drop

OKay, so, it has become very popular to cowrite code with a LLM. And I cannot argue that it is a tremendous force multiplier, however, I do have some suggestions

#1) Painful as it might be, *read every diff*. Do not ever commit code you haven’t read.
a) While you’re reading, see if you can shorten the comments. LLMs overcomment – the reason this matters is if you are going to use
LLMs to maintain the code over long terms, you do *not* want to be burning tokens with excessive comments

b) Check the logic and approach. LLMs make mistakes.

#2) If the LLM says something improbable, *definitely* push back. *Expect* the LLM to draw incorrect conclusions from individual failures – one example, recently Claude concluded that the shopify metaobject filter didn’t work because you can only create a metaobject filter for a metaobject
which exists. It didn’t know that, got errors, and concluded the errors were fatal in scope to the operation. It was all set to create a implementation with 30 webhook registrations where only 3 were needed. I repeatedly pushed back, and led it down the correct road, until it understood the right way to do things.

#3) Point out when the LLM says something blatantly wrong. among other things, there isn’t any real reasoning going on – remember, LLMs have no aboutness, they’re in no way anchored in reality – they can’t tell a cat from a cow, they just are a sliding set of activations of weights moving through a transformer, also thought of as a feed-forward ANN with a attention head. By pointing out a blatently wrong statement, you may well nudge them into the correct alignment.

#4) *TEST* everything. One *good* thing about LLMs is they are wonderful at writing unit tests. Use this ability – but also end to end test the system under development unless you can tell by reading the code that it’s going to work – and maybe even then. Certainly don’t release anything to production that hasn’t been tested.

#5) Sometimes, write it yourself. You need to keep the ability to write code, and it will atrophy if you don’t use it. You want to occasionally exercise those pathways – neural skills are use it or lose it.

I’ve now completed 1800 hours of practice since I installed the hour meter (early in COVID).

I put this here because

1) I want this played at my funeral
2) I want to cover it and I’m concerned there may be no copies of the lyrics left on the internet

When my time comes and you put me in the ground
Well don’t you have your heads hanging down
Now don’t you worry don’t you cry
I lived while I was still alive

So take me to my grave with pride
Used up and worn out from the ride
Sliding sideways skidmarks worldwide
Take me to my grave with pride

I lived while I was still alive
I lived while I was still alive
I lived while I was still alive

You liked my Jeckyll, Oh you loved my Hyde
The devil couldn’t catch me if he tried
Now it’s one last road trip, one more big surprise
I lived while I was still alive

So take me to my grave with pride
Used up and worn out from the ride
Sliding sideways skidmarks worldwide
Take me to my grave with pride

I lived while I was still alive
I lived while I was still alive
I lived while I was still alive

See the sun in your eyes
This is only goodbye

I lived while I was still alive.. alive.. alive.. alive

I lived while I was still alive
I lived while I was still alive
I lived while I was still alive
(Take me to my grave with pride)

I lived while I was still alive
I lived while I was still alive
I lived while I was still alive
(And the bell keeps ringing)

I lived while I was still alive
I lived while I was still alive
I lived while I was still alive

For those of you who like listening to me practicing, recording, etc – or those of you who *would* like to listen to those things, there is now a new WSHR tool that provides a searchable archive at https://archive.sheer.us/wshr/. The AI that is indexing it is slowly chewing through six years of recordings, so there should be progressively more and more material available over time.

You can also now self-service to subscribe and unsubscribe from both the real-time live announcement of broadcasting and the weekly digest.

Mom 80 – Happy Revolution Day

(With thanks to How Kuff for the concept of birthdays as revolution days)

God knows you weren’t the perfect parent
God knows I wasn’t the perfect child
You were a bit too bound by your tribe
I was maybe a bit too wild

But we’ve found our way through the years
And ended up as friends
You were there at the place where my road started
I’ll be there at the place yours ends

Happy revolution day
One more time around
Where the falling angel meets the rising ape
Standing on holy ground

You’ve been there through bad times and good
I’ll been there through dark and light
We’ve found many things to talk about
In this shadow play of wrong and right

You’ve made it through 80 journeys around the sun
With the laughter and the tears
And I feel certain that you find wisdom
In the exposure to the years

Happy revolution day
One more time around
I hope the laughter has outweighed the tears
I hope whatever you looked for you found

I wanted to write a little bit about what I’ve chosen to do for my solar battery bank because I think that the popular approach is less safe than what I’m doing.

Note that I am running a 12 volt system – but you could use this same approach for higher voltages. You would need to have breakers or fuses for midpack string equilization as well if you did. Feel free to ask me about this.

What I’ve done is first put a fuse on the positive terminal of every battery – this is a marine fuse, direct attaches to the battery post. Then I have 2 10 AWG wires going from each battery to ground, and 2 going to the battery breaker for that battery. Each battery has a 40 amp breaker.

The intention here is that if a battery were to get severely out of balance, it’s breaker would trip during charging because it would get a unreasonable amount of charge current. Every month or so I check to make sure I have no tripped breakers.

Beyond that, if a battery were to have a short circuit fault in it’s BMS, the fault current would be limited to what that battery could supply. I have seen many people advocating 4/0 or bus bars between batteries in 12 volt systems and I think this is potentially quite dangerous – especially in a large pack such as mine. (I have 12 280 AH batteries, for a total of 40kW of stored energy – if each battery contributed 250 amps of fault current, this would make for a eye popping 2500 amps.. I would be pulling bits of battery off the ceiling, not to mention that would be a very difficult arc to quench)

I would like to encourage DIY solar folks doing a battery bank to consider using my approach (many little wires, one breaker per battery) rather than the more popular (big bus bars between batteries) approach.

So, the US is currently involved in a war where, basically, we’re blowing up someone else because we cancelled a treaty we had made where they agreed not to develop a technology we already have. We cancelled the treaty. Then we got mad that they were developing the technology – which we already have – which we have already used – and bombed them. Then, we got mad and started a war with them. And started committing war crimes like threatening civilian topics.

I am ashamed to be a US citizen. We are thugs. We are a oil company with a army. We are on the side of wrong.

So, I’ve installed OpenClaw and tried to get it to do some basic things around here. So far, what the lesson for me has mostly been is how much smarter, more parallel, and more capable I am as compared with a ANN.

I also am convinced I could write a much better one.. so I’ve started sketching of design for PerlClaw. That may be my project for when I finish up KittenTrader, which is now paper trading and close to live trading.

I know in general being conservative means being unable to learn.

However, my hope is that as Donald Trump causes the next Great Depression, we will ALL learn that

1) Money in general is a bad idea
2) Conservative thoughts in general are a bad idea
3) the GOP’s “trickle down economics” don’t work
4) We should never again allow this particular type of non-fact-driven stupidity to drive our political decision making

No more religion
No more billionaires getting to be billionaires even though by becoming billionaires they have already proven they are morons.

(Look.. you’re reducing the amount of real tangible wealth EVERYONE INCLUDING YOU can have by deciding to use a trading token as a score counter)

So, most recently he has said ““Our message to Denmark is very simple: you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. You have under invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under invested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass filled with incredible people. That has to change, and because it hasn’t changed, this is why President Trump’s policy in Greenland is what it is,””

But.. by any standard, being annexed by the USA would be a step *down*. They’d suddenly have

1) A healthcare system that is among the worst in the world AND robs the users blind
2) Very little social safety net

Trump, how about stopping being the worst human being in the world.. if indeed you aren’t actually Satan himself.. and try to improve the situation of Americans, who are in MUCH worse shape than Greenland. Among other things, your stupidity and incompetence is leading us into a great depression and you’ve also taken away our ability to walk without fear in our country. We never know when your brown shirt ICE thugs will smash our windows, beat us up, and demand our papers.

No one would want to live under your rule except your braindead, brainwashed GOP syncophants.