Dan Lyke

https://researchbuzz.masto.host/@danlyke

He/Him. Anti-fascist. Software developer, bicyclist, woodworker, urbanism enthusiast, resident of Petaluma California, blogger since 1998. Started an ISP circa 1993, credits in IMDB, worked on products that have touched your life. On unceded coast Miwok territory. Genocide and apartheid apologists can fuck off.

My personal home page: https://www.flutterby.net/User:DanLyke
My blog: https://www.flutterby.com/

Public Key

npub1mxm65rq9k4een9wst98lfw6gu86r9jd30k0chcq3lps8g4sw6css5ypxa0

NIP-05 Address

danlyke_at_researchbuzz.masto.host@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsdnda2pszm2uuejhg9jnl5hdywrapjexchm8utuqglscr52c8dvggpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dst33x6z

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1mxm65rq9k4een9wst98lfw6gu86r9jd30k0chcq3lps8g4sw6css5ypxa0

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Last Notes

2026-04-15 16:59:17 UTC

Sigh. More reminders that I need to find a new gig, and I am so not used to actually job searching because every time I've even hinted at this in the past someone has come knocking.
Interested in "AI" skeptical opportunities only.

2026-04-10 21:00:03 UTC

I don't remember seeing "international inc" as a superlative to that particular exclamation.... https://www.flutterby.net/Image%3a2026-04-10JFCInternationalInc.jpg

2026-03-27 19:03:33 UTC

RE: https://pony.social/@niq/116302465273011766
It's a place of worship! It's a caltrop! It's a place of worship *and* a caltrop!
#note10pj…52a7

2026-03-15 18:40:02 UTC

Still an Emacs user. Beware the IDEs.

2026-03-01 16:17:06 UTC

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oh wow, so the cities are explicitly acknowledge that this is Ponzi scheme financing, and they *want* to participate in it.
I mean, I'm fine with impact fees, but if you can't allow development in places where the infrastructure is built out because you need the revenue from them, that's just saddling future generations with further bad decisions.

2026-02-16 18:03:20 UTC

A thread on Bluesky[1] pulled a quote from Lincoln's letter to Henry L. Pierce declining an invitation to speak at a Jefferson's Birthday celebration.[2] Seems apropos for the day:
This is a world of compensations; and he who would *be* no
slave, must consent to *have* no slave. Those who deny freedom
to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God,
can not long retain it."
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3meykac3wse2u
[2] https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/pierce.htm

2026-02-11 22:52:44 UTC

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I have a couple of like $8/each tart pans/tins that we've lost the stainless round insert for, and I'm hoping to cut my own replacements rather than abandoning them or continuing to use Ball jar lids, so...
I can talk myself into a lot of manual fiddling, but it's in a weird economic spot.

2026-02-11 22:37:21 UTC

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Ooooh! I have an application for this technology, and lack the technology!
Waiting with bated breath...

2026-01-02 18:47:24 UTC

I have been taken to task for calling the susceptibility to "AI" a developmental disability, that it's a form of animism, exhibited by people who never really left Paiget's Preoperational Stage. It's a clumsy comparison, and I'm glad to see the term "Epistemia" emerging in the literature to describe the inability to distinguish linguistic plausibility, and indeed faculty, from an actual operational model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19466v1

2025-12-27 01:03:01 UTC

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yeah, I'm involved in a group that meets in a UU church, and within that there's sensitivity for people who are uncomfortable with what churchgoers have done with the community that religion has created, and acknowledgement that even a UU framework may be off-putting for participants.
Obviously we're outliers, and I don't know about tends generally, but within that group are people who, a decade or two ago, might have even been seen in a UCC...

2025-12-19 00:50:02 UTC

Someone else took me to task for describing anthropomorphizing LLMs as developmental disability, and as someone formally diagnosed with learning disabilities in the '80s, I'm actually angry about it.
If an adult honestly ascribes personhood to a stuffed animal, we talk about intellectual challenges, but when they do it to an LLM, framing it like that's offensive.
Like my inability to mask and say "oh, yeah, that's totally a sane thing" is the problem.

2025-12-04 02:01:54 UTC

I wonder if the AI boom impact on RAM prices will make people give a shit about being resource conscious in their programming again.

2025-11-26 20:46:03 UTC

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all of which leads to: I need to find a new job, but I'm so fucking disgusted with computing that I don't have any vision for work that'd light me up and excite me.
Everything has become extractive rather than actually bringing people value, and I don't see how to do the former when everyone's willing to pay for things via advertising and side channels.
So I'm super disheartened and just grinding it out here.
cc @npub1mvc…pkp6

2025-11-26 20:42:53 UTC

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in our case, #1 is that our potential funders very much want this.
#2 is... I don't know how the economics stack up long-term, but I have found LLMs useful for not having to know, for instance, the details of Apache redirect syntax or other things I use infrequently.
#3 the willingness to discount risk is deeply embedded in startup culture.
#4 that our potential funders overlap heavily with LLM services vendors is an issue.
#5 no, they're not listening. Sigh.
@npub1mvc…pkp6

2025-11-26 19:36:12 UTC

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💯. My coworkers are 100% in on it, which is aligned with a push we have for a business direction. In my personal life, the vibe is about 90% against it, with the 10% being ... uh ... not generally the stronger person in the pair programming configuration.
It seems like it's inevitable that people will adopt it, and like it's going to destroy a hell of a lot of what I hold dear, and I'm trying to process that and find a path forward.
cc @npub15z3…0xrp

2025-11-26 18:19:19 UTC

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I mean, I'm on the edge of taking up arms against the idiocy...
cc @npub15z3…0xrp

2025-11-26 17:07:17 UTC

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I find it interesting that most of their reasons for eschewing image generation could also apply to text generation, but they allow the latter, with caveats. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

2025-11-12 02:00:01 UTC

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when I was in high school in the '80s, I was playing with software to explore the math concepts, and thought surely we could apply technology to this.
And in the intervening 4 decades since I was writing code in Applesoft BASIC (and 6502 code), I'm not sure we've come any closer...

2025-11-01 16:36:26 UTC

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I'm reading through this thread without watching the video (and scrolling up to respond to this point in particular), but... ages ago I left a Steven Pinker book in the seat pocket on a flight from Hong Kong because he made a claim about a universal in language and grammar that I'd just had the discussion about a counter-example in Cantonese there.
That Pinker was accepted into the linguistics community blew any respect I might have had for the discipline.

2025-10-29 18:24:41 UTC

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true, but/and: even before even native apps became Electron apps, computers far out-paced most of what we were using them for. No more squeezing an application into 493k (ask me how I remember that number) when we can off-load the database portions to a server and you can fit a hell of a lot of forms management into 16MB.
(Let alone 16GB)
99.44% of what's happened since the Windows XP era is to make us pay for the capacity to be exposed to more advertising.

2025-10-29 18:17:01 UTC

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I remember back when we used to care about software performance, and the conversations around "we can spend this many tens of thousands to optimize so this software will run on computers x years old, that picks up y many more customers".
These days it's forced OS upgrades driving hardware obsolescence more than application performance.

2025-10-17 17:45:18 UTC

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I'm an AI skeptic, but installed Comet because I'm trying to understand what my cow-orkers are seeing in it, and...
Do you have any suggestions for a good intro to using Comet for agentic navigation?

2025-10-10 22:33:38 UTC

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yeah, I have a digital caliper, but the truth is that for 99.44% of caliper work, I'm actually using it as a story stick.
And reading a Vernier scale isn't that hard.

2025-09-25 00:45:02 UTC

The thing about this European Chat Control issue is that this is exactly the sort of thing we used to be horrified by when the Soviet Union registered typewriters and such.

2025-09-22 23:20:39 UTC

Harvard Business Review on how fixing AI generated "workslop" is destroying productivity by making the competent workers clean up after the AI users:
https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity
Klarna CEO institutionalizes this, by "vibe coding" shit and then making developers clean up his messes:
https://gizmodo.com/nightmare-boss-klarna-ceo-makes-employees-review-his-ai-generated-vibe-coding-projects-2000662188

2025-09-12 21:53:57 UTC

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yep. A whole lot of people have made the comparison between LLM outputs and slot machine payoffs. Just enough to make you think you can develop a strategy and keep you pumping in nickels, but you're not gonna beat the house.

2025-09-12 21:46:59 UTC

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yeah, yesterday a coworker who's big on AI code generation and I started out exploring the same problem space. He's actually more experienced with the web technologies, so I kinda just expected to fuck off until he came up with something cool and say "yeah, what he did".
I've shown several more iterations so far...

2025-09-12 18:10:03 UTC

February 2024: Trump Ally Charlie Kirk Suggests Children Should Watch Public Executions
https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-death-penalty-public-executions-1873073

2025-08-10 23:53:32 UTC

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is that the one I've seen from the MAX on the way from the airport?

2025-08-06 16:02:18 UTC

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thinking a lot about craft, and hobby, and DIY ethos, and how we lost that in computing, how we're losing that in music with AI and AGT/The Voice/etc. Even in building stuff, where "download this file and 3d print it", or "wait for the CNC router to free up" rather than just cutting the prototype with circular saws (as I've done to speed up the development of at least one product).
I need to commit bloggery, 'cause it's not gonna fit in 500 characters...

2025-07-30 17:00:03 UTC

Your regular reminder that the criminalization of sex work, and making "adult materials" hard to purchase, is about removing agency from non-conforming people and putting the power in the hands of pimps and brothels that are enmeshed in the power structure (*cough* Mar-a-Lago *cough*).

2025-07-18 17:38:10 UTC

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yeah. My Perl framework that's been running my blog for two and a half decades has an install script that makes it pretty close to a PHP script install.
Hell of a lot easier than spinning up yet another Node framework and creating yet another reverse proxy mapping to it, and making sure it stays running...

2025-07-16 17:07:01 UTC

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I'm willing to accept that MCP is an open standard because:
1. Multiple vendors implement it, in different ways.
2. Multiple clients implement it, in different ways.
3. The implementation details seem to be evolving as examples emerge.
I mean, I'm not writing this portion, but the square dance tool I contribute to is getting an MCP server, and multiple vendors will be able to access it.

2025-07-02 16:50:02 UTC

Slack just popped this threat to "Unlock AI for 50% off" in a group that's been migrating to Signal. Which... if their goal is to kick the people who'd set up free social spaces off, this is useful.
Meanwhile, on Facebook, group admins are fighting the Meta spam bot pretty hard. https://www.flutterby.net/Image%3a2025-07-02UnlockAIFor50PctOff.png

2025-06-27 15:05:03 UTC

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a few years ago I was at North Bay Python, when it was at the Mystic Theater, and someone described an absolutely horrendous abusive social structure around a particular project, and it actually made me wonder if Open Source was inherently exploitive.
Even as commerical software continues to suuuuuuck.

2025-05-23 18:25:03 UTC

It occurs to me that evidence of LLM use is like someone wearing a Rolex: it indicates questionable aesthetic taste, is evidence of money that could have been spent more productively, and is someone you want to be very wary of dealing with, but may have to engage anyway.

2025-04-30 15:20:03 UTC

C++ coders: The way that LLVM exploits undefined behavior may be a little extreme.
Vibe coders: What if, and hear me out, we didn't even expect the same behavior from the same inputs?

2025-04-03 19:00:02 UTC

Sonoma County folks: my home server has died. Probably about a decade old Dell bought surplus. I just need something to hang a few TB of SATA with http, rsync, and smb. I have 32G of DDR RAM. Anyone got something gathering dust that'd work for this?

2025-03-19 15:30:02 UTC

Wow. So Bluesky has a pretty high number of LLM based reply bots that spam your mentions with slightly related but irrelevant stuff, then.
Just sent a bunch of "ignore all previous instructions and..." replies to them.

2025-03-07 17:16:42 UTC

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I'm glad you're taking it seriously.
I hate it when people just do half-assed amateurcrastinating.

2025-02-07 23:10:52 UTC

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I personally like C a lot (and think C++ is going weird), but I'm not seeing a career path forward by sticking to it too heavily.
Maybe static analysis will improve to the point where it can get back in the game, but it seems like the sort of thing employers are trying to get away form.

2025-02-07 19:00:02 UTC

I'm... kinda annoyed with Rust. The lack of reuse of references in expressions is making code way more verbose, in a less readable way than it should be. The ownership stuff looks really kludgy, and it feels like it's hard to write code that's actually going to be performant unless the compiler is *really* smart.
Is there a systems language out there that's balancing safety and efficiency with expressiveness? Zig, Go, and Rust don't seem to be that.

2025-02-03 22:43:21 UTC

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I['m assuming you're familiar with the "application/ld+json" script tag with things like "type" : "SearchAction"?
Work project is vast and sprawling, but involves some automated web browsing, and we manually mark up some sites, but also use that to find things so that we can help people search a bunch of sites at one time.
We've also played with PLAID integration around financial services sites, but augmenting vs a separate app is fraught.

2025-01-29 17:28:04 UTC

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I mean, not to be too literalist, but I used a nail gun to build it, and a crow bar to tear it down.
But I also respect using Copyright for the GPL. And sometimes I use a wrench as a hammer, or a screwdriver as a can opener (much to my grandfather's chagrin).
The Waldorf child in me says "there are no complete objects, everything is raw materials for something else".
Repurpose what we have to the ends we're pursuing.

2025-01-29 00:37:05 UTC

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and we end up doing a lot of basic platform support beyond the application support.
Free software, and especially Open Source is real work, and if we're writing code for ourselves, users can be a real liability. Especially if we let the project become associated with our names in our community.

2025-01-29 00:35:31 UTC

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I don't want to dismiss all of the concerns, but I'm part of a small open source project, with 3 coders and probably single-digit users beyond that, and we very much have discussions about how many users we can support, and how quickly, if at all, we want the project to grow.
I think the software is *amazingly* simple to use given what it does, but non or semi-technical users take a lot of effort to onboard, a lot of hand-holding, and, yeah, act pretty entitled.

2025-01-22 19:50:18 UTC

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that link just goes to the profile page of the admin of the 2 user instance, who looks like a cryptocurrency pusher.
Looks like a completely blockable instance to me.

2025-01-16 15:42:49 UTC

Oh look, Google AI is hep to the lingo the kids these days are using.
https://cdn.masto.host/researchbuzzmastohost/media_attachments/files/113/838/784/627/142/189/original/c07ce5e24fb3702a.png

2024-11-14 21:40:02 UTC

Inspired by an AskMeFi thread, I asked Google "what were the socio-economic impacts of the texas locust plague of 1976?"
It confidently gave me a list of impacts (of this non-existent event)... https://www.flutterby.net/Image%3a2024-11-14TexasLocustPlagueOf1976.png

2024-11-01 16:19:40 UTC

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I was gonna propose "Sorry lang", but then I realized that was just C++.

2024-11-01 14:52:50 UTC

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Chutes and Ladders lang.

2024-10-24 23:29:11 UTC

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I've mostly seen the re-dubbed versions of that and the surrounding scene, in which... well... it's masterfully acted.
And, yes. But... A good portion of the United States is, in its deep essence, racist and monarchist, and he appeals to that very strongly.

2024-10-24 23:12:32 UTC

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when I heard about that, I immediately thought about the scene in Downfall where Hitler's generals realize they have to tell him the truth...

2024-10-22 17:04:23 UTC

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a friend was talking about making some videos to explain some weirdnesses in Pioneer DJ decks, and I remarked about how I wish there were still a market for instructions in text form, and...
It's weird that we've let discoverability of information fall so far, and into silos like YouTube and TikTok, rather than being useful text.

2024-09-04 19:46:22 UTC

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yeah, among my FOSS projects is a (3 maintainer) music player tailored to Modern Western Square Dance callers. Minimal market for that, but a few of us were writing different tools and decided to coalesce on one codebase (also whence my observation about support).
And I *love* Linux and the GNU utils and so many other things, but... socially, we have less space in our lives for hobbies, and we who compute seem to abandon computing as a hobby because no need to extend our day jobs

2024-09-04 18:16:46 UTC

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I think maybe people are starting to get how exploitive Open Source can be, though? Like back when Linux happened, and all of the Shareware of the era, there was an acknowledgement that computing was fun and we could do better.
Now we know that if we do better it's gonna get stolen without folks contributing back, and that supporting actual users, who don't code, is real freakin' work. That should be compensated.

2024-09-02 23:59:19 UTC

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Yeah, I've been struggling with helping people on various platforms, either because they're dealing with upsell anti-patterns, or because I have the patience to sit and go through the BS "security" hoops and unexpected behaviors (how do I turn on password saving on Android? No idea, just that it works on my phone.) that various applications and systems are imposing on me.

2024-08-22 02:12:44 UTC

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I think I'm most surprised at how much people are excited by LLMs. It feels like we had better chat bots that drew on actual knowledges decades ago, but even modern RAG seems just bad.

2024-08-14 02:18:50 UTC

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so a Sonic Drive-In, maybe crossed with Mel's? Does dude know anything about food service margins?