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First kākāpō chick in four years hatches on Valentine's Day First chick of the 2026 breeding season! Kākāpō Yasmine hatched an egg fostered from kākāpō Tīwhiri on Valentine's Day, bringing the total number of kākāpō to 237 – though it won’t be officially added to the popula...

But the intellectually interesting part for me is something else. I now have something close to a magic box where I throw in a question and a first answer comes back basically for free, in terms of human effort. Before this, the way I'd explore a new idea is to either clums...

Today's links What's a "gig work minimum wage": The important rate is what you're paid when you're waiting for a job. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MBA phrenology; Sony's DRM CEO is out; Midwestern Tahrir; Reverse Centaurs and AI. Upcoming appear...

Well, the ESP32 Bluetooth bridge experiment was a complete failure. Not the radios themselves, they're actually pretty cool, but there's just no way I could get the Yale locks to be reliably operated by them. At a guess, BLE is a bit too passive to detect

Given the threat of cognitive debt brought on by AI-accelerated software development leading to more projects and less deep understanding of how they work and what they actually do, it's interesting to consider artifacts that might be able to help. Nathan Baschez on Twitter:...

Qwen3.5: Towards Native Multimodal Agents Alibaba's Qwen just released the first two models in the Qwen 3.5 series - one open weights, one proprietary. Both are multi-modal for vision input. The open weight one is a Mixture of Experts model called Qwen3.5-397B-A17B. Interest...

I introduced Showboat a week ago - my CLI tool that helps coding agents create Markdown documents that demonstrate the code that they have created. I've been finding new ways to use it on a daily basis, and I've just released two new tools to help get the best out of the Sho...

We recently released a brand new Try Yarn Spinner, which I wrote (more details in the Yarn Spinner January update), and I wrote a new demo story too! Check it out below:

Technical post on the new Try Yarn Spinner coming soon.

Anthropic's red team found 500+ critical vulnerabilities with Claude. But they focused on maintained software. The scarier problem is the long tail that nobody will ever patch.

The problem with Qwerty keyboards on small touchscreen devices is that they are designed for ten-finger typing, and we typically only use two thumbs to type. Surely there must be ways input can be optimised for two thumbs beyond the Qwerty keyboard. Obviously, on...

Over the weekend Ars Technica retracted an article because the AI a writer used hallucinated quotes from an open source library maintainer.

The irony here is the maintainer in question, Scott Shambaugh, was harassed by someone's AI agent over not merging it's AI slop code.

It's likely the bot was running through someone's local 'agentic AI' instance (likely using OpenClaw). The guy who built OpenClaw was just hired by OpenAI to "work on bringing agents to everyone." You'll have to forgive me if I'm not enthusastic about that.

I'm a very heavy user of Claude Code on the web, Anthropic's excellent but poorly named cloud version of Claude Code where everything runs in a container environment managed by them, greatly reducing the risk of anything bad happening to a computer I care about. I don't use ...

Het is 2026 en twee journalisten benaderen me met simpele vragen. Waarom kan je niet klikken op verwijzingen in Tweede Kamerstukken? En waarom kan ik de motienummers gebruikt tijdens Kamerdebatten nergens vinden? Innovatie is zo makkelijk nog niet. Dit is geen klacht over de Tweede Kamer: ik had deze problemen ook nog niet gespot, laat staan opgelost. Hier de twee gevallen, gevolgd door wat nabeschouwing over waarom zoiets zo lang duurt.

Today's links The online community trilemma: Reach, community and information, pick two. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bruces x Sony DRM; Eniac tell-all; HBO v PVRs; Fucking damselflies; Gil Scout Cookie wine-pairings; Big Pharma's opioid fines a...

The AI Vampire Steve Yegge's take on agent fatigue, and its relationship to burnout. Let's pretend you're the only person at your company using AI. In Scenario A, you decide you're going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it ...

This is an excellent video about modern UI/UX: "The Hidden Cost of 'Clean' Design." I highly recommend watching it and checking out Ilia's other work. I agree with nearly everything in the video, including this standout quote: If you want to understand a generation, don't...

Another entry in the Toy Optimizer series. Last time, we did load-store forwarding in the context of our Toy Optimizer. We managed to cache the results of both reads from and writes to the heap—at compile-time! We were careful to mind object aliasing: we separated our heap...

I'm occasionally accused of using LLMs to write the content on my blog. I don't do that, and I don't think my writing has much of an LLM smell to it... with one notable exception:

    # Finally, do em dashes
    s = s.replace(' - ', u'\u2014')

That code to add em dashes to my posts dates back to at least 2015 when I ported my blog from an older version of Django (in a long-lost Mercurial repository) and started afresh on GitHub.

Tags: generative-ai, typography, blogging, ai, llms, python

We coined a new term on the Oxide and Friends podcast last month (primary credit to Adam Leventhal) covering the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field...

Reals are really weird.