Back in May, I wrote a post about how I'd migrated all my repos away from GitHub. This ended up being a combination of my self-hosted Git server on my Synology (for my private repos) and Codeberg for my public ones. Well, since then Codeberg has just given me problem after problem. I had issues working with repos via SSH for weeks. It just kept timing out, or taking an age to actually do anything. So I switched to HTTPS instead, which seemed a little better, albeit still generally very slow.…
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Beyond DeepSeek: China’s Diverse Open-Weight AI Ecosystem and Its Policy Implications After years of lagging behind, Chinese AI models — especially open-weight LLMs — seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead of their global counterparts in advanced AI model capabilities and adoption. We profile and compare the capabilities and distinct features of four notable Chinese open-weight language model families, highlighting that…
It is important to acknowledge the frustration people may be feeling. You should even share your own. But you also can’t let people linger to the point that it becomes debilitating. Instead you can share the process that led to the decision. You retain agency by making your team the owner of the change. Only when your team feels agency can they work effectively. Only once they trust you will the follow you. Only once you commit can you truly lead. Source: How Not to Disagree I get where Boz is…
Ok I'm just thinking out loud so I'm not sure how coherent/eloquent this will be or how to best structure it. I wanted to write about open readings (just laying cards out without assigned spread positions), how they're better than spreads, and how I often see people do them in a way that's taking the worst of both worlds... An open reading allows the cards to exactly describe their relationship to each other just by their geometry, the images, the movement of the symbols between the cards.…
I knew of a team whose leaders had it in their heads that the executive team had no trust in them. It came after a couple of launches that were worked on for a long while were stopped just as they came close to shipping. And when their team was called to help on something nobody else wanted to work on. A negative thought like that ascribes negative intent. And in every action the executive team took subsequently, they found confirmation. Over time, the team started playing more defense as every…
I’ve heard people say, “I don’t use search engines, I just ask AI”. And I get it. It’s easy. If you use Google, the first result is always Googles AI, Gemini, replying. Earlier this week, Apple announced that it would remove support for CoreStorage. So I Googled — in other word asked Gemini — to refresh my memory. Ah, yes, it’s the container Apple used to introduce, among other things, encryption to its old HFS+ file system. After going down that rabbit hole, asking more and more questions…
In an attempt to reduce the amount of time I spend staring at my phone, I have bought myself another device. At least that is the lie I told myself for buying yet another gadget because it looked cool. After seeing Max Glenister and Neil Brown speak so highly of this device I just had to buy the XTEINK X4 e-reader. Note, this is not sponsored in any way I just wanted to share it with you! This is the 3rd e-reader that I own, so I definitely didn't need this device. I also have an old Kindle…
I still have both eyes.I don't know why I bother trying other tools. I'm just going to end up back in Emacs, anyway. ✍️ Reply by email
The Highrise Campsite by Willem De Haan is a clever idea. By using elements of construction scaffold, he was able to create a compact five-tier place for tents and space for living. I just have one question: since the tents create sail area that catches the wind, and the structure is significantly taller than it is wide, what holds down the windward side in conditions other than dead calm? Photo by Kristel Hayes on Unsplash
A bit different from the usual content I share, but this is webapp provides the best TV experience I've ever seen online. It's simple, doesn't require elaborate signups or setup, it relies on perfectly legal iptv/web sources and is incredibly responsive.
Coral is unsupported and cloud cameras keep leaking data. The Frigate NVR hardware I'd buy in 2026 - N100 mini PC, Pi 5 with Hailo, PoE cameras.
Like an 8-year-old boy, my blog has grown and changed. In case you missed it, yesterday my blog turned 8. The project and habit I’ve kept for the longest. Here’s what I’m doing differently: #1. No more SEO-optimized posts. Google killed blogging as a business. Then LLMs put the last nail in the coffin. I wrote my first posts to rank high in Google search results. I chose subjects and headlines from Google’s “People also asked” and related searches. Not anymore. #2. More subjects apart from…
OverviewThis one is landing Sunday instead of Friday. Friday got away from me, but the security news did not slow down while I caught up. The clearest pattern was pressure on the systems that concentrate trust: identity servers, SharePoint, security appliances, file-sharing controllers, developer pipelines, browsers, and the libraries sitting underneath internet services.Reality check: A late roundup is still useful if it sends you back to the right consoles. Start with the exploited systems…
Do you remember when I worried if I could think in N scale? Whether my mind would allow me to see, compose and create models in this smaller scale? Over the past few years I have deeply enjoyed the adventure, tipped over the edge by Chris. Today I find myself strangely unmoved by British OO - perhaps the transformation is complete?Bachmann and Farish Mk1 BG with a Pilot V5 pen.On my bench sits a pair of Mk1 BG models. The OO part of the collection for my weathering book, the N a feature of my…
Here’s a tiny, stupid problem that has stolen an embarrassing amount of my life: I plug a BrightSign player into my network, it grabs whatever dynamic IP the UniFi controller feels like handing out, and now I have to go find that IP before I can SSH in and do actual work. Claude skills and a new tool to the rescue!
Below are the steps to follow to port open in a syrotech fiber modem. Here we will open port 80. Login to the router (192.168.1.1). Go to Application > Advance NAT > Virtual Server. Click Add. For the Server IP Address add the local server IP address. In my case it is 192.168.1.33. For Please select a service, select Web Server (HTTP). Now there will be an entry in the below section. Click Enable in that first row and click Save/Apply. Next, go to Management > Device Manage and click Commit and…
I gave a talk earlier this year at CONVEX, in Madrid, in an actual cinema. The talk was my attempt to put everything I’ve been circling in this newsletter for the past few months into a single forty-minute argument about local AI, why the company everyone wrote off might win the infrastructure war, and why I think we should all be quietly building our own way out.This is me rounding off the local-AI series (and “the writing season”) with it. No new arguments this week. This talk was the perfect…
✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: Of Claudia Delusions, "Tokenmaxxing", and goblins 📰 Long-Form Content: Yes, we're still on Age Gating 🌞 Good News!: Elected officials are warming up to the idea of alternative platforms; No, you won't get "left behind;" and more AI data centre bans are happening. 📯 The Post-Script: Terry Godier's The Boring Internet. 📟 Short-Form ContentChatbots ("AI") "You can't use an LLM in any context where being wrong is a problem" is a quote I came across on…
For a really long time now I've used Squarespace as the website host for dante.cool, but not anymore! I was kind of spurred on by Squarespace jacking up the price on a yearly subscription by 70 dollars (from $138/yr to $204/yr), but if you've been reading this blog you know I sort of have "self-hosting fever". Naturally, I had been thinking about using Hugo for a while, and this seemed like a good test of my abilities. I did look at a few other options — there is LinkStack, which is sort of a…
How many times in your career as a software developer have you been handed a “requirement” that turned out to be difficult and costly to fulfil? I’ve been there many times, and I imagine you have, too. The hack I discovered a few years into my career is that one person’s “what” is almost always another person’s “how”. Software requirements very rarely describe an actual need – a user goal, for example. They’re usually a decision that someone has taken about how to address a need. When we make…
June in the UK was something of an endurance test, with temperatures regularly hitting the 30s. Also – reflections on my Amazon Kindle review a year on, and how to zero in on your most valuable work. | Read full post >>
Contrary to the belief of people, a fire alarm’s purpose is not just to let you know that there is fire. But also to let you know that it is safe to react or panic about the fire. Bystander effect experiment by Latane and Darley in 1968 states that you are more likely to be inactive or not help when you are in a group of people than when you’re alone. This also means you are more likely to help or react when you are lonely than in a group. So as to avoid embarassment or to be percieved as…
Every year on March 31st I have a sense of minor guilt, anxiety, and sheepishness. It’s World Backup Day and I don’t have good backups. The purpose of the day is to serve as a reminder to check that your backup system is functioning, that you can restore from your backups, and that all your data is included in the backup system. It’s not like I don’t have backups of my data, it’s just they’re not backup backups, you know? I could probably find a second copy of the most important stuff, or…
I was reading Marianne Bellotti’s Kill It with Fire when I found a description of COBOL that sounded strangely familiar: COBOL was a language built for people who did not want to understand how the computer worked; they just wanted to get the job done. Today, we would probably call those people vibe coders. That comparison might sound insulting to COBOL programmers, vibe coders, or both. I don’t mean it that way.
I just finished a 24-hour hackathon. Here is the breakdown: prompting 20 hours video editing 4 hours coding 0 hours We got stuck twice. The first time, someone ran out of Claude Code quota. They tried another coding agent, but it was not smart enough to pick up where Claude had stopped. The second time, someone's agent refused a git push. They couldn't merge the code in CLI. This is at MIT, where a different generation of hackers were born. Hackathons peak sometime after midnight. The coffee…
As much as I like to go thrifting from time to time, often my local thrift shops know nothing about technology and either don’t have technology for sale at all, or they end up mispricing them so badly that I couldn’t really swallow paying the price for it. As I’ve recently been diving for optical discs in Japan, I decided to expand my thrifting net to buy random products from Japan, especially as I would have to pay the commission/shipping overhead anyway, so I might as well grab a few extra…
1. Skills-based: Here’s what I know how to do; what interesting things can I do with my tools? 2. End product: Here’s what I want to do; what tools would let me do that, or how can I use my tools to do that? 3. Process focused: Here’s what tools I want to use; what project would let me use (and/or learn how to use) them? (“Tools” here is also standing in for skills and media / formats.) See also: Decisions are the foundation of art Which projects are worth doing? How to evaluate creative ideas…
A follow-up to One Million Worlds. One million characters took too long to generate so I went down an order of magnitude. The median planet population has 100,000 people, after all. Thank you to MTB and Ms. Quixotic for suggesting questions to ask the dataset. The GeneratorGenerating Classic Traveller characters is a lot trickier than planets, and not just because there are more fiddly components. Whereas world generation is fully procedural, character creation involves moments of decision --…
