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The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking – with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions – into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language.

That was the hard part when programmers were punching holes in cards. It was the hard part when they were typing COBOL code. It was the hard part when they were bringing Visual Basic GUIs to life (presumably to track the killer’s IP address). And it’s the hard part when they’re prompting language models to predict plausible-looking Python.

The hard part has always been – and likely will continue to be for many years to come – knowing exactly what to ask for.

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I'm doing some really excellent work on WordLand II, which is almost starting to get useful. We should be doing a lot more than writing posts next year. It's helping that a few of us are using Instant Outlines in Drummer to coordinate work. I work so much better this way, but it's not something you can do on your own.

NetNewsWire is moving away from Slack:

The switch to Discourse means conversations will be preserved and they will be able to benefit people for years to come. And we get to use an open web app that’s also open source.

Speech to text has gotten so good that the difference between “pretty good” and “perfect” is noticeable. I only use Siri when in the car. Laughing at how it transcribed “Redis set” to “red sat”. (Also, how do people use Apple Notes without good versioning? Yikes.)

Cool write-up of building a custom Micro.blog posting frontend with Claude. Next year I wonder if these kind of built on-the-fly custom pieces of software will become more common.

The year is about to end, and it’s unlikely I’ll finish more books, so I think it’s a good time to recap the books I read in 2025. I’m not going to include links to buy these books. There’s no point in doing that because you know better than I do where you like to buy books....

Finished reading: Making History by K. J. Parker. Neat idea, I was pulled into the narration. Wonder if it could’ve been an even longer full novel. 📚

I really like it when people post their end-of-year music round-up. Colly, Jon, and Naz have all posted about music they listened to in 2025. I recognise almost none of the albums that they’ve listed. That’s because my musical brain has been almost entirely conquered by Iri...

Not surprisingly, I don’t always file away my index cards as quickly as I probably ought to. Every now and then I go through my deck of unfiled cards and try to sort them into my card index/zettelkasten. The end of the year seems like a pretty good time to clear the decks. Because I … Continue reading Filing Index Cards with a C-Line Document Sorter

No matter how busy life is, there's always time to admire a beautiful sunset.

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Coffee and breakfast in Louisiana. Quick trip to see family, then back to Texas. ☕️

"I don't have time for this." That might be the name of a podcast. I just ended one with that exact phrase, and it totally fits the way I feel about these rambling diatribes by the time I'm about to sign off.

Good night!

Tim Chambers has his yearly predictions post for the open web. I enjoy these posts and I agree with most of his predictions for 2026. But there is one prediction that I think is too optimistic: The ActivityPub Fediverse (excluding Threads) will cross 15 million registered u...

When you're buying a house, the most important thing to check is the roof. Get two inspections. Get three. A house with a good roof will keep you dry. A house with a shitty roof isn't really a house is it?

I read 28 books in 2025. Looking back over that list, there are a few recurring themes… I read less of the Greek mythology retellings than last year but I seem to have developed a taste for medieval stories like Matrix, Nobber, and Haven. I finally got ‘round to reading so...

This came up on Kottke. I'm going to try commenting on other old school blogs more. Want to see if we can reboot the original sphere as a way of priming a new one.

We love Pluribus because it has all the features that we find irresistible.

1. AppleTV.
2. The makers of two previous huge hits.
3. An unsung and much loved star in the last hit.
4. An intriguing sci-fi plot.
5. It’s pretty good adventure type thriller in the first episodes that settles into a slower sexy love story.
6. A clever final scene in the final episode.
7. A typical long wait for the next season.

But all this is incidental, what really matters is that we’re all involved, have opinions, and thank goodness it doesn’t actually matter like the other stuff we debate.

I rated Common Side Effects as Loved, the second highest rating on Bingeworthy.