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Today's links A winning trade war strategy for Canada: Tech giants are also the enemy of American businesses. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Wikipedia v The Register; Jeff Koons v balloon dogs; Brewster Kahle on aaronsw; Chelsea Manning on aaronsw...

I wanted to have the most accurate timepiece possible mounted in my mini rack. Therefore I built this:

This is a GPS-based clock running on a Raspberry Pi Pico in a custom 1U 10" rack faceplate. The clock displays time based on a GPS input, and will not display time until a GPS timing lock has been acquired.

• When you turn on the Pico, the display reads ----
• Upon 3D fix, you get a time on the clock, and the colon starts blinking
• If the 3D fix is lost, the colon goes solid
• When the 3D fix is regained, the colon starts blinking again

For full details on designing and building this clock, see:

I’ve been slowly reading my copy of “The Internet Phone Book” and I recently read an essay in it by Elan Ullendorff called “The New Turing Test”. Elan argues that what matters in a work isn’t the tools used to make it, but the “expressiveness” of the work itself (was it made...

Sega does what Nintendon't

Reviewbot is eternal, yet also very cooked.

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype I'm glad someone was brave enough to say this. There is a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the software development community these days. Much of it is justified, but if you let people convince you that AI isn't genuinely useful for software devel...

Experiments in cognitive architecture.

Last month I wrote about porting JustHTML from Python to JavaScript using Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in a few hours while also buying a Christmas tree and watching Knives Out 3. I ended that post with a series of open questions about the ethics and legality of this style of work....

I love writing software, line by line. It could be said that my career was a continuous effort to create software well written, minimal, where the human touch was the fundamental feature. I also hope for a society where the last are not forgotten. Moreover, I don't want AI to...

Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer.

— Linus Torvalds, Another silly guitar-pedal-related repo

Tags: ai, vibe-coding, linus-torvalds, python, llms, generative-ai

A Software Library with No Code

Provocative experiment from Drew Breunig, who designed a new library for time formatting ("3 hours ago" kind of thing) called "whenwords" that has no code at all, just a carefully written specification, an AGENTS.md and a collection of conformance tests in a YAML file.

Pass that to your coding agent of choice, tell it what language you need and it will write it for you on demand!

This meshes nearly with my recent interest in conformance suites. If you publish good enough language-independent tests it's pretty astonishing how far today's coding agents can take you!

Tags: testing, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, drew-breunig, coding-agents

Today's links Predistribution vs redistribution (Big Tech edition): A thing that governments can do with 100% reliability. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Oral B lockpicks; Ipod Levi's; Sue Townsend on Adrian Mole; RIAA must pay $45m to Canadian mu...

Europe is experiencing a crisis of digital autonomy. Our dependence on US big tech has been growing for decades and is now nearly total, at a time when worries about our former ally are no longer theoretical. Might we, like the International Criminal Court in The Hague, find ourselves locked out of our own mailboxes if we say something that is upsetting to the US government? This post was written in response to an article in the Financial Times.

New from Fly.io today: Sprites.dev. Here's their blog post and YouTube demo. It's an interesting new product that's quite difficult to explain - Fly call it "Stateful sandbox environments with checkpoint & restore" but I see it as hitting two of my current favorite probl...

This blog has a history of answering questions that no one should be asking. Today, we continue that proud legacy.

Why DRAM shortages, not capital, will define AI infrastructure growth through 2027

Today's links bunnie's piggyback hack: An actual "one weird trick" that's pretty fucking spectacular. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Keyboard Practice"; Sam Bulte says she's no dirtier than other MPs; Gene Luen Yang's Amabassador for Young People...

How Markdown took over the world Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whet...