Don't count on the promotion
I took my advancement test today and it was by far the worst performance that I have ever given on any examination in my whole entire life. My mind was boggled by the questions and I feel like I completely bombed it.
However, I am not surprised. As I have been writing about all month I went into that test completely unprepared and am willing to face the consequences of my laziness.
It is just so difficult to study for. There are two hundred questions that are picked at random from references numbering in the thousands of pages. How in the world are you supposed to:
1. Learn that amount of information
2. Decipher what is important and what is not
3. Retain that information until the next advancement exam.
Even though I have not made the best effort this time around I am determined to not repeat this performance the next time that the advancement test comes around. This is just one of many many tests that I am going to have to take for the rest of my life so there is no sense in letting this one failure bring me down. No matter how difficult it may be, the next time that the advancement test comes around I am going to be well prepared.
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Check out some more stuff to read down below.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- A Year Of Vibes from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Moving from WordPress to Substack from charity.wtf
- Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
- [RIDGELINE] No Phones in The Ten-don Shop from Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
- Open design: the opportunity design students didn’t know they were missing from Ubuntu blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
2025: The year in LLMs
This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 and Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. It’s been a year filled with a lot of …
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries December 31, 2025Weeknote #1981
Stickers, journalling, so many links
via Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed December 31, 2025Building an internal agent: Subagent support
Most of the extensions to our internal agent have been the direct result of running into a problem that I couldn’t elegantly solve within our current framework. Evals, compaction, large-file handling all fit into that category. Subagents, allowing an agent t…
via Irrational Exuberance December 31, 2025Generated by openring