Moss Prescott

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:38:07 -0400

Ayoade. Taskmaster. It is so on

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:24:48 -0400

Working on a new project, which some might recognize. Claude is writing Python to push pixels around, and I’m doing the very tedious annotation you see in progress here:

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:17:20 -0400

So far “Claude Code gets confused and burns ‘usage’ going in circles when I ask it to do a refactor” is a pretty good proxy for when I haven’t actually thought clearly enough about the change I want to make. I do feel like I have sit on it though. Wish it was better about asking for help.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:07:01 -0400

The productivity gain for $20 spent on Claude Code is hard to argue with, if it was just about money vs time. But I don’t really want Anthropic to ruin the environment and throw the global RAM supply chain into chaos to save me a few minutes. Wish there was more visibility into the actual impact

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:03:52 -0400

It’s a lot more fun to write Rust when AI is dealing with the semicolons, borrow-checker nagging, and all the other paper cuts (new paradigm: “Paper-cut Oriented Programming”?) I mean, I can write Rust. I have written Rust. But do I like writing Rust? Reading it I can just about deal with

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:54:28 -0400

Some thought after spending several hours with Claude Code on a new project…

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 21:18:50 -0400

I oppose the bombing of Iran today. I don’t believe it represents the will of the people, I dread the suffering and chaos it will unleash, and I’m somehow still, even now, dumbstruck at how brazen, cruel, and short-sighted my country’s leaders are capable of being. This is not who we are meant to be

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:42:54 -0400

Preach. graydon2.dreamwidth.org/322461.ht…

Current

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:09:03 -0400

I’m intrigued by Current (via Daring Fireball), and I really enjoyed the essay that seems to have preceded it but…

This product claims to respect my time and attention, yet the page is so scroll-jacked and CSS-transitioned-up that I had to give it a couple of tries before I could bring myself to read to the bottom. Posts coming and going in a dynamic way might make sense in a reader app, but it does not for paragraphs on a web page, sir.

It’s paid up-front!? With versions for three platforms? How are they going to make enough to sustain this app? Is it even worth investing the time to try when it will inevitably go through a painful, soul-destroying transition to a subscription model sometime 2–3 years from now?

So I guess I’m giving it a pass for now but hopefully I’ve been hasty in my judgement and the next time it comes cross my RSS reader it will land better. Either way, it’s good to see RSS getting some love.

Study list for Spelling Bee: words of more than 4 letters, only 3 distinct

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:21:08 -0400

If you play Spelling Bee for a while, you’ll notice there are some words that keep coming up over and over. For example, there are lots of relatively long words that contain only three different letters, so they appear all the time. The other day I thought, “how many of these words can there be”, so I wrote a script:

download all the accepted words for the last two years (about 8300 words)
identify just the words that have more than 4 letters (so, higher scoring) and no more than 3 distinct letters

It turns out there are only about 140 such words, so as a public service I include them here:

abk: babka
abm: mamba
abn: banana
abo: baobab
abu: bubba
aci: acacia
acl: calla
acn: cancan, canna
aco: cacao, cocoa
ade: added
adm: madam
ado: doodad
adr: radar
ady: daddy
ael: allele
afl: alfalfa
agl: algal
agm: gamma, magma
ahl: halal
aht: hatha
akp: kappa
alm: llama, mammal
aln: annal
alp: appall, palapa, papal
aly: allay
am:  mamma
amn: manna
amo: momma
amp: pampa
ant: natant
anw: wanna
any: nanny
aop: poppa
aot: tattoo
apw: papaw, pawpaw
apy: papaya, pappy, yappy
art: attar, ratatat, tartar
ary: array
aty: tatty
bde: bedded, ebbed
bel: belle
bfo: boffo
bho: boohoo
bhu: hubbub
bno: bonbon, bonobo
bo:  booboo
bos: booboos, boobs
bow: bowwow
boy: booby
cde: ceded
cem: emcee
chi: chichi
cho: hooch
cim: mimic
cio: cocci
cir: cirri
civ: civic
cno: cocoon
cor: rococo
de:  deeded
deg: edged, egged
deh: heeded
dei: eddied
dek: deked
dem: deemed, memed
den: ended, needed
dep: peeped, pepped
deu: duded
dew: wedded, weeded
dgo: doggo
dho: hoodoo
div: vivid
dmu: dumdum
dov: voodoo
efm: femme
eft: effete
egl: gelee
eht: teeth, teethe
ein: innie
elm: melee
elv: levee, level
emz: mezze
enp: penne
ent: entente, tenet
ept: teepee, tepee
epv: peeve
epw: peewee, pewee
epy: peppy
equ: queue
etu: tutee
etw: tweet
flu: fluff
gin: gigging, ginning, inning
glo: googol
hor: horror
hot: tooth
how: woohoo
hoy: yoohoo
ijn: jinni
imn: minim
ino: onion
inp: pippin
iny: ninny
ipt: pipit
itu: tutti
koy: kooky
lop: lollop
lot: lotto
mop: pompom
mot: motto
moy: mommy
mru: murmur
mu:  muumuu
muy: mummy, yummy
opw: powwow
opy: poppy
ort: rotor
puy: puppy

Happy Solving!

Speculating about Apple Silicon

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 15:38:56 -0400

I know nothing beyond what’s been reported, but here’s my guess about where Apple’s high-end chips are going:

There’s no M4 Ultra because the next Mac Pro will get an M4 or M5 that supports multiple dies/packages and discrete RAM. To really pile on the CPU/GPU cores, they’ll be able to add more chips. Maybe several Maxs, or a variant with some new interconnect.

Presumably with some RAM packaged with each chip and a lot of magic to deal with the different memory latencies across the different processor and memory chips.

That’s how you build a truly scalable high-performance workstation for AI training as well as video/audio production.

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 20:39:53 -0400

Weather troll: unbelievably clear blue skies in upstate New York today, the day before the eclipse. Forecast for tomorrow doesn’t look so promising, but 🤞

PSA: Google Calendar on iPhone needs “Precise Location”

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 12:31:09 -0400

At some point the Google Calendar app on my iPhone stopped letting me search for locations when editing events. I could type in text, but would get no suggestions and would have to type/paste in an entire street address for it to do anything useful. Today I looked into it and after some experimenting, it looks like it was broken because I had turned off “precise location” for that app in Privacy settings. Because, why would my calendar need to know my precise location? In any case, turning it back on seems to have fixed it. And given that I’m putting the location on an event in order to eventually navigate there using Google Maps, I guess I’m not really exposing anything new. Still frustrating.

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 15:04:03 -0400

ML/AI is the long-awaited answer to the question “what are we going to do with all these transistors, since we can’t figure out how to write programs that do something useful with more than a handful of CPU cores?”

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 17:14:28 -0400

Source: gist.github.com/mosspresc…

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 11:11:29 -0400

⚽ Group G

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 11:05:47 -0400

⚽ Group H

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 10:35:35 -0400

⚽ Group E

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 10:22:54 -0400

⚽ Group F

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 12:18:01 -0400

Group C

#worldcup ⚽

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 12:17:34 -0400

Watching the final games of the group stages, I can never keep track of the possible results in my head. So I made a quick and dirty viewer using SwiftUI:

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 19:45:44 -0400

Have we reached peak Zuckerberg? Where do we go from here? #holodeck #bondvillain

More Nand to Tetris: now self-contained

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 14:43:16 -0400

After a long break, I spent some time recently fleshing out my Python re-implementation of the remarkable From Nand to Tetris course. You can now compile and run Jack programs without downloading any other tools, and work through the entire course up to and including writing your own compiler for your CPU.

It’s still seriously good fun to build a (simulated) CPU from scratch in a couple of hours, and then see what it’s like to run an interactive program on it.

If you’re interested in learning about how an entire computer is built out of dumb electronic components, or you know how this stuff works and you want to play with your own designs, and if you like Python, check it out at github/mossprescott/pynand.

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 11:27:02 -0400

After decades(!) of watching from the sidelines, this year I’m putting some real time and energy into #WWDC2021. Feels good to be focusing on making great Mac software, which was my first love after all.

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 17:34:42 -0400

It’s on. #coffee