Amazing seeing this here. I hung out with him a few times back then, and I was just thinking about this again just a few days ago. It was really great spending some time with such a smart person. He showed me how he would write little notes and mind maps in the margins of books, and the peg system of mnemonics. One of the times I was there, he was teaching python lessons to someone. I tried to make sense of his notebook system, and to this day I still use color coding, and things like a triangle for pieces of data in my notes. Somewhere, I have or had a copy of this with a lot of writing in the margins trying to make some linear sense of it.
Lately, I've been keeping an "engineering" notebook, using similar technique to the original poster's technique: dated entries and a place for a table of contents (that I need to update).
The boom loom boss was a winner of the 2025 Core77 Design Award for Toys and Play.
It's like an analog computer of weaving.
If you have any experience with weaving you will understand the importance of shed formation. The key innovation is the heddle mechanism which affords great efficiency with weft pattern making through rotation of a pattern bar allowing the weaver to focus on other variables like yarn selection or design sequence. There is even a web app pattern picker to plan out designs developed with the help of a mathematician [1]
Perhaps other similar ideas might be something like tablet weaving [2] or Der Weberknecht [3]
The primary difference is the quick prep and setup time with the boom loom and it's near instant to develop modular samplers [4]
If anyone knows of any other hacking mechanical weaving machines like the boom loom; please share!
Why not just mechanical turk the codebase? Lotsa jobs even with LLM augmentation at current state.
Where is the long term thinking of utility vs cost?
Until AI can solve its own energy generation issues, the hype is gross.
Thankfully I'll be long dead (hopefully) before a local AQI > 500 is considered the new normal common good trade for high fidelity personalized deep fake pr0n
or the cure for cancer at US healthcare billable rates.
>"All of our future books will involve AI."
>It is antithetical to the premise of the book (classic programming projects!) that they agreed to publish.
I hope this trend is not industry wide.
A publisher chasing fads and trends over enduring quality, so sad. I wish I knew who the publisher was to avoid but I can foresee their pivot to AI authors with titles like "From Zero to Hero, ChatGPT 5.2 Top Prompting Secrets for Dummies"
Technical books don't sell well to begin with. I've written a couple w/ a major publisher, it never paid back the RAM I needed to purchase to run the lab environment.
Publishers are going to demand chasing the hot-new-thing which will most likely be irrelevant by the time the book is on the shelf.
"How to write x86 ASM... with the Copilot Desktop app! - Build your bootloader in 15 seconds!"
>publishers live on the outsize success of very few of their books, and the rest of them are losses.
That is true of many industries, including films, vc software startups, games and books. As the Internet increases competition and opportunity, it is likely to become more true.
I’ve never worked in technical publishing but I have a few acquaintances who do. Adding chapters on AI is pretty close to industry wide for new writers. Experienced writers with sales figures have a lot more freedom.
The thing is, it’s not about getting chapters published on AI. The publishers are keenly aware that AI is using their content to steal their market and so anything they publish on AI will be obsolete before the final manuscript is published. It’s about getting potentially difficult first time authors to quit before their first third gets approved - that’s when the author is owed their first advance.
It’s a lot easier to slaughter sheep if the most docile select themselves.
I can't detail it much further than just this, but I understand that Tim O'Reilly has the AI virus bad and makes his reports tell him what they've done with AI that day every day. So I've got a first guess.
Glad this story got on HN, it moved the heart and I hope it spreads in the little openings of our lives. Nothings perfect, but day by day, more kindness and care, we can share https://youtu.be/wlpcFnOPH2k?si=C1Wa1cviJMa1zlYm
Thank you, finally a SRS implementation I can use for my plain text files. Very nice! I had Gemini make a deck from https://github.com/eudoxia0/hashcards , hashcard_tutorial.md and after correcting my deck to account for escaping the < and > with \< and \>; on the second run ($ hashcards drill --card-limit=10 ./)dealt me all the correct cards, like a self QA
I really like the keyboard shortcut of space and 1,2,3,4 for making deck reviewing quick work.
>transparent leadership. In my book, a good leader ...
I practice this in my day job, as in that is the default mode for continued employment.
Not sure how these practices are new. I wonder if it is a generational thing.
[1] Lion Kimbro. How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think. 2003 https://users.speakeasy.net/~lion/nb/book.pdf