Found myself unexpectedly with a day to spend in Phoenix, so I went to the excellent Musical Instruments Museum and ogled the mandolins.

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 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...

Good night!

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...

Painting heaven and hell

On the road in Arizona.

Nollaig shona daoibh go léir, a chairde!

Christmas with Sandy

It’s getting towards the end of the year. That’s when I put together a post reviewing the books I’ve read in the previous twelve months. I think I might change things up in 2026. Instead of waiting until the end of the year to write all the little reviews at once, I think I...

Sleepy Sandy

Arizona

Waking up in an airport hotel room with a runway view.

Going to Arizona. brb

Thursday session

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.

And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.

So much truth in one story:

They built a machine to gentrify the English language.

They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.

They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.

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Wednesday session

But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.

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Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.

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Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.

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In an Irish session, tunes are almost never played in isolation. They’re played in sets. A set of tunes might be as few as two. More usually, it’s three or more. It’s unusual to change from one tune type into another. You tend to get a set of jigs, or a set of reels, or a ...

You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.

While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.

Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.

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See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.

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👀

Tá sceitimíní orm!

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Maureen has written a really good overview of web feeds for this year’s HTMHell advent calendar. The common belief is that nobody uses RSS feeds these days. And while it’s true that I wish more people used feed readers—the perfect antidote to being fed from an algorithm—the...

Reading Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

Pan-fried Irish salmon.

I suppose it’s not clear to me what a ‘good’ window into unreliable, systemically toxic systems accomplishes, or how it changes anything that matters for the better, or what that idea even means at all. I don’t understand how “ethical AI” isn’t just “clean coal” or “natural gas.” The power of normalization as four generations are raised breathing low doses of aerosolized neurotoxins; the alternative was called “unleaded”, but the poison was called “regular gas”.

There’s a real technology here, somewhere. Stochastic pattern recognition seems like a powerful tool for solving some problems. But solving a problem starts at the problem, not working backwards from the tools.

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Delivering total nonsense, with complete confidence.

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