FeedCity

In 2024 I built a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case, and installed it in my 19" rack. Using a Coral TPU for object detection, it's been dutifully surveilling my property—on my terms (100% local, no cloud integration or account required).

I've wanted to downsize the setup while keeping cheap large hard drives¹, and an AI accelerator.

(English below) Ik heb een aantal kleine formele nevenfuncties: Technisch adviseur bij de Kiesraad Raad van Advies bij de Autoriteit online Terroristisch en Kinderpornografisch Materiaal (ATKM) Adviseur bij Beta in Bestuur en Beleid Redactieraad Delta van de TU Delft (staat nog niet op de site) English I hold a number of small formal secondary positions: Technical advisor at the Dutch Electoral Board Member of the Board of Advice over at the Dutch Authority Online Terrorist and CSAM material (ATKM) Advisor at Beta in Bestuur en Beleid Member of the Advisory Board of Delta, the newspaper of Delft University of Technology

Apparently Apple thinks nobody with a modern Mac uses spinning rust (hard drives with platters) anymore.

I plugged in a hard drive from an old iMac into my Mac Studio using my Sabrent USB to SATA Hard Drive enclosure, and opened up Disk Utility, clicked on the top-level disk in the sidebar, and clicked 'Erase'.

Lo and behold, there's no 'Security Options' button on there, as there had been since—I believe—the very first version of Disk Utility in Mac OS X!

Agentic Engineering Patterns > Many of my tips for working productively with coding agents are extensions of advice I've found useful in my career without them. Here's a great example of that: hoard things you know how to do. A big part of the skill in building softwa...

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. [...]

— Andrej Karpathy

Tags: andrej-karpathy, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

On Saturday I wrote about what happens when a fundamental input gets cheap and new categories of activity explode in ways nobody predicts.

Soms denk je, kan het nog gekker? We gaan het beheer van het platform waarop DigiD draait overlaten aan een Amerikaans bedrijf. Dit was niet de bedoeling, maar het gebeurt nu toch. Maar het blijkt dat het nog erger kan. DigiD is nog wel van ons, maar het beheer van de computers wordt Amerikaans. Maar wat nou als je die stap overslaat, en alles door Amerikanen laat doen? Dat is wat de belastingdienst nu van plan is met de BTW.

Today's links If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it): Trump wants Big Tech to win, not to play fair. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Harpercollins v libraries; Rothfuss x Firefly; Bookseller seethings; If magazine; HBR v exec...

Talking through the tech reckoning Many of the topics that we’ve all been discussing about technology these days seem to matter so much more, and the stakes have never been higher. So, I’ve been trying to engage with more conversations out in the world, in hopes of communica...

Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But then Gemini Changed the Rules. Yikes! It turns out Gemini and Google Maps (and other services) share the same API keys... but Google Maps API keys are designed to be public, since they are embedded directly in web pages. Gemini API keys c...

If people are only using this a couple of times a week at most, and can’t think of anything to do with it on the average day, it hasn’t changed their life. OpenAI itself admits the problem, talking about a ‘capability gap’ between what the models can do and what people do with them, which seems to me like a way to avoid saying that you don’t have clear product-market fit.

Hence, OpenAI’s ad project is partly just about covering the cost of serving the 90% or more of users who don’t pay (and capturing an early lead with advertisers and early learning in how this might work), but more strategically, it’s also about making it possible to give those users the latest and most powerful (i.e. expensive) models, in the hope that this will deepen their engagement.

— Benedict Evans, How will OpenAI compete?

Tags: openai, chatgpt, benedict-evans, ai

Why I replaced SaaS code review tools with OpenCode running in CI/CD pipelines - cheaper, more secure, and works with any Git provider

tldraw issue: Move tests to closed source repo It's become very apparent over the past few months that a comprehensive test suite is enough to build a completely fresh implementation of any open source library from scratch, potentially in a different language. This has worry...

Claude Code Remote Control New Claude Code feature dropped yesterday: you can now run a "remote control" session on your computer and then use the Claude Code for web interfaces (on web, iOS and native desktop app) to send prompts to that session. It's a little bit janky rig...

I gave a talk this weekend at Social Science FOO Camp in Mountain View. The event was a classic unconference format where anyone could present a talk without needing to propose it in advance. I grabbed a slot for a talk I titled "The State of LLMs, February 2026 edition", su...

Today's links The whole economy pays the Amazon tax: You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Math denial; Disney v young Tim Burton; Make v Sony; American oligarchs' wealth (2011); New Librarian of Congress; The M...

It’s also reasonable for people who entered technology in the last couple of decades because it was good job, or because they enjoyed coding to look at this moment with a real feeling of loss. That feeling of loss though can be hard to understand emotionally for people my age who entered tech because we were addicted to feeling of agency it gave us. The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful.

— Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Code has always been the easy part

Tags: perl, generative-ai, kellan-elliott-mccrea, agentic-engineering, ai, llms, deep-blue

Agentic Engineering Patterns > Sometimes it's useful to have a coding agent give you a structured walkthrough of a codebase. Maybe it's existing code you need to get up to speed on, maybe it's your own code that you've forgotten the details of, or maybe you vibe code...

Another entry in the Toy Optimizer series. It’s hard to get compiler optimizers right. Even if you build up a painstaking test suite by hand, you will likely miss corner cases, especially corner cases at the interactions of multiple components or multiple optimization passe...

Anthropic recently released a blog post with the description of an experiment in which the last version of Opus, the 4.6, was instructed to write a C compiler in Rust, in a “clean room” setup. The experiment methodology left me dubious about the kind of point they wanted to ...