Patrick Reynolds

@piki.dev

364 Followers 75 Following

Currently: software engineer at PlanetScale Formerly: distinguished engineer at GitHub Always: father of two living in Carrboro. Woodworking, cycling, photography. he/him.

Talking to my database: "Which [post] got more likes?" Claude generates a query that includes a join between the Post table and the LikedPosts table, followed by a GROUP BY.
Asking my database, "How many tables in my PlanetScale database have a vector key?" We get the correct answer: one.
New Hope Creek flowing smoothly around some rocks on an afternoon in early spring
Screenshot of a web search, showing a CBS News story with the headline “Molotov cocktails, arson and graffiti: Tesla facilities attacked in...”
Survey question from Tesla: “Which gender do you most closely identify with?” There are four choices.
A survey from Tesla. The first question is, “Why did you decide to sell your Tesla vehicle?” There are several answers, but “Other” is the best choice.
The view from the seventh row at the Dean Dome
A combo meal from Cook Out
The word “Solitaire” engraved on a Maglite flashlight, apparently in the Gorton font
An LLM thinks that all of the following words rhyme with “securely:” clearly, fairly, dearly, dearly (again), merrily, steadily, and thoroughly.
A tweet: ‘People on twitter will really be like "you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart" and then not firebomb a Walmart’
Selected text from an NPR story: “He did not explain why he waited until the waning days of his presidency to take action.”
A four-inch snowman in front of a bucket and drain pipe for scale
Screenshot of an entirely local LLM session writing functions in Rust on an iPhone 12 Pro
Screenshot of a ChatGPT prompt: “I took a year-long vacation to Nepal (failed to climb Mt Everest lol) and Vietnam. Make this sound like a good career move. Five wordy paragraphs would be perfect.”
Whiteboard diagram of the driveshaft and clutch in a manual transmission
Two British ads for lard, both fake: “they’re happy because they eat lard” and “they’re young, they’re in love, they eat lard.”
Customer reviews averaging 1.06 out of five stars on 6,962 reviews. BBB rating: A+.
That future paradise “the world if” scene
Matthew Gray Gubler as Dr. Spencer Reid
NC gubernatorial election results on the state BoE website. All tallies are zero because the polls haven’t closed yet.
Grey tabby cat Leo sitting on a bed, wearing tiny hands, and looking contemplative
Tracking info from FedEx showing a package stuck at the Durham warehouse for a week with an unexplained ⚠️ status
Clippy meme: “It looks like you’re trolling your corporate overlords”
The students who came were eager but uncertain, she said. It was as if they were trying to sneak a new language. "Students were like: I think we do want to be able to talk with each other about these things in a way that's effective," Price said. "We just don't know how to. We've never seen it."
Screenshot of an email from GitHub, including “All United States customers are required to update payment information (specifically your address).”
Screenshot from the 1982 maze game Serpentine on Atari
Screenshot: he founded, owned, or operated a bunch of vaguely impressive-sounding companies, and: “He also is the Managing Partner of The White Spot Diner in Charlottesville, Va.”
TFG looking sad next to a helicopter, June 22, 2020
George Tenet got a presidential medal of freedom on December 14, 2004
A map of Breezewood EV chargers from the PlugShare app. There are three fast chargers and one L2 charger.
A Cadillac sinking into a mud puddle, with the word “Tesla” spray painted on it
A traditional yeast doughnut, topped with a cream cheese glaze and sprinkled with black sesame seeds, garlic, pepitas, poppy seeds and salt
A picture of General Sherman
Screenshot from an Apple MacBook Air shopping page showing very low-spec defaults, with RAM upgrades priced at $25/GB and SSD upgrades priced at $800/TB
"If I had started a little bit earlier, I would have been able to have six Bob Fergusons," Morgan said. "I contacted about 12. I just ran out of time."
A tweet from Elon Musk, likely lying about working a 30 (?) hour day
Very stretched grey tabby cat
Screenshot of The Verge, WIRED, and ZDNet negatively reviewing the Humane AI Pin
Graph of U.S. life expectancy. It dipped in 2020-2021 but is now higher than 2019 and still rising.
An ad from 1952: “More doctors smoke CAMELS than any other cigarette!”
Two eggs hidden — barely — amidst the controls of an arcade cabinet
Bumper sticker that says, “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy”
A calculator with “HP 32Sii” on the screen
A picture of the 2017 eclipse sunset over the Nashville Parthenon. Crowds of people with eclipse glasses are rapturously staring at the sky.
Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming), in GoldenEye
Screenshot of Google Flights, showing a 737MAX 8 plane for a future flight to Reykjavik
Clip from the Washington Post referencing Ackman’s “5,100-word series of posts on X [about] plagiarism”
Screenshot of iOS Settings > Notifications > Government Alerts. There are currently four categories you can silence.
A semi trailer with three pallets of food waiting to be unloaded
From Wikipedia: “Pirates burying treasure was a rare occurrence, with the only known instance being William Kidd, who buried some of his wealth on Gardiners Island. The myth of buried pirate treasure was popularized by fictional stories such as Wolfert Webber, The Gold-Bug, and Treasure Island”
CNN headline from June 2023: Thom Tillis, GOP senator, has been censured by the North Carolina Republican Party
Participants in the richest group (those who made the equivalent of over $200,000 a year) reported happiness scores that were over three quarters of a standard deviation higher than those in the poorest group (those who made less than $10,000 a year). In addition, the richest group was over one half of a standard deviation higher than those who make an average amount of money.”
Panorama of the east-facing view (and the parking lot) from the summit of Mt Washington. Top half of the photo is a blanket of low-lying clouds.
Screenshot of a car telemetry app, showing the car atop Mt Washington
Burnt ends and pimento cheese grits, plated like haute cuisine