Thomas Ptacek
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sockpuppet.org
Thomas Ptacek
@sockpuppet.org
Full of passionate intensity.
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Three dumb ideas that recur constantly in discussions among nerds about intelligence:

(1) IQ tests are illegal in hiring.
(2) There exist national average IQ numbers.
(3) Intelligence research is suppressed.
November 9, 2025 at 11:24 PM
I wrote a thing, about a project you should knock out when you get 45 minutes free. fly.io/blog/everyon...
You Should Write An Agent
They're like riding a bike: easy, and you don't get it until you try.
fly.io
November 6, 2025 at 8:55 PM
@oakparknerd.bsky.social Mask off for Stopeck, I guess.
October 2, 2025 at 2:57 AM
Have you moved to the district yet?
It’s official: AIPAC is trying to buy my election to keep me out of Congress.

Apparently, I’m a “dangerous detractor”... by believing Palestinians (like myself and my family) deserve basic human rights.

But we’re not going to let AIPAC win.
September 30, 2025 at 12:44 AM
Simon calls out this Dan Abramov comment about how ATproto is qualitatively different from ActivityPub. Maybe he's right. But I look at ActivityPub/Mastodon as a midpoint between blog/RSS and Twitter, and I don't remember the blogosphere being ineffective.

simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/27/...
A quote from Dan Abramov
Conceptually, Mastodon is a bunch of copies of the same webapp emailing each other. There is no realtime global aggregation across the network so it can only offer a fragmented …
simonwillison.net
September 29, 2025 at 12:41 AM
New Neko is fine. Good. The music has gotten more interesting. This is better than the last album with all the cigarettes on it. Still not clear how you can ever outdo Fox Confessor.
September 27, 2025 at 11:56 PM
Claude Can (Sometimes) Prove It
www.galois.com
September 20, 2025 at 12:54 PM
Good Morning Spider is an underrated album.
September 17, 2025 at 9:49 PM
New frontiers in carnitas-making. Today: took the fat cap/skin off in a whole sheet, sliced that into big cubes, rendered it for a couple hours, tried not to eat all of that, then browned the shoulder in the fat, cubed up, threw the skin in, and braised it off. I've been doing the fat cap all wrong!
September 13, 2025 at 11:52 PM
What the FUCK, Microsoft?
September 11, 2025 at 8:55 PM
Current status at Apple SEAR:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GJS...
Oogie Boogie bug/uncovered version
YouTube video by kiddodeathsoul667
www.youtube.com
September 9, 2025 at 6:54 PM
I am unreasonably excited about this.

go.dev/blog/jsonv2-...
A new experimental Go API for JSON - The Go Programming Language
Go 1.25 introduces experimental support for encoding/json/jsontext and encoding/json/v2 packages.
go.dev
September 9, 2025 at 6:04 PM
My basic thing is if you're going to write a whole big splashy blog post about how a piece of anti-surveillance tech has a vulnerability in it, you should first be sure it has that vulnerability in it. It'll look pretty grim if you write the piece and it doesn't.
September 9, 2025 at 12:29 AM
I don't get what Ken White thinks he stands to gain by wading into these social media slapfights between progressives and liberals. Lakshya Jain's first couple polls for The Argument haven't impressed me, but he's not a comic book villain. The people who think he is hate Ken and everything believes.
September 5, 2025 at 1:54 AM
Somewhere on Kyle Kingsbury's site there's a link to a "What are birds?" video (it is what it sounds like) and I always assumed it was just a meme everyone knew but the Internet does not know about this meme and it lives permanently in my brain and I'm constantly having to go find it on his site.
September 5, 2025 at 12:11 AM
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois: heart of the Prairie Demoscene.
September 4, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Changed my mind, back to hating AI.
September 3, 2025 at 12:39 AM
It is weird that I feel like I've never read this take before.

andre.arko.net/2025/06/30/y...
You should delete tests
We’ve had decades of thought leadership around testing, especially coming from wholistic development philosophies like Agile, TDD, and BDD. After all that time and several supposedly superseding movem...
andre.arko.net
August 30, 2025 at 4:07 AM
Ed... can I call you Ed? If you want to write a piece about "how to argue with an AI booster", one good reportorial step you might take would be to actually *have an argument with an AI booster*. I'm available, but so are other people who have done things more recently than 2 months ago.
August 26, 2025 at 6:21 PM
He's like Steve Buscemi's P.I. character in 30 Rock. How do you take this seriously? There are plenty of LLM skeptics who actually code professionally. Why source your skepticism here?
August 26, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Marking this now as a contender for the funniest subhed of 2025.
August 24, 2025 at 3:31 AM
Quick reminder for Chicago nerds that Chisec is tonight, the last one we're having at Twisted Spoke (Ogden/Grand), because Spoke is closing --- 7PM. No RSVP or anything, just show up. It's nice out, we'll probably be on the roof.
August 21, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Chicago nerds: Chisec is tomorrow, at Twisted Spoke on Ogden/Grand at 7PM-ish. It's the last-ever Spoke Chisec, since Spoke is... ☠️closing☠️. (Erin will find someplace else to hold it in September).
August 19, 2025 at 11:35 PM