Closing the Gap Between Data, Insight, and Action. Palantir, Databricks, Snowflake, and now Microsoft Fabric are often compared as if they solve the same problem. They don’t. Most organisations…

Managers going back to coding for various reasons. I'm trying to find which group I belong to.

I did a show in Chicago last week and I’m sorry you weren’t there because it was so fabulously good. I’m from Minnesota and was brought up not to say that but I’m 83 and it’s time to take liberties.…

In this episode I talk about a bomb scare at a Peter Kay show, a new Amstrad meetup in the UK, Atari's acquisition of the Wizardry RPG series, the MiSTer MultiSystem 2 Arcade, SEGA's Neptune, the new…

Fresh off the digital press, a message on being overwhelmed, grateful, turn bits into opportunities and endless shiny new little bits to discover.

We’re wired to look for faces. Show someone a photograph with people in it and their eyes go straight to the faces, searching for expression, emotion, identity. This reflex runs deep enough…

Contents : - April fishing - Snakes alive! - Chris Bladen's bronze art - Sussex fly fishing clinic - An ode to the French Partridge - A chalkstream guide's fly tying recipe - Birthday wishes - Heron…

i actually do this quite often. but today, i finally asked someone else about it. it feels like something that’s hard to explain—like something you can only conceptualise if you feel the same way,…

If you think the AI we use today is smart, fast, and accommodating, then you will want to read the McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor published this week. It announces, in the sober language of…

An article dispelling myths about W Social, the new European platform that aims to rival X: it is a fork of Bluesky that shares many similarities with Eurosky and requires government ID to sign up.

I attended Anthropic's Code with Claude developer conference in San Francisco on May 6th. Here's what I learned about context management, the shifting bottlenecks in software engineering, and what it…

Last weekend, I went down to San Diego for my close friends’ annual Kentucky Derby party - reliably one of the most fun weekends of the year. This year was a bit more “mature” than…

Man, I just can’t shake this upper respiratory infection. Getting sick at 50 feels a lot different from when I was ten. I’m not sure how she found this old shirt, but I was delighted to…

Genius Loci readers: Greetings from the far side of the academic year. It is officially summer break, which checks out. The past few days in Florida have seen near-record heat. Thankfully the…

We're in the process of moving and it's eye-opening just how much stuff we've accumulated over the span of just two and a half years. During that time, my in-laws from Viet Nam stayed with us for…

Normal human habits like swapped letters, fillers, shorthand, pasted IDs, boundary whitespace, and nearby word forms can change token count without changing intent much.

New set has already been out for like a few weeks, so this is my set recap for the previous set Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set! Flavor I have decent familiarity with the source material, possibly…

★★★½☆ - Stephen Baxter: A sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine that drastically expands the scope across multiple timelines, from the dawn of time to the far future seen in the original. Now with…

Plus: The search for instant coffee and a universal clock. (#570)

I have too many books, and I’ve grown to accept that I always will. When I first started reading, I always finished books that I bought or borrowed before buying another one. This used to be an…

A data pipeline is a set of choices. It's almost always a bet that you know how this data will be used, how it needs to be modeled, how it needs to be queried. I've watched a data engineers…

The most exciting bit of news this week is that I bought myself a new phone. It's not brand new; it's a refurbished Samsung A23 which is a huge leap from my old phone and it will hopefully make my…

Can IPv6 play a role in resisting internet censorship? Background Earlier this week a user on the Fediverse noticed that a website titled “w-social.eu,” recently went offline. Looking…

Learn why using multiple AI subagents improves results through cleaner context, natural output diversity, sharper task prompts, and adversarial reviews.

I’m going to say something that’ll upset a lot of people: pandas had its run. Polars is just better. I don’t mean that lightly. I spent years writing pandas code. I taught pandas to…

Orson Welles, 1962, ★★★★ A surrealist nightmare of expressionist lighting and skewed compositions made from colossal pre- and postwar European architecture, oppressive even when it’s beautiful, its…

I've lived with depression/anxiety/whatever for years, many of them untreated. Five or so years ago, I started therapy and have been in it most weeks since then, except for one lapse after getting…

Corporate social media is having a devastating effect on queer peoples' lives

Are you a master of the “warm intro” who is not afraid to step inside Tokyo’s luxury hotels while also meandering the hidden ateliers of Kanazawa ? Do you thrive in the high-octane…

The first Mass Effect Alright, let's go back to the year 2007, where Britney Spears shaved her head, Transformers was the summer's blockbuster hit, and the first iPhone was released. People still…

Recently, I’ve realized that some the qualities I cherish in people seem to be mutually exclusive. And not in an obvious way: you’d expect the Venn diagram of nerdy and sporty people look like a half…

In the last ~6 months, Agent Skills have gone from a new feature introduced by Claude Code to a widely adopted paradigm across the industry. Companies that want to signal they understand customer AI…

I’ve commented that agentic coding makes things that were previously on your “list of impossible projects” into things that you can do. I have long had on my “impossible…

An ongoing data extortion attack targeting the widely-used education technology platform Canvas disrupted classes and coursework at school districts and universities across the United States today,…

You know when I’m home on my own I don’t watch much TV like actual TV, but I do watch music videos on YouTube on the TV. Sometimes new music but often ones I know really well. Music videos are such a…

Last night, I finished reading The Wayfinder , a novel by Adam Johnson. I had started this book on Christmas Day (I give books to each of my family, and when I saw this on the table at Flyleaf Books,…

todetowed. taud

Feeling ugly, feeling bad, feeling all kinds of sad. Which is odd, because recently, things have been relatively good. And I can hear my priest in my head now. Something about the kind of happiness…

I have released SatPulse 0.2. This is a major new release with a lot of new functionality (more than 60% of the code is new since 0.1).

I just got back from DevOpsDays Austin, and it’s always great to go out and talk with a wide array of folks from the tech community to see what’s up. The takeaways were interesting.…

In the recent weeks I've been engaging Prot as an Emacs coach to help with doing review passes over my upcoming ffs package as I work on polishing and documenting it in preparation for offering it…

The company behind the Centurion Club and the Black Card, best known for a concierge service and charge cards without limits, and for turning the card in your wallet into a lifestyle choice, that…

It's been a weird year. Last May I was working full-time for a client when they announced that they wanted to try Claude Code. Suddenly, I was furnished with an account and encouragement to try it…

RIP Magic “Screwdark” There are moments in “Screwdark” that sound like three DJ Shadows DJing at each other like the Spider-Man meme, or someone trying to Zaireeka the entire…

Today I opened my university's Canvas and attempted to take a quiz. The quiz did not load. Instead, I saw a ransom note from the hackers who have been attacking Canvas. Frustrated, I watched the due…

Look, I’m going to be direct here. If you are not using AI agentic coding methods right now - today - you are going too slow. Not “a little behind.” Not “maybe missing…

**Regularly UPDATED**   Reflecting on the Russo-Ukraine War, I am putting together a timeline of the most relevant…