Gina Trapani on how she thinks about and uses AI as a former full-time software engineer. “It’s remarkable and so very bad at the same time.”
I’m visiting Kyoto soon, so I reread Lauren Groff’s piece about The Tale of Genji: A Tale of Sex and Intrigue in Imperial Kyoto. “I believe that places, like people, hold memory, and when place memory announces itself, it does so through the body.”
Song Exploder
• Hrishikesh Hirway
Reason enough to be rooting for the Blue Jays. Put this man in the Hall of Fame already. For chrissake his name is Donnie Baseball.
Claude Code stores full logs of your sessions as newline-delimited JSON in ~/.claude/projects/encoded-directory/*.jsonl on your machine. I currently have 379MB of these!
Here's an example jsonl file which I extracted from my Deepseek-OCR on NVIDIA Spark project. I have a little vibe-coded tool for converting those into Markdown which produces results like this.
Unfortunately Claude Code has a nasty default behavior of deleting these after 30 days! You can't disable this entirely, but you can at least delay it for 274 years by adding this to your ~/.claude/settings.json file:
{
"cleanupPeriodDays": 99999
}
Claude Code's settings are documented here.
Tags: coding-agents, anthropic, claude-code, generative-ai, ai, llms
nytimes.com/2025/10/21/us/politics/trump-justice-department-compensation.html
Here’s an update I just posted to yesterday’s piece on organized phone theft rings in London:
I forgot to apply one of the core tenets of Brian Kernighan’s wonderful book Millions, Billions, Zillions ($19 in hardcover from Amazon; BookShop.org link to indie booksellers): always do some back-of-the-envelope double-checking of the math in news stories. 1.5 miles of aluminum (or even aluminium) foil from Costco is just 12 rolls at 200 meters each. I wouldn’t blink my eyes at someone with a dozen rolls of foil in the cart at Costco.
Link: daringfireball.net/linked/2025/10/20/london-phone-theft
New essay collection from classist Emily Wilson: Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea. “From Athenian comedy and Rome’s love of Greek culture to Han Kang’s novels, Cardi B’s lyrics and the discoveries she made whilst translating Homer…”