Words, code, truth, kindness, other arcana ∙ github.com/jlevy

SF
The danger is not in letting students use tools like ChatGPT. It is in letting them learn that they don’t have to think, or believing that the tools are smarter than they are.
Now tools that create plausible yet dubious content are ubiquitous, good judgement and critical thinking are more important than ever. I’d like to see teachers help students critique AI-written essays. Find errors, describe what is incorrect or what you would write differently.
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As you delegate more and more to your coding agents, remember there is still one weird trick that only you can do properly: Deciding which files on your constantly full drive are safe to delete.
💾 Disk Saving Tip #1: I just saved 200gb 😮 1. Remove old Docker containers (80gb) 2. Purge old pnpm stores (50gb) 3. Remove old emulators - iOS + Android (70gb)
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But seriously this is such a big problem you should install my fdu skill for it.
I'm pleased to announce the release of fdu, the world's fastest disk usage and file tree analytics CLI+API. Over the past few months, I found myself managing numerous worktrees with hundreds of thousands of files. Agents struggle to tally disk usage, file age, or know where to begin to clean up large folders. fdu is an ground-up rewrite of both du and more modern tools like dust. It's pre-built and distributed via uv so you can run it right now with `uvx fdu@latest`. Thanks to an agentic performance iteration loop, it is the fastest tool of its kind, typically walking and tallying 5-10GB/s or 100-200K files/s on my old MacBook. That is ~9x faster than du and 10-100% faster than other modern native/Rust/Go options. It's instant to install as a skill or use as a CLI. Or can be used as a Python or Rust API. Other features: colored terminal output, tree views, last modification time for every directory (recursive), gitignore awareness, document analysis, and programming language detection (with code/comment/blank line tallies), filename and age filtering, native directory watching, a file cache for faster reruns, and parsable outputs like YAML and JSONL. All my agents now use the fdu to disk usage. Give it a try and let me know if it's useful! Or what you'd like to see in it next.
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Or ... was it just ... matcha and pickles? This is a whole genre now
You Can Eat Anything (by tommcgovern27 on IG)
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Credit: lars.hub and sutter.nolan on Instagram for acting good enough I had to watch it 3 times
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Replying to @Plasmaposting
To give credit fairly, Lars Midhun's skit is from Oct 15, three days before the one from Tom McGovern
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Joshua Levy retweeted
"Picking archetypal song lyrics as a glimpse into the heart or soul of a place" Very into this. I'd love to see an interactive audio exhibit where you travel the world through songs, listening to the poets and musicians who have best articulated the soul of each city. A musical atlas of the world’s collective psyche!!
Replying to @majamediaco
This got me thinking about picking archetypal song lyrics as a glimpse into the heart or soul of a place. You could definitely do this for California: The Last Resort (Eagles) Hotel California San Francisco (Scott McKenzie) California Dreamin
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Woohoo! The next big one
lol here's a lean proof of the optimal packing for 19 squares github.com/ofitzharding/sq19
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Noticing the wild swing in my Twitter feed’s p(doom) again today makes me want to tap the sign. Take a breath. Stay humble when making predictions. But never underestimate human ingenuity. Go do good work. Hug your family. It’ll be okay.
Humans make errors in prediction both in optimism and in pessimism, in spite of clever and careful reasoning. To take but one example, here are a few predictions that were credible and believed by many, from 1970.
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Replying to @ojoshe
Well worth checking out this article from @Mark_J_Perry about how expert consensus can be spectacularly wrong. This is not to dismiss all predictions of doom. But rather to encourage healthy skepticism and humility when it comes to predictions. aei.org/carpe-diem/18-specta…
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My friends Evan and Babur are setting up this event in Nov. I think it is interesting because it might be a glimpse of the future. So there are obvious analogies of buying compute today with financial markets and with traditional cloud compute marketplaces. But I think the dynamics of the market are quite different because AI compute is so new (we don’t know all the form factors), so scarce, and so opaque. As crazy as AI buildout may seem already, the demand for compute is almost insatiable: yes, there is speculation and over-use of AI by some early adopters, but fundamentally, most consumers and enterprises are still only getting started with using AI. Tokens are going to be scarce for a while. Few people have visibility on the market. Prices wildly vary. A lot of the digital economy will rest on compute deals and how they are brokered.
Introducing the Haight Street Compute Market. A one-day trading floor where vetted buyers and sellers of compute meet and sign deals in person. Nov 17, at the old Federal Reserve building in San Francisco. Request your invite: luma.com/86cjwpui
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Feel free to DM me if you’re interested in attending.
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Joshua Levy retweeted
Dostoevsky will just drop a line like this and move on
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I'm pleased to announce the release of fdu, the world's fastest disk usage and file tree analytics CLI+API. Over the past few months, I found myself managing numerous worktrees with hundreds of thousands of files. Agents struggle to tally disk usage, file age, or know where to begin to clean up large folders. fdu is an ground-up rewrite of both du and more modern tools like dust. It's pre-built and distributed via uv so you can run it right now with `uvx fdu@latest`. Thanks to an agentic performance iteration loop, it is the fastest tool of its kind, typically walking and tallying 5-10GB/s or 100-200K files/s on my old MacBook. That is ~9x faster than du and 10-100% faster than other modern native/Rust/Go options. It's instant to install as a skill or use as a CLI. Or can be used as a Python or Rust API. Other features: colored terminal output, tree views, last modification time for every directory (recursive), gitignore awareness, document analysis, and programming language detection (with code/comment/blank line tallies), filename and age filtering, native directory watching, a file cache for faster reruns, and parsable outputs like YAML and JSONL. All my agents now use the fdu to disk usage. Give it a try and let me know if it's useful! Or what you'd like to see in it next.
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It took quite a bit of iteration (2368 commits, 179 PRs) to get the layered design clean and to set up and run auto-optimization loops for Mac and Linux. It's still alpha but I think it's now good enough to be a standard skill if you're dealing with lots of files. MIT license: github.com/jlevy/fdu
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fdu is self-installing as a skill so just tell your agent: > Run `uvx fdu@latest` and follow the help instructions to install it as a skill I'll use this chance to share more technical notes, since I found building fdu was a great exercise in several agentic engineering techniques. [100% human text here so pardon the roughness:] 1. This began with a complete research pass, first analyzing every previous implementation of a tool like this. Before settling on the current design. These are checked in so every agent has access to all reasearch. 2. I used github.com/jlevy/tbd to streamline these research reports, spec-based planning, and high-quality Rust CLI design. A lot of work here was around customizing which system calls to use for file watching and the best API design for streaming that wouldn't adversely affect performance or memory use. 3. The actual implementation process was tracked with beads in tbd. By mapping the design to beads, it could run more reliably for 12-24 hours at a pass to do clean spec-driven implementation. Also tbd has baked into it lots of agent guidelines for things like setting up the repo and CI, release engineering, Rust best practices, etc. 4. Another key design element is distributing prebuilt Rust wheels through PyPI. I find cargo installs clumsy as it assumes a full Rust toolchain and source build. Many agents and developers developers already have uv available but don't want the size and complexity of a Rust build. By using PyO3+maturin for build and packaging, we make the native CLI installable via `uv tool install fdu` or `uvx fdu@latest` with no local compilation. In short, it's a little counter-intuitive, but I recommend using this approach of uv+PyPI to distribute Rust CLIs you want agents and humans to try easily. 5. Getting high performance is another big process, and probably the most interesting technical challenge. I set up an auto research loop powered by github.com/jlevy/softchema that systematically enumerate different hypotheses about better performance so there's a creative listing of all the different processes. Softschema is a convention for structuring the records as Markdown+YAML. Then there's an auto research loop that iterates through every hypothesis, implements the performance change, benchmarks, and then decides whether to keep or abandon that particular improvement. I ran this for a few days of agent time on both Mac and Linux, which produced a bunch of charts showing performance improvements (these are in the repo too). This was dozens of improvements with a total gain of 2-3X. 6. Another really important trick when building complex apps is to use golden testing. I have tbd guidelines on this (install tbd and ask about it!) but the core idea here is to use Tryscript, a simple session-based testing framework that makes testing serialization fast and easy, by using Markdown docs that document their actual behavior as the test framework. This is a big improvement over most agent-written, verbose unit and integration tests: github.com/jlevy/tryscript 7. There's also subtlety on how to use native APIs for Mac and Linux. The fast Mac-only dumac uses macOS-specific system calls to better batch file stats. That's a key reason it is so much faster than built-in du. We use the same approach as dumac but are cross platform and offer more features. Another nuance is the fact that for tallying only, caching results does not save you any time because the cost is mainly the stat (and on most filesystems, you have to stat every file to see which are modified). But if you're reading the files to count lines of code, disk caching (so you don't recompute unless a file is modified) is a massive speedup. This means you can rerun it on a giant codebase and get document and LOC tallies right away. 8. The fdu repo also has a little tool to generate a clean terminal video of using the CLI with real time outputs and realistic input typing (based on modeling human typing patterns). I could pull this out as a new tool if there is interest. 9. If you are as much of a terminal and design nerd as I am, you might enjoy checking out Planetaire, a new monospace font I use here. It is a modernized version of the legendary B612 and in my humble opinion now the most beautifully yet extremely legible font you can use in a terminal: github.com/jlevy/planetaire
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Joshua Levy retweeted
Math is not dead. Math is not all of science or human knowledge, but it is an essential cornerstone of human knowledge. AI has not killed math; it will substantially accelerate mathematical progress, and thus the rate of progress of human knowledge
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Another major square packing result! Alongside 11 squares, announced last week by @ManassehA06, 17 has been the most iconic open square packing problem. It is now being reviewed. This is a very intense proof compared to n=11, because of so many “orbits,” or possible configurations that must be systematically addressed. It has been amazing to see the explosion of results, now leading to this latest from @kleddamag which may be the most impressive achievement yet. Much rapid progress now comes from collaboration using what amounts to a shared library of proof machinery. It is a lot like open-source software but with tools for proof. This new @kleddamag proof builds on the results of @ManassehA06 who built on @kleddamag ’s own lower bound for 11 and work from @_Mira___Mira_ @guzhou0806 @wand_125 who improved lower bounds. All those built on my own repo started in late Aug that had the first new but weaker lower bound proof for n=11 since 2003. I'd also like to credit @ctjlewis for resources and expertise on formalization and @evanbd for a vast number of other results and tools.
A proof candidate for 17 squares: the 1998 packing cannot be beaten. s(17) = 4.67553009… Built with @OpenAI Codex and @AnthropicAI Claude. Thanks to @ojoshe, @_Mira___Mira_, @guzhou0806 and @ManassehA06, whose work this builds on. Try to break it: github.com/Kleddamag/the-sev…
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At a social event yesterday, a man gave me the Nassim Taleb argument about the ugly surgeon. If you haven't already heard it, it goes like this: if you're picking a surgeon and you don't have other things to go off of, you should pick the uglier surgeon. The argument is that they likely are more qualified because they overcame more difficulties in life yet achieved the same position. The man liked the argument because it's clever. We all feel smart when we explain a clever argument. But having made choices about surgeons a few times myself, I'm not impressed by it. In fact, I have a distaste for arguments like this. It's not that it's wrong. It's just that it's not fully right either. And worse, it doesn't reveal the ways it could be wrong. Absolutely, there is truth to the argument. But I think you should be even more wary of glib and incomplete arguments than you are of good-looking surgeons. A preference for glibness encourages a lack of thoroughness in your own thinking. I tried not to argue, but next time, I might counter with this anecdote about the dirty and clean guests.
小孩问庄子,什么是诡辩。庄子反问:我家来了两个客人,一个很干净,一个很脏。我请他俩洗澡,你觉得谁会洗? 小孩脱口而出;肯定是脏的那个! 庄子摇摇头:不对。干净的人爱干净,脏的人不在乎脏,应该是干净的人洗。 小孩赶紧改口:那就是干净的洗。 庄子又笑了:又错了。干净的人没必要洗,脏的人才需要洗,是脏的洗。 小孩情了:那到底是谁洗? 庄子说:干净的人有习惯,脏的人有需要,两个人都洗。不等小孩反应,他又补了一句;其实俩人都不洗,干净的不用洗,脏的不爱洗。 小孩彻底迷糊。 庄子这才点明:这就是诡辩。逻辑都通顺,但答案却不一样,很多人跟你争论,逻辑听着都没问题,但结论可以随意变换。 绕来绕去,目的不是求真,只是把你绕晕。 遇到这种诡辩,不必争辩。
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Joshua Levy retweeted
Replying to @ojoshe
@ojoshe my 12yr old somehow stumbled across your square project
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