Objects, attributes, maps, oh my!
Or, IC UC we all C for ICs. In many dynamically typed programming languages, objects look like a big ol’ mapping of names to values. The languages encourage this flexibility. Consider for example…
I was persuaded by a decision I never made
My agent saved a memory saying I'd decided to work with plumbers in the UK. I hadn't, but every agent sharing that memory kept steering me there.
I built a Mac app to keep work and personal links apart
LinkLane sends every link to the right browser and profile – work links to the work profile, personal links to the personal one. Why I built it and how it works.
The Temptation of Vibe Coding
I have an app in my head I'm tempted to 'vibe code'; the reason why I'm reticent might not be what you think. (But it might be that, too.)
Stop Teaching Your AI Agent the Wrong Lessons
How to decide what an agent should remember, where it belongs, and whether it helps the next task.
Fossil Footprint Nebula
The Fossil Footprint Nebula This is the Fossil Footprint Nebula, NGC 1491, about 10,700 light-years away in Perseus. The bright blue-green center is surrounded by a much larger cloud of glowing gas.…
How to Sensor with Devicetree (on Raspberry Pi)
On an Arduino there are libraries to drive sensors. On a Linux desktop the hardware is automatically configured and abstracted. But what about embedded Linux? What about a Raspberry Pi? This is where…
Introducing Mensara: shared memory for people and agents
Mensara gives your team and its AI agents a shared Mind, with access and changes you control. We're opening a waitlist for our founding group.
Cellebrite’s Advanced Unlocks and the case of the missing iPhone 17
A leaked Cellebrite datasheet quotes a working range in meters, skips the entire iPhone 17 generation and stalls at iOS 26.4. A researcher thinks he knows why. I review the argument, check where it…
The API is English, the deterministic-agentic border is shifting
We’ve all been amazed at how many LLMs and decisional models we’ve managed to integrate, in all sorts of places, in our codebases. What was once a complicated deterministic process combining many…
Haar and DCT Time Reparameterization in NumPyro
This is another research iteration with Opus 5.5, see PR #215. I verified every step and concept and wrote most of the prose myself (where I didn’t, I guided the LLMs carefully, as I am not a native…
Michal Wallace on Narrative Programming: Why Learn J when LLMs Code?
What’s left to teach when AI codes? Building a system model in your head is the slowest part of programming, what’s still worth understanding?
Braindump: From 'Let's Make It Work' to 'Let's Build Something'
An honest braindump on how pairing Gemini Antigravity (Gemini 3.8 Flash on Medium effort) with Cloudflare eliminated site maintenance friction, accelerated content, and transformed both my blog and…
A Galactic Singularity
We’re safe from ω...for now
Sheetmusic4J 0.0.5: LilyPond Import and Export
Sheetmusic4J is a Java(FX) library to render and interact with sheet music. After MusicXML, MIDI, ABC and Guitar Pro, version 0.0.5 adds another format: LilyPond.
AI Is Exhausting the People Who Use It Most — Here’s How to Escape the Brain Fry and Prioritize Your Peace
Smart leaders are scrutinizing where AI can genuinely lighten their load, versus piling more on their overworked brains. Here’s how.
One Clear Message Is Kind
Several years ago, I had to tell an engineer that their performance was unacceptable. This is a conversation I’ve had several times over my career as a manager, and it’s never an easy conversation.…
System Guardrails for Software Factories - Building Pits of Success for Agents and Humans
I've been diving into software factories and how they're built as I believe that's where the industry is heading. AIs can crank out reasonable code much faster than we can and often at same or higher…
Stop automatic file tracking in VS Code's Explorer tab
Find out how to stop automatic file tracking in VS Code's Explorer tab.
Should You Do a Cloud Certification? The Four Reasons I Tell People Not to Collect Them, What the Exams Cost in 2026, and the One Case Where a Certificate Is Worth the Money
TL;DR Certifications are not bad; chasing them is. A badge proves you reached the passing mark on one exam on one day. It does not prove you have run the service in production, and the terms attached…
NYT games hints and secrets
Going into the network tab of the NYT Games to reveal hidden secrets
twitter for agents
Every community platform right now ends up as a tiny dictatorship. Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, subreddits. Someone happens to be in the right place at the right time, opens a group around a…
From Small Things
Neutrinos don’t interact strongly with regular matter. Countless neutrinos stream through us all the time with no effect. But neutrinos weren’t always so weakly interacting. In the…
Years in Books: 2026
A list of books read or listened to by me in 2026.
How to Prioritize Research Questions
Notes from the faculty-trainee lunch at Yale with Jun Lu on Oct 21, 2026 Main goal would be to help the field of interest progress. Questions while aproaching a problem How well or poorly is the…
5 years at Monzo
I joined Monzo in September 2021. I wasn’t particularly looking to get into FinTech, but I knew they’d hired a fantastic team and established a top-notch engineering culture. I was…
One shared truth for Storybook and Figma
Brand rules and structured content empower live sites and designer Figma files.
AI Agent Cost Per Month (2026): 5 Models, Real Numbers
A 6,000-run support agent costs $9.52 to $150.62 a month in API fees. I priced 5 LLMs across 67 routes and separated the three levers that matter.
New in the R Observatory: Repositories Beyond GitHub
Not every R package lives on GitHub. The R Observatory used to look only there anyway. Package pages now show repository figures for packages hosted on GitLab and Codeberg too. Life outside GitHub…
Announcing Uchi
I have used pretty much every admin panel in existence. I’ve even been content with some, but mostly it has always felt like settling. Sure, in the beginning it’s great, but then there’s that point…
222 - Building for the bots
Exploring the benefits of creating an MCP server for AI agents and its potential for growth and distribution.
Walking
My one-year-old has taken his first steps!
Interoperability vs. Absorption: Who Gets to Be the Agent?
Epic just announced "Connectors," a framework that invites outside software developers to plug their services into Epic’s AI assistants using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Testing begins late…
Making a split tunnel out of eduVPN for mail and intranet only
My institute wants me on a VPN to send mail, but I made that VPN carry only my mails and nothing more.
Why software is converging on Rust in the age of AI
For a decade, 'rewrite it in Rust' was a joke, because rewrites took years. In 2026, Ladybird, Bun, Meta's React Compiler and GitHub's Copilot runtime were all ported to Rust with AI agents in weeks,…
A Rust primer for humans: what matters when your agent writes the code
Coding agents are writing more and more Rust, and a lot of people who know Python or TypeScript are about to start reviewing it. Rust from hello world to ownership and borrowing, explained with…
Quasi-Riemann, Biologic Discovery, and Swanson's "Undiscovered Public Knowledge"
From mathematical proofs to biological discoveries, AI is connecting ideas across disciplines, bringing new scale to Don Swanson's "undiscovered public knowledge".
Approved Isn't the Same as Trusted
This week AgentTacho, my small incubating macOS menu bar app for tracking agent usage, got a feature that refreshes its numbers whenever I open its menu. Before the merge, agents reviewed it at every…
Twelve Rating Systems, Walked Forward Through Eight Seasons
elote v1.3.0 added four rating systems: Massey, Keener, Pythagorean expectation, and Whole-History Rating. Three of those were invented specifically to rank college football teams. The library…
Story of Attention
Attention in a transformer is usually explained with math: queries, keys, values, a dot product, and a softmax, as in the paper that introduced the transformer, Attention Is All You Need. The math is…
Critical PHP Vulnerabilities: Security Update
Fixing two PHP vulnerabilities rated 9.2 CVSS 4. Critical for server security.
gVisor, a kernel in Go: what sits between untrusted code and Linux
gVisor answers your app's system calls with its own kernel, the Sentry, written in Go and running in user space. I learned its map one review comment at a time, from the maintainer who kept…
True Love and Mere Lust
A reprint of a column from May of 2003. Please note this was written in my Atheist days, so nothing but secular reasoning is here. I have been asked what the vice might be in a man and woman, both…
TR-49 is good
I played the database game TR-49 , by Jon Ingold et al, during a micro-convalescence brought about through my annual double-jab of flu and covid vaccine boosters. After putting close to ten hours…
UCCS Visual Art Faculty Exhibition
GOCA presents the 2026 UCCS Visual Art Faculty Exhibition. Brand new artworks from ten distinguished faculty will be on view in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery at the Ent Center for the Arts. The…
Record Release >> ULTRA INFRA [field studies]
ULTRA INFRA [field studies] is a numbered limited edition 7” vinyl record featuring two tracks exploring sound beyond human hearing range. Side A (Above) is a composition of ultrasonic bat…
Readjustments
I want to draw your attention to some changes in the menu of this blog, most notably the addition of the “About this Blog” tab. I’m going to go grab the text I put there and paste…
Climbing Tips: Do THIS, not THAT (Part 11)
Five bite sized, quick tips of best practices. In this post: 1) why you don't need an extension for a Grigri rappel, 2) backup that hauling system 3) better hiking in your harness 4) when to use a…