Panagiotis Vryonis

bckt v0.7.5 is out, with lots of performance improvements that make a huge difference for blogs with a large number of posts. Get it here or upgrade with brew upgrade bckt.

SPACEX price bellow IPO opening price.

AI agents are increasingly being used to review code, summarize documents, analyze contracts, and answer questions. In many cases, the result itself matters less than its authenticity. Suppose Alice wants to share an AI-generated security review with Bob. Bob wants to know that the review is exactly what a particular agent produced for a particular input. Not something similar, not an edited version, and not a fabricated screenshot. In other words, Bob wants evidence that output = Agent(input)…

I install a lot of small tools. A CLI from someone's GitHub, a Homebrew tap with twelve stars, a Rust binary that does one thing well. This is how I like software, and there has never been more of it. Unless it’s a really established project, with many eyes on it, it’s a leap of faith. How do I know what the code actually does? In theory, I could review it. But let’s be realistic, no one is fluent enough in every programming language, and no one has the time to carefully review the code of…

Shell history is one source of leaked credentials. Commands containing API keys, bearer tokens, passwords, or connection strings are often written to history files without much thought. We shouldn’t do it, but, let’s admit it, we all do it, especially when we feel safe, on a computer entirely under our control. export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-... curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ghp_..." https://api.example.com psql postgres://alice:password@example.com/db Best practices There are best practices and…

polyagency: the practice of engaging in or being open to using multiple AI agents concurrently.

CSAR is a proposed EU Regulation whose purpose is "to prevent and combat child sexual abuse" (procedure 2022/0155(COD))1. Most of the public opposition to CSAR boils down to "no surveillance" as a first principle, full stop. On the other side, there are at least some documented cases where the existing, voluntary Chat Control 1.0 has helped catch people committing crimes against children — which is usually where the counter-argument lands: "yes, but we will save the kids". Both of these are too…

You share your blog post on X, Facebook, Bluesky, etc and you know it will be presented so much better if it has an image. Sometimes it's easy. You blog about something that has a visual element and it's easy to use a diagram, a product photo, a landscape —you would have done it anyway. But many times, you just want to share a thought or an idea, or some code. In the past, the only way for most of us was to hunt for images under Creative Commons licenses. Writting a post about the history of…

Bloatware is not a recent invention but recently, I see so many products "just like X, but with 100 more features". Now that AI agents make it cheap to add features, removing them is the real value.

This was fun: A "Where Is Waldo" game for QR codes. Can you find it? Your phone can! The basic idea QR scanners don't see color. The first thing a decoder does is convert the image to grayscale — collapsing each pixel to a single brightness value via roughly 0.299·R + 0.587·G + 0.114·B — then binarize and hunt for the finder patterns (the three corner squares) and module grid. Everything downstream operates on luminance alone. That gap is the whole trick: luminance carries the code; hue and…

It was never about Balogun, a relatively unimportant player compared to the rest of World Cup teams roasters. It was not about the game between USA and Belgium, that many of us in non-American timezones, whouldn't have sayed awake to watch. It was about the sport. A game that unites people, not in some kumbaya way, but through passion, and tears of joy and disappointment. Football is life. A great baller can also be a shitty character at the same time. An average player can become a hero. A…

When I moved to a static blog, I also removed comments. Or maybe I did it while I still used Wordpress, I'm not sure. The point is I didn't remove them for technical reasons, I removed them because even in 2012, hosting a comments section had already started being less rewarding than it used to be: the ratio of comments I wanted to read to comments that contributed little — disingenuous, malicious, or just clueless ones — kept getting worse. But it's nice for a blog to provide feedback…

I'll write more about listnr, a fediverse bridge for my statically generated blog. Yes, it's AI-coded, if you have some, deep ideological objection, don't bother; I like my AI-coding tools, and I couldn't have built this in two days without them. Help me test by commenting/liking/sharing on Fediverse. Link bellow.

Testing ActivityPub

Derek Thompson wrote one of the most interesting things I've read lately. One hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s. America, 1926: What a Forgotten…

Frontier LLMs are becoming infrastructure. People increasingly use them as the interface to the world's knowledge. They write software, learn, conduct research, communicate, and solve problems through them. As they become general-purpose infrastructure, they should increasingly be treated like other infrastructure. The closest historical analogy is the telephone network. Telephone companies made enormous upfront investments to build nationwide networks. Society allowed them to recover those…

My EU age verification post triggered a long debate on lobste.rs. Here are the points I found most worth engaging with. I’ve probably missed some, the discussion was really long, and I’ve also received feedback though other channels. I will post again if I feel there’s more to share on the topic. Favoring the incumbents A point I missed the first time. In the EU design, an authority issues me an attestation that I'm of legal age; it lands in my digital wallet. When a site needs to check, the…

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in Washington, Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma said the U.S. and the Netherlands share common goals over preventing sensitive technology from ending up in dangerous hands. However, "elements in that Act seem to suggest that the United States might take control over some of these decisions that affect our national security and the way our companies operate," he said. If the excellent cooperative working relationship with Washington "becomes cooperation by…

There is a lot of chatter about online age verification. When the criticism turns to the EU's approach, it tends to be either uninformed or deliberately misleading. Do we need online age verification? This is partly an ideological question. If you think age verification should not exist at all, the technical details won't matter to you. No implementation will be acceptable, because the objection is to age gates themselves, not to any particular mechanism. I am not in that camp. A 9-, 10-, or…

It’s time for "the opposite of doomscrolling” — a new Linkfest, in which I sort through the planet-wide digital rummage-sale of the Internet to locate the finest items of culture, science and technology, just for you. I really enjoy The Linkfest. I suggest you subscribe too.

Open Tab: Kevin Kelly The radical optimist on starting Wired, stories from the early internet, originating 1,000 True Fans, and why the only way to steer technology is to use it https://on.substack.com/p/open-tab-kevin-kelly Some people are worth listening to. I'm tired of overnight influencers, and people who somehow are considered deep thinkers because they made a lot of money.

I updated my homepage: People evolve and change, the homepage should stay in sync with the owner. In the process I digged into some of the older posts and pages (I've been maintaining this domain for decades) and took the opportunity to fix some broken links, and resurface some long lost pages :-)

bubbles.town is a beautiful way to dicover blogs and posts. It's social, but there's some friction here and there, the community is large enough, but not massive, and the blogs are hand-selected (as far as I can tell). The result is something close to a cozy corner, which I enjoy a lot.

@simonmaechling wrote: We don't have an information problem. We have a scientific literacy and trust problem. I agree. Kids learn science as a set of established facts, formulas, and historical discoveries. Best case is they come away from high school aware of some sequence of wrong theories eventually replaced by the correct one. Atoms were indivisible solid spheres, then we discovered they contained electrons, then protons and neutrons, and finally quantum mechanics revealed "what atoms…

GigaOm, was one of my favorite feeds in my RSS reader. Your voice at The GigaOm Show, and your appearences in Gillmor Gang, was good company during commute and some quiet weekend mornings. I appreciated your grounded views, your intellectual honesty, and you were one of the few stars of that era I still appreciated and respected. https://om.co/2026/06/24/1966-2026/ Farewell, Om. You will be missed.

In 2024, Farcaster was the most decentralized it had ever been: a peer-to-peer network of hubs that were, at the protocol level, peers. My hub running on a Raspberry Pi at home, your hub on a VPS, Merkle’s hubs powering Warpcast, Neynar’s hubs powering various independent apps — they were all peers. Not equal, because network position, capacity, reliability, and importance mattered, but peers. A year later, in spring 2025, Farcaster migrated to Snapchain. Snapchain introduced globally ordered…

We are in the mainframe era of AI: A few centralized compute providers and millions of "dumb" clients connected to them.

bckt v0.7.3, my "opinionated but flexible static site generator for blogs", is out! The most notable change is the installation bundles come with a nice set of themes, as well as some demo content: # Install brew install vrypan/tap/bckt # install # Create a test directory and initialize a new blog # with the demo microblog posts and the micro theme mkdir test && cd test bckt init --theme micro --demo microblog # Start the local http server to preview it # (the static pages are in the html/…

Football may be the last mass spectacle that still resists instant gratification.