She sleeps like she pays rent.

When she's not sleeping, she's doing her level best to be on the ceiling, whether it's hitching a ride on my shoulders to get to the top of the refrigerator or whatever. Or meowing at me incessantly about being on the ground, as though I'm supposed to somehow fix that.

It's almost tragic because she's so small, and yet wants to be so big.

Sometimes I pick her up and hold her up to the ceiling so she can paw at it. At first I thought maybe she'd realize there's nothing up there and lose interest. No such luck. It just makes her want up there more.

We'll be installing "cat shelves" in the bedroom in short order. Spoiled thing.

And then there's my coffee. Every time I pour a cup she's all over me to see what's in there. Every time, same old coffee - black. She doesn't need any. Terrorist. Murder muffin.

I've been buried in some research on finite automata, nerding out on some techniques for converting lazy expressions into deterministic greedy expressions over the past couple of weeks.

In that time I've developed an elaborate R&D framework to both explore finite automata theory, and test hypotheses around it pretty easily, primarily using tools like LINQ.

It's fun stuff, and I'm excited about it, or was. Then it got hot. It's getting into the late summer sweaty unproductive time before fall kicks in, and I've never liked this time of year.

It's the old gym socks of weather. It's hard to be excited about anything when it's so nasty and muggy out.

Creativity for me, is kind of delicate. I need a proper environment for it to really manifest. This isn't it. Now I'm bored, and it's not because I don't have anything to do.

And I couldn't be happier about it.

The post was titled "codeproject.com is no more =("

and it was removed as outdated.

the internet rejoices

all of the reputation points transfers are being delayed due to the migration layer being entirely implemented as excel sheet macros. =)

woot!

'MURICA!

/hides

Caching is always great to deal with when it comes to debugging. Always so helpful it is, serving out valid, stale requests that don't reflect what is actually happening on the ground.

@pkfox Good to see you!

I don't trust ChatGPT's model, but then the last one i tried was 4. Everyone I talked to about it said try Claude Sonnet 4 so I did, and in some ways it really impressed me. Of course immediately after it would do something pants-on-head stupid. XD

I'm not sure if this applies to every language, but at least for C++ it looks like the code theme was designed for a dark background. Particularly the light greens do not show up well against the white. It makes it very hard to read.

I'd suggest darkening the background of the code sections. Something other than blinding white.

Yeah this one is strictly drip, although it can do over ice, and a couple of other brew styles. In the drip coffee maker world, it's kinda pricey. As espresso machines go, not so much, but it isn't one.

The machine is not a liar, it's a bullshitter. The intent is different, but the result is often the same.
There's a notes section anthropic has which it will use to seed all your prompts i guess. Mine says "the right question is more important than the right answer. don't be afraid to say I don't know. "
Not sure how effective it is in practice.

It's not great at imperative development, but it's a set monster. Give it a functional problem vs an imperative one, and it will absolutely go to town on it.

I used it for research, because I don't have a math background, and I was exploring some new frontiers in Chomsky type 3 discrete deterministic finite automata, a subject I know a lot about fundamentally, but I am taxed when it comes to expanding the algorithms, because my grasp of them isn't always complete, especially in the extents, and the math fails me. Well. Claude was able to explore some techniques with me from "The Dragon Book" (not its actual title but if you know what this is you know what this is) and implement them with little to no guidance from me, which allowed me to learn the things I didn't understand, and come to a whole new class of understandings about the way FSMs work, which furthered my research goals.

It's not a substitute for knowledge. You have to know enough about the subject to know if it's bullshitting you. Claude would have led me down counterproductive rabbit holes a lot more often than it did if I wasn't vigilant and aware enough of the subject matter to say "hey, wait a minute! what's that about?!" Even with knowledge i ended up being glad i saved work in progress copies of my code before making major changes it suggested.

And unit test unit test unit test. The thing doesn't like handling edge cases. So you better test for them especially. Also, I've tried getting it to write unit tests for me and in the end it's questionable whether that saved me any time. It wrote a bunch of bad tests, and i had to review all of them anyway.

This article, for example is mine
https://main.codeproject.com/articles/Dynamically-Updating-Firmware-from-Arbitrary-Sourc
It says it's by Deeksha Shenoy

PLEASE fix this. I don't know how many articles are affected. This is just what I found when I first hit the site

I've had a Breville. Frankly, I don't like paying for garbage that I end up having to throw away, so I will never buy another. I had a terrible experience with them. Hope yours is better.

So I bought myself a Ninja - and I liked it so much I bought one for my sister and her family. It's not for espresso (though they make those too). I'd offer the model # but it looks like they don't manufacture it anymore. Shame. Still, they sell it on amazon currently: https://www.amazon.com/Ninja-Specialty-Fold-Away-Frother-CM401/dp/B07PFLM2LK

It's expensive. It's also worth it. It's one of those things that's so well engineered that you appreciate it every time you use it.

Groucho is a a little show off. He likes to catch toy mice, and then strut around with them in his mouth, yowling with his mouth full: "Look at me! Look at me! I'm a ferocious hunter"

Yeah sure, Nimrod. If I was a toy mouse I'd be terrified. He likes an audience and so he has taken a keen interest in interrupting my Teams meetings to the point where I have to preface my presence with a disclaimer about my cat.

@kmoorevs I use reddit in doses mostly for technical content - things like r/esp32 and r/embedded are great resources - not as a social media hub, although I have met a couple of online friendos that way.

@Sander-Rossel I've got whole new coding horrors for you. like my extension method .ToLazyList() that works off an IEnumerable<T> and is every bit as horrible as it appears. XD

@Sander-Rossel It's good to finally hear from you, especially since you've been scolding me in my head about my code off and on in absentia since codeproject went dark. XD