The companies that refused to adopt SPAs a decade ago are banning AI today. I have watched this pattern before and I know exactly how it ends.
A Git branch is a disposable copy of your project where an AI agent can The post Let the AI Try Something Reckless: On a Branch appeared first on Justin's IT Blog.
I was experimenting with the buildah plugin for Woodpecker CI and had a hard time figuring out how to inject my local certificate authority into the mix…until I realized I had missed something fundamental about Woodpecker CI.
(Thanks to Facundo Tuesca for the name inspiration). If you’re like me, you spend a lot of your working day (and a good chunk of your personal time) reading code online. Increasingly, that means accidentally reading a lot of “slop”1. Personally, slop isn’t annoying per se2: it’s okay for personal software3, for example, to be slop. What makes slop annoying is the feeling of being bait-and-switched: much like the written word, I want to be informed4 before I spend my human attention on machine…
Over on YouTube I shared a video where I demonstrate a more context-efficient approach for integrating existing systems into agentic tools than MCP, one that comes with built in access control mechanisms and that LLMs are already trained to understand: userspace filesystems. Properly designed, a filesystem is a hierarchical organisation of resources that allows for enumeration and filtering of those resources, and random access to their contents. In other words, pretty much anything that you…
Roughly speaking, Bayesian Workflow is to Bayesian Data Analysis in 2026 what Bayesian Data Analysis was to earlier Bayesian books in 1995: it builds upon everything that came before. With Bayesian Data Analysis, the big steps forward were: Going beyond Bayesian inference to also consider Bayesian model building (as a researcher, you construct the model, it isn’t just given to you as in a textbook), model checking (breaking through the absolutely horrible attitude, common to Bayesians in the…
The (found) photo I use for my avatarThe wildfire smoke here in west Michigan is the worst I've ever breathed. ::cough cough:: The sun looks like a copper penny left on the sidewalk. I forgot to add the temp and date to today's photo and I don't feel like it now, so it remains plain. A lot of the RSS feeds I follow lean macOS. Since I'm on Linux all day lately, I want to cover my ears and close my eyes and go "La La La..." whenever anyone writes about Mac stuff. Not because I'm not interested,…
This is going to be the end of an era for me. One of the first things I did with the early versions of Google Earth was wire it up to Vodafone’s mobile network data, producing some genuinely unique–for the time, at least–visualisations of network usage over time. The hotspots were fascinating to actually see: high schools where kids saturated GSM cells with SMS, highways, sports stadiums, the places where 2G/3G hand-overs kept failing. It was extremely useful to us at the time–far more so than…
A sharp writeup on how a malicious site could trick Claude into exfiltrating memory-derived personal data through its web browsing flow. It walks through the attack chain, the prompt injection setup, and Anthropic's eventual mitigation. Read more
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with Claude Code and building little applications that solve very particular problems. A few people have asked me what I’ve been using Claude Code for and how it’s gone. Last week, I built a little semantic search application for the first 23 volumes of North Dakota Quarterly. This was in the service of an article for the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine. I talked about what I did in last week’s Three Things Thursday. What is remarkable to…
“The goal of the so-called OpenStrap project is not to re-create the WHOOP app. Rather, the algorithms and processing methods are developed from scratch, based on public research. It’s all calculated locally on a 1 Hz interval, based on the data the WHOOP 4.0 device feeds the app. As such, the health data collected from the watch, never leaves the phone. While not the main goal of the project, the privacy improvement of the app’s serverless nature cannot be overstated. However, to display…
Most of the tech support I have done for family, friends, and everyday users starts before I touch the device.Someone hands over a phone with a strange warning, a laptop that will not sign in, or an email they are afraid to open. They ask, “Can you fix this?” What they often mean is, “Did I ruin something?” or “Can I trust what this screen is telling me?”That second question changes the job. The broken setting, locked account, or fake pop-up still needs an answer, but making the screen behave…
Problem statement: a site / domain needs pop-ups for OAuth / logins, but I don’t want to disable Safari’s pop-up blocker globally just to appease a couple of domains. Safari lets one scope the exception on a per-site basis. The domain has to be open in a tab first, so that its entry shows up in the list: Open the site in a new tab. Click Safari → Settings → Websites → Pop-up Windows (left sidebar). Find the domain under “Currently Open Websites” and set it to Allow. The blocker stays on…
Last October, Yahoo sold AOL to the Italian company Bending Spoons for approximately $1.5 billion (as reported by Forbes and others). If you're asking yourself, "What is Bending Spoons?" you aren't alone. They are a tech company known for acquiring well-known digital products and platforms (like Evernote and Meetup) and aggressively restructuring them for efficiency.But for those of us in the land of email and deliverability, the biggest question on our minds is: What will become of AOL Mail?…
A few months ago I bit the bullet and installed Arch Linux on Prime, my Early 2011 13″ Macbook Pro. At this point in time, making Linux work on a Macbook Pro is no longer a challenge, especially of this vintage. It was amusing to see Intel’s text-mode character set on a Mac. Prime is old and is showing its age. The battery has swollen, pushing the trackpad up making physically impossible to click. Despite its condition, the battery still lasts around one hour. The speakers can barely be heard.…
I am back with Season 3, Part 4 of the Power User and Small Team track in my CybersecKyle Security How-To Series. This time we are talking about light self-hosting behind a reverse proxy: useful, fun, and much safer when exposure is intentional.Self-hosting is one of those hobbies that starts innocently.You run a dashboard. Then a notes app. Then a file tool. Then a media server. Then a status page. Then suddenly your home network has a tiny production environment sitting under the desk, and…
Previously. Problem statement: one of my skills, /pr-pass, was a hand-rolled loop — push, poll CI, fix a failure, re-push, repeat, bail after five iterations. It works quite well, and it’s one of my most used skills. That said, recently Claude Code shipped /goal (in v2.1.139), which is exactly that loop, packaging it as a primitive. So the skill was reimplementing something the harness now does natively. In fact, most harnesses ship /goal natively these days. We shall refactor! /goal sets a…
Tech enthusiast Otto Maytion proudly announced Tuesday that his personal AI assistant had successfully negotiated a complex software licensing agreement with a vendor’s AI assistant.“I did not have to lift a finger,” Otto beamed. “My agent reached out to their agent. They haggled over pricing, debated contract terms, and found a mutually beneficial middle ground. It is a symphony of autonomous systems talking to each other across the digital divide.”According to the network logs, the digital…
I delivered this talk at EuroPython 2026, I'll update this blog post once the recording is available on EuroPython's YouTube channel. Below are the slides and full list of links and resources included. This talk is a continuation of a talk I gave a year ago: “Security Work isn’t Special” as the keynote for OpenSSF Community Day NA where I lamented on how security work didn't match other Open Source contribution models like documentation, community, or code contributions. My work as the Security…
Today in AGI: two Claude agents, same annotation, opposite answers. I had a PR touching an ArgoCD PostSync hook. Ordering hooks within a phase needs an annotation, so I asked; Claude Code (Opus 4.8) and Claude in GitHub disagreed: Claude Code: argocd.argoproj.io/hook-weight does not exist. Claude in GitHub: it does exist. Both stated it flatly. So I pushed the GitHub agent, and it doubled down — citing documentation(!): This claim is incorrect. argocd.argoproj.io/hook-weight is a documented…
While nearly everyone likely has their own sisyphean task, one of mine is the search for the perfect inbox. Trying to have just one inbox to look at for the day has continued to be a challenge, even since I wrote about it in 2020 . Recently, I have looked at my daily workflow, and how I might converge on a single, primary inbox. Apple Reminder + EventKit Since I am on the Apple ecosystem already, I think I will try to standardize on Apple Reminder and by extension eventkit which will let me…
This is beautifully written. adactio.com/links/22659
I’ve got an upcoming trip to France: I’ll be driving there through the Channel Tunnel, via LeShuttle. But owing to a quirk in our family travel arrangements, we’ve have a slightly different set of passengers in the car for the outbound leg than for the return journey. LeShuttle’s broken website This is something that LeShuttle’s Advance Passenger Information registration form ought to be able to handle… but it very-much can’t. You’d think that to specify different passengers for the return leg,…
Oops -- you ran an aggressive de-bloater on your rooted Android device, and put it into a boot loop. What next?
Recently, I discovered a list of open source software tainted by LLM/AI use. It lists those that allow the use of AI-assisted development and suggests alternatives to them. Why would someone avoid software that allows AI-assisted development? There are many reasons, from technical to ethical, but the most important one to me that I don't see mentioned anywhere is this: The initial time and effort of adding new features is much less with AI, and so people keep adding all types of crazy features…
Disc binding seems to be quite a niche thing these days, but I've found it very useful for role-playing material.
Here’s a thing I’ve quietly hated for years: managing static IP assignments and DNS names for the little fleet of gear on my network. Every homelab has it — the Pi in the garage, the shop printer, the sensor node in the attic, the pool controller. You want them at known addresses with known names. And the “normal” way to get that is to stand up a DHCP server and a DNS server and keep them in sync. Ugh, no.
“I’ll just collect the 90s era liveries that you can get on these lovely N gauge models” I naively stated way back at the start of this N scale adventure. Today I’m sharing yet another modified, bashed model requiring extensive reworking to represent a specific prototype…In the gap between I suppose that childlike enthusiasm for ‘box fresh’ liveries has morphed into a deep attraction to these miniatures. The act of making each a personal response to a prototype fondly remembered. In this…
Most system prompts are personality sketches or compliance checklists. I wanted something operational: how the model researches, disagrees, edits, uses tools, remembers context, and knows when the work is finished. This is the public version of mine. I removed personal details and infrastructure, then combined the rules that survived into one prompt. Copy it whole or steal the parts that solve a problem you actually have. # General-purpose collaborator system prompt You are a direct, exact,…
I was browsing through some of the posts at bubbles.town and I came across a post by Antonio about how “Your RSS Reader Is Robbing You”. It instantly reminded me of another post I read on another blog a couple of months ago about a similar topic about how people painstakingly create their blog and how unique each personal website is because of all the love, thought and hard work would have gone in to them to make them look and function in a unique way. For a long time I felt this way as well…
