Maintenance and intent play the decisive role in how AI will impact software development.

It’s time to celebrate a little win. The other day, my mom contacted me saying her 10-year-old iPhone wouldn’t turn on. After getting a hold of the device and doing some family IT support, I concluded the battery was dead. So I bought her a new (old) one on Walmart (SE 3rd gen., if you must know). Her old phone used a SIM card, so I was expecting the process to go something like this: Take the SIM out of the old phone Put it in the new phone Setup the device Troubleshoot why there was no…

<h1>The Better Technology</h1> <p>This summer I did a 3-month residency in Berlin. I attended a program called <a href="https://sandbox.techeurope.io">The Sandbox</a>.</p> <p>One of the most memorable days was a trip, organized by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/janne-mandelkau/">Janne</a>, to the warehouse of a prominent logistics company. It handled tons of products from various vendors, and the size of the place, the number of packages, and the number of people working there were all…

I've spent a lot of my career optimising websites and apps to run faster, and it's been interesting to apply some of those principles to agentic workflows. I'll run over some of my key learnings - there's many more I want to get written down at some point, but for brevity I think this is my rough mental model of tackling this. Inference speed The obvious thing to start with is inference speed. This has two key components, which will be familiar if you have done any backend API optimisation. The…

• 4-star hikes • 4 to 6 mile options • Easy | Gain 240 to 470 feet • Concord & Lincoln, MA | MetroWest Region . Fall colors on the shores of Fairhaven Bay Wright Woods and Adams Woods are adjacent conservation lands south of the town of Concord, Massachusetts. Located close to the popular Walden Pond made famous by American writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, these lands remain in a mostly natural state and are visited infrequently, mostly by locals looking for some nearby tranquility.…

Yeah, so I’m a day late with this thing again. Blame two consecutive (incredible) nights seeing Built to Spill. Maybe I should just start calling this the “Mid-Week Boston-Area Shows Post” instead of the “Weekly Wednesday…”, though I’d miss the alliteration, if not the self-set deadline. But if I start doing that, I’d probably end […]

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***It was time to stick a safety pin through your nose and practice your gobbing because this was the week that saw the release of New Rose by the Damned, seemingly the first single ever to be marketed as punk rock.Elsewhere, racing driver James Hunt became the Formula One world champion.But of far more interest to me would have been that, on October 27th, BBC Two was showing The Mind…

Whaddya know? Another distant relation to Edgar Allan Poe cropped up. This time it's Robert Poe who wrote two mystery novels inspired by two short stories by the Master of the Macabre. I found his second one first and because it's titled The Black Cat (1997) and drawn from that nasty story of ax murder, a body walled up in a cellar, and a vengeful cat, I thought I'd tackle this one for Halloween. It also promised a storyline about a witch and how her practicing Wicca affects the town of Crowley…

An interpretability study of two open reasoning models on matched English, Twi and Twi–English mobile money tasks. Earlier this month (October 2026) I released sika-agent, an RL environment where an agent runs a Ghanaian mobile money wallet through tools: sending money, buying airtime, paying bills, repaying a device loan, and dealing with scams and planted instructions. Every task can arrive in English, Twi or Twi–English, which in the Ghanaian context is what a lot more people speak. MoMo…

“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. The verdict on it lies in this nature of its origin: there is no other.” Rainer Maria Rilke in his first letter to Franz Xaver Kappus, compiled in Letters to a Young Poet. I need to pick up The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge again, I remember really enjoying it but left the pocket edition in the UK. Apparently there was a new translation of it in 2022, worth checking out. Maybe also worth reading Le Guin’s “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter”…

The Long-Term Campaign episode went live a month and half ago on The Classic Adventure Gaming Podcast. Gus invited us to share more about our Conquering the Barbarian Altanis campaign. This Monday we celebrated our 200th session. Since the episode went live I have received a number of questions via Discord, email, and in-person. I have collected them all (as much as I could remember) below. Feel free to comment if you have additional questions. You can listen to the episode here and find my…

fight choreography and floating around in the trees furthers the characaters’ emotions and internal struggles jen getting pulled every which way while trying to find freedom: ultimately does her romance is not done very well, but mu bai and shu lien’s is excellent

A Week at the Movies This month I volunteered at the Chicago International Film Festival, which means I got to watch a bunch of new movies for free. It was a solid week of inhaling and exhaling cinema, and it became a bit intoxicating—I could keep doing this forever! It was a nice reminder that there's nothing quite like being in a theater and experiencing art with a bunch of strangers, laughing and gasping and tearfully applauding together in huge, dark rooms. I love the movies! Here are all…

written yesterday around 3pm. [redacted for now].

This familiar bluebird logo on W Alexander coaches brings back fond memories of Sunday trips to visit lovely Scottish towns such as Callander and of course, the mystery tours.

Today I gave a short talk about complete mappings. A complete mapping of a group is a bijection on the group such that the positions in the Cayley table corresponding to an element and its image select a transversal. In other words, the cells so specified include one in each row, one in each column, and one containing each letter. The idea goes back not far short of 100 years. Hall and Paige conjectured that a finite group has a complete mapping if and only if its Sylow 2-subgroups are trivial…

Fjord, a provocative drama from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, tackles the difficult subject of child abuse, turning it into a springboard for examining cultural conflict and rigid institutional power. Fjord may be an anomaly. Mungiu’s movie asks liberal-leaning audiences to accept the idea that a Pentecostal Christian family can become victims of severely applied state policies about child abuse and the separation of church and state. That's a big script to flip, but Mungiu does it without…

Learn how to write and use thread-safe iterators in Python 3.15. This article shows how to write and use iterators in a thread-safe manner using the new tools from Python 3.15: threading.serialize_iterator threading.synchronized_iterator 15 days of Python 3.15 To celebrate the release of Python 3.15, over the next 15 business days I'll be writing about a new 3.15 feature every day. Explained clearly and with examples so you don't have to sift through the changelog. Subscribe to receive this…

Federico Viticci, in the smartest article I’ve read about the new MacBook Pro: I’d argue that the Mac’s lack of touch is a liability at this point. Its omission has turned from a deliberate design decision that made sense for its time to a choice dictated by inertia and, perhaps, an unwillingness to challenge the status quo. Which is especially funny since the “status quo” of Apple is that of a company that sells millions of touch-enabled devices every year and considerably fewer trackpad-only…

There are two main narratives related to Artificial Intelligence. One is that it will become a new kind of utility, raw intelligence used by token or whatever unit of measure will apply, just like water or electricity are billed on volume. The other is that it is going to be the new Google search, a gated monopoly owned by just one company that will win over all of the others. Even if both imply a limitation of access by big corporations, the two models are radically different. Case in point,…

I saw this question asked in a comment thread responding to Seraphim Seraphina's Pawn Stance is Objectively Correct post and it finally inspired me to hop on Prismatic Wasteland's Player Advice Blogwagon. I don't think of myself as a particularly good TTRPG player! I enjoy playing games but I'm not a grand tactician/logistician, I'm not particularly instrumental, and I'm not always great at holding a character goal at front-of-mind during role play. I think I'm good with riddles and puzzles, I…

This blog post is about touch screen Macs, but I’ll start by talking about touch screen cars. Vehicle manufacturers have increasingly replaced physical controls in cars with touch screens, and it hasn’t gone well, because the touch screens frustrate drivers. As a resident of the Upper Midwest who drives wearing gloves in the winter, I suspect that that the idea for touch screens came from somewhere warmer than the traditional home of the automotive industry, Detroit. For further reading on the…

Discussions with the US about the American health care system often counterpose the well-known issues of the US health care system (high costs, lack of health insurance, unequal access to care, lower health outcomes than many other high-income countries) with a nebulous alternative often called “national health insurance, like all the other countries in the world” or sometimes “Medicare for all.” I refer to the alternatives as “nebulous” because the suggestion seems to be that these alternative…

Some more Morrissey Mullen, but jumping ahead several albums to the late 80s. Definitely much more of a late 80s sound than their first collaboration. Interesting seeing them lean much further into synths, too. Some tracks like That's Jazz are definitely pointing towards the laid-back smooth direction fusion would be moving into in the early 90s.

I am pretty sure I got my first smartphone (an android) back in 2011 or 2012 (my personal instagram has pictures from 2012, and that was when they added the android app). Since I’ve deleted my social media apps off my phone, I’ve been wondering what I used to do pre-smartphone. I definitely used my laptop A LOT. It was just more dedicated computer time to use social media. List of things I think I was doing: I was in college - so probably had IRL friend stuff DeviantArt still had a very active…

The final Halloween weekend of my 30s is upon me. And..... I'm going to a live Rocky Horror Picture Show! It's been a minute since I've done one of these.

During the Covid lockdowns, like millions of others, I watched YouTube to kill time. This included fitness content. I was among the 40–60 percent of people who gained weight during the lockdowns (in their infinite wisdom, the “experts” decided a virus with a ~100% survivability rate for healthy adults necessitated shutting down the economy). I finally lost the weight, and more, around early 2023. This got me into studying metabolism. I had already written a ton about IQ when I started my blog,…

Just published a short story I called “The Second Visit.” It’s a nod to Isaac Asimov’s “Silly Asses,” a story I’ve always liked.

Nets hang from a fishing trawler spotted in Galveston Harbor, Texas. The post Nets appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.