Aaron Meurer
asmeurer.com
Aaron Meurer
@asmeurer.com
Posting about AI, Python, SymPy, and other nonsense.

asmeurer.com
Pinned
Bluesky is cringe
The search function doesn't even work at all anymore on BlueSky?
October 15, 2025 at 6:39 PM
lol there are apparently some people so convinced that AI doesn't work that they believe it's popularity must be a mass psychosis event.
Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it
AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event
Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.
www.theatlantic.com
August 20, 2025 at 12:19 AM
If you want to know how good an AI is, ask it a question about something you actually care about, not proxy questions that you would never actually want to know the answer to.

Ask it how it would fix a problem you had yesterday, not how many r's are in "strawberry".
August 8, 2025 at 7:06 PM
So what ended up being the resolution of that whole Bluesky Gaza spam thing?
July 30, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Why is the GitHub mobile interface different depending on whether you're logged in or not?

The tabs move to the top...the star button gets smaller...more links like "code of conduct" appear... WTF?
July 19, 2025 at 5:36 PM
They finally added the ability to get push notifications only for mentions on this app. So while I'll still not use it much I'll at least now see it if you mention me.
July 8, 2025 at 4:33 PM
PSA: if you ever want to "fork" a project in the OSS sense, don't use the GitHub "fork" feature. Create a new repository and copy the history over instead.
June 7, 2025 at 6:18 PM
defaults write com.google.Chrome GeminiSettings -int 1
June 6, 2025 at 7:22 PM
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Butlerian Jihad as a cautionary tale

Anti-Tech Person: At long last, we have created the Butlerian Jihad from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Butlerian Jihad
June 3, 2025 at 10:13 PM
It's no different than the people who believe that evolution cannot be real because it couldn't possibly create such complex organisms. Actually it's worse because in the case of LLMs the counter evidence is very directly available.
The now viral, incorrect meme that LLMs are just next token predictors is causing so much confusion
May 21, 2025 at 6:09 AM
I don't know how anyone could be anti-AI after seeing this video.
We've seen nothing yet! We hosted a 9-13 yo vibe-coding event with @robertkeus.bsky.social this weekend (h/t
@antonosika.bsky.social and Lovable)

takeaway? AI is unleashing a generation of wildly creative builders beyond anything I'd have imagined

and they grow up knowing they can build anything!
May 20, 2025 at 5:49 PM
It's funny how the anti-AIers will say "why use ChatGPT, just use Google" and then turn around and complain about how bad Google is. Yeah. ChatGPT is better than Google.
May 13, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Is there any frontend to ollama that doesn't completely suck from a UX perspective? Used to use Msty but for some reason they decided to remove ollama support from the free tier.
May 12, 2025 at 5:05 PM
These new features to argparse in Python 3.14 are nice, but why aren't they enabled by default?
May 10, 2025 at 8:03 PM
Even if ChatGPT did use that much energy/water/whatever it would be fine because it's for science.
May 9, 2025 at 11:58 PM
One interesting thing about t-strings: in most monospace fonts, t looks very similar to an upside down f. I expect t"string" and f"string" to be very commonly confused in quick scanning, even by non-dyslexics. Although a simple solution would be to use T"string" instead.
Can't decide if t-strings are a good idea or not.
May 9, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Reposted by Aaron Meurer
Bluesky is cringe
April 16, 2024 at 7:25 PM
Reposted by Aaron Meurer
Examples:

Denial: "AI can't be useful because it's too 'statistical'"

Anger: "FUCK OFF"

Bargaining: "There's a difference between ML and genAI"

Depression: "They're just stealing all our data"

Acceptance: "Actually I have to admit ChatGPT has been useful to me lately"
February 11, 2025 at 7:08 PM
What would you call the function that works like x mod n except it maps to the set {1, ..., n}?
April 30, 2025 at 11:17 PM
Those of use who were in school between 2005–2010 (roughly) can attest that there were teachers who told us to not use Wikipedia at all. Wikipedia was a website that could be edited by *literally anyone*, and was therefore dangerous to use as a source of information.
Some of the anti-AI stuff feels a bit like when people would say "don't use Wikipedia as a source." It's just like anything else, a piece of information that you weigh against multiple sources and your own understanding of its likely failure modes
April 27, 2025 at 5:51 PM
Has anyone built any kind of app or wrapper dashboard around USPS informed delivery? It's useful, but there's got to be something better than just going to the USPS website to view your mail.
April 25, 2025 at 7:32 PM
I think I'm going to give up on Bluesky, at least for now. I will probably still check it from time to time and might post stuff here if it think it would interest the people who are on here, but I'm not going to go to the effort to cross-post everything here from X anymore.
April 19, 2025 at 5:49 PM
Terminal "hardcore mode":

echo 'set -e' >> ~/.bashrc

This will make bash immediately exit the first time you type a command that fails.
April 17, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Very convenient that the "top coding model" doesn't let you upload source code files.
April 14, 2025 at 1:45 AM
Remember when we all weren't sure if LLMs could think or if all our queries just happened to be in the training set?
April 13, 2025 at 12:42 AM