jonno.nz

The ground starts moving before you see the fire. You spread your feet, reach for something solid. A voice calls your name, but the sound arrives too slowly. You watch a mouth finish speaking before you hear the words. Even your hands seem far away. Then the storm comes through, and the world you recognise begins to burn. You step into the darkness. Later, you will call it a tunnel. From inside, you can’t tell. You reach out on either side and find nothing. There are no walls to follow, no…

Helplessness grows in the distance between the hit and your first act of control. In boxing, the hit might be a jab you never saw. Outside the ring, it might be a rejection, a failure or a year where nothing works. The longer you go without affecting what happens next, the easier it becomes to stop trying. Modern learned helplessness research suggests the name is slightly backwards. Passivity under prolonged stress is the default. Control is what gets learned. In a 2020 experiment, 100 adults…

New Zealand knows how many days of diesel it has. At 11:59pm on Sunday 23 August, the answer was 44.8 days in the country or on ships headed here. Petrol was 49.2 days. Jet fuel was 42. A separate Crown-controlled diesel reserve at Marsden Point sat outside those numbers. MBIE publishes the count every Wednesday. We do not know how many days of AI New Zealand has. Days may be the wrong unit. You can put diesel in a tank. You cannot put next month's inference in a tank. A token is made at the…

Keith Miller got two parking fines from a camera in Miramar, and the only way out was to prove his own innocence. Miller, a former Wētā VFX supervisor, shopped at the New World in Miramar in December and went back in January. Smart Compliance Management runs the number plate cameras in that car park. They sent him a breach notice showing his car arriving and his car leaving, and billed him for one long overstay. Two separate trips. The camera had missed one of the departures, so the system took…

Ukraine has turned drone warfare into an engineering feedback loop. A crew flies a system until Russian electronic warfare finds a weakness. Operators report the failure. Engineers change the radio, navigation or software, then send a new batch back to the front. I spent years building teams that shipped software several times a day. The mechanics feel familiar: release something small, inspect the result and fix what broke. The consequences in Ukraine sit on another scale. A failed software…

At 1pm UTC on a Friday last June, an airline pilot posted a Show HN: interactive graphs and globes built from years of his own flight logs. It went huge. 1,539 points, the third biggest Show HN of the entire year. By dinner he had 123 comments. On day three the thread got 3 comments. In week two it got zero. The third best launch out of more than forty thousand, and the conversation was over before the weekend ended. I wanted to know whether that shape is the exception or the rule, so I scraped…

In 1979 a law professor named Geoffrey Palmer wrote that New Zealand had the fastest lawmakers in the West. In 2024, he updated the diagnosis: "We've gone from being the fastest lawmakers in the west to the fastest repealers in the west." Palmer would know. He went on to be Prime Minister, and the machine he described in Unbridled Power? is the one we still run: one chamber of Parliament, no upper house, no written constitution, and almost nothing a government with a one-vote majority can't do…

Auckland Light Rail ran for six years, spent $228 million, and laid zero metres of track. At its peak the project was paying about $920,000 a week to two engineering firms. Not to build anything. To plan, re-plan, and re-plan again, through three different versions of the route. In January 2024 a new government cancelled it as part of a 100-day plan, and the public got nothing back for a quarter of a billion dollars except some very expensive PDFs. I want to be upfront about what this series…

A few weeks ago I was on the couch with my eight-year-old, and she was going on about worms. Kids ask the kind of questions we forget to ask as adults, the ones that drop off once we get all mature and sensible. That conversation is the reason a worm ended up driving Claude. Right now everyone builds LLM agents the same way. Take a model, bolt more tools onto it, hand it a bigger toolbox. I wanted to try the opposite. Leave the model alone, and put a brain inside the loop to do the steering.…

Every time something goes down, the first instinct in the room is to add a layer. Another replica. A second region. One more health check in front of the thing that broke. It feels like progress, and the Swiss cheese model hands that instinct a lovely picture to point at. You know the diagram even if you've never heard the name. Stacked slices of cheese, each slice a layer of defence, every slice riddled with holes. An accident only makes it through when the holes in all the slices happen to…

I recently finished Robert Greene's The Laws of Human Nature and it wouldn't leave me alone. Eighteen laws, each one a separate pattern in how people actually behave (not how we like to think we behave). I kept catching myself watching the patterns play out in real life: in meetings, in news cycles, in my own head. So I built this. Eighteen cards, one per law. Tap any of them to read my full take, with two real-world examples and a short list of behavioural things you can do this week. About a…

I build with Conscious Minimalism. Conscious Minimalism means every dependency, every service, every line is a choice. Nothing ships by default. The shape grows with the purpose, not before it. I obsess over the interface, not the internals. The boundary is what you live with, and what you refactor and scale. I optimise for speed to de-validation. The faster I kill a bad idea, the less sunk cost owns me. I fix one narrow painpoint, not a broad category or a platform play. One thing, done…

"The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills." — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929) Hemingway wasn't writing about leadership but he might as well have been. Some of the senior leaders I've worked with have taken serious dents over their careers. The board that turns. The launch that lands flat. The cofounder who walks. The round that doesn't close. The dents come with the job. The question is what's there a year…

I open about thirty tabs a day. I read maybe three of them. The rest are "oh that looks interesting, I'll come back to that," and then they sit there until my browser starts choking and I close everything in a fit of guilt. Bookmarks aren't the answer. Bookmarks go into a folder I never open. Pocket was the answer, except Mozilla shut Pocket down in July 2025, which I found out the way most people did: by going to save something and discovering the service was gone. So I built Read Later. It's…

Product market fit gets sold as a milestone. Find it and you're off to the races. That's the bit nobody who's been through it actually believes. PMF is a gauntlet. It eats teams, it bends founders, and it quietly poisons the technical decisions you're proud of at the time. Most of the damage I've watched done to good companies wasn't from missing PMF. It was from how they behaved while they were looking for it. It's not for everyone, and that's fine There's a particular kind of person who does…

There's a whole business discipline called change management. Frameworks, certifications, consultancies, the lot. Every big company has someone running it during a restructure or a tech migration. Nobody runs it for you when your life turns over. Which is strange, because the personal version is the harder problem — and right now, more people are facing it than at any point in recent memory. More than 92,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026 alone, bringing the total close to 900,000…

ST-ResNet's core insight is that not all history is created equal. When you're predicting crime in Auckland next month, three different kinds of past information matter. What happened in the last couple of months — the recent trend. What happened at the same time last year — the seasonal pattern. And what's been happening over the longer term — whether crime is generally rising or falling in an area. ConvLSTM treats all of this as one continuous sequence and hopes the network figures out which…

I spent an evening working out what I'm worth to Big Tech, and then spent the rest of the week trying to stop thinking about it. The clever thing about "free" on the internet isn't that the trade doesn't exist. It's that it's been designed so you can't see it. No money changes hands. No receipt arrives. No app shows you the meter ticking as you scroll. The exchange is real — your attention and your data in, Instagram and Google and LinkedIn out — but by the time the numbers get tallied, they…

ConvLSTM was built for weather radar. Turns out predicting crime on a grid is basically the same problem. Here's how it works and what it learned.

AI made software cheap to build but not cheap to scale. Evolutionary architecture with domain-aware AI agents is the missing piece.

I built OpenHealth because Claude's and ChatGPT's Apple Health connectors are US-only. Drop your export.zip, get seven markdown files any LLM can read — browser, CLI, or phone-to-desktop over WebRTC.

Wiring up an MCP server so Claude Code can spawn isolated VMs, the SSE-to-Streamable-HTTP migration that broke everything, streaming architecture, and what productionising this would actually look like.

Anthropic's Glasswing is for enterprises with six-figure security budgets. The rest of us need open-source security agents that learn our systems and act autonomously.

The first time I got a Firecracker VM to boot and respond to a vsock ping from the host, I sat there grinning like an idiot. Typed a command on my machine, it reached through a kernel-level socket into a completely separate Linux system with its own kernel, and got a reply. Under a second. That was about 30 hours into the project. The previous 29 were mostly fighting with rootfs images and iptables rules. Part 1 covered why I built this — Firecracker MicroVMs for running Claude Code in…

Before deep learning gets a chance, we need to know how well stupid-simple models perform. Turns out, they put up a real fight.

Four architectural patterns from NanoClaw's tiny codebase that translate directly to production web apps and SaaS — credential sidecars, infrastructure-level isolation, polling loops, and Postgres as your message queue.

We're still shipping hand-crafted frontends while AI can generate entire interfaces. What if the browser itself generated the UI from an API manifest and your preferences?

Before throwing deep learning at Auckland crime data, you need to actually look at it. Seasonal patterns, spatial hotspots, and the sparsity problem.

Turn any Android phone into a programmable SMS gateway for your SaaS — no per-message fees, no carrier contracts, no vendor lock-in.

NZ Police's crime dataset is publicly available — but it's UTF-16 encoded, full of trailing periods, and 32% of records don't know what time the crime happened. Here's how we cleaned it up.