Going to dip my toe into @ziglang today. And, for almost entirely poetic reasons, I'm going to do it with Zed. Zzzz

Approach I'm referencing is here...
roadtolarissa.com/d3-mp4/

Messing around with some D3 animation stuff today and came across a really nice recording approach from @adamrpearce which means I don't need to faff around with screen recorders.

Still a novice when it comes to D3 though! Baby steps.

Is it true that @Nespresso don't publish exact caffeine content for their pods? Surely this information must be available somewhere?

Sub-text: Feel so alive this morning. Smashing out code and assuming it's something to do with the new pod...

Hot Take: Embrace the micro-plastics. Ingest as many as possible. Become the 3D Printer you always wanted to be.

6/6 Bottom line, I think something like a Bot Score would really help here. Similar to how @XEng has added the "Probably Spam" to replies, it would be good to have a "Probable Bot" or "Bot Rating: High" or something so that we could define our own thresholds for removing them

5/6 Lastly, I dealt with the impersonator type bots i.e. those who had taken a real account and varied the username by a few characters.

These are harder to automate and, clearly, they do dupe a lot more people as they had a large number of followers in some cases.

4/6 If they weren't already filtered by the above, I just looked at anyone with a female profile pic and a lack of Posts/Replies. That found a bunch more.

There is definitely something in common with these PFPs. I can't articulate it but I'm sure a simple ML classifier could do it.

3/6 If I then go a bit deeper, and look at accounts with a Following:Follower ratio of about 50:1 without a single Post or Reply on their account, I'd have caught another ~25%

2/6 For example, by just looking at the usernames e.g. "bO9yMtn63I4Y8kA" and filtering all those with a high percentage of digits, I catch about 50% of cases straight away.

1/6 Out of 155 followers, 90+ were bots! Pretty annoying. They're gone now and I have a clean slate to start from.

What really shocked me is how easy it was to identify them. Seriously, a few simple heuristics would capture almost 100% of cases.

Is this something @XEng can help with?
🧵👇

Spotted some weird activity in terms of follower-count this morning - dug a little deeper

Didn't realise a lot of bots will unfollow after a few days of not receiving a reciprocal-follow-back. It's apparently a bot evasion technique to stop the following/follower ratio getting too out of line.

My @Jetbrains subscription just expired, and I'm torn on renewing. VSCode doesn't quite do it for me, and whilst I enjoy @Neovim, it hasn't matched the productivity boost I get from Webstorm or Pycharm.

Most likely, I'm probably just gonna renew and call it a Christmas gift to myself.

If you want to mix things up a bit, adjust your favourite LLM prompt to answer you in Yoda-styled language.

"Hmmmm. Clean the npm cache first, you must. If fail it does, then node_modules AND package-lock.json, delete together you shall. Only a Sith Lord deletes package-lock.json alone, yes, mmmm."

My wife has suggested we get rid of our Roomba as we never use it, it's very old and it's quite damaged.

I know the responsible thing to do is to sell or donate it but I just really, really, really want to hack the software/firmware and turn it into a battle-bot to guard our apartment.

Thinking of launching BritGPT, exactly like ChatGPT except:

• Apologises for every response
• Adds 'with all due respect' before each correction
• Calls every runtime error 'a bit of a pickle'
• Weather complaints in all error logs
• Adds the letter 'u' to words generously

Who's with me?

It's kinda wild how little time people spend crafting good prompts as a percentage of their overall AI usage.

It takes like ~1 hour to skim through, say, the @AnthropicAI prompt engineering guides and ROI on that time is insanely high.

Pull request count by programming language 2012-2024.

Now 2024 is over, I thought it would be fun to look back over the Github archives and see how many PRs have been raised in each language

bsky has a 60s limit on video so I've linked to the full version here for now ...

x.com/LostAndFound...

I’m gonna say 7. Big margin of error here though. More in winter. Less in summer.

Not 100% sure but I measure my consumption in handfuls if that’s any indicator.

The Problem-Finding Problem An engineer's reality check: trading corporate problem-solving for the fuzzier world of finding a problem, building a solution, and then monetising the damned thing.

www.lostandfounding.com/p/the-proble...

The Problem-Finding Problem An engineer's reality check: trading corporate problem-solving for the fuzzier world of finding a problem, building a solution, and then monetising the damned thing.

I’m writing about my journey as a new solo tech founder…

Lostandfounding.com

Username Monitoring & Brand Protection for X and Bluesky | Handle Hawk Get instantly notified when your desired X (Twitter) or Bluesky handle becomes available. Protect your brand from impersonation with 24/7 username monitoring. Free signup available.

👋 Cool starter pack.

handlehawk.com

Would love to be added if it’s still open.

Ideas Are Free (Execution Sold Separately) Adventures in the Space Between Ideas and Implementation

Ending the week with Issue 2 of Lost And Founding.

Happy weekend folks!

Reason I'm getting so much from @bsky.app is that it's a fresh start & chance to connect with folks working on things I'm interested in - not a time-suck of political controversy

Not saying it will _never_ happen but I'm trying to curate my feed in favour of doers rather than political commentators

Username Monitoring & Brand Protection for X and Bluesky | Handle Hawk Get instantly notified when your desired X (Twitter) or Bluesky handle becomes available. Protect your brand from impersonation with 24/7 username monitoring. Free signup available.

Handlehawk.com

Username Monitoring & Brand Protection for X and Bluesky | Handle Hawk Get instantly notified when your desired X (Twitter) or Bluesky handle becomes available. Protect your brand from impersonation with 24/7 username monitoring. Free signup available.

Felt like it was only right to add Bluesky username monitoring to handlehawk.com! And, I had a spare afternoon so why not?

Could be useful for anyone who wasn't able to get the username they wanted first time around.

Like, I really like the fact the API is developer friendly and doesn't cost a small fortune (looking at you X) but it comes with downsides.

Not to mention all the bots that will just swarm Bluesky via the frontend rather than proper App password access.

This is the big unknown for me right now in terms of Bluesky's longterm viability. If the platform really takes over, it will attract a wave of bots and automated responses such that exist in Twitter.

I don't know what @moderation.bsky.app's plans are for this but it will be the make/break scenario