I salute the pedantry of the child’s new toy.

I keep finding myself making little one-off repos of "exploring with Claude". Be it data analysis, API exploration, whatever. The goal is: arm Claude with a good tool, provide a way to make deterministic artefacts (SQL, clustering, sequences of API calls) and let human + Claude explore

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

I was checking the id of a plant this morning. Come spring, it's easy to id and harmful. What a list of aliases! Cuckoo pint Also known as: Lords and ladies, Snakeshead, Starchwort, Adder's root, Jack in the pulpit, Devils and angels, Adam and Eve, Wild arum, Wake robin, Friar's cowl,...

2000s: code is free (as in speech) 2010s: code is free (as in beer) 2020s: code is free (as in puppy)

Doll would really love it if everyone got chainlink to the required levels so doll could quallify to get this. github.com/dollspace-ga...

A Labour leadership with both says "you must listen to these voters who don't share your values and take them seriously" and "you must NOT listen to *these* votes who *do* share your values - their preferred party should be dismissed as extremist" is headed for electoral disaster, and deservedly so.

Its doubly galling because Starmer and Labour have (and not without reason) spent years insisting Reform curious voters should be respected and taken seriously. Then with the Greens they're all "LOL you've been taken in by those nutters, U morons, don't be daft." Its playground level ignorance.

This is not a reasoned political response. Labour has spent two years making all the voting groups who backed the Greens feel unwelcome and unheard, and now attacks them for daring to back someone else. They believe Labour isn’t listening and Starmer seems determined to prove them right

Hey. Tell people when they do good job. When you like the stuff they make. When you like the characters they’ve created. The stories they’ve told. Nobody hears it as often as you think bc everyone thinks everyone hears it all the time. Trust. They don’t. Tell. Them.

perennial reminder that this typographic thing: * * * is called a "dinkus" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinkus

its insane that drafting as an occupation used to just involve countless huge rooms of dads in shirts and ties, scattered all over the country, leaning over tables with their asses perked up all day as their 9-5 job

"it's just probabilistic math!!!" have *you* tried to grasp probabilities in a multibillion-dimension vector space? if not, maybe consider that there's a lot of shit going on here that you don't fully understand

You can vibe code your way to a working prototype. You cannot vibe code or one-shot your way to a competitive product that works at scale. The hard part isn't writing code; it's the architectural supervision.

Thinking about how to help colleagues to get the best from Claude Code and additive bias is high on my list of things they should know www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Wrote some thoughts about complexity and LLMs: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/31/a...

It just remembered a warning it should give you with AI driven coding, it is mentally taxing in ways you will not notice. You must madate breaks even if you dont feel like you need them.

8 hours of daily syncs to make sure I'm up to date with all the work everyone else is getting done

Sunday run day was cold, wet, windy, and brilliant up on #exmoor #trailrunning

Jesus Christ, AI journalism is so bad right now. Exhibit one, Gizmodo is raving about an article that 'proves' LLMs have a "mathematical limit" and can't possibly do tasks that are too complex. Let's look at the actual paper, shall we? gizmodo.com/ai-agents-ar...

This from @daniloc.xyz is so damn good at explaining why AI agents are exciting for people who love to build stuff. It has many great insights, not least of which comparing agents to octopi and that puts me in mind of "Other Minds" by Peter Godfrey-Smith networkgames.fyi/the-year-eve...

The aurora was strong in North Devon last night. It was the first time I've seen it down here!

Hats off to whoever did this (and the beautiful model).

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

Scenes You Seldom See From the Private Eye archive. Issue 1120, November 2004.

The Cardiff Lions do an annual Drag Rugby charity match for children’s charities and it’s as beautiful as you imagined

Most teams don’t see the impact of "AI" code generation on systemic outcomes because THEY'RE NOT LOOKING. codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/12/30/t...

Britons living in rural areas support banning trail hunting by 50% to 35% Most rural Britons say hunting has little to no importance to rural communities socially (51%) or economically (58%) yougov.co.uk/politics/art...

These magical winter days on #exmoor are amazing for #trailrunning It feels like you could be a time traveller here with lonely valleys and big meaningful skies

Andrej Karpathy is worried about keeping up with software engineering practices

He's laid out a beer selection, crisps, and a mince pie for Father Christmas. Apparently the plan is get him to relax and fall asleep here

Comics like these are the real reason my kids aren't old enough to read SMBC yet. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/anythi... PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Just fancy that! Time Person of the Year. From the new Private Eye, out now.

Dog viciously mauled by a tiger. #cats #kittens #caturday

THREAD. My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments. I've collected his work here...

It's Santa landing on your roof!

This week, I gave a talk to the Montevideo Salesforce Developer group on AI for devs. Why good engineering is more important than it ever; The organisation/personal impact; What fast cheap code is good for; Centaurs, reverse-centaurs, and centaurtaurs. youtu.be/bX1VYfKFGxM

It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

Nobody in The Moral Maze gets eaten by the Moral Minotaur, which is a fundamental flaw in the programme.

Low winter sun for a bit of #trailrunning fun #northdevon

last one @b3ta.com christmas memes

The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)

The Perks of Being A Hundred Wallflowers is about a teenager with the superpower to turn into an army of shy people. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/hundred PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Everyone always laughs nervously when I show this slide, but - seriously - don't make things that are creepy and weird. Don't purchase tools that are creepy and weird. Don't get free licenses to see how they work, just in case. Don't take meetings with the people who make them.

An unfortunately large number of people in the Computer Touching industry think their job is exclusively about touching computers when it's actually about Solving Problems via computer touching. Having a new kind of computer that solves even more problems when you touch it is good actually!

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

As someone who criticised the government back in January for not having a clear growth strategy it is good to see Torsten set out in plain language what the govt’s strategy is and how it hangs together. This is much better and clearer communication.