Robert Smallshire
Founding Tubetrain 🚀. Building Demonstrable® at Sixty North. Director for lithium explorer Transition Elements. "utterly competent". Geoscience PhD. 330 ppm CO₂. Caver. 🇳🇴🇬🇧
- Interesting to come back to C++ after over 15 years. While I've been gone they've finally admitted that operating systems exist and provide enough useful OS integration out of the box to make it a half-reasonable platform.
- Reposted by Robert SmallshireThis would be a very good week for anyone who has not already abandoned the Mercator projection for maps of the world to do so
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- The best use of American AI today would be to help Europe build its own sovereign technologies: operating systems, social media, communications, semiconductors, defence, and yes, more AI. While the subsidies are flowing, let them underwrite a future of genuine technological independence.
- I worked in C++ from 1995 to 2010, then in Python from 2010 to 2025. I've been building complex native application in C++ again recently, almost entirely mediated by AI. It's hard to leave a 100x performance gain on the table when the dev- experience of interpreted versus native code is eliminated.
- One Earth radius of cycling in 2025 achieved. For the other geo-pedants out there, a distance slightly greater than that from the summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, which at 6384.4 km is the furthest point from the centre of the Earth. 🌍 🚴♂️
- This misses what’s happening: a categorical shift from specifying program representations in ever higher-level languages, to delegation. I’m no longer expressing programs; I’m directing an agent that expresses and manipulates programs. The directions themselves are ephemeral.
- It's not another rung on the program representation abstraction ladder. It's a sideways hop into agent management, and likely on to a different and new abstraction ladder.
- On zero-sum thinking. www.ft.com/content/30a4...
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- Reposted by Robert Smallshire"I hate AI because it states blatantly wrong things confidently sometimes. And also because it uses 50 gajillion gallons of water per query."
- Slop in, slop out.
- Why are Apple emulating failing eyesight with their new Liquid Glass app icon filter?
- Empire of AI by @karenhao.bsky.social contains serious errors regarding data centre water use. I thought it was an important book which I’ve recommended to folks, but I won’t be recommending it further unless a heavily revised second edition is published. andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-...
- The people making a pig’s ear of programming _with_ AI are mostly the same ones who made a pig’s ear of it _without_ AI. Still talking only about features, still ignoring system qualities. Same mindset, new tools, same outcome.
- When you realise that the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect applies to all of Wikipedia.
- Status: Fixing Human Slop on Wikipedia.
- From 1998: “An [SGI] Octane system featuring 250-MHz R10000 processor, meanwhile, will drop from $38,995 to $24,995.” I was coding on systems like this around the turn of the millennium. There’s a huge upside in how much money we’ll be prepared to pay for AI tooling. $200/month is nothing.
- I can't help but wonder if this post would have got more attention on his platform if I had omitted the word 'vibe'.
- I became interested in a space-filling foam called the Weaire-Phelan structure. I struggled to build intuition from static pictures, so I vibe-coded a geometry generator in Python and a custom visualiser in ThreeJS. From idea to realisation in 90 minutes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG1E...
- I became interested in a space-filling foam called the Weaire-Phelan structure. I struggled to build intuition from static pictures, so I vibe-coded a geometry generator in Python and a custom visualiser in ThreeJS. From idea to realisation in 90 minutes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG1E...
- The Weaire-Phelan Structure is the best known solution to the Kelvin problem of tiling space by equal volume cells of minimum surface area. I started out by using more artisanal visualisation techniques, but it soon became clear this would be massive time committment.
- Prediction (10 years) : The revolution currently underway in coding will be almost complete. Prediction (10 years) : There will be more programming than ever, but primarily in English, not in high-level programming languages like Python, C# or Java. English: HL-PLLs :: HL-PLLs : assembly
- We entered the 1980s writing in assembly, entered the 1990s writing in C and C++.
- Computing finally produces phenomena that demand the scientific method to understand and leverage, only to reveal that Computer Scientists were never taught how to do science.
- Key scientific tools: Hypothesis formation, experimental design, controlling for confounding factors, parsimony of explanation, replicability, critical evaluation of evidence ... even iterative model refinement originated in Software Engineering.
