Today
- Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days: Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”. I feel this. So...
Yesterday
- A huge problem I encounter with Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is that there are thousands of cards in the game (around 33000 unique cards as of the time of writing). Depending on the format you play, you may be required to select a limited subset of these cards to play...
- Recently, someone rebuilt a famous and expensive piece of software with an AI agent, and published it for free. Thousands of people installed it. It made a lot of noise, and kicked off a whole “Reverse-Engineer-Everything” trend. Almost no one read the source. The author had not...
- Bryan Cantrill has a great line from a talk where he cautions against anthropomorphizing Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. I think it’s also a mistake to treat any tech…
- The Job is Knowing When to Be Deterministic & When to Be Probabilistic This week, I gave a short talk at AGNTCon titled, “Context Fails & Fixes,” that functioned as a sort of “State of Context Engineering.” How did context engineering emerge, where has it gone, and where might...
- I spent the last few days decompiling my favorite computer game: Fast Food Tycoon 2. There's a very good chance that you have not heard of this oddball 2001 business simulator. But when I was a kid in 2004, I picked it out of a lineup of discounted games in a mall and it hasn't...
This week
- Animations for System Builders: Metastability and Lost Writes Pretty pictures help us learn, maybe? One of the things I love using LLMs for is helping me understand systems better. In the Strands Decider post I wrote about how I often ask ask me questions to check I understand...
- Good friends and family know this, but I am bad at email. Like chronically bad. If you have tried to email me, you know this too and you either never got a reply or received one 9-months later starting with the phrase, “Sorry.” I am truly sorry… but also I’m not. It’s a function...
- Many people are saying that AI will make software faster by rewriting it in faster languages, but this isn’t generally true. Most programs cannot be…
- Herman's blog Home Now Projects Blog 22 Oct, 2026 People use the word just a lot when talking about problems. If people would just drive slowly near schools. If people would just pay their taxes. If people would just follow the rules. It's a sentence that sounds reasonable as...
- Git had too many performance problems at 30,000 PRs per day, so Anthropic built its own. I talked with the team, including asking why they didn’t open source its new system, ‘Scion.’...
- I’ve had “AI usage statements” in the back of my mind ever since I read Ethan Marcott’s blog post sharing a round-up of his favorite ones. I didn’t consider writing one for this site, since it had the smell of status-signaling. Like a quasi-political declaration of allegiance to...
- I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons. Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown). In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at...
- Gergely Orosz is frustrated at those that entered his explicitly “No AI” essay competition and used AI. He goes on to say: When I start to suspect some part is AI about someone I don’t know: how can I tell how much of it is? And how much time and effort do I want to invest to...
- Many others have covered the manipulation of colour in CSS. This is me documenting what has worked for me, practically, 'in the wild'. It is a common requirement to need a variant of an existing colour. Think about the borders for a visual pod/component; it may have a background...
- My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones (play it here). Unlike my previous experiments, this one is …
- Tasting History with Max Miller is must-watch YouTube for me. Miller is a wonderful storyteller, and his show melds interesting history lessons with period-appropriate recipes. As it turns out, he’s also a fan of board games. His new game is now live on Kickstarter. If you...
- Every year, browser vendors collaborate via the Interop project to synchronize their efforts on new HTML/CSS/JS features. This year, there’s a ton of super exciting features being considered! In this blog post, we’ll explore the CSS of the future, to get a glimpse of what we’ll...
- Have you heard the good news? I bemoaned the approach of putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate! John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface...
- Some people think that LLMs should not be used in technical fields like programming or mathematics, because those fields are actually art. True or not, this…
- I live in Ireland, and avoiding rain is a national pastime. Sadly the best data we have, which comes from Met Eireann the national meteorological service, is delivered in a pretty low quality app that makes it hard to use and understand. To fix this I built the app Rainy.ie It’s...
- When designing software, the requirements you don’t have are as important as the requirements you do. Identifying what you can compromise on — what can be slow…
Last week
- Recently, while troubleshooting a PATH issue, I noticed an entry for /pkg/env/global/bin. At first, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Turns out, this is part of macOS 27.0… though no one is sure what it’s for yet. First, some background. Since Mac OS X 10.5 in...
- Most collaboration problems between teams are interface problems, not relationship problems. Clear ownership, inspectable priorities, and a clear process for new work fix them....
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