As AI models improve, the engineering challenge shifts to agent harnesses, data quality, evaluations, memory and security. Here's what it takes to build reliable AI systems.

Event: Community Over Code 2026 Dates: October 11–14, 2026Location: Glasgow, UKWebsite: https://communityovercode.apache.org/events/glasgow-2026/ Community Over Code is the Apache Software…

Keep WordPress updated. Use reputable plugins. Download them from official sources. That’s familiar advice, and there are good reasons for it. But what happens when the official plugin package…

VMPal is described as “Virtual Machines built for Apple silicon and AI agents”. Straight from Apple, installed in minutes, with Metal on your Mac’s GPU. VMPal Tools add the clipboard and drag &…

My grandmother hated throwing away the boxes things came in. There was a mountain of them in the storage closet by the kitchen that threatened to topple over every time we needed something from the…

Every teacher who builds slides has hit the same problem. You need a particular shape or piece of clip art, and it isn’t there. As a science teacher, the one I want most often is a thermometer, and…

IntroWatch the video: The Marketplace of Alignment Last week, All-In Podcast E292 spent more than half an hour on whether Claude might be conscious. What does it mean that a frontier lab takes the…

Will the real hockey fans please stand up? Believe it or not, some teams have already played more than 10% of their seasons. We've had some surprises, and plenty of things have gone exactly as…

Dates are ALWAYS necessary, Ren!! Source

Philip Glass is sometimes wrongly credited with composing the soundtrack for the 2014 biopic of physicist Stephen Hawking The Theory of Everything . This is because the theatrical trailer for the…

I have been trying out Grammarly, but the editors it integrates with are not the ones I use. I want to write Markdown in vim on Linux and have the same features.

I’ve not posted here for a while. Some of that is because I was moving cross country, some of it is because this is usually just an extra space for ideas that I’m not pitching to…

Recently at Nordhealth we embarked on a re-skin of our entire application: a visual uplift of the whole product to bring it into 2026. These kinds of changes have a big blast radius and are…

guy at my showing of you can see everything kept changing his opacity from 100% to 13% to 93% mid movie. really distracting.

A guy in Hampton turned ~$10m into ~$50m picking stocks. He makes 2.9 decisions a year. What the rare market-beaters have in common, and how to apply it to your business. The post 2.9 decisions a…

Volume 10 , Issue 31 ; 19 Oct 2026 Who doesn’t love a good markup side quest? In my day job , we run regression tests before each release . Regression tests generate a bunch of XML and the easiest…

A lot is happening these days that makes my book The World After Capital more relevant than ever. My central argument is that digital technology, with AI as its apotheosis, is so powerful that it…

TLDR; I set out to make asynchronous programming on microcontrollers easier. Along the way, I accidentally built somewhere that humans and AI’s can work together comfortably. This is the first…

Seems there is a bit of a rumble on the web at the moment about a ‘vibe-coded‘ suite of applications, called ArtCraft. These are said to be”clones” of leading Adobe and…

"I don't use Artificial Intelligence." A carpenter who refuses a hammer doesn't make the house any better. He has only made his work slower and harder. Judge the work, not the tool.

We’ve all seen the pictures of the thousands of arrests of peaceful protesters for supporting Palestine Action: an 83-year-old retired priest; a 94-year-old Jewish former human rights lawyer; a blind…

A smart person knows everything about a single topic. An intelligent person knows as much as possible about more than one topic. Both have great value, and depending on the industry, some…

10th October 2026 Oxford City FC were making one of their longest journeys of the season in the Conference North, taking on league newcomers Hebburn Town on the southern side of the River Tyne. It…

In honor of Thomas Ray Heels (AKA Tom Heels), October 19 is now Like Everything Day. Tom Heels was born on 1936-10-19 and died on 2025-12-05. Today, 2026-10-19, would have been his 90th birthday. On…

Yellow knight mushrooms, also known as man on horseback, are a controversial edible mushroom. Here's what you need to know before eating them. Jousting with the Yellow Knight is the latest post on…

T o properly finalize the development of this board—which is a modern clone of the original AKAI card—I need to create the metal mounting bracket for the rear panel of the S5000 rack. In theory, the…

Colors in DuPont Oct 18 I realize that there is a head spinning amount of information in my last two blogs. With our future gardens certainly to be reduced in size, delegating continuation and…

Spent most of yesterday in the mountains just east of Eugene, on a trail run along the McKenzie River Trail and around Clear Lake. I’ve been going to Clear Lake for years now and find it a…

Week notes, week 1342 / 2026-10-11 Immediately after complaining that my room and mental is a mess in the last week notes, per long-standing tradition of this blog, I proceeded to clean up the whole…

I started this blog a few years ago when I began my journey studying immunology, to have a place to write about what I was learning and about applications of AI to the field. My studies were a…

AFTER the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, progeny of the Nazis) secured the largest slice of the vote in the elections […]

What you see: Mandarin oranges that look old, dried out and sad. They may have brown splotches on their peels.What it is: Old mandarins.Eat or toss: These are simply showing their age; they might…

My mum’s iPhone face ID stopped recognising her. Just didn’t want to know her. We spent an hour resetting things, rebooting the phone, following all steps. In the end it turned out that…

Steve Cobb's "Must Dance" Playlist My birthday was last weekend and I started writing a blog post about how lucky I feel to have lived 74 years. At the same time, I realized that my blog has become…

I’ve just complete a project using AI, namely Claude. It involved linguistics. I’m new to using AI seriously; I first used Claude only a month ago. AI has been mostly irrelevant to what I…

Njabulo S. Ndebele, Boxers Die Alone: Reflections on Boxing in the Eastern Cape (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2026) OVER four decades […]

(Yes, it’s long. I have many many thoughts, and even left some of them out!) Event PyCon Africa 2026Dates October 7–9, 2026Location Speke Resort Munyonyo, Kampala, UgandaWebsite…

Catarina must deal with a belligerent patron

It has been quite a while since my last post, and during this time I have been investigating a couple of complimentary things: TabPFN and revisiting my Kalman-EMA filter. I say complimentary as I…

I often say free advice is worth what you pay for it, but after extensive experience in a brutal job market during the Great Recession, I found a few tips that helped me get through it. A lot of…

A recent Anthropic blog post contained a short paragraph, not at all the point of the post, which has been buzzing around my brain since I read it: A new level of operational excellence is possible.…

I drew this week’s cartoon thinking about this strange period of figuring out how to market to the agents that (I almost wrote “who”) are increasingly shopping on customers’…

I visited an iconic tourist destination in Central Park, New York City and photographed the fountain under construction on a cool autumn day.

I feel somethin' so right doin' the wrong thing And I feel somethin' so wrong doin' the right thing Everything that kills me makes me feel alive And I feel somethin' so wrong doin' the right thing…

Clonfert Cathedral, not far from the banks of the River Shannon in east Galway, on ground St Brendan the Navigator first chose for a monastery around 563 (yes, that Brendan - the one whose legendary…

It’s early afternoon on Friday 16 October 2026. I enter the public transport office in central Strasbourg, next to the Alt Winmärik tram stop. Alt Winmärik means Old Wine Market in the old Germanic…

Stepping into a wild jungle 🌴 When the rest of the world 🗺️

Despite all that you’ve heard, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Digger is not a wretched stinker of a movie. Despite the groan-worthy zany trailer heralding the impending doom of exploding…

The tragic final march of the Man of Faith. Unpacking the TV show LOST — Season 5: Episode 7

A few months ago, I wrote about getting back into blogging after almost a decade, and casually mentioned that this website is running on my homelab. I also promised to write about how I set it up.…