March 2025

Why did we fall in love with chat interfaces for human-ai interaction? Let us leave them behind once and for all.

In March 2001, Nintendo introduced an advanced portable model to the gaming market with the release of the Game Boy Advance (GBA, codenamed Advanced Game Boy or AGB). Equipped with a modernized 32-bit ARM CPU running at twice the speed of the Game Boy Color (GBC), this small device was more than capable of playing SNES-like games—still at the price of only two AA batteries.

OK, so AI doesn’t think the same way that people do. I’m fine with that. What’s important to me is that it can do some work for me, work that could also be done by people thinking. Cars (“horseless carriages”) do work that used to be done by horses running. No one now complains that cars work differently than horses.

By emphasizing documentation as the primary source of truth, establishing explicit linkages between development artifacts, and employing iterative, human-guided prompting, the whole team can harness the power of LLMs while mitigating their current limitations.

This is a long overdue post on iximiuz Labs' internal kitchen. It'll cover why I decided to build my own learning-by-doing platform for DevOps, SRE, and Platform engineers, how I designed it, what technology stack chose, and how various components of the platform were implemented. It'll also touch on some of the trade-offs that I had to make along the way and highlight the most interesting parts of the platform's architecture. In the end, I'll, of course, share my thoughts on what's next on the roadmap. Sounds interesting? Then brace for a long read!

In this video and accompanying article I reveal how the seemingly impossible effect in Nine was pulled off.

It turns out that E.T. isn't a bad game after all. With a few simple changes we were able to dramatically improve an already good game by eliminating the most common complaints. With a few additional changes, we were able to clear up any confusion for players who care about the score, and were confused by the differences between what the manual claims and what actually happens in-game. Next time someone tells you that "E.T. for the Atari 2600 is the worst game ever made" you can tell them that this is not the case. It's been fixed, and you know how.

The framework for building with WebAssembly (wasm). Easily load wasm modules, move data, call functions, and build extensible apps.

Model Context Protocol on steroids ;)

Tonight I’ll tell you what gets me excited about my homelab and maybe inspire you to make your own. I'll get into what I like about it and clue you into some of the fun you get to have if one of your projects meant to protect your homelab goes hockey-stick.

Pocket ID is a simple and easy-to-use OIDC provider that allows users to authenticate with their passkeys to your services.

It is therefore my intention, through this article, to write a love letter to this data format, often criticized for the wrong reasons, even more so when it is somehow deemed "cool" to hate on it. My point is not, far from it, to say that CSV is a silver bullet but rather to shine a light on some of the format's sometimes overlooked strengths.

Right now, I’m not overly excited by MCP over “standard” tool calling. I much prefer agents.json and the concepts around endpoint discovery, which feel much more natural if you are working with APIs.

I feel that such claims about the IndieWeb not "taking off" are either stating the obvious or, if that's not the intention, completely missing the point. It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. The IndieWeb doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate in it. Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, embracing creative freedom, and expressing your individuality! It's not about appealing to the masses!

"Vibe Coding" might get you 80% the way to a functioning concept. But to produce something reliable, secure, and worth spending money on, you’ll need experienced humans to do the hard work not possible with today’s models.

One consistent pattern I’ve observed in the past year, since I published "The death of the junior developer", is that junior developers have actually been far more eager to adopt AI than senior devs. It’s not always true; a few folks have told us that their juniors are scared to use it because they think, somewhat irrationally, that it will take their jobs. (See: Behavioral regret theory. Thanks for the pointer Dr. Daniel Rock!)

Engelbart's demo also featured an input device known as the keyset, but unlike his other innovations, the keyset failed to catch on. The 5-finger keyset lets you type without moving your hand, entering characters by pressing multiple keys simultaneously as a chord. Christina Englebart, his daughter, loaned one of Engelbart's keysets to me. I constructed an interface to connect the keyset to USB, so that it can be used with a modern computer. The video below shows me typing with the keyset, using the mouse buttons to select upper case and special characters.

A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React. Opensource alternative to Notion or Outline.

​Odysseus was a groundbreaking larp production that was originally run in 2019 and again as remastered version in 2024. Massive team of volunteers transformed an elementary school into a living, breathing space ship and took over 600 players from 30 different countries to an unforgettable journey through the stars.

Last year, hundreds of players inhabited a spaceship on the run, scrambling to keep one step ahead of the enemy. The sci-fi larp Odysseus was inspired by Battlestar Galactica’s “33“, but where that episode only lasted 45 minutes, Odysseus’ players worked, fought, ate, and slept in-game for fifty non-stop hours.

Once you overcome your desire to compete with others, you can actually just sit back and enjoy the outcomes that others compete to produce for you. Read great books, watch interesting movies, dance to the music, use latest gadgets, and eat good food.

By default, the parser does string interpolation using the characters < (less than) and > (greater than). The cleverness of this is debatable: these characters are also used for I/O redirection, which can quickly make things confusing. Luckily, the parser also accepts the directives .BRA and .KET, each followed by a single character, which lets the programmer override the default interpolation characters. The terms BRA and KET are most likely borrowed from Dirac notation.

Behold (in text) - the mythological Vectrex Computer. Supposedly it even had 5 titles ready to ship in early 1984!

This paradoxical duality of writing commercial software and cracking games defines the complex and often incomprehensible attitude towards copyright or intellectual property - for lack of a better word - on the demo scene.

Political, cultural, technology, and media commentary from a philosophical and radical liberal perspective.

before writing code, put in place some means of verifying that the code is correct, or at least have an idea of what you'll do.

I now, although tentatively, believe that LLMs can indeed succeed in all domains with perfect oracles.

I mean into big papercraft. Like ten feet tall. I built this Recognizer for our TRON party this Sunday:

Sophie builds fun things out of HTML, CSS & JavaScript, and writes blog posts about tech and mental health.

If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

You might have already heard of a 10x engineer. Probably too often, actually. If there's such a thing as a 10x engineer, surely there must be a 1x engineer, too? Of course there is! Let's dig into a non-exhaustive list of what qualities make up a 1x engineer.

My son asked if I’d beaten my game. I explained that I’d transcended it by creating a mathematical representation of its entire possibility space. He asked if that meant “no.”

Software engineer. One-track lover down a two-way lane

Using LLMs to write code is difficult and unintuitive. It takes significant effort to figure out the sharp and soft edges of using them in this way, and there’s precious little guidance to help people figure out how best to apply them. If someone tells you that coding with LLMs is easy they are (probably unintentionally) misleading you. They may well have stumbled on to patterns that work, but those patterns do not come naturally to everyone. I’ve been getting great results out of LLMs for code for over two years now. Here’s my attempt at transferring some of that experience and intution to you.

A steward doesn't jealously guard, or struggle to gain more power. A steward watches what her responsibilities are, ensuring enough to contribute but not so many as to burn out. And she nurtures and cares for the code, to make sure that it continues to serve its purpose. Instead of an adversarial relationship, stewardship promotes partnership: It promotes working with others to figure out how to make the best use of resources, instead of hoarding them for yourself.

A native macOS app that allows users to chat with a local LLM that can respond with information from files, folders and websites on your Mac without installing any other software. Powered by llama.cpp.

A Python script to sync finished books from a Goodreads shelf to a Storygraph journal

Possible alternative to Celery for background job processing

What if super-intelligent AI1 arrives but it can be run by anyone, basically for free?

It’s probably old news for most, but I’ve recently started using Tailscale and wanted to share my experience with it.

It’s the only kind of trade war that Canadian politicians can win against Americans: the kind where prices for Canadians don’t go up because of tariffs; where the price of apps, repair, parts, and upgrades goes way down; and where a new, high-tech manufacturing sector pulls in vast sums from customers all over the world.

The first company to get this will own the next phase of AI development tools. They’ll build tools for real software instead of toys. They’ll make everything available today look like primitive experiments.

Welcome to Boomer Prompts—an affectionate trip down memory lane of the elaborate, quirky, and sometimes overkill techniques used to guide earlier Large Language Models. These “relics” showcase just how much LLMs have evolved—where once you needed to triple your instructions and role-play as a wise oracle, now simpler, more direct prompts suffice. Read on for a chuckle, and discover how far we’ve come!

most of the people still masking are among the strongest, most self-assured people I’ve known. They are the least concerned about other’s perceptions, the most concerned about others/our collective well-being, are embodying self-care by protecting their health (and mental health), willing to interrogate their choices and motivations, and are committed to accepting and integrating data and new information - even when they want desperately to be wrong about what they learn. They are also among the most alienated, judged, ignored, harassed, invisibilized, and forgotten.

An ActivityPub server with an NNTP interface.

Instead of a boring scrollbar thought it would be fun to have an animated stick figure that walks up and down the side of your page when you scroll.

In this article, I'm going to try to work out exactly how 6502 Elite was developed over the years, by looking for clues in the original source code and digging through the game binaries. Software archaeology, here we come...