If some details (like sequence charts) display incorrectly, please check the website version of this page . The Formal Frontier and Formal-First Research By Fabrizio Montesi. Created on 2026-10-19.…

Reading Time: 2 minutesHere is a link to a talk I gave at the Independent School for the City about the Banana ... as a way to talk about the relationships between artificial environments, colonial…

I was invited to take part in a project about songs that describe America, and, well, if you look up “paradox of choice” in the dictionary, it’s really just a picture of my invitation email. I’m…

Again, I’m late to updating my Now page for September, but this time I think I have a decent excuse: my son was born at the end of the month. Anyone who has had children will likely know exactly what…

We’re looking at recaps from the Jealous Patrons Book Club’s read of Tyra Banks’s Modelland. We read this in 2023, so some references to current…

Last week we reviewed SPIRITUAL CAPITAL. The week before that I did an overview of all five forms of capital we need to cultivate in our family business and specifically in the family room.We MUST…

The all-out-to-burnout cycle isn't about time or boundaries. You're running a marathon like a sprinter, and an ADHD brain can't see mile twenty coming.

A new picker with aliases, first-class worktrees mapped to GitHub issues, faster caching, and more.

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It takes an enormous amount of math to train AI

With last week’s training not going entirely to plan, I’ve come up with less structured approach for this week, hoping that life allows me to follow through with my 30km...

Questions and answers.

Run your thumbnail along the frame of a 1930s steel casement and you can feel it. The section is barely a quarter inch thick, yet it has held a pane of glass square for ninety years through…

TL;DR I’ve wanted Claude Code to compact my conversations in the background for a long time. It now compacts a long session when I walk away from it for about an hour. My Claude went through my…

Across 24 tasks mined from my own Git history, model rankings correlate with Cognition's FrontierCode at 0.96 Spearman over 10 shared configurations. Here is what it took to build: qualifying tasks,…

Some disorganised, cluttered thoughts about the rise of AI in my life.

***** A lot of book readers today would love to read more classic novels, but everybody knows that old literature can be more difficult to read than today’s average bestseller. However, if you…

We added 80 new records, updated 54 records, and made a constellation of improvements and updates to the Semantic Farm and Bioregistry in the first two weeks of October 2026. This post gives more…

What is this?A weekly note on what I've been up to. Last week's is here.Tuesday: Just a normal guy definitely enjoying the taste of GuinnesstldrPast 1,000km for the year. Doorframes…

I made a photo of a lady playing music to a horse in Mexico in 2023 and it was published in a magazine recently. Never give up on your dreams of making a photo of a horse going to a concert in Baja…

Deb’s tablet games only worked online and were full of ads. On our flight to New York I vibe coded her an alternative: Pocket Arcade, nine casual games with no ads that install in the browser…

Every app is becoming a tool your AI can use. Your assistant will know more about you and do more on your behalf. Who owns that memory, and who holds the approve button?

I’m emerging from a few months of doing things, art workshops, childcare, days out and other such activities that are easier done than documented. It seems odd to write about this as the leaves…

Every few months someone writes that PHP is dead. After years in languages that most developers stopped talking about, here is how I check that claim: with installs, release dates and a community…

… few doubt that the middle east is in the grip of epoch shaping convulsions. Nothing speaks more eloquently to this truth than the astonishing territorial gains of Yemen’s de facto government,…

Click on any photo for truly lovely hi-res photos (by Brian Gee, visit his website and Instagram and show him some love, and FYI photos were taken with a Sony A1 Mark II with a Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM…

Moon Monday #297 and Indian Space Progress #45: 🌘 🧊 👀

I can’t see anything

Once more, Tom Roberts has worked his magic. Feast your eyes! (The cover here is followed by the rough and then the line drawing - both stages that cover artists share with the publisher art…

• Another week, another round of good progress towards Hanami 3.1 readiness. Lots of little improvements, plus a couple of nice highlights. • The main thrust of my work was...

Science Fiction Book Review ★★☆☆☆ I quit halfway though. I can't stand the characters. I just don't want to read about their angst and their emotional problems. I want heroes, not emotionally stunted…

There is a particular kind of frustration that only a great puzzle game can produce. You stare at the screen, convinced that the solution must be obvious. You move a block, undo the move, try…

I missed our meet up on the 7th October as I was ill. Thanks very much to Tristan for taking some notes. Here’s some of what was talked about: Looking for new job How to write AI skills on a CV…

This post describes a recent improvement to the Semantic Farm alignment workflow with the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry enabled by contributing upstream data and code…

The tech & services I use to make life a wee bit easier

Congratulations to Mike Rogers of Michigan, Dan S. Sullivan of Alaska, and Ashley Hinson of Iowa -- three Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate who think President Trump is a fool for buying…

I work on a shared project with many other developers in my organization. Its shared instructions added up to roughly 13,200 tokens, including workflows for Claude Code. My personal Codex harness…

Polishing sentences in a story that does not work is the most expensive mistake in revision. Here is how to tell which kind of editing your draft needs, and in what order.

Sigma today introduced the FP2, a complete redo of their earlier camera-in-a-small-box. The box is similar, losing just a bit of depth and only .2 ounces (6g) heavier. The fp name of the earlier…

Prologue #Like last year, I livetooted the release of Python 3.15.0. Here it is in blogpost form! Two weeks #Two weeks until Python 3.15.0 final! #Python #Python315 Fri, Sep 18, 2026, 00:30 EEST One…

Grey is now an available color for the Honda S2000, as long as updated instructions for every color in today’s quality standard.

Claude Design can replace Canva/Figma for casual design tasks, and is going for more. It infiltrated my workflow when I started using it for experimenting … The post How Many Specialty Tools Will We…

My wife Maggie and I went last week to my friend Colette Paul’s launch for her new book, A Complete Success. (Check it out: Colette has a wonderful narrative voice, conversational in tone,…

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I’ve had many memorable conversations in pubs, and about pubs, and one particular such exchange from a few years back still stands out. I’d been arguing the case that JD Wetherspoon was a social…

Most people think trading means you need to be active. You sit in front of several screens, watch every price move, and buy and sell stocks all day. I do the opposite. Sure, I follow the market every…

Christopher Lee as Dracula. The idea of inserting Count Dracula into a groovy 1970s London setting was a potentially intriguing idea. Unfortunately, by the time Hammer Films produced Dracula A.D.…

Cursor's $60 Pro+ plan is now a legacy subscription, replaced by a $100 Super plan that bundles Grok and bills Claude, GPT, and Gemini at API rates from the first request. Inference is getting…

The Issue: A hat is usually sufficient to block the glare of the direct light of the sun, but sometimes this just isn’t enough. For example, if you’re at the beach, on a lake, or in a burning-hot…