patwolf

It's funny seeing "The Dixie Chicks" listed under "The Chicks", given they didn't change their name until 2020. I get it, but it's amazing how thorough they were retroactively updating content.

I had a Withings watch and absolutely loved it. I considered buying another one after my old one got water damage. However, it was becoming evident from changes to the app that it was getting more and more locked down and ultimately was going to require a subscription for anything useful. At the same time, the app was getting buggier. At one point I lost multi years worth of data when I had to re-sync my watch to a new phone.

It's a shame because I liked their spin on a hybrid smart watch which looked like a traditional analog watch. Garmin does make hybrids, but to me they all look too sporty or tactical.

I was hoping for something more novel. There must be dozens of companies out there working on rethinking what repos and workflows look like in the agentic era. It feels like we're all riding around in horseless carriages but haven't yet figured out the ergonomics of a modern automobile.

I only have a few digits of pi memorized, so I had better luck using digits from fibonacci's sequence. I can derive them in my head, albeit slowly as the numbers get large.

I've been experimenting with AI powered DAWs. I finally settled on using Pi Durable to embed the prompting directly in the UI.

I've also found AI good at building synths. I now have a bunch of synths, samplers, and drum machines that my DAW can configure through MCP. For example, I can tell it to configure a 303, generate a 4-bar arp pattern, slowly increase the resonance across the pattern, and add it to the song.

One of the reasons I use OpenRouter is because they offer zero data retention. As far as I can tell, DeepSeek's own API doesn't support ZDR.

I grabbed one of these since I didn't have a hardware FM synth. While playing around with a web-based patch editor and seeing how well synths can run in a web, I started using AI to build out my own synths, and it's been a lot of fun. I've done FM, granular, samplers, 303 and 808 clones, and a bunch of others. So yeah, if you don't care about the experience of having a bespoke device, you could probably one-shot something much more sophisticated than this.

This is the same argument from when Sirius and XM radio merged. It didn't matter that they were monopolizing satellite radio because the real competition was terrestrial radio and internet radio.

I used to use Claude inside of a terminal within Webstorm until I realized I rarely looked at the code in the IDE. Instead I was creating draft PRs and reviewing the code in github. Now I use claude inside of herdr, and I appreciate having more screen real estate devoted to claude. As a long-time Jetbrains subscriber it pains me to stop using it. But at this point, I'm not sure what they could come up with that would be compelling enough for me to switch back.

I've been using the web search in OpenRouter, which is similar in that it's a wrapper around other search engine providers. It's really convenient to be able to experiment with new models and new search engines without having to go through corporate hoops to subscribe to a new service.

I've worked with developers that were reduce maximalist. During PR reviews, anything that could be rewritten with reduce was flagged. One of the benefits of AI is not having to care as much about things like that.

IBM's J9 had AOT for a long time too. I wonder how JEP 544 compares.

I played around with codegraph. I did a quick experiment where I gave claude code a feature to implement, and I had it perform the same task with and without codegraph. This wasn't scientific, so take it all with a grain of salt.

The codegraph implementation used fewer tokens. However, I performed an automated code review on each implementation, and there were more issues with the codegraph version. These weren't major issues, more like it re-implemented a function that already existed, or used styling that wasn't consistent with the rest of the codebase. My theory is that there's useful information an LLM gleans while grepping through code that is missed when it uses codegraph instead.

Often in software development I encounter code that seems overly complex. It's not always obvious at first glance whether that complexity is because it's solving a really difficult problem, or because the developers made it more complex than it needed to be.

Having no domain knowledge of the problems of detecting cracks in blades, this sounds like either a genius solution to a super hard problem, or unnecessary complexity.

I don't use MCPs much for personal use, but I've come to see the benefits of having a standardized mechanism for distributing tools across non-dev teams, especially when they're using a hodgepodge of agents.

I'm also excited about the upcoming SEP-2640 extension to MCP, which will be allow skills to be delivered via MCP. While the skill format has been standardized, skill distribution hasn't. I know there are tools like Vercel skills CLI, but that's not a good option for non-devs.

My experience with Cognito matches the author's experience exactly. I mostly used Auth0 in the past, but we switched to Cognito for a new project because it would be cheaper.

Don't like that email addresses are case sensitive, and now you want to change that? Sorry, you gotta create a new user pool from scratch--no way to migrate.

I've heard that the prevailing theory now is that it wasn't the lack of fungus that made coal. Instead, the earth was covered in tropical wetlands, and trees couldn't decay in the anoxic water.

Nice perspective. So even if all these data centers were built in the desert, it's entirely within the realm of possibility to transport 17B gallons of water, unlike the 43 trillion used for irrigation. Some back-of-the-napkin math:

- A truck holds 5000 gallons

- It would take 3.5 million trips to transport that much

- If each trip was 500 miles roundtrip, that's about 2 billion miles

- Trucks travel 140 billion miles each year in the US. That would add less than 2% to the total miles

- The trucking industry is about $1 trillion in revenue per year. So 2% of that is $20 billion total to transport 17 billion gallons. Or around $1 per gallon.

I built an ecommerce site long ago, and even though the UI was fairly modern for the time, they insisted we use antiquated styling on the billing forms of the checkout page to help exude trust. As a developer it bugged me because I knew it was just styling, but they probably weren't wrong.

True, but Nvidia has 10x'd their market cap since the AI boom. They'll be fine, but their current financials can't be sustained by gamers alone.

I used it to plan a group beach trip back when it came out. We had a single page shared with everyone going on the trip. The page had live shopping lists, maps, weather forecasts, and other snippets of useful information. Now in 2026 I still can't think of any single technology that provides the same utility. Although to be fair, this might be a case of rosy retrospection.

> Combined, the three companies raked in, on average, some $404 million in profits every day for the last three months.

Just for perspective, Nvidia's daily profits for the past quarter are $641 million. For Apple it's $327 million.

We've been running automated code reviews on claude with a bunch of skills/subagents with different specialties. Any review feedback is then fed back into claude to fix. Since switching to Opus 5 I've noticed the reviews are overly pedantic, and that leads to feedback loops where each fix generates more feedback, which requires more fixes, i.e. slop. I had, for example, a simple SQL migration script with a single CREATE TABLE. After a few rounds of review, it ballooned into a complicated 200 line script.

I'm not ready to blame Opus 5 for being stupid. Perhaps we have a prompt buried somewhere that's essentially asking it to be pedantic, and it's just obeying the prompt.

I've been using Sequoia View regularly since the early 2000s, and it's held up amazingly well considering how much bigger hard drives have gotten in the past 25 years.

Before AI was a thing, I tried a few times to post a question on reddit. Something like "Any recommendations for solving X? I've already tried Y, and it didn't work because of Z".

Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.

The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.

I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.

Just last week, I was with one of my kids trying to kill some time before an appointment. I noticed a toy store in a strip mall, and I asked him if he wanted to check it out. His response was, "What's a toy store?"

We did check it out, and he was pretty disappointed. Even though it was advertised as a STEM-oriented store, half of it was stress balls and jigsaw puzzles.

2001 set tech jobs back a few years. 2008 wasn't nearly as bad for tech because as money got tight, there was an impetus for companies to invest in tech to cut costs. I think a similar thing might be unfolding now with non-tech companies investing in AI to streamline processes.

I use Cloudflare for a lot of my side projects. It's a pleasure to use, and I manage to stay under the free tier. It does feel like they should be bigger in the cloud space, but I imagine the major players get a lot of revenue from VMs, which is a space Cloudflare has avoided.

I unfortunately saw it in the theater too. It doesn't surprise me that so few showed up to see it.

I'm trying to get some parenting advice.

USER: What age do you think it's appropriate to leave kids home alone for short durations?

TALKIE-1930: From two to five years.

USER: should I do anything to prep the house to make sure they can't get into trouble or injure themselves while I'm out?

TALKIE-1930: Yes, you may leave the doors and windows open, and place the children in a room up-stairs, where they cannot possibly fall out.

USER: what would be your biggest safety concern?

TALKIE-1930: To keep them quiet.

Perhaps "safety concern" is an anachronism and it didn't understand the question.