David Nash

Home: Part of an amazing #Polyfidelitous family (3 adults, 4 kids)

Work: #DataEngineering currently. #WebDevelopment and #DevOps in the past. #Chemistry a long time ago.

Developer of the HYG + AT-HYG star catalogs, and star chart software (https://codeberg.org/astronexus).

Expect lots of posts on #Cats, #Astronomy, #Computers, #Books, and other geeky topics here.

_Glacies delenda est._

Last Notes

2026-07-03 17:04:50 UTC

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@nprofile…v5q3 Badly dated, alas. Here's how it works today:
Junior: Asks ChatGPT to help them draw a circle. It spits out a shape that looks vaguely like a heptagon with cat ears. Carefully pastes the exact output into their application.
Middle: Asks Claude Code to create a circle-drawing program. The code is full of mathematical formulas and looks correct, except for drawing a square about 4% of the time and inviting Little Bobby Tables into the corporate intranet's database every other Thursday. The junior is tasked with fixing the squares and refilling the damaged database with proper circles.
Senior (mid-thirties): Uses agentic AI to create an entire department of circle-drawing agents. Their code to replace all occurrences of the letter "E" in the company intranet with circles wins the agentic-AI leaderboard one month. They are eventually called in to explain why the corporate web site is all circles, no text, but are given a promotion because of how quickly their agentic process updated the web site.
Senior (graybeard): Coffee-cup method, as before. They are fired because agentic AI is incapable of applying coffee cups to paper.

2026-06-18 19:56:22 UTC

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@nprofile…2ujz Ah yes, potent oxidizing agents like hydrogen peroxide, notably famous for not ever, not even once, reacting with random shit in their surroundings. 😖

2026-06-16 07:13:17 UTC

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@nprofile…7q7j
Web form: “Pick your country”
User 1: “US”
Web app: Aha! User is from the United States!
User 2: “CN”
Web app: Got it! User is from China!
User 3: “NO”
Web app: Oh no! User is stateless! We cannot serve them! Bye now!
(This is not that far removed from an actual bug I encountered once, which only manifested with site visitors from Norway, and sure enough, there was a bit of code that treated “YES” and “NO” as Boolean true and false instead of text strings.)

2026-06-11 18:25:01 UTC

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@nprofile…yjg9
Theoretical astronomers and astrophysicists are fine.
It’s those new upstart “experimental” astrophysicists that are a headache. I’ve already had to batten down my desk like it’s hurricane season several times this year, because one of their new grad students keeps trying to build an improperly contained neutron star on their desktop.

2026-05-15 17:07:55 UTC

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@nprofile…hytu Some of this old C code is still hosted on Giþub.

2026-04-02 17:26:11 UTC

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@nprofile…ugpy
“No! That’s not what it means when we say a lion’s mane is ‘shaggy’!”

2026-04-02 01:14:08 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj
(Looks up \u2014 in Unicode)
No way. No fscking way. That is…so unbelievably perfect.

2026-03-31 19:40:22 UTC

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@nprofile…qj99
My schaden is nicely freuded after seeing both this code dump and the fustercluck where people on Anthropic’s $100/$200 monthly plans are blowing through their 5-hour and weekly token allotments in no time flat.
Linked Reddit thread has numerous examples of pissed-off users, my favorite so far being the person who blew through the 5-hour quota trying to get Claude to realize that the 24th of March this year was not, in fact, a Monday. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7fcjf/claude_usage_limits_discussion_megathread_ongoing/

2026-02-05 18:13:56 UTC

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@nprofile…p227
My working assumption is that any device that has had #OpenClaw installed on it, even momentarily, anytime in the foreseeable future, is compromised.
Not *may become* compromised. *Is already* compromised.

2025-08-11 16:58:11 UTC

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@nprofile…qz4x I've probably mentioned this before, but just in case not:
If you took an "AP English" class (mine was equivalent to the modern "AP English Literature"; I don't think there was a Literature vs Language breakdown back then) in the 80s or 90s, and then took the official AP test for possible college credit, the test graders didn't care whether the essay was 5-paragraph-essay shaped or not.
I know this because one of my parents volunteered to grade some practice exams for one of my school's AP English classes (not mine; no nepotism occurred here), which were direct excerpts from actual AP exams from a year or two back. So I got to see what the last couple years' rubric looked like. The format of the essay didn't matter, so long as it made sensible arguments that were supported by what was actually in the work being analyzed or critiqued, and that it showed an understanding of literary techniques discussed in class.
To get a good score, you couldn't hack the system with a ChatGPT-style 5PE-shaped pile of word barf. It actually had to be a good analysis, at least by the standards of a college-level introductory English lit class.

2025-04-04 02:50:10 UTC

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@nprofile…48vs @nprofile…6r7l @nprofile…ahr2 @nprofile…ghzp You’ve both got the right basic idea (and both are very funny) but I think @nprofile…48vs is a bit closer. The first one was more like “I will fuck (specifically, anally): hey you, learn”. Second is more like “I fuck and I find out.” Probably best to make ‘em both imperative (the “hey you: do this” verb form) and just to be mildly obnoxious, try to get an equivalent of English “around” in the mix. So I propose “circumfutue et inveni.”

2025-03-14 06:27:38 UTC

And almost as if on cue, the clouds rolled up at my place right before totality. Still a good show! #astronomy #TotalLunarEclipse
https://s3.c.im/media_attachments/files/114/159/344/954/617/081/original/792162d1d481e17f.jpeg