If there is some kind of award for knowing the most about D&D without ever actually playing it, I would like to apply.

As a suburban, atheist dad, the closest I get to religion is when it somehow rains right after I put down fresh grass seed.

I am so good at vibe-coding purpose-made web sites, I sort of wonder if there is a market for vibe-coded sites. It does take a little technical and aesthetic acumen to get it right.

A library with a librarian was the first large language model.

My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it.

People who are skeptical or worried about AI, including the Pope, sometimes come across as if there is something we can do about it. There are many technologies that can’t be undone. When fire was invented, the Pope might ask “let’s slow down adoption of fire” but it wouldn’t work because … fire.

Every time I go back to Twitter I realize that not only is it as unredeemable as ever, it’s somehow worse than the last time I checked it. What a shit show.

This ‘80s-era coffee mug has never been more apt.

Always be fixing little things. Even if it takes you 7 years to get around to it. github.com/sparkle-p…

I’m out to see an exhibit of aging hipsters in Boston. Oh and Belle & Sebastian are playing it.

Just posted Black Ink 2.4.7 with bug fixes affecting clue visibility, UTF-8 preservation, and more. redsweater.com/blog/4274…

Whenever I unsubscribe from a mailing list, and the confirmation message says “We’ll miss you!”, it makes me extra glad to have parted ways with such a saccharine, insincere business.

“Online Only.” Really? Costco DOESN’T want to share the luxurious sheen of this CASKET in stores? 😂

Seeing as AI is being used in virtually every intellectual pursuit on earth, it stands to reason it’s being used to aid in things like electrification and fuel efficiency, among many others. Every extent to which AI helps reduce the widespread use of oil is a credit against its own energy use.

I got tired of both Claude and Codex failing to fix a bug that I thought would be easy for either of them, so I had to step in and do it myself. kisses biceps still got it …

Thirty years ago today, I was hired as a full-time employee at Apple Computer, Inc. bitsplitting.org/2026/05/1…

Just saw a man walking down my block with one kid on his shoulders and one kid walking next to him. I know EXACTLY what his partner wanted for Mother’s Day.

Billion dollar idea: a streaming service aggregator that automatically signs you up for any service that hosts a show you want to watch right now, and quietly unsubscribes you after the shortest possible subscription interval. “Watch what you want, when you want, pay as you go.”

What do you call a marginally qualified candidate who gets hired on the strength of their open source activity? Repo baby.

Everybody has been talking for years about how declarative programming is the future, but nobody anticipated it would mean declaring, “Claude, make me an app.”

If mifepristone caused erections we would not be in this situation. Politicians only fight against women's health, never against men's.

Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind” is so good that I can sit through a whole YouTube video even after suffering 110% exposure by street merchants in Times Square. www.youtube.com/watch

The greatest practical downside to agentic AI in programming is the unpredictable delay between request and response. When I worked at Apple in the late ’90s, we would start a build at night to be sure it was fresh in the morning. During the day we would play video games while waiting.

AI offers incredible powers to people today who ALREADY know how to do their jobs. The real risk, IMO, is that a whole generation will never learn how to actually do the jobs.

I just left the sheet music to “Linus and Lucy” on the piano and now I hear intermittent attempts to play it.

Something it’s taken me many years to learn, even after growing up in a progressive town (Santa Cruz, CA) is that people you’re standing up for are usually pretty lenient about the bozo moves you might make while standing up for them.

Inspired by my kid’s impromptu crossword creation, I decided to take another stab at construction myself. Now my kid is test-solving it. I’ll submit it to the NYT first because of course I want that glory, but then I’ll see if anybody else wants it!

I admit I was anxious to post about my discomfort referring to trans or non-binary kids in the company of their parents. I thought that people who have a much harder time living a life where their identity is constantly challenged might find my concern too trivial. I’ve had good feedback so far. 🙏

Be right back. Just placing seashells on a beach spelling out that we should “86” — and by 86 of course I don’t mean kill, because that would be the stupidest interpretation – the Supreme Court justices who voted to eradicate the Voting Rights Act. And I know we CAN’T 86 them, but still. Seashells.

A very modern social challenge is learning about your kid’s friend being trans or non-binary, and wanting to respect their pronouns, but not sensing any buy-in from the parents. I’m always wondering if they’re misgendering their kid “for my sake” or, because they don’t know yet, or worse…

Unbeknownst to me, my son (17yo) learned enough about crossword construction to make a puzzle, print it with MY APP, and leave it as tribute on the table, waiting for me when I returned home. Very good for somebody who has never had any training or practice, as far as I know!

If you’re a parent who, for whatever reason, is lucky enough to have a piano in your home, the sweetest sound imaginable is the sound of your kids playing the piano.

No idea how likely to be true this is, but I thought it was interesting that AI knowing so much about a particular framework or technology might extend its lifetime, regardless of future frameworks' merits. bsky.app/profile/m…

Tim Cook donated $1M to Trump’s inauguration. He fawned over Trump and gifted him a 24-karat gold plaque (as Apple lobbied for tariff exemptions). Apple donated to Trump’s White House ballroom. And it removed ICE tracking apps from its stores following a demand from the DOJ. Remember this.

I’ve had great experiences with Apple’s “Express Replacement” in the past, but now that I’ve been waiting 10 days for a replacement, with no updates, I’m wondering if other people haven’t had the same stellar service I used to enjoy.

Assistant TO the regional CEO.

Not surprising, given the number of times we agreed about it on Core Intuition, but I agree 100% with @Manton’s judgment of acceptable semantic versioning. The only one I suck it up and defy (holding my nose) is “2.1.10”. www.manton.org/2026/04/1…

As my oldest son gets ready for college, I'm thinking about the fears surrounding going out on one's own. Having to, all at once, pay all the bills while hoping for some relief. He's lucky to have a backstop in me/us, but so many kids don't. College should be universally funded.

The biggest marketing coup in the AI era is Anthropic calling its agentic, command-line tool, “Claude Code.” It’s a diversely capable model that can be used for ANY matter of tasks, but calling it “code” made it feel like the perfect choice for coders. OpenAI’s Codex doesn’t hit the same mark.

AI skeptics often express a fear about how it might do something bad without you knowing. You can’t “trust” it. It’s absolutely, 100% true. But the question of whether you trust it or not is entirely in your hands. You CAN review every word, code snippet, etc., before it does it. If you choose to.

The utility that Claude built for me features a tmux (terminal multiplexer) managing orchestrator that dispatches all of my download plugins to do their thing, and monitors the result. It lets me dive in to their logs, connect to the live tty, or kill the pertinent process.

That statements downloading workflow is an example of a pattern in my use of AI: ask it to build the necessary tools for me to do what I want, with my private data, when I want. Don’t ask it to DO what you want. Ask it to AUTOMATE doing what you want.

For years I’ve been grappling with the problem of maintaining a local archive of all the digital documents that used to naturally archive themselves by showing up on paper. I got Claude to help me orchestrate the whole ... https://danielpunkass.micro.blog/2026/04/14/for-years-ive-been-grappling.html

My kids have been incredibly successful so far. I’m sure they could have done “better” by somebody’s standard, but I never wanted to stress them out. They enjoy doing well, and many times that means getting an A, but sometimes it means getting a B. They are perfect.

I “just” got back from the ACPT: America’s crossword tournament. It takes a while to sink in, because it’s a surreal experience living, eating, drinking, and most importantly SOLVING in the midst of so many amazing crossword enthusiasts. Even the celebrities there are accessible. So cool, so nerdy.

@darthbluesky.bsky.social Thank you for favoriting and reposting. It's this little guy. He's the cool sax and piano player now :)

My 14yo started with violin in 3rd grade, switch to saxophone in 4th grade, but took piano lessons on the side. Those only lasted a couple years, but thanks to his commitment to the sax he joined the middle school jazz ensemble. Now he’s playing Dave Brubeck riffs on piano while I write this. 😭

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about “America” (the USA) is that people as diametrically opposed as the staunchest conservative, easily labeled a fascist, and the staunchest liberal, easily labeled an anarchist, find common ground declaring the United States as the country they are most loyal to.

In some countries, announcing you have a better espionage tool than the government might be considered an act of insurrection, but I hope that is not the case here.

If Anthropic has really developed an LLM that can suss out security weaknesses better than any other AI, the US government would be foolish to continue shunning them. Oh, right, it is foolish.