Your perspective changes with age because you see less opportunity in front of you. Not because your experiences have made you cynical & jaded, but because you have less time on this earth to realise…

Posted on 2026-05-07 by Oleg Grenrus engineering Seven years ago I wrote a post about compatibility packages. It is now highly outdated, so let us revisit the matter. Recently there have been a small…

Academic reviewing used to be more fun. (As fun as it can be, of course.)

Buying a second-hand 2020 MacBook Pro for twenty-five dollars, upgrading from Catalina to Sequoia, and identifying the problems with the laptop's non-functional screen and Touch Bar. Diagnosing and…

To-do lists are often touted as the solution to task management. It makes sense on the surface—what better way to keep track of what needs to be done than by writing everything down in a list? This…

We can't find a fitting metaphor for AI, which may be a sign of how transformative it will be.

Around the world, Central Banks are attempting to rescue weak governments. Fiscal Policy changes belong to the government, but in restrictive times those policies are generally unpopular (think…

A Spotted Eagle-Owl with unusually heavy feather fraying and a lice infestation is recovering at African Raptor Centre until a full moult restores flight

a quick one. small adjustments to how i work with agents, none of them deep on their own. but i can feel them adding up, the workflow shifting in a way that feels worth pausing on before any of it…

Eight founder types from three orthogonal axes. Pick the playbook that fits your psychology, not the one that worked for someone else.

RC 2 of the book is out. When I asked for readers a few weeks ago, I half expected polite “looks great!” replies. I got that, but also the opposite, which honestly is more helpful. Almost…

My rule for AI use is a border of interaction. Before the border, in private, I am happy to use AI as much as it helps: search, planning, code, transcription, translation, summaries, drafts, and any…

TP-7 CLI is a Rust command-line tool for humans and agents to manage files on a Teenage Engineering TP-7 field recorder from macOS. It can browse the recorder, download recordings from the device,…

Machines should bend to suit humans (centaurs), not humans bend to suit machines (reverse centaurs).

Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.

I run NixOS on my laptop. I use Claude Code daily. Recently the two stopped getting along, so I sat down and fixed it. The official Claude Code installer (curl -fsSL claude.ai/install.sh | bash)…

What's the reason for a watchdog taking 23 times as long to reset the device? It turns out the Flash Option Bytes are. And a mass erase doesn't reset those.

A reading note on A Theory of Deep Learning by Elon Litman (May 2026, preprint forthcoming).

A reading note on Neural Tangent Kernel: Convergence and Generalization in Neural Networks by Arthur Jacot, Franck Gabriel, and Clément Hongler (NeurIPS 2018).

Recently, the Zed editor had its 1.0 release. While I can't say what it's going to be like in a few years, even now it has largely replaced Visual Studio Code as my editor for non-IDE tasks (though I…

The joys of a small, passionate audience

Formula 1 Round 6 2026 recap: Kimi Antonelli wins in Miami; McLaren, Ferrari, and Red Bull bring upgrades and become more competitive, while Mercedes no longer has such a big advantage, and there is…

TL;DR: you may no longer use the content of this website for commercial purposes. In particular, you may not use it as training data for commercial language models. I decided to change the licence…

Every time you load a website, send an email, or update an app, you’re quietly relying on a handful of unglamorous services that route your packets to the right place: DNS to translate names into…

Banning a digit doesn't kill the cowardice — it relocates it. I banned 7s on my bake ratings, and the middle 6 inherited it. The rule is a lens, not a fix.

The agent principal-agent problem 2026-05-07 Code review is broken. The industry-established code review process, review-then-commit, was a straightforward mechanism that allowed a relatively…

Something finally clicked for me. When looking at an ASCII table, you will notice that after the uppercase Z, there are a few other characters before lowercase a: Decimal Binary Symbol 88 01011000 X…

Contents Introduction Specifying what I wanted The Satori plus sharp libraries What posts are eligible for a generated og image? The renderer Caching the generated PNGs The orchestrator Conclusion…

Let's say you are the maintainer of a Python library that depends on another Python library like “ urllib3 ”. Because you want to make sure users receive a compatible version of urllib3 you add a…

An announcement of the Google Summer of Code 2026. Four accepted candidates.

In The Last Programming Language Might Not Be for Humans, I argued that if AI becomes the primary author of code, the source language has to bend around that author. In What Comes After the Last…

Disclaimer: Mesh networks over LoRa as described here (MeshCore/Meshtastic) do not require a license in the US, since they operate on the unlicensed & public domain 915 MHz ISM band under FCC…

I’ve seen the term “player-coach” now come up enough times that I’m going to write about it while I enjoy my morning coffee.

30 projects in 30 days using AI-assisted coding. Here’s what was easy, what was hard, what was unexpected, and where this is all going.

could this be where ravinia ends up?

An AI-generated projection of React's public API, shaped around what a TanStack Start app needs. ~9KB client, 2–3× faster on our workloads. Powers this blog today; capable of running tanstack.com…

This is a topic that I have been planning to dive into for a long time, but I kept procrastinating. Yet, finally I sat down to it and found out it is much, much simple than I anticipated. I am a fan…

In a previous post , I explained that the pivot operation on a table of data is equivalent to a groupby operation on that data, but with the output table rearranged into a squatter configuration. But…

Marc Andreessen Egg Game helps you make eggs that look like Marc Andreessen.

i said in my second ceramics class post that i'd be back in early may with a roundup of my third class pieces and, here we are, in early may. i brought my final pieces home on monday and i am so…

I have recently expanded the offerings on Mortagarden's git server by migrating some old repos from...

It’s been some time since I updated this blog. I was on a family vacation to Singapore and Malaysia for close to two weeks. Now that I’m back to my regular routine, frankly speaking, I’m stuck in a…

A logo is a tool that reminds people of who you are. Your personal brand already has that. Your face. It ticks all the boxes of great logo design: It’s unique It’s memorable It stands out…

On the walk to nursery this morning my wife and kids were startled by a car that drove onto the pavement within a foot of them. After reporting the offence via Operation Snap I spotted all of the…

Preface to the Japanese translation of Ben Morea's "Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion"

I’ve written not one, but two new things for school publications! First, I’ve written about The Sound, one of my favorite bands, in Firebird. If you were wondering why I’d dug up an…

RubyLLM 1.15 adds image editing, cost tracking, inferred tool parameters, additive callbacks, and Rails fixes.

Oh boy yet more linux kernel vulns

How far back in time can you understand English? The same passage written in 100 year intervals, here’s how English in the year 1000 reads: And þæt heo sægde wæs eall soþ. Ic ƿifode on hire, and heo…