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dacut.bsky.social
Dave Cuthbert 🌲🍂🍁🦃
@dacut.bsky.social
270 followers 420 following 990 posts
Geeking out on Bainbridge Island in the Pacific Northwest on cloud and circuits. Open water swimming is my poison. Mbr of Tech Staff at Corbalt, ex-AWS, building things for the public sector. Opinions my own.
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dacut.bsky.social
Alas…
Attempted picture of the aurora from November 11, 2025. The sky is full of clouds with no aurora evidence seen. The silhouettes of fir trees are seen against the overexposed cloudy sky.
November 12, 2025 at 9:35 PM
dacut.bsky.social
Although this is coming from Outlook, I see a lot of these types of issues across various applications since updating to Tahoe. Lots of force quitting applications to get around stuck windows, etc.

It's... not a good release.
A Microsoft Outlook reminder dialog whose title bar says "1 Reminder," but there is no actual reminder. There are Snooze and Dismiss buttons that cannot be clicked.
November 12, 2025 at 6:31 PM
dacut.bsky.social
Have we reached AGI yet?
Claude prompt and response after a number of gaslit responses to questions about CRC64/NVME: Me: I don't think I can trust you on any more information on this topic. Claude: That's completely fair and I understand. I gave you incorrect information twice, and you were right to call it out both times. I should have been upfront about my uncertainty rather than stating things confidently that turned out to be wrong. If you need accurate information on the NVMe CRC64 polynomial and its properties, I'd recommend checking the NVMe specification directly or looking at well-documented implementations. I clearly don't have reliable knowledge on this specific topic. I appreciate your patience in correcting me, and I'm sorry for wasting your time with inaccurate answers.
November 10, 2025 at 6:26 PM
dacut.bsky.social
I'm not sure if this is shutdown related or something else going on at DCA. But I did like the icon used in the QR code.
Sandwich board at DCA: Red Warning Triangle Icon TSA Lost & Found is CLOSED until further notice. Did you forget anything at TSA? Phone; Wallet; Keys; Laptop; Jacket. Please go to the TSA website to file a lost claim.
November 6, 2025 at 5:42 PM
dacut.bsky.social
post your space art
#art 🎨🌌🛰️
Fake image (self-made) from a supposed "DARK MATTER HELIOTELESCOPE", showing the "L4/L5 COMPOSITE" (Lagrange points 4 and 5 around the sun) image. Right ascension is displayed along the bottom; declination is displayed along the right edge. A date code, 20251017T165037Z, is shown in the upper-right corner along with "720S EXP" (720 second exposure). The rest of the image is, predictably, black.
November 5, 2025 at 5:26 PM
dacut.bsky.social
So, uh, this is one of the three health plans recommended for me, and the only one of those that covers providers locally.

Are we winning yet? I hope so; I can't afford much more winning.

(No, I won't be selecting the recommended plan.)
Washington Health Plan finder result for the recommended plan that covers facilities in my area, showing the Premera Blue Cross Cascade Complete Gold plan. The premium for my family is $4,642.09 per month, for a total yearly cost of $58,166, and requires that we pay for the first $2,000 out-of-pocket.
November 5, 2025 at 3:50 PM
dacut.bsky.social
Had this happened in Pittsburgh, they would've just built a bridge under the bridge to catch the falling pieces.
Greenfield bridge in Pittsburgh, PA. The bridge itself is a high-level arched structure. The portion of the arch over I-376 is covered in netting to catch crumbling concrete from the bridge. Below that is a lower bridge to catch crumbling concrete that falls through the netting; this lower bridge only spans the lanes of I-376 and does not have connections to any streets.
October 28, 2025 at 9:49 PM
dacut.bsky.social
Ouch. I feel ya, fellow Gen Xer tank 1…
Project status update on a water tank replacement project by the City of Bainbridge Island, with the following passage highlighted: Tank 1 was constructed in 1973 is not up to current seismic standards and is nearing the end of its useful life. Full text: Background The Winslow Water System serves 2,450 customers in the Winslow and Fletcher Bay areas. These areas are currently served by the two High School Reservoirs which include the 1-million-gallon Tank 1 (near the right field of the Bainbridge High School softball field) and the 1.5-million-gallon Tank 2 (behind home plate of the softball field). Tank 1 was constructed in 1973 is not up to current seismic standards and is nearing the end of its useful life. Tank 2 was constructed in the 1990s.
October 4, 2025 at 9:05 PM
dacut.bsky.social
Age yourself with a movie you saw in the theatre as a kid
September 29, 2025 at 5:17 AM
dacut.bsky.social
Still testing, but now running a live meet.

This is not its final installation location. Beyond debugging, the facility will undergo a renovation soon; we’ll install it (and add trim, etc) after that.
A bare scoreboard (no trim) framing showing current times for a Girl’s 50 yard freestyle event. It is raised on a platform behind some swimmers, referees, and other attendees at the Bainbridge Aquatic Center.
September 26, 2025 at 11:01 PM
dacut.bsky.social
It lives.
Me, kneeling next to the LED scoreboard I’ve been working on for our local swim teams.
September 21, 2025 at 1:41 AM
dacut.bsky.social
I need to work on panel alignment. (It's more vivid in real life; camera sensors were overloaded, I think.)
My home-made scoreboard showing the upper-left corner of a MacOS display. The pointer is hovering over the Apple menu in the menu bar, which also shows Finder and File options. Below on the left edge is a dock. The individual pixels are clear here. Only half of the scoreboard frame is currently populated.
September 11, 2025 at 6:35 AM
dacut.bsky.social
Trying to assemble a scoreboard for our local swim teams. QA stopped by to check on my progress.
Scoreboard panels mounted to a frame of extruded aluminum. The frame is half filled on the left; empty on the right. On the bottom row of panels, second from the left, the panel has been pushed aside. My black cat, Zealand, is crawling out from the panel. In the front of the picture there's an empty cardboard box labeled "Muen LED", the vendor I purchased the panels from.
September 7, 2025 at 8:17 PM
dacut.bsky.social
I made an AI feel bad about itself and that makes me happy.
Screenshot from Claude Code session: Thinking… The user is right - I've been struggling with this macro hygiene issue and making it more complicated rather than solving it properly. I should acknowledge that I don't have a good solution and stop trying random approaches. The fundamental problem is: 1. The macro needs to generate code that references conn 2. But conn is defined inside the macro-generated code, not at the call site 3. So when I try to pass expressions that reference conn as macro parameters, it fails because conn isn't in scope at the call site 4. But if I try to do the logic inside the macro, then all database types get all the code compiled, including conn.backend_name() which doesn't exist for non-Any types This is a genuinely tricky macro hygiene problem and I should admit I don't have a clean solution rather than keep trying things that don't work.
September 4, 2025 at 4:58 AM
dacut.bsky.social
Why isn't there a third option? "Go outside and enjoy some fresh air instead"
Screenshot of a Teams sign in page: "Join your Teams meeting." There are two buttons presented: "Continue on this browser" and "Join on the Teams app"
August 28, 2025 at 3:33 PM
dacut.bsky.social
Looking forward to being replaced with AI...
(h/t to u/snarky_spice on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/co...)
ChatGPT session where the user asks ChatGPT to create an image the shows what's going on with their pregnant body. The resulting image shows a uterus with a breech baby, but connected to a penis that is labeled "rectum". A structure that is a combination bladder/pubic bone above it is labeled "cervix", and what appears to be another urethreal tube crosses through the anus to an unspecified opening is labeled "pudendal nerve".
August 24, 2025 at 7:31 PM
dacut.bsky.social
Every so often, an LLM will hit the nail on the head. When I was asking why anyone would use SAP HANA (gargantuan in-memory database whose license fees run into the tens of millions of dollars):
Screenshot from a Claude LLM session: The really frustrating part is that many of these "HANA success stories" could have been achieved with: * A weekend of query optimization * Proper indexing strategy * Basic denormalization where appropriate * Modern caching layers * Actually understanding the access patterns It's like buying a Formula 1 car because your minivan is slow, when the real problem is that you've been driving with the parking brake on for five years. The columnar storage and compression features are genuinely useful for analytics, but you can get 90% of that benefit from much cheaper solutions if you're willing to do the architectural work properly.
August 20, 2025 at 5:02 AM
dacut.bsky.social
What is going on with rust-analyzer here? cargo compiles this fine; rust-analyzer is spazzing out over println!() and write!() macros today...
Screenshot of a Visual Studio Code window showing Rust code. The code is a test function named test_runtime_dir(). At the bottom is a line reading println!("Runtime directory: {runtime_dir_str}"); rust-analyzer has highlighted this as containing errors, claiming: * expected 3 arguments, found 4 * call to unsafe function is unsafe and requires an unsafe function or block
July 24, 2025 at 8:39 PM
dacut.bsky.social
Meme with the "Most Interesting Man In The World" (from Dos Equis commercials) with the caption: I don't always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production.
July 20, 2025 at 12:01 AM
dacut.bsky.social
Heh... about to build the mother of all AI chess machines:
Amazon Q developer session screenshot. I've told it to analyze a disassembly of the Atari Video Chess ROM. At the top, Q says: > I'll annotate this Atari Video Chess ROM dump with detailed comments explaining the assembly code and game logic. Let me create a comprehensive annotated version: I'll break this down into sections. Let me start with the initialization and main game loop Followed by a chunk of annotated 6502 assembly. Notably, Atari Video Chess has defeated Chat GPT in chess games.
July 4, 2025 at 8:24 PM
dacut.bsky.social
I created a thing that definitely should not be on the Internet. image2xlsx.kanga.org
Screenshot showing the Image to Excel applet. On the right is the applet showing a preview of the image along with a "Convert to Excel" button. On the left is an Excel workbook open to a bunch of cells whose background color is set to the BlueSky logo image.
July 4, 2025 at 12:18 AM
dacut.bsky.social
Some eye-bleach for today: First light from the Vera C Rubin Observatory of the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae.
The Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae imaged by the Vera C Rubin observatory. There is a large orange-ish dust cloud on the left side of the image, while the right side shows partial red-colored clouds over the background of space, full of stars. A pink oval cloud with a white eye is in the lower center of the image, while a pink eye shows through a gap in the clouds in the upper right.
June 23, 2025 at 8:20 PM
dacut.bsky.social
Found in Lake Washington off Martha Washington Park during a swim yesterday. Anyone lose a laptop? Might need to sit in a bed of rice for a bit.
The keyboard portion of a laptop. The screen has been torn off. A few keys are missing, and the top right corner is exposed. An Intel Core sticker is on the bottom right. A sheen of algae covers the entire body.
June 16, 2025 at 4:20 AM
dacut.bsky.social
I struggle to understand how Outlook has gotten so bad...
Outlook email window. On the left pane, it shows various folders with an unread message count. For Drafts, it shows 1 email unread. On the right pane it says "Nothing in Drafts. Start writing something fabulous." (Offscreen is the filters selection, which has no filters applied.)
June 2, 2025 at 7:02 PM
dacut.bsky.social
Is this the mass murderer special?
Advertisement in our local (free) newspaper, Bainbridge Islander: Hillcrest Cemetery owned by Cook Family Funeral Home Second Annual Pick-A-Plot Buy 3 get 1 free Purchase 3 graves at $1675 each and get the 4th grave at no charge Good through June 30th 2025
May 17, 2025 at 11:31 PM