Long term readers may wonder – VS Code, Ben? Really? Let’s not getting into that now, instead, just the issue before us. The problem before us is that we want to highlight just the active indent guide of the code in the editor. By default, VS Code highlights both the active indent level, and also, […]

Lots of links and a new outtakes section

I joined a recording of the Oxide and Friends podcast on Tuesday to talk about 1, 3 and 6 year predictions for the tech industry. This is my second appearance on their annual predictions episode, you can see my predictions from January 2025 here. Here's the page for this year's episode, with options to listen in all of your favorite podcast apps or directly on YouTube. Bryan Cantrill started th...

How Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI I picked up a few interesting tidbits from this Wall Street Journal piece on Google's recent hard won success with Gemini. Here's the origin of the name "Nano Banana": Naina Raisinghani, known inside Google for working late into the night, needed a name for the new tool to complete the upload. It was 2:30 a.m., though, and nobody was aro...

A solution to swapping usernames when cross posting between Mastodon and Bluesky

Principal Programmer Jeremy Daer explains how we moved billions of files out of Amazon S3 with zero downtime.

Old steam trains often had whistles that worked much like organ pipes, as both are labial aerophones, instruments where air splits against a sharp edge to create sound. Perhaps that’s why trains always seemed so alive to me. I breathe. They breathe. Organs breathe. This might be how a choir of trains would sound, gathered together in a depot before sleep.coignard.org/wiegenlied-fuer-zuege

Matthias Ott shared a link to a post from Anthropic titled “Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign”, which I read because I’m interested in the messy intersection of AI and security. I gotta say: I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything quite like this article. At first, the article felt like a responsible disclosure — “Hey, we’re reaching an inflection point wher...

📷 Created a series to document the snowfall around where I live during this winter season. You can see all the photos in Winter 25/26 series. Hoping to have a few more days worth of photos! 🤞

[...] the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month. [...] Traf...

An update to my default apps list

AGI is here! When exactly it arrived, we’ll never know; whether it was one company’s Pro or another company’s Pro Max (Eddie Bauer Edition) that tip-toed first across the line … you may debate. But generality has been achieved, & now we can proceed to new questions. [...] The key word in Artificial General Intelligence is General. That’s the word that makes this AI unlike every other AI: be...

If the Logitech servers are down, my mouse is broken and that is fucking stupid

A field guide to sandboxes for AI This guide to the current sandboxing landscape by Luis Cardoso is comprehensive, dense and absolutely fantastic. He starts by differentiating between containers (which share the host kernel), microVMs (their own guest kernel behind hardwae virtualization), gVisor userspace kernels and WebAssembly/isolates that constrain everything within a runtime. The piece th...

Recently, Kev posted a survey on his site to figure out how people access his content. Big fan of asking people directly and the results are not at all surprising to me. As I said to him, RSS traffic on my server is VERY high. But it's fun to get more datapoints so I created a similar survey and I'd really appreciate it if you could take probably 10 seconds to answer it. It's literally 1 questi...

Chip Rossetti, 2014 Donald James Parker has written no fewer than 18 evangelical Christian feature films since 2013, and he starred in most of them as well, including Gramps Goes to College. They say you should write about what you know, and Parker’s main character in this film—a retired computer programmer who played tennis as an undergrad and moves from South Dakota to Tennessee—is ...

Importing my pens and inks into Obsidian bases and showing a preview of a hex code in a Base

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons Devastating critique of the new menu icons in macOS Tahoe by Nikita Prokopov, who starts by quoting the 1992 Apple HIG rule to not "overload the user with complex icons" and then provides comprehensive evidence of Tahoe doing exactly that. In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphor...

The year is 2026, and RSS is still, by far, the best way to keep up with sites on the web. If you already know what RSS is but you’re not currently using it, consider this a reminder for you to dust off that RSS reader of yours and put it back to use. And don’t listen to the party-poopers that claim that RSS is dead. It is not. If instead you don’t know what RSS is, here’s a very brief explanat...

Oxide and Friends Predictions 2026, today at 4pm PT I joined the Oxide and Friends podcast last year to predict the next 1, 3 and 6 years(!) of AI developments. With hindsight I did very badly, but they're inviting me back again anyway to have another go. We will be recording live today at 4pm Pacific on their Discord - you can join that here, and the podcast version will go out shortly afterwa...

Microsoft’s definitely huffing the good stuff. WowNeeds more .NET Want to leave a comment?, or just Respond via email.

Rijswijk, NL

A flexible system for consistent stroke widths across type sizes Before vector art, high-DPI raster image processing, and retina screens took over the world, if someone wanted to draw very fine and precise lines, they relied upon steady hands, cork-backed metal rulers, French curves, and a set of expensive technical pens. The Rapidograph pens I used in college could be a headache to maintain—...

It genuinely feels to me like GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 in November represent an inflection point - one of those moments where the models get incrementally better in a way that tips across an invisible capability line where suddenly a whole bunch of much harder coding problems open up. Tags: anthropic, claude, openai, ai, llms, gpt-5, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, claude-4

The setup for my notes blog looks like this: Content is plain-text markdown files (synced via Dropbox, editable in iA Writer on my Mac, iPad, or iPhone) Codebase is on GitHub Builds are triggered in Netlify by a Shortcut I try to catch spelling issues and what not before I publish, but I’m not perfect. I can proofread a draft as much as I want, but nothing helps me catch errors better than hi...

I don’t much enjoy being a lab rat to your half-baked ideas. I can tell when your approach to what I use is: “Ship it and let’s see how people respond.” Well let me tell you something: I’m not going to respond. My desire to give you constructive feedback is in direct correlation to your effort to care — about your communications, about what you ship, even about what you don’t ship. Just becaus...

With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency - regardless of what you promised. Someone is scraping your API, automating your quirks, caching your bugs. This creates a career-level insight: you can’t treat compatibility work as “maintenance” and new features as “real work.” Compatibility is product. Design your deprecations as migrations with time, tooling, and empathy. Mos...

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up anymore...

Added to the film diary:Wake Up Dead ManRian Johnson, 2025, ★★½PFS at the Bourse, Philadelphia, PAThe 10th VictimElio Petri, 1965, ★★★½Sleepless in SeattleNora Ephron, 1993, ★★★½MouseHuntGore Verbinski, 1997, ★★½A Single ManTom Ford, 2009, ★★ Tagged: January 2026 Reply via email

I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour. It's not perfect and I'm iterating on it but this is where we are right now. If you are skeptical of coding agents, try ...

🔗 AI statement I wonder if I should add something like that to my blog. Also, loved the PS.

Hello! This is my summary of 2025 and the “start here” post for new readers. Links and stats follow… According to Fathom, my most trafficked posts of 2025 were (in descending order): Context plumbing (29 Nov) Extending AI chat with Model Context Protocol (and why it matters) (11 Feb) Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected (19 Feb) tl;dr I ran a marathon at the weekend and it was hard (4 Ap...

Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger? Depending on how you measure it, the tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger appears to be 123.45 beats per minute. This is one of those things that's so cool I'm just going to accept it as true. (I only today learned from the Hacker News comments that Veridis Quo is "Very Disco", and if you flip the o...

🔗 The Case for Blogging in the Ruins great blog post with a clear call to action: start a blog! This call to action is probably not useful here, I bet most people reading my blog owns a blog, but if you don’t, get one! ☝️ Seriously! Don’t wait any longer! And send me the link please!

My experience is that real AI adoption on real problems is a complex blend of: domain context on the problem, domain experience with AI tooling, and old-fashioned IT issues. I’m deeply skeptical of any initiative for internal AI adoption that doesn’t anchor on all three of those. This is an advantage of earlier stage companies, because you can often find aspects of all three of those in a singl...

The most popular blogs of Hacker News in 2025 Michael Lynch maintains HN Popularity Contest, a site that tracks personal blogs on Hacker News and scores them based on how well they perform on that platform. The engine behind the project is the domain-meta.csv CSV on GiHub, a hand-curated list of known personal blogs with author and bio and tag metadata, which Michael uses to separate out person...

A new year has begun! Lots of people have goals established, set out to do things. Not me. Well, I finished 2025 trying to simplify things. I left social media a couple months ago. Not entirely, I was still lurking around instagram an embarrassing amount of time. Late December I deleted the app, logged out. Four days after, I downloaded the app again, logged in and deactivated my account. Delet...

A basic version of profiles are now available to everyone on EchoFeed

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with V.H. Belvadi, whose blog can be found at vhbelvadi.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Marcus Richardson and the other 129 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar...

I sent the December edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access a copy here. In the newsletter this month: An in-depth review of LLMs in 2025 My coding agent projects in December New models for December 2025 Skills are an open standard now Claude's "Soul Document" Tools I'm using at the moment Here's a copy of the Nov...

[Claude Code] has the potential to transform all of tech. I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that t...

I am a huge fan of gistpreview.github.io, the site by Leon Huang that lets you append ?GIST_id to see a browser-rendered version of an HTML page that you have saved to a Gist. The last commit was ten years ago and I needed a couple of small changes so I've forked it and deployed an updated version at gisthost.github.io. Some background on gistpreview The genius thing about gistpreview.github.io...

I got a speeding ticket the other day, my first in probably more than 25 years. After a decade and a half of not owning a car, L and I reluctantly accepted a hand-me-down Hyundai Tucson a couple years ago so we could be more nimble for the sake of our aging parents. Not coincidentally, I’ve been driving it a lot lately, making regular visits to the memory-care residence my mom now calls home, o...

I distinctly remember waking up early, on January 1st, 2017, going downstairs with my laptop, making myself some coffee, and coding what ended up being the first iteration of this blog. I wanted to write weekly updates to hold myself accountable. I failed spectacularly. Reading that post from 9 years ago made me smile: 27-year-old me wanted to cut down on distractions and get the habit of waki...

Howdy folks, can you believe that the year is over? Shocking! I spent December travelling around Sri Lanka with my family, and it was incredible! I published a few pics from our trip. I managed to catch up on a long reading list and, as I do every year, I published my annual summary of the past year. It’s been a good year for me! I have a ton of good links for you prepared this month. Eve...

This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 and Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. It’s been a year filled with a lot of different trends. The year of "reasoning" The year of agents The year of coding agents and Claude Code The year of LLMs on the comma...

Stickers, journalling, so many links

Happy New Year! 🎆 May 2026 be a nice year to every one of us! With less doom-scrolling, less AI all the time. More creativity, human authenticity, and niceness among earthlings! 🙂🙃 Photos from the last few days!

A functional Lisp interpreter as a single PostgreSQL query The post Happy New Year: Lisp interpreter in SQL appeared first on EXPLAIN EXTENDED.

Codex cloud is now called Codex web It looks like OpenAI's Codex cloud (the cloud version of their Codex coding agent) was quietly rebranded to Codex web at some point in the last few days. Here's a screenshot of the Internet Archive copy from 18th December (the capture on the 28th maintains that Codex cloud title but did not fully load CSS for me): And here's that same page today with the upd...

2025 was tough, but 2026 will be even better than 2027.

As usual, I don’t do year-end summaries, but why not try summing up the first quarter of this century? Summarising all of this in text would be completely pointless, far too much has managed to happen. So instead, let there be a video assembled from bits of various other recordings I’ve filmed over 2024-2025. The video with music is from September, but it turned out so saturated that it makes a...

[...] The puzzle is still there. What’s gone is the labor. I never enjoyed hitting keys, writing minimal repro cases with little insight, digging through debug logs, or trying to decipher some obscure AWS IAM permission error. That work wasn’t the puzzle for me. It was just friction, laborious and frustrating. The thinking remains; the hitting of the keys and the frustrating is what’s been remo...

TIL: Downloading archived Git repositories from archive.softwareheritage.org Back in February I blogged about a neat Python library called sqlite-s3vfs for accessing SQLite databases hosted in an S3 bucket, released as MIT licensed open source by the UK government's Department for Business and Trade. I went looking for it today and found that the github.com/uktrade/sqlite-s3vfs repository is no...

In essence a language model changes you from a programmer who writes lines of code, to a programmer that manages the context the model has access to, prunes irrelevant things, adds useful material to context, and writes detailed specifications. If that doesn't sound fun to you, you won't enjoy it. Think about it as if it is a junior developer that has read every textbook in the world but has 0 ...

Josh Safdie, 2025, ★★★★ What a relief that this is not the uplifting sports drama it’s being sold as, but rather a properly stressful Safdie movie full of terrible people. Also, I’m not sure why every single pair of eyeglasses in this film is exquisite, but I’m all for it. Tagged: December 2025, film diary, film, review, Josh Safdie, PFS East, Philadelphia, PA Reply via e...

We spent most of the month in Sri Lanka. It is becoming our annual tradition to travel abroad for the Christmas season. What a country, I’m telling you! People in Sri Lanka are incredibly kind. No matter whether they are wealthy or living in extreme poverty, no matter which god they pray to, south or north, Sri Lankan people are the loveliest. Crazy tuk-tuk drivers though! Do not ask them for n...

shot-scraper 1.9 New release of my shot-scraper CLI tool for taking screenshots and scraping websites with JavaScript from the terminal. The shot-scraper har command has a new -x/--extract option which extracts all of the resources loaded by the page out to a set of files. This location can be controlled by the -o dir/ option. #184 Fixed the shot-scraper accessibility command for compatibilit...

But once we got that and got this aviation grade testing in place, the number of bugs just dropped to a trickle. Now we still do have bugs but the aviation grade testing allows us to move fast, which is important because in this business you either move fast or you're disrupted. So, we're able to make major changes to the structure of the code that we deliver and be confident that we're not bre...

The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -- into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language. That was the hard part when programmers were pun...

2025 year in review

Copyright Release for Contributions To SQLite D. Richard Hipp called me out for spreading misinformation on Hacker News that SQLite refuses outside contributions: No, Simon, we don't "refuse". We are just very selective and there is a lot of paperwork involved to confirm the contribution is in the public domain and does not contaminate the SQLite core with licensed code. I deeply regret this ...

Recently I’ve been composing a short organ dedication to a close friend of mine in honour of her birthday. Despite the fact that I mainly work on experimental organ music these days, composing something simple and uncomplicated for a change turned out to be quite inspiring as well.coignard.org/fuer-irina

In addition to my recent notes about the experimental organ ambient album “Wolfen”, I’d also like to share a short video I’ve assembled from parts of the documentary “Original Wolfen. Aus der Geschichte einer Filmfabrik”, filmed in 1995 by Niels Bolbrinker and Kerstin Stutterheim. Overall, the resulting work complements the musical composition rather well, particularly because with that low-fre...

Recently I shared a couple of useful templates for Dorico, the notation software, on the Steinberg forums, and I’d like to briefly mention this here in my weblog. The templates are made to simplify composing for Organteq 2, the physical model of an organ.The first template allows opening and closing stops using their names in notation, making it easier to compose drafts. The second template is ...

The year is about to end, and it’s unlikely I’ll finish more books, so I think it’s a good time to recap the books I read in 2025. I’m not going to include links to buy these books. There’s no point in doing that because you know better than I do where you like to buy books. Some I read in Italian, others in English, but I’ll list the English version here when possible. Carrying the Fire by Mi...

Jevons paradox is coming to knowledge work. By making it far cheaper to take on any type of task that we can possibly imagine, we’re ultimately going to be doing far more. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things we don't even do today as workers: they will be used on the software projects that wouldn't have been started, the contracts that wouldn't have been reviewed...

simonw/actions-latest Today in extremely niche projects, I got fed up of Claude Code creating GitHub Actions workflows for me that used stale actions: actions/setup-python@v4 when the latest is actions/setup-python@v6 for example. I couldn't find a good single place listing those latest versions, so I had Claude Code for web (via my phone, I'm out on errands) build a Git scraper to publish thos...

In “The Future of Software Development is Software Developers” Jason Gorman alludes to how terrible natural language is at programming computers: The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking – with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions – into computational thinking that is logically precise a...

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47nil has an interesting Notes Framework that is way simpler than my current one for work notes. Coming back from vacations tomorrow, I will probably make some changes to my current system for work notes. Since starting at the new job, I have been taking lots of notes using a local Obsidian vault. That is still somewhat organised, but I feel that it could be better and this gives me some ideas ...

I just found out that a bunch of old posts with broken photos, those were imported from Glass, and because it was just a hot-link to the photo hosted there, they got broken. They probably changed something. 😔 I’m slowly fixing those as I find them. I always remember @jthingelstad post about blog gardening, and I have been trying to mend mine on a daily basis lately.

Added to the film diary:NebraskaAlexander Payne, 2013, ★★★½The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!David Zucker, 1988, ★★★★½The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of FearDavid Zucker, 1991, ★★★½Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final InsultPeter Segal, 1994, ★★★Memoirs of an Invisible ManJohn Carpenter, 1992, ★★½We Want the Funk!Stanley Nelson and Nicole London, 2025, ★★½Bergman IslandMia Hansen-Løve, 2021, ★★★½ ...

I just sent out the latest edition of the newsletter version of this blog. It's a long one! Turns out I wrote a lot of stuff in the past 10 days. The newsletter is out two days later than I had planned because I kept running into an infuriating issue with Substack: it would refuse to save my content with a "Network error" and "Not saved" and I couldn't figure out why. So I asked ChatGPT to dig...

In advocating for LLMs as useful and important technology despite how they're trained I'm beginning to feel a little bit like John Cena in Pluribus. Pluribus spoiler (episode 6) Given our druthers, would we choose to consume HDP? No. Throughout history, most cultures, though not all, have taken a dim view of anthropophagy. Honestly, we're not that keen on it ourselves. But we're left with litt...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Lars-Christian Simonsen, whose blog can be found at lars-christian.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Seth Larson and the other 129 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little a...

I’m away with family this week so here are some more scraps from my notes (previously). Disney is considering a reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise. Goodness knows how many Jurassic Park movies there are. We need to create new IP. Culture creates new ideas downstream. Without new IP, it’s like trying to feed yourself by eating your own arm. So: moratorium on re-using IP in movies. The UK ma...

Paul Verhoeven, 2021, ★★ I decided to close out Christmas with the most sacrilegious thing within reach, but for all its cheekily provocative preoccupation with lust and power, Benedetta’s satire and sleaze are largely drowned out by a tedious veneer of prestige melodrama. Tagged: December 2025, film diary, film, review, Paul Verhoeven Reply via email

Last year we spent the end of December in Portugal, which started a new family tradition of travelling abroad for the Christmas season. We don’t like the cold, Mariah Carey and George Michael songs are not particularly to our taste, and overeating Christmas food just because it’s the holiday season is disgusting. We are in Sri Lanka now, the epicentre of insane tuk-tuk drivers, coconut ro...

William Oldroyd, 2023, ★★★ Massachusetts, I can’t say I miss ya. Tagged: December 2025, film diary, film, review, William Oldroyd Reply via email