CategoryMisc

While doing programming challenges in Advent of Code, I came across an interesting behavior of LLMs in coding assistants and decided to write about it to clear my thoughts. First some background. Advent of Code is a series of daily coding challenges released during the season of advent (the period just before Christmas). Each challenge has 2 parts, and you must solve part 1 before the part 2 is...

We’ve all seen the “tiny gains post”. How if you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.” Well…… First of all, 1% isn’t ‘tiny’. I know a few bankers who’d sacrifice their first born for a daily increment of 1% on their portfolio. After all, how many bankers do you...

All architects know what’s best practice, but only good architects know when to use them. I’ve been in plenty conversations where someone goes “we should do X because it’s best practice” — and act that the discussion ended. Best practice is what works for most people, most of the time. It isn’t something that works for everyone all of the time —...

It’s been 6 years now since the big sayakenahack debacle. I won’t go into details on what happened, but … I thought it’d be nice to take a stroll down memory lane with some pictures 🙂

On September 2021, malaysiakini reported on a website called mysppl, that was selling personal data online. The site used previous breached data on Malaysians, and was selling it to anyone with a credit card (or Grabpay account). Note to aspiring criminals.. the last thing you want when doing something illegal like selling personal data ,is to tie that back to Bank Account by accepting payments...

`I’ve been playing guitar for over 25 years — but I still suck at it. I spent my first ever bonus I got (~RM2,000) on a brand new Norman Guitar, and now I’m the proud owner of multiple expensive guitars and amps … but all that expensive gear hasn’t improved my playing one iota. Even though I used religiously change my guitar strings every month. The number of years...

I found a few tutorials online to do this, but they’re old and don’t 100% work. So here’s some quick steps on how you might sign your git commits with GPG keys stored on your Yubikey. Since I’m a mac user, these steps are specifically for macOS, for Windows check out Scott Hanselman’s great post here. Step 1: Generate your GPG keys First install GPG and then generate...

So you think Ivermectin works. You studied the data, you’ve read all the medical studies you could find, you’ve seen hours of YouTube videos where doctors swear by the drug, and you’ve even spent days (or weeks) researching on your on. Finally you conclude, that the data suggest Ivermectin is an effective treatment against COVID-19. Great news, you’re being inquisitive...

Most of the time, adding a python package to a Lambda function is a simple task. You pip install to a directory, and then copy that directory to the function either directly or through a lambda layer. But sometimes, there’s extra work required. Packages like opencv install additional files on your system that aren’t available in the same directory you pip installed into. When you pip...

This weekend, I decided to learn me some Vim. According to it’s website, “Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient” — to be honest, I only used vim when forced to from the command line, I wasn’t sure why anyone would choose to do ‘serious’ editing in Vim. Vim is notoriously hard —...