Tech — Work — Ramblings

by Mike Kalvas

I see you're not using JavaScript (which is awesome!) on one of my pages that uses it to provide a better experience. If you see something not working right, please let me know. My site should work exactly the same without it apart from any exceptions noted here.

I use prism.min.js to do syntax highlighting. It clocks in at 23kb total in size. Since the majority of the writing I do involves coding, I personally find this to be a worthwhile trade off. If you choose to keep this disabled, rest assured, the code examples are still there, they just may have some extra whitespace and obviously no syntax highlighting.

I do no tracking at all and am a zealot about keeping my pages as small as possible. If you're reading a page of mine that transfers more than about 250kb over the wire (including my most gratuitous indulgence — fonts) I've messed up.

So, if you'd like to have a slightly richer experience, consider enabling javascript for my site and I promise your trust won't be misplaced.

202506112001 You can’t spell Gell-Mann amnesia without LLM

Lately, some people I know to be good developers have been telling me about how they find LLMs useful as coding assistants. I'm trying to figure out how to make these work for me even though my experience has been pretty bad so far.

So I ask them what in particular they’re useful for and their answers have largely fallen into one of two categories:

Searching for information they don't know
Helping them with tasks or languages that they don't know well

So I ask them if they find them useful for the areas I know they have expertise in. They typically say no, the output isn't high enough quality to be particularly useful in those areas.¹

Gell-Mann amnesia effect. (2025). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect&oldid=1291989377 ↩