activescott's Notes

Public notes from activescott

Saturday, January 3, 2026

Friday, January 2, 2026

Thursday, January 1, 2026

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee released on Wednesday a transcript and video of a closed-door interview Smith gave about two investigations of Trump. The document shows how Smith during the course of a daylong deposition repeatedly defended the basis for pursuing indictments against Trump and vigorously rejected Republican suggestions that his investigations were politically motivated.

“The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy. These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit,” Smith said, bristling at a question about whether his investigations were meant to prevent Trump from reclaiming the presidency in 2024.

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

In August 2024, it was reported that the Sheikh Radwan Lagoon had become polluted by sewage and stagnant rainwater as the result of the area's sanitation systems being damaged by the Gaza war. The lack of infrastructure had led to increase in water-born disease, including polio, hepatitis A, and cholera, and skin infections.[27][28][29] The United Nations established vaccination clinic in Sheikh Radwan in November 2024 to distribute the polio vaccine to Palestinian children. The clinic was bombed a few hours after opening, injuring two adults and four children.

Although the Supreme Court hasn't weighed in on the issue, seven federal circuit courts have, and they all upheld the First Amendment right to record the police. Likewise, federal circuits have upheld the right to use vulgar language to oppose police without fear of retaliation, and to warn others of nearby police checkpoints or speed traps.

Kind of a shitty, misrepresented framing for this article, but those that bother to read may see that his positions are more nuanced and dare we say open-minded than the title might lead one to believe. Just like any media coverage of a politician, the media reports on the most extreme things you can probably find an inflates them. Yet if you see the guy speak in an interview or even bother to read beyond the sound bite you see he’s quite well informed.

During a lengthy interview on the Odd Lots podcast, Mamdani went into more detail about the kinds of deregulation he supported to enable more housing construction, such as ending parking minimums and two-stair requirements. He also criticized the New York City Council's practice of "member deference," whereby the Council will reject housing projects that are opposed by the councilmember whose district they'd be built in.

It would go much too far to say that Mamdani has had a deeper ideological shift to a more market-oriented perspective. He has continued to insist that rent freezes and faster permitting of new housing can coexist as complementary policies.

Monday, December 29, 2025

Using rules that exempt certain bills from the filibuster, Congress passed (and President Trump signed into law) the 330-page "reconciliation" bill which included tax breaks adding $500 billion to the deficit; new limits on Medicaid, SNAP, federal student loads, and green energy; and $171 billion for immigration enforcement, making ICE the largest law enforcement agency in the United States.

Those were perhaps the most controversial bills ever enacted, with senators voting yes on the reconciliation bill representing just 44% of the country's population. I don't think that's ever happened before and really captures the political climate. (For comparison, the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, passed the Senate with the yea votes representing 62% of the country’s population.)

If you find yourself writing a prompt for something repetitively and instructions can be static/precise, it's a good idea to make a custom command. You can tell Claude to make custom commands. It knows how (or it will search the web and figure it out via claude-code-guide.md) and then it will make it for you.

The Explore agent is a read-only file search specialist. It can use Glob, Grep, Read, and limited Bash commands to navigate codebases but is strictly prohibited from creating or modifying files.

You will notice how thorough the prompt is in terms of specifying when to use what tool call. Well, most people underestimate how hard it's to make tool calling work accurately.

Context engineering is about answering "what configuration of context is most likely to generate our model's desired behavior?"

Seems about right.

Instead of typing syntax, we're reviewing implementations, catching edge cases, and shipping features in hours that used to take days. That's genuinely exciting.

Yes, there's a learning curve. Understanding how to provide context, iterate on plans, and review AI-generated code quickly takes practice. But this is learnable through doing - build small tools, review everything, develop intuition through repetition.

The multiplier potential is real when you combine AI speed with engineering judgment. We're not replacing coding skills but we're finally able to focus them on the interesting problems while delegating the tedious parts.

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