kamal-backup 1.0 brings exact Rails restores, restore drills, and PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, SFTP, and rclone support to Kamal.

A season-long fantasy prediction game where you guess your teams final score each week instead of drafting or setting lineups.

Famix is the meta-model family of Moose allowing one to analyse the dependencies of a project and its global architecture. But sometimes, you want more, you want to see what are the part of the code…

In July of 2025, I took over as (or became the first, depending on the accounting) MPA director at NIU. My role is to run the academic side of the house; my department chair runs the university side.…

A prompt is for communicating an idea to an LLM. If you tell your idea to an AI agent and ask it to write down in its own words, say, a “skill” document which is meant to be a reusable…

In my previous post I argued that the human code review has become the bottleneck in our software delivery process, and that most of what a review used to buy us no longer fits in a diff. But if we…

I spent years arguing against utility classes. Here is what made me change my mind about Tailwind CSS — and where I still think it hurts.

The simple loop executives use

Modern Web Guidance is a set of skills from the Chrome and Edge teams that feeds expert-written platform guidance straight into your coding agent, with Baseline compatibility data baked in. It's…

A `pre-receive` hook that checks out the incoming tree, runs a real check against it, and rejects the push at the transport layer if it fails, before a single ref is updated.

Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton University Press, 2009). In my ongoing attempt to “try on” views of the world, philosphies, or mental…

A visit to the Lake District would not be complete without at least one walk to the top of a big hill. What with spouse and I not being regular users of shanks pony least of all up mountains I asked…

Image search on one client site ran at 64% of web's impressions and 11% of its clicks, and no tool in the stack could see it. The new GSC MCP update ships 8 free image SEO tools that read that…

lost, what you never owned. still claiming for it blamed, what you couldn't control. still believing it did saw, what you wanted to see. kept looking for it found, what you feared the most. kept…

Disclosure: this research was conducted using an ANY.RUN account provided as part of a collaboration. All analysis and conclusions are my own. I did not execute the malware locally. Local work was…

The workspace — it’s called Metis now — needs a teacher: the big always-on model that plans and reviews for the smaller ones. I’m not picking it by vibes. Five big open models, one…

Mine Print Hash 2026-35

Tobari gives my AI coding agents deterministic evidence for finding and consolidating overlapping Go tests.

How we used AI, profiling, adversarial tests, and repeatable Go benchmarks to cut hot-path work and make filtered log writes up to 77x faster.

A practical look at what a megawatt of power is worth and the factors that shape its value.

https://blainsmith.com/essays/humanities-in-the-machine/ I've been meaning to write about this since [2026-03-20 Fri]. finally doing it. Quick note on the title before I get into it. It's riffing on…

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” Edward Abbey The modern world is built on a system in which we must “progress” in order to survive. The issue is that we never ask…

It whispers to me like the Green Goblin mask. It says... "Pikachu... Pika pika." Which I think translates to either "Drink from me, Gadda" or "oh god i'm a disembodied head" Farmhands pledging $1 or…

Naming Things by Tom Benner a tiny but neat book about the naming of identifies in code (variables, classes, methods, so not packages or libraries). It had entered my to-read list a few years ago,…

Jugulans is now developed on Chicken Scheme 6 After upgrading from Chicken Scheme 5 to Chicken Scheme 6 I am now developing jugulans on Chicken Scheme 6. This required only a minor change. jugulans…

The Claude Code and Cursor CLI status lines we actually run, on macOS and Linux, with the GNU vs BSD adaptations and copy-paste scripts plus the statusLine config blocks.

Everyone fed up with Opus 5 Claudish. Here is how to shut it up.

LLMs look brilliant in a greenfield repo and mediocre in a legacy one. The difference is the codebase. The fix is to invest in it directly: split strategic from tactical work, keep the strategic…

I’ve been fascinated recently at what the best practices in the new age of engineering look like. But it’s hard to find real data on best practices. For example, X has a ton of…

Observations on when its okay and not okay to AI-generate content

Mike Driscoll invited me onto The Python Show to talk about the Python Developer Tooling Handbook. We covered how I got into Python, why I built the handbook, the current type checker race,…

Building an Agent Skill to convert my hand-written drafts to Astro-friendly markdown with Antigravity.

Jargon is now available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store . Jargon began as my offline reader for the Jargon File, the dictionary of early hacker language and culture. After releasing the Android…

When I was working on Vector Search with JavaScript, vector search was a hot topic. By the time the ...

Moving my personal long form writing to the ATmosphere.

I saw the original post generating a bit of talk, and I haven't written many lighter posts lately, so I figured I'd add what I had to say. First off, OP said: I would never tell anyone to their face…

One of my favourite Persian poems is عصیان بندگی (The Servant’s Rebellion) by Forugh Farrokhzad. Born in Tehran in 1934, Farrokhzad became one of Iran’s defining modernist poets and also a filmmaker…

We’re all just little headache machines and we need to take our daily mandated no-headache liquid and rest and air. 😆Chibird store | Mail club | Instagram

An Evolutionary Astrology analysis of Sir Thomas More, exploring his transition from radical intellectual logic to the transformative courage of the heart.

Sometimes there is a beautiful soul that lights up the world around it - I am sure that most people have heard the news by now of Dolly Parton's passing at the age of 80 - a good age and yet with the…

Here’s my design of 2P Ivan. I wanted to keep his original hair color but lean into the classic red eye color that most 2P characters get and give him even paper skin and heavy eyebags.…

With a custom shader GUI, we can bring together all the features we've built and combine them into a mega PBR shader.

Intro So, Emacs 31 has been released, and a lot of shiny new stuff is there, ready for us to play with. You probably heard of this new markdown-ts-mode and decided to check it out. And guess what? On…

I am following up my last post about how I write with a text about how I specifically get that writing done with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. 🧂 It cannot be a straightforward answer.…

I'm at the four week mark working on Shipaton 2026: My RevenueCat Paywall is hooked up to App Store Connect & tested, operationalising the app is coming along and I have a rough website

Rather late getting this online (blame Taiwan!): podcast interview about Computer Science, AI and IRCAM with Research Director Gérard Assayag.

I am subletting my apartment. Based on the dozens of messages I have received, here are some of the mistakes that might hurt your flat search. The mysterious stranger In Berlin, an apartment listing…

an inkling or two for who? more intimations fewer intimations sustain other things said span Yesterday :: Wednesday, 26th August 2026