Interesting to come back to C++ after over 15 years. While I've been gone they've finally admitted that operating systems exist and provide enough useful OS integration out of the box to make it a half-reasonable platform.

This would be a very good week for anyone who has not already abandoned the Mercator projection for maps of the world to do so

Finally, finally getting off my butt and getting off all possible US goods and services. Some will just take longer than others! www.goeuropean.org

First US tech company/service dropped from my life, long overdue: Backblaze. Lets go for Norwegian company Jottcloud instead. 10 minutes work to change my rclone backup script over to use Jotta instead for backups, and hey - a waaay nicer UX in their web console, to boot 🙂🪄

The best use of American AI today would be to help Europe build its own sovereign technologies: operating systems, social media, communications, semiconductors, defence, and yes, more AI. While the subsidies are flowing, let them underwrite a future of genuine technological independence.

I worked in C++ from 1995 to 2010, then in Python from 2010 to 2025. I've been building complex native application in C++ again recently, almost entirely mediated by AI. It's hard to leave a 100x performance gain on the table when the dev- experience of interpreted versus native code is eliminated.

One Earth radius of cycling in 2025 achieved. For the other geo-pedants out there, a distance slightly greater than that from the summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, which at 6384.4 km is the furthest point from the centre of the Earth. 🌍 🚴‍♂️

This misses what’s happening: a categorical shift from specifying program representations in ever higher-level languages, to delegation. I’m no longer expressing programs; I’m directing an agent that expresses and manipulates programs. The directions themselves are ephemeral.

On zero-sum thinking. www.ft.com/content/30a4...

Favorite so far

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely? hey.paris/posts/appleid/

"I hate AI because it states blatantly wrong things confidently sometimes. And also because it uses 50 gajillion gallons of water per query."

Slop in, slop out.

Why are Apple emulating failing eyesight with their new Liquid Glass app icon filter?

Empire of AI by @karenhao.bsky.social contains serious errors regarding data centre water use. I thought it was an important book which I’ve recommended to folks, but I won’t be recommending it further unless a heavily revised second edition is published. andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-...

The people making a pig’s ear of programming _with_ AI are mostly the same ones who made a pig’s ear of it _without_ AI. Still talking only about features, still ignoring system qualities. Same mindset, new tools, same outcome.

When you realise that the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect applies to all of Wikipedia.

Status: Fixing Human Slop on Wikipedia.

From 1998: “An [SGI] Octane system featuring 250-MHz R10000 processor, meanwhile, will drop from $38,995 to $24,995.” I was coding on systems like this around the turn of the millennium. There’s a huge upside in how much money we’ll be prepared to pay for AI tooling. $200/month is nothing.

I can't help but wonder if this post would have got more attention on his platform if I had omitted the word 'vibe'.

I became interested in a space-filling foam called the Weaire-Phelan structure. I struggled to build intuition from static pictures, so I vibe-coded a geometry generator in Python and a custom visualiser in ThreeJS. From idea to realisation in 90 minutes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG1E...

Prediction (10 years) : The revolution currently underway in coding will be almost complete. Prediction (10 years) : There will be more programming than ever, but primarily in English, not in high-level programming languages like Python, C# or Java. English: HL-PLLs :: HL-PLLs : assembly

Computing finally produces phenomena that demand the scientific method to understand and leverage, only to reveal that Computer Scientists were never taught how to do science.

To all the programmers out there, TIL that the number of centiseconds in a day is divisible by 256.

Fractal yak shaving status: Annotating the disassembly of an operating system at well past my bedtime.

"I apologize - I made a mistake. When I did git stash drop, I permanently deleted your uncommitted changes." Thanks, Claude. 🤦

Convinced the crisis of app UX is a result of a generation of designers who have never experienced computers being used (and needed!) for serious work. A fucking avalanche of triviality.

A new personal best.

Friday morning, 8½ hours of work lined up for the coding servant. The weekend starts here?

On decibels: ”The bel is named in the honor of Alexander Bell; this is in the same tradition that prompted us to name the “wat” in honor of James Watt.“

I’d like to be able to claim this this is my 15 year old daughter’s first international independent travel experience 🇳🇴 ✈️ 🇬🇧 , but she’s already had a day out in Göteborg 🇸🇪 without asking.

Go Trump! [Not really]

There are two rational responses to AI-assisted programming: 1) Do the same work in (much) less time. Work less. Enjoy life. 2) Manage multiple agents concurrently, and work just as much as before. At an individual level many would prefer 1. At a population level we'll all be driven to option 2.

Workers have completed the main excavation of the Brenner Base Tunnel between Austria and Italy, set to become the world’s longest underground rail link. The project is a key part of the EU’s push to shift freight from road to rail, cutting pollution and boosting European trade.

A short tale illustrating the need for sovereign European AI: Claude: label. isHidden = true label.wantsLayer = true label. layer?. isHidden = true // Belt and suspenders Me: I'm British. Belt and *braces*. Suspenders are what ladies use to hold up their stockings.

No wonder the rear brakes on my touring bike were protesting for the last day or so of cycling from Oslo to Monaco. No brake lining left at all. Still, they got me down four mountain ranges and around 30000 metres of descent, with a heavily laden bike. 🚲

Too long since I made any truly whimsical software, so last night I added Apple Touch Bar support to the Mac version of the BeebEm BBC Micro Emulator to give important missing function keys f0-f9 in iconic red-orange, a copy key in somewhat less iconic olive-brown and, a Break key in desiato black.

🎵 Too many agents on the go... It's a nightmare scenario... 🎶

Very LinkedIn Agile Consultant: What really matters is continuous improvement. Tiny wins. Every sprint. 🚀 Dev: I used <favourite-coding-agent>. Code’s better now. Not perfect. Very LinkedIn Agile Consultant: NOT PERFECT?! AI SLOP!!

Good numbers today! 25 km/h over 130 km. 🚴‍♂️ In Norway, not Norfolk, too.

It's time I found a new contract, so... If you’re looking for a backend dev (C#/C++), need a hand with build/test/deployment automation, or getting to grips with TDD/agile ways of working, etc. then I might be of use. London, Cambridgeshire, or remote. www.linkedin.com/in/chrisoldw...

Perhaps the quietest place I have ever been. So peaceful.

Another step towards me giving up on the UK completely.

Day 5 of returning from a 3270 km cycle tour from Oslo 🇳🇴 to Monte Carlo 🇲🇨. Boat is by far the best way to arrive in Oslo. As I pass by home, it’s still one of the more beautiful places I’ve been on my travels. 🇳🇴 ❤️

When OpenAI say “Legitimate Ph.D. level expert” they don’t tell you that a Ph.D. is a pre-academic early career trainee research student, mostly figuring out how to do research, rather than being particularly expert in anything.

Day 4 of returning from a 3270 km cycle tour from Oslo 🇳🇴 to Monte Carlo 🇲🇨 “by train”. Cycled from the campsite the remaining 30 km to Kiel, in lieu of Deutschebahn’s comprehensive failure to operated the railway yesterday. Now on board the Color Line ferry from Kiel to Oslo.

Day 3 of returning from a 3270 km cycle tour from Oslo 🇳🇴 to Monte Carlo 🇲🇨 by train. IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOLLOWS Don’t on any account consider taking your bike on a train in Germany.

Day 2 of returning from a 3270 km cycle tour from Oslo 🇳🇴 to Monte Carlo 🇲🇨 by train: The crux – Germany 🇩🇪. This morning I start in Zurich🇨🇭. Let’s see how far north I can get having patched together a bizarre and somewhat fragile route with extremely scarce cycle reservation slots at short notice.

Having cycled from Oslo 🇳🇴 to Monte Carlo 🇲🇨, I now need to get home. Rather than disassemble the bike and fly from Nice 🇫🇷, I’ll take the train. Much like the cycling I don’t have a detailed plan, just a vision to head home, which means North.

Thing about time-series maximums is that they only ever go up.