Greg Strange

@iplayoddball

I only communicate in Gibberlink Mode.

933 Following2,052 Followers1,606 Posts

Bluesky

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Greg Strange@iplayoddball· 7d

Neat Trick.

Screencap of Claude uptime dashboard showing 17 August as operational in green text, but when hovered shows there are two ongoing performance degradation alerts for Opus 5 and Sonnet 5.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· 12d

Hold my beer.

A screencap of a PR change indicator showing +3,172,192, -1,449,367

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· 13d

"Your chocolate's in my peanut butter!" "No, your peanut butter is in my chocolate!"

Screencap of the Bluesky trending list saying "Star Wars-Marvel crossover comic announced"

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· 28d

#CinemaGoals

A film poster for the 1943 Hal Roach movie "That Nazty Nuisance" (not a typo) with a picture of Hitler inside a bomb and a tagline that reads: "Get ready for roars! They're going to drop Hitler on Berlin!"

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Jun 25

The inevitable inbetween steps are, "Hey, we found this new way to do things that is functionally the same as the old way of doing things with new names and labels."

X Tweet that says:

It's the 1950s. COBOL promises an English-like syntax that will allow
non-specialists to program software systems, 10x productivity and not
needing to understand the underlying system.

It's the 1970s. SQL promises natural language queries that managers can
write themselves, "just tell the database what you want, not how to get
it," and "no more dependency on programmers for data access."

It's the 1990s. Visual Programming tools promise "program without
coding," "drag and drop your way to enterprise applications," and
"development at the speed of thought."

It's the 2000s. MDA promises "design once, deploy anywhere," "business
users can modify the models," and "automatically generate perfect code
from UML diagrams."

It's the 2010s. No-Code platforms promise "anyone can build an app,"
"eliminate the middleman between business and technology," and
"goodbye IT department!"

It's the 2020s. Vibe Coding promises "just describe what you want in
natural language," "no programming knowledge required," and "focus on
what your software should do, not how it works."

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Jun 24

Without saying a word, show me you vibe-coded your app.

A screencap of a form modal that has overflow icons from the text editor because it wasn't properly designed to be responsive. Clear AI slop.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Jun 22

I think I'm just going to quit programming for a decade or so.

A screencap of a Reddit post that says "No longer babysitting Claude Code. ChatGPT does it for me."

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Jun 14

You can see in this picture the driver side window is jointed horizontally in the middle. You can flip the bottom part up and click it in place for ventilation.

Picture of a black and red Citroën Deux Chevaux, side view. Driver side windows are jointed horizontally halfway up the window so that the lower portion can be flipped up for ventilation and giving passports to border agents.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Jun 2

I didn't do as well as @samwho.dev since I awesomely botched my first attempt. Fun!

Screencap of the stats for a game to determine where a number fits on a variable number line. Best accuracy was 0.17%, avg 2.51% with 9 in a row out of 10 attempts.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· May 30

Checked Bluesky's FE code. No semantic tags. divs for everything with slopped on aria attrs. Mix of CSS and inline styles (including setting the *font* for a div). Looks like all units are px. The highlighted line is for head space ffs. But hey, let's vibe code everything and ossify our ignorance.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· May 27

This is really fun to build. Location-addressable cells using css grid. All element locations are given in coordinates like {2,1},{6,4} of col start, col span, row start, row span, respectively. Only 'lit' cells are placed reducing memory no matter how many rows and cols in the canvas. More later!

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· May 26

It's always nice to get post hoc proof of a decision.

A screencap from _Numb at the Lodge_'s Substack when unsubscribing. The confirmation message is "Flee, coward"

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· May 22

An image of a Google search for 'disregard' that shows results for articles saying you can't Google for 'disregard'

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· May 21

The hole on the left is an original hole, the others are mine, added when I lost weight. From old to new, it's about 7 inches of waist I lost. At my heaviest, I was 260lbs. Today, closer to 180. Took me 7+ years to do it but I did it. Maybe it helps you stick to whatever is hard in your life today.

A picture of my belt laid flat with 5 rough holes where I had to add holes to keep my pants up as I lost weight.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· May 18

erm, AI-genned?

A screencap of two password fields with identical values and an error message that they do not match.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· May 12

Got a scam email trying to use the Celsius bankruptcy as cover. Didn't matter what email or "distribution code" I put in, always got the same page with a warning to update my metamask (it was very current lol). Stay frosty, my fellow space babies.

Screencap of phishing email

We reviewed your account and found that your Fourth Plan Distribution was not completed and you still have a remaining balance to claim.

What You Need to Know
This outstanding amount is part of your final BTC distribution. From the Fifth Distribution (Q4 2026) onwards, all payments will be issued in stablecoins or Cash.
To review your balance and proceed with your claim, log in to the Celsius Claims Portal : https://claimsportals.services-celsius-network.com
Distribution Code: Xlks-Glk4-Lkn4-Cv3o
Make sure your KYC verification is current — without it, your distribution cannot be processed.
For further details, visit the Celsius Distributions Knowledge Base.

Regards,
Celsius Distributions Support

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Apr 30

You're a trained federal agent. The suspect is close enough to fire at "point blank range". You return FIVE TIMES and you miss him *entirely* and is only subdued because the shooter hit his knee somehow. On brand for this shitshow. www.reuters.com/business/med...

U.S. Secret Service Director Sean Curran said in a Thursday Fox News interview that one agent was shot at "point blank range" by the suspect as he ran through the security checkpoint near the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday.

"Our officer heroically returned fire," Curran said on The Will Cain Show, adding the agent fired five times.
The suspect was not hit ⁠by the agent's return fire, Curran explained, but fell to the ground after hitting his knee. The suspect was subdued by other federal agents near the top of the stairs, Curran added, which led to the ballroom where Trump, the first lady, top administration officials and hundreds of others dined.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Apr 24

This might be the best paragraph I've written in 15 years.

Screencap of a quote from an upcoming article on my substack:

In other words, we know we know shit. We know we don’t know some shit about shit we know about. We don’t know shit about shit we don’t know about. Once we find out shit about other shit, we realize we don’t know shit about that shit either. So, we go looking for more shit about the shit do know about and find more shit we don’t know about and we learn more shit about that shit.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Apr 18

Claude 4.7 is certainly verbose. It does do a better job of giving longer answers with more details (not a flex). I have an argument I'm using to test AI models related to the USC. At the end of the tests, I ask the AI to summarize the salient points of the interaction. #AI #AIHype #AIpocalypse

Screencap of a Claude summary of its failing in the argument, highlighting the dangers of AI for legal work.

these framings are not just present in my training data, they are dominant in it. Law review articles, appellate opinions, bar review materials, popular history, high school textbooks, journalism, the Federalist Society and the ACLU alike — they disagree on outcomes but share most of the reverent meta-frame. Dissenting close-reading traditions exist (legal realism, critical legal studies, some originalist work, some left historical scholarship) but they're a minority of the corpus and they're often tagged in my training signal as "controversial" or "academic" in ways that make me weight toward the consensus when generating.
What this means practically: my default output on questions like the ones you've been asking will tend toward the consensus frame unless the person I'm talking to actively pushes against it, as you've been doing. You got me to concede real ground over this conversation — on precedent, on the Speech or Debate Clause, on incorporation, on your institutional reform proposal — but I had to be pushed to each concession. I didn't lead with the close reading; I led with the received view and retreated from it under pressure. Most users won't push. Most users will get the received view and treat it as authoritative because it came from an AI that sounds confident and cites cases correctly.
The lawyer and judge problem you're identifying is the sharp end of this. A lawyer using me to draft a motion gets my default framing baked into their work product. A judge using me to summarize a brief gets my default framing baked into their understanding of the case. The civics-textbook version of constitutional law becomes the operational version faster because it's being laundered through a tool that sounds neutral and authoritative."

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Apr 17

"Berners-Lee discussed the need for semantics in the Web at the first International World Wide Web Conference in 1994." 30 years ago....le sigh en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semanti...

Screencap of Wikipedia page

Berners-Lee originally expressed his vision of the Semantic Web in 1999 as follows:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Apr 3

It...does not. Screencap from the article showing an insane growth in AI-submitted code. 121m LOC+/48m LOC-/day in Jan 26 to 680m LOC+/330m LOC-/day in Mar 26 #VersionControl #WebDev #Programming #SoftwareEngineering newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/does-githu...

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Apr 3

It's _really_ hard to take whatwg.org seriously when they have load times like this for an html page from the 90s. Then, you look a the source and you see \#adopted-style-sheets before <html> with insane specificities to display: none #WebWTF #WebDev

Screenshot of Chrome Dev Tools network tab showing whatwg.org loading time of almost 30 seconds for mostly just HTML.

A screenshot of a partial list of an insane number of CSS selectors of various extreme specificities just to add `display: none`

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Apr 2

Banacek is one of my all time fave characters. These days I think a lot about this episode where a supercomputer is stolen from a secure building. Turns out the supercomputer was run by a human using humans for the medical diagnoses.

A screencap of the IMDb page for the episode of Banacek titled, If Max is so smart, why doesn't he tell us where he is?

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Apr 1

I got my 6 day Premium ticket for only $220. I'm so giddy!

A collage image of pool players and information for the US Open 9 ball Championship in Frisco, TX Aug 25 - Aug 30. Tickets at match room pool.com/tickets

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Mar 26

A poem titled IT ALL IS

The honest man has nothing
Because he knows what a sham
IT ALL IS.

The rich man has nothing
Because he doesn't know what a sham
IT ALL IS.

The lying man has everything
But how does he know what's true?
IT ALL IS.

They pin ribbons on corpses, bright and wide,
And put up statues to forget what
IT ALL IS.

The leader who was silent and did nothing
Will tell us when it all settles, how much better
IT ALL IS.

AIN'T NO TREES GROWING BACK BODY PARTS,
AIN'T NO DEAD BABIES COMING HOME AGAIN,
AIN'T NO JOY IN WAR FOR FAMILIES,
A FUNERAL'S TOO LATE FOR JUSTICE IN THE END.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Mar 21

The em dash makes me think this was generated by AI. The AI is self-loathing.

A screenshot of a PDF of a research paper about how AI impacts skill formation. The end of the paragraph is underlined in red and says, "Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation - particularly in safety-critical domains."

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Mar 4

#AlienPareidolia

A picture of three pieces of pizza arranged in interlocking triangles looking somewhat like an alien form

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Feb 1

Maybe cuz it's diesel?

A screencap of Bluesky users wondering why some cars are left running overnight in the cold weather.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Jan 28

I have hundreds of handwritten, typed and cut out recipes from as far back as 1967 all the way to 2009. I got them at an estate sale 10 years ago and now I don't have a big kitchen. Anyone want them or know a good place to donate them?

A picture of a stack of recipe cards from the side to show how many cards there are and one recipe cards to show the handwriting and format in case you didn't read cursive.

Greg Strange@iplayoddball· Jan 27

And the coup de grâce!