I’m sure this will age like fine wine, but the title is obviously an allusion to Epic’s statement “programming is hard”, with which they justified their decision to fully vibe code a cross-platform Epic Games Store app. But it goes further than that even. In my life, I’ve so often heard people say “programming is hard”, “computers are hard”, “math is hard”, “physics is hard”. These are specific to my life’s choices, but I’m sure you’ve heard something similar. “Drawing is hard” or “knitting is…

We’ve all been beginners one day. And we’ve all been criticised for creating cliché photographs. The implication is that clichés shows a failure of originality, something to get rid of as quickly as possible because it’s not interesting, it’s already done to death. The implication is wrong. Cliché but I learned from creating it When I learned photography, I had no plan because I knew nothing. I didn’t even know what aperture was. I looked at a lot of photos and decided on a number of things I…

As I mentioned before, it takes me way too long to edit a single video. So I am releasing it in chunks. If I never finish it, well then at least I'll have a few videos out. What is the video about? Well, it is about the future we were promised, versus the one we are actually living in. It's not dystopian, but it seems like the goal of tech is supposedly to automate the tedious and mundane, so we can have more time to do the things we love. But along the way came the word productivity. The goal…

If I were to (as the story goes) get a job at Google, fix one bug, and quit, this is the bug I would fix: the same event should only be shown on your Calendar once, even if you can see the event on multiple calendars. Google Calendar Calendear shows this sensibly Calendear also lets you paste an image to add a calendar entry. The models that Apple Intelligence ships are good enough to OCR the image and parse some dates out, so this can be done locally. I went through the motions, and it's out…

This can sound stupid, but I’ve only recently learned how to insert PDF files on a web page; see, I’m from the generation that suffered the dreaded Adobe Acrobat thing, and also ActiveX controls, and if you don’t know what these are, well, ask your grandpa but don’t make him cry too much. So say you have a PDF you’d like to insert on a page; here’s the HTML you need: <embed src="https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/pdf/issue-083-php.pdf" width="100%" height="900px" > And the result, unsurprisingly,…

As a software engineer, LLM-use is non-negotiable at work. When I wrote 🌰 loot boxes, casinos, and work chat, Slack was the “Instagram for work”: the loot box of notifications winning against the Type-2-fun of deep, single-minded focus. LLM agents exasperbate the loot box effect: I must refresh to find out if it finished early or got stuck midway through The agent is doing the building. The building is what matters. Unblock the agent ASAP. The agent has produced 3000 words and 12 PRs. It would…

Is Spaces in macOS 27 borked for other people or just me?

I added a new Upcoming feature to Release Notes: Release Notes now has a new section for what’s coming next. In Upcoming you can save birthdays, anniversaries, trips, and one-time events. You can choose when you would like these events to show up in your Release Notes. Trips include a destination with a start and end date. All of these upcoming events are private to only you. I’m having a lot of fun journaling each days version.

In the 1990s, users of some Unix-based operating systems would sometimes see a peculiar error. It happened occasionally when sending an email to a person you might have already sent email to before, and in addition to the error being confusing, the message itself was particularly bewildering. Let’s say you wanted to send an email to “MWichary.” Instead of a confirmation, you would see this: 550 mwichary... User unknown: Not a typewriter As many strange errors tend to be, this one was at an…

Years ago I discovered the work of nnxyz on nifty.ink. I acquired a few of his pieces and grew to like it more and more. I ended up collecting four complete collections of hundreds of pieces. I had always wished to create a gallery like experience for anyone to experience. With the help of AI I was able to make that vision a reality. Check out the nnxyz rooms. Some highlights of what the website has. Every drawing can be watched being made. The 574 Nifty Ink works are rebuilt from their…

Near Intents, a cross-chain swap service, halted operations after an attacker drained around $3.8 million by exploiting a bug in its Omni layer.The next day, Near Intents posted addresses for returning the funds and threatened the attacker: "We have identified you, sir." The attacker returned everything the next day, in a transaction that included an on-chain message saying "We've returned all the funds, we were in the wrong". Near Intents confirmed the funds were returned, and said they were…

(my areas of expertise, specifically)

iPhone Duo preorders open tomorrow. AppleCare seems like a very good idea for this product: Repair Price Cover layer damage $49 Back glass damage $199 Battery service $229 Rear camera damage $229 Outer display damage $379 Outer display damage $509 Back glass damage $509 Inner display damage $999 Other damage $1,499 I’ve been using AppleCare One for a while now, and recently moved to the AppleCare One Family. For my family, it was a good bit cheaper than all five of us having our own AppleCare…

Lately been back to playing with the website a bit. I’ve wanted to try out some css changes so luckily I can run the local development server first that lets me see how things will look. If I add some functionality it helps find issues. One of the things I want to add are notes. I think of them as shorter little things. Maybe little life things or an idea. Something I read somewhere. This will take a few little liquid things and I also want the notes to have an rss feed separate from the site…

Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 created by the team behind the Blur NFT marketplace, is shutting down less than three years after launch. In the announcement, they disclosed that its costs now exceed its revenue and that it sees "no credible path" to fixing that. Despite once boasting of more than $2 billion in total value locked in June 2024, generating revenue from network usage of around $3.5 million, that revenue has collapsed to less than $2,000 last month. Tweet by Blast "Once a $2 billion…

We get a lot of flak at WordPress.org for supporting older PHP versions, but an area we’ve always pushed the frontier is in Web Standards, getting websites and browsers evolving together to make the web richer. Ever since I caught the religion from Zeldman, promoting more functionality in the browser has been a life mission. It’s a little nerdy, but we wanted to do client-side media processing (use all that amazing Apple and Google silicon instead of burdening the poor servers) so we used…

Playing New Vegas on Linux Mint has been surprisingly easy. Minor hiccup setting it up with a mod manager, but mostly smooth sailing. My current setup: OS: Linux Mint 22.3 Xfce 64-bit Game: Fallout: New Vegas from GOG Mod manager: Amethyst The basic steps: Use the Heroic Game Launcher to install Fallout: New Vegas. In Amethyst, add the game. On the Amethyst game configuration screen, under "Proton prefix", make sure the the Proton prefix field points to the game's Prefix folder. Should be…

Years ago, Marco Arment said something that I think about all the time: Don’t bet against the smartphone. It’s amazing how many products have run straight into this idea, like a sprinting outfielder who hasn’t slowed down in time to avoid the wall. There are some obvious examples, especially in our AI-crazed day. The Humane AI pin never stood a chance. The Rabbit R1 is beautiful, but is at best a novelty. The friend is never going to escape the gravity of its own domain name. I think there are…

Unacceptable: Apple Health Sync is now behind a $99/year paywall for new accounts: What’s changing for new members: for accounts created from October 13, 2026, automatic sync to third-party apps is part of Withings+. Add Withings to my personal boycott list. If they’re gouging new customers today, I predict that within the year they’ll also charge existing users who purchase newly-launched devices. They’ll never see another penny from me.

Here is a small tip that has saved me a lot of time: Always log your entire parsed configuration when your service or application boots. Or at least, support logging it through a verbose logging level. In practice, this can be logging the entire parsed YAML structure1, your config struct, or all the variables you have set from environment variables. No matter how you load your configuration, log it (but mask your secrets).

🧱 I’m Mete, a product designer, builder, and inventor with 10+ years of experience at companies like Netflix and Peloton. I write to help connect the macro and the micro forces behind AI - from ways of thinking to ways of working. If you’re looking to understand and use AI beyond the surface-level, you’re in the right place. Subscribe nowI’ve been test-driving Dots daily since its release last week. As someone who’s been using Hermes and test-driving lots of other agentic consumer products, I…

The amount of code being written at Anthropic continues to rise exponentially. It is being managed by Scion, their internal replacement for GitHub that is better suited to the scale and style of the operation, which they created with a small team in five months. This week also saw the release of two supposed frontier model models. Google has finally given us Gemini 4 Argon, along with a robust safety report. We do not yet know if Argon lives up to its benchmarks or internal hype. I plan to…

Accidentally running a checkerboarded square as a linear polar and then performing a polar to cartesian transformation, with repeats, yields inwardly folding patterns.firstsecondthirdfourthfifth timeThe pattern continues to collapse; five are fine. Your results will vary with the transformer that is used.

At work we have started using AI as a first-pass code reviewer. Nothing goes out the door without a human giving it approval, but more and more we code with AI assistance, it's only fair we get it to do some of the reviewing. We use AI code review as a first pass - whether it is Claude being pointed at a branch or MR/PR or Gitlab Duo [https://docs.gitlab.com/user/gitlab_duo/code_review/] being assigned the merge request, we use a similar set of instructions for both. Having an AI do the first…

After 3 months of work, today was the day to test a brand-new invoicing module for a hardware shop. We’re building a Blazor app to charge companies based on active users and license fees. By “we” means a team of contractors I’m part of. At the beginning of every month, the CEO creates invoices and charges cards manually. Zero automation. One by one. It takes him two or three days of work. Yes, in the 21st century. Today, the CEO decided to compare his manual process to the new module. On the…

The first three AudioRouter posts talked about how the project got built and what it does. This one is about the part I get asked about the most when I show it to other developers: the backend. How a UI, a command line, an AI assistant, and an optional REST adapter all end up calling the exact same…

Epic just announced the upcoming version 2 of their Linux implementation of Easy Anti-Cheat. It’s based on using the Linux eBPF security module to monitor what’s happening, and then a bunch of extra infrastructure to make sure this can’t be bypassed. The core part of this is requiring secure boot be enabled (ensuring that modified kernels can’t be used), using measured boot to verify that secure boot is enabled and which keys are used (to prevent you from just signing your own modified kernel),…

This post replaces “Transitioning from Laravel Echo Server to Laravel WebSockets”, which I wrote for the Oh Dear blog on 4 December 2018. The full 2018 story is below. I added what happened to both packages since, what Oh Dear runs today, and how I’d set this up in 2026 with Laravel Reverb.

The research and the exact config I used to run the 125B Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on one RTX 3090 Ti with Strata, as an OpenCode coding model. Which quant and why, the install fixes Pop!_OS 22.04 needed, the sampling block Strata does not write for you, calibration results, a one-command switch back to llama.cpp, and a side-by-side speed probe against my old Qwen3.8-27B.