How to Move Beyond Vibes to Learnings

Posted on 2025/07/15 by Patrick

It’s incredibly easy to get an LLM to emit just a ton of code that may or may not do what you ask. It’s not free, you still have to do the work to understand the code. Otherwise you and the LLM are just wasting time, writing something destined for the trash bin.

It is very powerful. This is a way to learn about new technologies, new techniques, and to get a lot of tech in place quickly that you have little familiarity with. It’s also easy to get lost in a muddle of broken code you don’t understand and you can’t see a way forward and the LLM is fighting your every request.

You must temper your expectations and, yes, spend more than a little time thinking to make a real project. Here’s three tips to get the most out of vibecoding a new project from scratch.

Continue reading →
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Excellence Out of Mediocrity

Posted on 2025/03/31 by Patrick

My email sig has been “Defy Mediocrity” ever since I found myself at a job where I ran out of work to do. Since then I have challenged myself to do excellent and difficult work. Did crazy stuff with Eclipse and databases for a couple years, then Swing and patient bedside devices for a few years, then 14 (!) years with Android and Payments.

As of 6 days ago, I no longer work for Square. I was laid off with 900+ others. Now, more than a few folks would challenge that I was ever anything but mediocre. Did I so quickly abandon my credo?

Continue reading →
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Yay, Encoding issues

Posted on 2022/04/07 by Patrick

I’ll try to get encoding issues resolved, for now enjoy your “” characters and more!

Fixed with Better Search Replace!

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Wannabe: Dimensionality

Posted on 2018/06/24 by Patrick

As I proceed farther into wannabe, I find I need more content to test and validate the work I’m doing.   That is the purpose for the vignette milestones over in the issue tracker.   So, I’ve finally started on one: Rain.   In it, the plan is to have a house, a yard, some background terrain, and ultimately some animated rain falling silently. Read through the end for some fun videos! Continue reading →

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Wannabe: The Perils of Hidden Voxel Removal

Posted on 2017/07/31 by Patrick

At least part of the problem Wannabe has with rendering is that we’re blindly drawing every voxel in a somewhat arbitrary manner.   Right now, it’s sorted only by Z, the rest stays in the order added to the initial grid.   We can trick the various RenderTypes to show the wrong thing pretty easily then, just by crafting the data properly.   Only reason things have been reasonably decent is because I’ve tended to add voxels from left to right, top to bottom, and the best looking renderer is up-and-to-the-left.   Any mistakes will get drawn over. Continue reading →

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Wannabe: Interlude

Posted on 2017/04/29 by Patrick

I’ve not not been working on wannabe — in fact I have significant code and written content that I haven’t posted.   I’ll try to get somewhere more this weekend.   In a nutshell, there’s at least two problems: I use a pretty naive neighbor data structure, and I ended up conflating hidden surface removal with hidden voxel removal.   And I’m not sure I can quite tease those apart.

Continue reading →

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Wannabe: Gaining some perspective

Posted on 2016/04/18 by Patrick

Small diversion:   What I didn’t really mention in the last post was that I had actually gotten the PsuedoPerspective working a bit better.   Let’s see what that looks like! Continue reading →

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Wannabe: Advanced cubism

Posted on 2016/02/07 by Patrick

Continuing the Cabinet projection effort from the last post let’s see if we can close out issue #1 on github.   We need to add sides and make sure things look good under different circumstances. Continue reading →

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Wannabe: making a Cabinet

Posted on 2015/08/29 by Patrick

I’ve copied several of the issues from the last post into the github project’s issues list. Herein, I work on issue #1: A Cabinet (Projection).   Read on to see how we can make these little squares a little more cubey. Continue reading →

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Even a wannabe needs goals

Posted on 2015/08/11 by Patrick

In the first article, I described the basics of wannabe: a simple graphics engine.   I haven’t been letting it sit, I’ve added some small features to it and have been making plans.

On github: wannabe: Multiplatform low-resolution 3d engine. For losers, by losers. Continue reading →

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Muppets Most Bestest

Posted on 2014/03/24 by Patrick

Someone on the Internet is wrong.   IGN recently made an ordering of the Muppet movies from worst to best. It’s almost entirely wrong.

Here’s  my list, from best to worst:

  1. The Muppet Movie — It’s hard to argue with the first one.   Lots of heart, fun introductions for all the characters.   This was my introduction to the Muppets, I hadn’t really seen much of the series yet.
  2. The Muppet Christmas Carol — Aside from the great story, a great juggling of traditional Muppet roles.   Gonzo and Rizzo as narrators, lots of fun songs.   Except “The Love Is Gone”, ugh, that one’s tedious (and only involves humans anyway).
  3. Muppets From Space — Mega-funk soundtrack, and lots of chances for the new Muppets Tonight characters to really shine.   Much love for Bobo.
  4. Muppet Treasure Island — Tim Curry is always gold.   Great songs and wackiness, but it just didn’t rise to the level of the Christmas Carol.
  5. Muppets Most Wanted — a pretty good return to form after the disappointing The Muppets.   Action, goofiness, good songs.   Ty Burrell and Sam the Eagle had a fun subplot and one of the betters songs.
  6. The Muppets — while it was great to see a return to the big screen, this film felt a little whiny and angsty.   It seemed to have very few musical numbers, too.   The opening bit was pretty good, though.

And here’s the Miasma.   I just don’t remember anything remarkable about these Muppet films; I should re-watch so I can insert in the above list.   And isn’t there another one?   I’m almost positive that in the opening act of Muppets Most Wanted they said that this was the eighth sequel.

  • The Muppets Take Manhattan
  • The Great Muppet Caper
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Fun economic reading

Posted on 2014/03/03 by Patrick

Three interesting (but not short) economic documents came across my desk over the last couple of months. Sort of natural, I guess, given that I work for Square, but I think they are all worth reading. That said, I’m about halfway through each. 😉

  1. A simple explanation of how money moves around the banking system — Ever Move money electronically?   How does that work?
  2. How the Bitcoin protocol actually works — pretty applicable to Dogecoin, too, a far more impressive currency.
  3. The Economics of Star Trek — I often give some thought to this.   This is a fun exploration of really doing it.
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The Clumsy Pattern: Doing “Girl Power” wrong.

Posted on 2013/12/03 by Patrick

The debate over gendered pronouns popped up in computer-science-land over a couple of commits for node.js.   There are serious problems with the male-dominated culture in CS (and video games, for that matter), and this blog post by the corporate maintainers of node.js was really the wrong reaction on a couple of points. Continue reading →

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The wannabe graphics engine

Posted on 2013/11/21 by Patrick

After recently getting an Ouya  device, I got inspired to make a game.  Then I realized two things: I don’t have any skill with 3d, and I learn by doing.

Here’s a quick guide to what I’ve done so far: wannabe, a multiplatform 3d engine, for losers, by losers. Continue reading →

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Making an Android app look like a web browser

Posted on 2013/10/25 by Patrick

I’m not in the business of writing web browsers, but my HTC One X has a problem: HtcLinkify. Due to an annoying lawsuit from Apple, HTC changed the behavior of web links on their devices.   Instead of jumping right into a specific app, the web browser just dumbly follows the link itself.   There is a way to fix, but you have to root your phone. Continue reading →

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Great game music…

Posted on 2013/02/14 by Patrick

I have a large mix of games, many of the recent additions from yon Humble Indie Bundle.   The great thing about Humble is you always get access to game soundtracks, so there’s a lot of top-quality music available.   Here’s some of my favorites. Continue reading →

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What’s it like to be smart?

Posted on 2012/10/30 by Patrick

What’s it like to be smart?   Some quick thoughts, with a twist that surprised even me.

Continue reading →

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I’m on a Mac: Recovery

Posted on 2012/07/09 by Patrick

Tried to boot up my macbook after a long weekend.   Got the inscrutable flashing folder with a question mark.   Tried a couple of tips from the internet, like holding option or ‘c’ down, neither of which worked.

Then, hooked up my TimeMachine backup and the recovery console came up on its own, and allowed me to fix the disk (partition table reported the wrong size).   Everything was happy.

Kudos, then, Mr. Mac.   If you have a time machine handy, it works pretty well.   The opposite of kudos for not really telling me that before or after, and for crashing in the first place!

 

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Upgrading Git on MacOS X Lion

Posted on 2012/03/14 by Patrick

This was way harder than it needs to be, because MacOS X Lion ships with git 1.7.4.4 in /usr/bin.   Here’s a quick sequence of steps:

  1. Download and install latest version from http://git-scm.com/.   This appears to work but won’t change anything from the command line.   The new version is installed in /usr/local/git.
  2. Reconfigure your path to put /usr/local/git/bin in front of /usr/bin.   Something like this in your ~/.bash_profile: 
    export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH
Posted in I'm on a Mac, Technical | Tagged , | 2 Comments

I’m on a Mac: Utilities you need to survive

Posted on 2011/12/02 by Patrick

Several utilities that make life bearable on the mac:

  • KeyRemap4MacBook — awesome way to make sensible keyboard changes.   Recommend the following settings:
    • Change Eject Key / Eject to Forward Delete
    • Change Fn Key / Fn+letter to Control_L+Letter (note: I use MacOS’s keyboard changes to change Control keys to Command keys)
    • Custom Shortcuts / Hold Command+Q to Quit Application
    • And my own private.xml file, with Change Cmd+H to Ctrl+H (For Eclipse), and remap Alt-F4 to Command+Q (not that I love windows, but I don’t want quitting to be easy)
  • Stay — $15, but worth it if you move between different monitor configurations.
  • Airfoil — $25, if you want to use AirPlay with external programs like Pandora or Spotify.
  • Jumpcut — clipboard history
  • Disk Inventory X — find out where your disk space is going
  • Bigger names, all cross-platform: Songbird, Firefox, Chrome, Steam, etc.
  • Finally, VirtualBox, so I can use real operating systems when I need them.
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