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Nothing on this page is factually controversial. However, many things in this post make for uncomfortable reading. And, climate discourse is now so politicized that many factual statements are taken as dog whistles. For example, in what follows I will state that climate has always been changing, and has in fact never been stable for very long. This is 100% true, but people interpret this as if the writer means that our current climate change is not caused by human beings, or is nothing to worry about.

In my previous post, Malleable software in the age of LLMs, I laid out a theory for how LLMs might enable a new era of people creating their own personal software:

I think it’s likely that soon all computer users will have the ability to develop...

17 odd years ago when I stared programming, PHP was all the rage. Javascript was steadily gaining traction. Django and Ruby on Rails were in their infancy, but promised greatly increased productivity. A few years later, inspired by Ruby’s fame, Coffeescript became a mainstay in the Javascript ecosystem. Statically compiled, typed languages, used to build monolithic web applications, were rapidly falling out of favour. In 2023 the trend is reversing, static compilation and types are cool again. Monoliths are making a comeback. The pendulum is turning.

An article about getting the most out of error messages, particularly OS and network errors. Adapted from a talk I gave to colleagues last year.

I wrote this piece after an early-career friend of mine asked some very good questions on how to be useful. Since this is a thing I struggle a bit with myself, I thought it worthwhile to write up my thoughts. Note that I fully understand that not everyone has the luxury to think about their career like this – you first have to take care of yourself and family before you can start fretting about if your working life is saving the world!

Recently, I wrote a small open source tool to make the official Dutch national address & building database more accessible. More about the tool below, but first an introduction. Last data update: 2025-01-09 If all you need is an up to date CSV file of all Dutch addresses, their zipcodes and coordinates, scroll down to the end. If all you need is a web service, try https://berthub.eu/pcode/2513AA/14. For more details (including a live demo), do read on.

A description of the algorithms for generating the Spectre tiling in my puzzle game Loopy.

"Best een goede samenvatting eigenlijk" — een daadwerkelijke energie-expert Op 10 juni 2023 is dit artikel uit 2022 ge-update met een extra stukje over waterstof en waar het niet voor geschikt is, plus wat meer over kernenergie, en over minder energie verbruiken. Sinds een tijdje maak ik grafiekjes van hoe Nederland aan z’n elektriciteit komt. En soms ben ik daar dan enthousiast over, zeker als de wind waait en de zon goed schijnt.

This is a mirror of the original about:intel post, since the about:intel server is sadly sometimes overloaded. Also do read the opposing view from Jan-Jaap Oerlemans and the reflection by Lotte Houwing The Dutch government is proposing adding a lex specialis to its existing intelligence and security services act. This addition significantly changes the scope of many powers and also extends who they can be applied to. A draft of an English summary of this proposed law can be found here.

Keygen, a software licensing and distribution API, goes open source.

Last year, I had an idea for a fun side project – I wanted to create a ‘weekend’ device that would let me stay in touch with friends and…