Hello! This is my summary of 2025 and the “start here” post for new readers. Links and stats follow…
According to Fathom, my most trafficked posts of 2025 were (in descending order):
Context plumbing (29 Nov)
Extending AI chat with Model Context Protocol (and why it matte...
I’m away with family this week so here are some more scraps from my notes (previously).
Disney is considering a reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise. Goodness knows how many Jurassic Park movies there are.
We need to create new IP.
Culture creates new ideas downstream. Wit...
1.
Why Were All the Bells in the World Removed? The Forgotten Power of Sound and Frequency (Jamie Freeman).
Church bells: "something strange happened in the 19th and 20th centuries: nearly all of the world’s ancient bells were removed, melted down, or destroyed."
(I don’t kn...
My new fave thing to go to is live coding gigs, a.k.a. algoraves.
There are special browser-based programming languages like strudel where you type code to define the beats and the sound, like mod synth in code, and it plays in a loop even while you’re coding. (The playhead ...
I left a loose end the other day when I said that AI is about intent and context.
That was when I said "what’s context at inference time is valuable training data if it’s recorded."
But I left it at that, and didn’t really get into why training data is valuable.
I think we o...
These past few weeks I’ve been deep in code and doing what I think about as context plumbing.
I’ve been building an AI system and that’s what it feels like.
Let me unpack.
Intent
Loosely AI interfaces are about intent and context.
Intent is the user’s goal, big or small, ex...
I’m spinning up something new with a buddy and you can guess what it is by what I’ve been writing about recently.
Big picture, there are two visions for the future of computing: cyborgs and rooms. I’m Team Augmented Environments. Mainly because so much of what I care about h...
I had a look to see when I first mentioned Samuel Arbesman here. It was 2011: the average size of scientific discoveries is getting smaller.
Anyway I’ve been reading his new book, The Magic of Code (official site).
There’s computing history, magic, the simulation hypothesis,...
Ok spoilers ahead.
But Oedipus Rex a.k.a. Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles is almost 2,500 years old at this point so it’s fair game imo.
The Oedipus story in a nutshell:
Oedipus, who was secretly adopted, receives a prophecy that he will kill his dad. So to thwart fate he leav...
1.
When you sit with friends at a wobbly table,
Simply rotate till it becomes stable.
No need to find a wedge for one of its four feet.
Math will ensure nothing spills while you eat.
The Wobbly Table Theorem (Department of Mathematics, Harvard University).
2.
David Ogilvy ch...
I’m on my hols. Some recommendations.
Watch The Ballad of Wallis Island.
Charming, poignant comedy about a washed-up folk musician and loss. By Tim Key and Tom Basden.
Now I knew Basden can write - the first episode of Party is the tightest wittiest 25 minutes of ensemble r...
I belatedly joined the 3D printer club and got myself a brand new Bambu P1S. (Days before the next-gen P2S was released it turns out, but I got the P1S on sale so I don’t feel so bad.)
I have wooden floors.
So I’ve been printing printer foot adaptors to make the optional rub...
Loosely I can see two visions for the future of how we interact with computers: cyborgs and rooms.
The first is where the industry is going today; I’m more interested in the latter.
Cyborgs
Near-term, cyborgs means wearables.
The original definition of cyborg by Clynes and K...
When I was at uni I went with some friends into a cellar with a druid to experience his home-made 6 foot tall light-strobing monolith, what I now know was a type of Dreammachine, which was a pair of stacked out-of-sync strobing lights so bright that it makes the receptors in...
TV networks should have an extra channel that shows exclusively portrait mode content.
i.e. BBC Vertical.
Also: Netflix Vertical, National Geographic Vertical, ESPN Vertical, etc.
Why?
Because there’s demand
To discover how to make good portrait-mode content
To promote new ...
I looked in my home directory in my desktop Mac, which I don’t very often (I run a tidy operation here), and I found a file I didn’t recognise called out.html.
Here is out.html.
For the benefit of the tape: it is a half-baked GeoCities-style homepage complete with favourite ...
1.
With less human noise to compete with, the birds are able to have ‘deeper conversations,’ says biologist (2020):
Researchers studying birdsong in the San Francisco Bay found the sparrows’ mating calls became quieter, more complex, and just generally “sexier” now that the...
I suggested last week that Claude Code needs elevator music…
Like, in the 3 minutes while you’re waiting for your coding agent to write your code, and meanwhile you’re gazing out the window and contemplating the mysteries of life, or your gas bill, maybe some gentle muzak co...
Writing code with Claude Code doesn’t feel the same as any other way of writing code.
Quick background: it’s an AI tool that you install and run in your terminal in a code repository. It’s a little like a chat interface on the command line, but mainly you type what you want,...
I’m the tube a bunch right now (cooking something new and borrowing desks, thanks!) and one of the frustrating bits of the commute is going street level to underground. Escalators are slooooow.
(Whereas being static on trains is fine as I can tap blog posts with my thumbs wh...
David Galbraith has a smart way to think about how AI will change the user interface.
First he imagines taking creating prompts and wrapping them up as buttons:
The best prompts now are quite simple, leaving AI to handle how to answer a question. Meanwhile AI chat suffers f...
Well, you would begin with Out of Office auto reply as a service.
I’m on my hols this week so this is on my mind, and this is a free idea for anyone looking for a startup to keep them out of trouble.
Out of Office is one of those weird email features that (a) has hyper usage...
I’ve been popping up in a few places lately. Here’s a round-up: a talk, an academic paper, and a blog post.
Rethink AI, WIRED x Kendryl
I spoke about AI agents as part of a Wired event called Rethink AI with Azeem Azhar and others (as previously mentioned).
Here’s the Rethin...
Today is one of the most beautiful, delicate feelings that I know and wait for, and first I have to provide some backstory.
I love cricket.
In particular, Test cricket. A match lasts 5 days.
So there are back-and-forths, intense 20 minute periods of play forcing one team int...
1.
Lightning maps:
Next time there’s a lightning storm, open that page or grab an app.
It’s a live view of lightning strikes, globally. The map focuses on where you are.
What’s neat: when a dot flashes for a new strike, a circle expands around it. This circle grows at the sp...
I’m a big fan of the podcast Hardcore History by Dan Carlin.
Like, if you want six episodes on the fall of the Roman Republic, and each episodes is 5 hours long, Carlin has you covered.
I went digging for anything about Carlin’s creative process, and this jumped out at me, f...
I’ve been in Shenzhen the last few days visiting factories and suppliers for my Poem/1 AI clock.
Remember that clock?
It tells the time with a new rhyming couplet every minute. A half million poems per year which I believe is the highest poem velocity of any consumer gadget....
Hey the song of the summer is autonomous AI and vending machines.
And I feel like people are drawing the wrong lesson. It is not oh-ho look the AI can kinda run a shop.
The real lesson, which is actionable by businesses today, is about governance.
By way of background, ten ...
It’s AI consciousness week here on the blog (see all posts tagged ai-consciousness) but it’s Friday afternoon so instead here are some links regarding cats.
1.
One man, eight years, nearly 20,000 cat videos, and not a single viral hit (The Outline, 2018).
Eight years ago, ...
Do bumble bees play? (paper in Animal Behaviour, 2022).
It seems like they do, yes.
Eighteen wooden balls (15mm diameter), sprayed yellow and purple, were present in the walkway to the hive for a separate experiment. But, an observation:
Despite there being enough space to ...
