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I was debugging an issue and I found a link to my blog!

Interviewing a senior software engineer

Biggest challenge so far in any coding project?

My biggest challenge isn't code per se. It is explaining to someone else what I am trying to do with the code. It is surprisingly hard to convert the thoughts in my head (or the code) into something coherent someone else can understand.

I still believe that. I don't even remember when we had this discussion, but I'm glad Walter has kept it up. And a great reminder of my priorities.

If you weren't coding, what would you be doing?

I'd be a writer. (not a good one, but one nonetheless)

Yep.

It's easier for someone in my position, after working 20 years in this field to talk about morals. I can disagree with the choices my employer makes. In fact, I can walk away. But I remember the dilemma I felt I was in, earlier in my career. The lead developer stood behind...

Tool: Video compressor

I recorded a short demo video of my Equal Earth animation on my phone and wanted to publish an optimized version of that video (using FFMPEG) on my blog, so I had Claude Fable 5.1 in Claude Code for web build me this tool using the WebAssembly build of FFMPEG.

Tags: ffmpeg, video, webassembly, claude, claude-code, claude-mythos-fable

Tool: Mercator ↔ Equal Earth

I got curious about the Equal Earth map projection that was recently voted on at the UN so I had GPT-6 Astra (medium) in ChatGPT Work build me this animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth using D3.

Tags: geospatial, d3, vibe-coding, gpt-6-astra

Raymond Chandler would have loved generative AI

How and why I went from AI optimist to AI doomer.

The Online Etymological Dictionary gives the following etymology for grok: grok (v.) “understand empathically,” 1961, an arbitrary formation by U.S. science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) in his book “Stranger in a Strange Land.” In the book it is a transliteration of a Martian word and is said to mean etymologically “to drink.” It attained […]

The post Ngram error rate first appeared on John D. Cook.

On September 6, 2001, HP announced its intention to acquire Compaq for $25 billion. It was a stunning end for what still seemed to be one of the rising stars of the PC industry. I also think it proved that

The post The ill-fated HP-Compaq merger appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Zondag 6 september mocht ik voor het Paradisodebat van Kunsten ‘92 de aftrap geven voor twee uur discussie over AI. Er is een uitstekende video-opname van het hele evenement (link naar mijn bijdrage). Ik ben de organisatie erg dankbaar voor de uitnodiging voor dit publiek te spreken.
Voor mij als nerd uit de tech scene was dit een heel fijn uitstapje, eens “gluren bij de buren”. Want daar word je altijd wijzer van.

Today's links How corporate America built a better Roach Motel: Hostages beat customers every day. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 3-hole punches; Warner Bros v Warner Bros; Privacy wars get worse; "Weapons of Math Destruction"; HK elections go to ...

Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

Apparently today is RSI day at OpenAI, for Recursive Self-Improvement - I think it's their new AGI. Both this piece and the new essay An Alien Mind (by Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki) talk about it, and this one doesn't even bother to expand the acronym.

Included are details on how OpenAI's own research team are using coding agents. Like pretty much everyone else 2026 has been the year that agentic engineering really took off at OpenAI, best illustrated by this chart:

I'm intrigued at what caused that significant acceleration in AI spend per researcher in late July - my best guess is that's when internal employees gained access to the model later released as GPT-6 Astra.

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, coding-agents, november-2025-inflection, recursive-self-improvement

My comment on There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get — Lobste.rs. [In reply to a comment about burning it down to start from scratch when technical debt becomes overwhelming] In my experience it's so rare for that to work. You announce the old thing is irrecovera...

I've started playing around with YouTube's "create video thumbnail", which hopefully will give me back a bit of time in my day (it used to be a manual job in Photoshop) and be a bit more interesting. And on that note, the imagery it&

Declaring victory without a definition simply muddies the waters

After a year of work, hundreds of commits, 5 generations of pull requests, dozens of tests, rewriting part of Anubis in Rust, the first compiler bug of my career, and at least three times making my tower run out of ram I think I have finally done it. The next versio...

The recent agent sandbox escapes at OpenAI and Anthropic look less like a technical failure and more like a philosophical one - treating security controls as though they only need to work most of the time.

The purpose of DNS is to spread scams

Terence Eden shares some daunting statistics in support of his take that "the Domain Name System's purpose seems to be a vector for criminals to run scams on people at a terrifyingly high rate".

On this Interisle report (via Andrew Campling), Terence says:

It says 85 million new registrations of gTLDs were made in 2025. Of those 8.5 million were added to blocklists by May 2025. It reckons that a 10% abuse rate is the likely floor for these numbers and it's probably closer to 20%. One in five newly registered domains with a gTLD are scams. That's a bloody crisis.

I had no idea. Apparently ICANN have been discussing this problem for years.

Tags: dns, scams, terence-eden

I imagine everyone here has received an unsolicited message telling them that their tax is overdue and that they urgently need to visit Genuine-Tax-Payment-Website.fart or that a parcel is delayed at customs and you can pay a small sum for its release at Almost-The-Right-Acronym.ak You know it is a scam. Most people just mark as spam and move on with their day. But a significant number of people …

If you continue to add floors and rooms to a building forever, it will collapse. Software faces no such constraint. The code can always get worse. There can always be a new layer of indirection or a reduction in performance.

— Zach Kehs, There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get

Tags: technical-debt

This August, I accomplished what I wanted for many years: I deleted the last cgo dependency in Debian Code Search! This was made possible by Go’s recently introduced SIMD support, because now we can implement the TurboPFor integer compression format as efficiently — more eff...