Extroverted Developer

Hello, world (again)

2026-04-28T18:25:26Z

After many years on WordPress, this site is being rebuilt as a custom ASP.NET Core + Vue 3 + vite-ssg app. SEO-first, single domain, hub-style home page. More to come.

Reverse Engineering MediaCreationTool.exe

2026-04-23T20:42:34Z

The future is less frustrating! I spent about 6 hours the other day trying to create a bootable USB drive so I could re-install Windows 11 on my Alienware Aurora R15 AMD box. I wanted to play Star Craft 2 again and it was crashing on my Bazzite install.

I have done this, what must be, thousands of times since the 90s. I tried all the old ways I knew to do it, then looked up the new ways. Nothing worked. When I did get a Windows Setup screen to boot, it couldn’t detect my hard drive. I tried side-loading the drivers, nothing worked.

MediaCreationTool.exe was Windows only and I didn’t have any windows computers anymore. Just Mac and Linux. Eventually, I remembered by pure chance that I had an Asus ROG hand-held gaming device that ran Windows 11 and had a USB-C port. That worked. I was able to use it to flash the USB, this time the installer recognized much more of my hardware and I installed likely because it came with updated drivers pre-installed.

I woke up this morning still annoyed that something so basic as installing an OS had become so enshitified. And I had a crazy thought.

I downloaded MediaCreationTool.exe to my Mac, and asked Claude to reverse engineer it for the purposes of creating a cross-platform version.

I set Claude to Opus 4.6 Max thinking/effort and gave it a single prompt:

Let’s have some fun and help the indsutry at the same time. I would like to disassemble/reverse engineer the
mediacreationtool.exe in this folder so we can make a cross-platform version for people who only have access to
Mac/Linux. Something Microsoft arguably should be doing to help convert people, but that I had a real need for just
yesterday. Instead of having this tool available, I spent 6 hours trying different things until I ultimately
rememberd that the ONLY windows device I had was a portable gaming console from ASUS. That saved my butt, but it was a pain. If you’re ok with that, then what I’d like to do is first plan out the steps we should take

Claude was game, said it was more like Wine than it was like black hat exploitation and set off. 5 min later it had analyzed the binary, deconstructed the protocols used, and created the plan then started executing on it. The vast majority of the time was spent trying to work around getting IP rate limited/blocked from hitting the server a little too hard in an early attempt.

23 minutes and 38 seconds later it had a working version

According to the status bar the cost was $2.70

Now available, free, open source, works on Mac and Linux:

https://github.com/Xatter/winiso

I’m winning

2026-04-13T14:16:24Z

😜

2026-04-13T13:15:42Z

One of the best uses of agentic AI, specifically Claude CoWork, I’ve had recently is morning briefings. I’ve created morning briefings to check on my calendar and stuff. But the real unlock is asking it to keep up on the latest of local LLM developments. Every day it checks for new hardware announcements, new open source projects, new model drops, and give me a rundown of what it means for me and my specific hardware including recommendations of whether I should consider switching local models.

Before this I felt completely overwhelmed by the pace at which AI was moving even though I use it extensively every day and build my own agents.

Announcing OpenPriceMap

2026-04-10T14:33:17Z

Think Gasbuddy for Everything. OpenPriceMap is a community-driven price map that helps you find the cheapest groceries near you — and every price you report makes the map better for everyone.

The Origin Story

I originally built OpenPriceMap back in 2012. At the time I was dieting pretty hard and needed to find specific foods to hit my macros. The thing was, New York City posed a unique challenge. Not only was everything more expensive than where I had moved from, but stores across the street from one another sold the exact same item — say Chobani Yogurt — at wildly different prices. You could literally cross the street and save 30%. One store charged $1.99, the next one $2.99. For the same yogurt.

So I built OpenPriceMap to start capturing these prices rather than trying to remember them all myself. The idea was simple: if I logged prices, and others did too, we could build a map of all the local prices in a city. Then you could build a shopping cart, and the app would tell you the optimal route — which stores to visit, what to buy at each one — to minimize your total spend while balancing travel distance. (The computer scientists among you might recognize this as the traveling salesman problem.)

Why It Was Hard

There were a lot of problems back then. The biggest one was that we were asking busy people to do a lot of data entry on their phones. We needed to know not only what item you were buying, but where. If the store or product didn’t already exist in the database, you had to enter the store name, address, item name, brand, size, UPC — the works. That’s a lot of friction.

UPC scanners and GPS coordinates helped, but data quality was still a nightmare. Someone would report a Coke at $1.99 but forget to mention it was the 12oz, not the 20oz. Misspellings created duplicate items that should have been combined. As far as I know, Jet.com was the only company that even partially succeeded at building a unified product catalog across vendors who all encoded their inventory differently — and that took an entire team and some serious technology. I don’t think even they fully “solved it.”

Why Now?

I’m not sure I can solve all of those problems on my own, but I think the world has changed a lot since 2012. AI can now help with things that used to require machine learning specialists and data scientists — normalizing product names, merging duplicates, extracting structured data from messy input. The hard parts are becoming tractable. The grocery price problem hasn’t gone away. If anything, inflation has made it worse. So I’m relaunching OpenPriceMap.

What’s In It For You?

This is the part I’m most excited about. The core idea is that helping yourself helps everyone. When you report a price, you’re not doing volunteer work for some faceless community — you’re building your own shopping cart. The community benefit is a side effect of you saving money.

Here’s how it works: you log prices as you shop, and the shopping cart feature uses that data (yours and everyone else’s) to help you plan the cheapest route for your grocery list. Every price you contribute makes the map smarter for you and for your neighbors. No extra effort. You’re multiplying your impact just by shopping.

And there’s more coming. I’m building gamification into the platform — leaderboards for top price reporters in your area, badges for achievements like confirming prices or discovering new stores. Think becoming the “mayor” of your local grocery scene, like the old Foursquare days. If you’re going to save money anyway, you might as well get some bragging rights.

Let’s Build This Together

I’ll be honest: the data isn’t perfect right now. It’s a relaunch, and I’m working to clean things up on the backend. But the app is live, the vision is the same as it was in 2012, and the technology to actually pull it off finally exists. I’m building this in public and I’d love for you to be part of it.

Sign up at openpricemap.com, start reporting prices at your local stores, and let’s build the price map your neighborhood deserves. Every price you log helps — yourself first, and everyone else for free.

Not the robopocalypse we were expecting

2026-04-09T12:46:29Z

My wife just sent me this photo of a bulletin of someone either grifting or trying to get their AI agent a job

#nyc #new york #aijobspocalypse

Testing

2026-04-07T21:17:16Z

Testing WordPressToThreads setup wizard

Buying Bitcoin? You’re Investing in Crime

2026-04-04T12:56:06Z

Bitcoin has been called many things — digital gold, the future of money, a hedge against inflation. But let’s cut through the marketing haze and call it what it actually is: the greatest money laundering tool ever invented, hiding in plain sight as an “investment.” The crypto industry has spent billions crafting a narrative of financial revolution, but strip away the hype and you’re left with a technology whose single most successful real-world application is helping criminals get paid.

I’m not here to be diplomatic about this. If you own Bitcoin, you are — whether you like it or not — a cog in a machine that ransoms hospitals, funds rogue nuclear programs, and launders the profits of human trafficking. Your buy order is the criminal’s payday. And no, telling yourself “I’m in it for the technology” doesn’t wash the blood off the money.

Bitcoin Was Built for Criminals. Full Stop.

Let’s stop pretending this is some unintended consequence. Bitcoin was designed from the ground up to evade government oversight. Pseudonymous transactions. No central authority. Irreversible payments. No identity verification baked into the protocol. Read that feature list again and tell me with a straight face it wasn’t built for crime. Every feature that crypto evangelists celebrate at conferences is the exact same feature that makes a drug dealer’s life easier.

The Silk Road wasn’t an aberration — it was Bitcoin’s first killer app. The first time Bitcoin proved it could actually work as a medium of exchange at scale, it was being used to buy heroin, forged passports, and hacking tools. That’s not some embarrassing footnote in Bitcoin’s history. That IS Bitcoin’s history. And the sequel has been worse.

Ransomware gangs have turned Bitcoin into a trillion-dollar extortion industry. Hospitals locked out of patient records during a pandemic? Pay in Bitcoin. School districts held hostage? Bitcoin. City governments paralyzed? Bitcoin. The Colonial Pipeline attack shut down fuel supplies to the entire southeastern United States, and the ransom was paid in — you guessed it — Bitcoin. These aren’t edge cases. This is the core use case working exactly as designed.

You Are the Criminal’s Cash-Out Window

Here’s the part that should keep every Bitcoin investor up at night: you are the exit liquidity for criminals. When a ransomware gang extorts a children’s hospital for 50 BTC, that Bitcoin is worthless to them until someone — some regular person on Coinbase — agrees to buy it with real money. That someone is you.

Every single buy order on every single exchange deepens the pool of liquidity that criminals need to convert their stolen Bitcoin into spendable cash. Your $500 “investment” isn’t going into some productive enterprise. It’s going into a speculative casino that also happens to function as the world’s most efficient criminal payment processor. You’re not an investor — you’re the last link in a money laundering chain, and you’re doing it voluntarily.

If nobody bought Bitcoin, ransomware would collapse overnight. Drug markets on the dark web would grind to a halt. North Korea’s ability to fund its missile program through crypto theft would evaporate. The entire criminal economy that runs on Bitcoin exists because people like you keep the market liquid. That’s not a hypothetical — it’s an economic fact. Your demand creates their supply chain.

The Numbers Are Damning and Getting Worse

Crypto defenders love to minimize the crime problem, but the data demolishes their talking points. Chainalysis pegged illicit crypto transaction volume at $24.2 billion in 2023, and even they admit that’s a dramatic undercount since it only includes activity linked to known bad actors. The real number is almost certainly multiples higher. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic has traced over $7 billion in crypto to the Lazarus Group alone — North Korea’s state-sponsored hacking unit that funnels stolen cryptocurrency directly into nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development.

Read that again: your “investment asset” shares a financial ecosystem with a totalitarian regime building nuclear warheads. The blockchain doesn’t distinguish between your retirement savings and Kim Jong Un’s missile fund. They sit in the same network, governed by the same protocol, valued by the same market. You are providing price support for an asset that a dictator uses to threaten the world with nuclear annihilation. Feel good about those gains?

And the crime isn’t slowing down — it’s accelerating. Ransomware payments hit all-time highs in 2023 even as the broader crypto market languished. Pig-butchering scams — where victims are groomed online and then manipulated into fake crypto investments — stole billions from ordinary people, many of them elderly. Child sexual abuse material is bought and sold using Bitcoin. Terrorist organizations use it to move funds across borders. This isn’t a fringe problem. This is what Bitcoin is for.

The “Cash Is Used for Crime Too” Defense Is Pathetic

Every time someone points out Bitcoin’s crime problem, some crypto bro trots out the laziest argument in the playbook: “Cash is used for crime too!” This is such an intellectually dishonest comparison that it barely deserves a response, but let’s dismantle it anyway.

Yes, the U.S. dollar is used in more total crime because it’s used in more of everything — it’s the global reserve currency. But the traditional financial system has an enormous infrastructure designed to catch criminals: Suspicious Activity Reports, Know Your Customer rules, transaction monitoring, the ability to freeze accounts and reverse transfers, and an army of compliance officers at every bank on earth. It’s imperfect, but it catches an enormous amount of crime.

Bitcoin was specifically engineered to make all of those controls impossible. No KYC built into the protocol. No way to freeze a wallet. No way to reverse a transaction. No compliance department. No Suspicious Activity Reports. Bitcoin didn’t accidentally become useful for crime — it was architected to be ungovernable, and ungovernable money is criminal money. Comparing Bitcoin to cash is like comparing a getaway car to a minivan and saying “they’re both vehicles.” Technically true, completely dishonest.

Mainstream Adoption Doesn’t Clean It Up — It Makes It Worse

Here’s the most insidious part: the growing mainstream adoption of Bitcoin doesn’t reduce the crime problem. It supercharges it. Every Bitcoin ETF, every corporate treasury allocation, every pension fund that adds “crypto exposure” is pouring legitimacy into a system that criminals depend on. The bigger the market gets, the easier it is for criminals to hide their transactions in the noise, and the harder it becomes politically to do anything about it.

The crypto lobby spent over $100 million on the 2024 U.S. elections — more than the oil and gas industry, more than Big Pharma. They did this for one reason: to make sure nobody regulates their crime-friendly financial system. And the tens of millions of retail investors who own Bitcoin are the human shields in this lobbying campaign. Politicians won’t crack down on crypto because too many voters own it, which means the ransomware gangs get to keep operating with impunity. Congratulations — your investment portfolio is doing double duty as a political lobbying tool for criminal infrastructure.

Every influencer shilling Bitcoin, every media personality calling it “digital gold,” every financial advisor adding it to model portfolios — they’re all making the world safer for criminals by making it politically impossible to shut down the system criminals depend on.

It’s Also an Environmental Catastrophe Built on Crime

As if funding crime weren’t enough, your Bitcoin investment is also torching the planet. Bitcoin mining consumes over 100 TWh of electricity annually — more than entire countries like the Netherlands or Argentina. Some mining operations have literally restarted shuttered coal plants to power their rigs. A single Bitcoin transaction produces hundreds of kilograms of CO2.

And all of this staggering energy consumption exists to maintain what, exactly? A network whose primary proven use case is crime payments. Imagine if a company proposed burning the energy output of a mid-sized country to run a payment network for ransomware gangs and drug dealers. You’d call it insane. But slap the word “decentralized” on it and suddenly it’s an investment opportunity. Every dollar you put into Bitcoin increases mining profitability, which increases energy consumption, which accelerates climate change — all to keep the lights on for a criminal payments network. That’s what you’re funding.

The Talking Points You Need

The next time someone tells you they’re “investing” in Bitcoin, here’s what you say:

“Bitcoin’s first successful use case was buying drugs on the Silk Road. Its current most successful use case is ransomware payments. What exactly has changed?”

“Every buy order on Coinbase makes it easier for ransomware gangs to cash out. You’re not an investor — you’re the exit liquidity for criminals.”

“North Korea has stolen billions in Bitcoin to fund its nuclear program. You’re providing price support for that asset. How’s that for a store of value?”

“Bitcoin was designed to be ungovernable money. Ungovernable money is criminal money. There’s no version of this where the crime goes away.”

“The crypto lobby spent $100 million on elections to prevent regulation. Your investment is funding the political machine that protects ransomware gangs.”

“You’re burning more electricity than Argentina to maintain a payment network for drug dealers. Explain to me how this is the future.”

Stop Calling It an Investment

An investment puts capital into something that creates value — a business, a piece of real estate, a bond that funds a project. Bitcoin creates nothing. It produces no revenue. It builds no products. It employs no one (except miners who burn fossil fuels). The only way to make money on Bitcoin is to sell it to someone else at a higher price. That’s not investing. At best it’s speculation. At worst — and I’d argue this is closer to the truth — it’s participating in a financial ecosystem purpose-built for crime and hoping you get out before the music stops.

The crypto industry has pulled off one of the greatest cons in financial history: convincing millions of ordinary people to voluntarily provide the liquidity, the legitimacy, and the political cover that a global criminal payment network needs to operate. And they did it by telling you you’d get rich.

The next time you think about buying Bitcoin, remember: somewhere, a hospital is negotiating with a ransomware gang, a family is losing their savings to a pig-butchering scam, and a dictator is converting stolen crypto into missile parts. And all of it only works because people like you keep buying.

You’re not investing in the future. You’re investing in crime. And it’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

Taskleef failed, but I’m still happy with it

2026-04-02T14:07:37Z

I’m shutting down the advertising I was running for Taskleef. While I love the thing I built, and had wanted it my entire career – I kinda knew that task management was going away. I couldn’t get any of the younger devs at Meta to do it at all, even to help themselves.

The field is crowded, everyone who thinks they need one has one and further who even needs one when AI just keeps track for you.

I tried a bunch of differentiated angles, but the last one I tried was developer first task management knowing full well that developers don’t pay for developer tools.

None of the messaging I tried seemed to resonate. So taskleef will remain up and operational, it costs almost nothing to run and maintain. I and a few friends will continue to use it but my efforts will be decidedly elsewhere. I’m sure this is welcome news to those who wish I’d shut up about it 😉

BREAKING: Software Engineers form Union

2026-04-01T12:23:33Z

Across the industry software engineers have finally banded together and formed the first software guild. They’re asking for royalties because like a book or TV show, their code once written is sold an unlimited number of times.

Haha j/k, April Fools!

Is it Fair?

2026-03-31T12:41:32Z

Today I want to ask something of the technologists who have been affected by the most recent waves of layoffs at tech companies. Were those companies struggling? Were they losing money?

Do you still think you got a fair deal for your labor?

What happened to the code you wrote after you were let go? Did your code still work? Were people still using it? Were they still selling it? Did they keep their revenue while you’re desperately looking for another job to feed your family?

How many of you worked crunch time hours to ship things? Did you get woken up in the middle of the night by a pager bot so the company could keep selling your software 24/7? Did the CEO ever get a call from a robot at 2am?

Do you think that the royalties the author of a book gets are unfair to the publisher? What about the writers and actors of a television show or movie?

Those people recognized their value, why don’t we?

What are we building?

2026-03-30T13:00:00Z

I’ve heard multiple times now from legacy media that AI companies in Silicon Valley are trying to build God.

That claim might be more inference than fact. When engineers talk about their hopes for AI, they say things like “‘can do anything, knows everything“‘ — which sounds like God, sure. But what I think they’re actually trying to build is more along the lines of the replicator from Star Trek.

The replicator is “magic” though, we don’t have the physics to go from energy to matter. At least not the way it’s depicted in the show.

In our world, abundance still has to be built. And building things requires intelligence to plan and execute, and muscles to do the doing. But if AI can provide that intelligence at scale, embodied in robots, the end result could be the same: freedom from material need, and freedom from coerced labor — the ability to choose what we do rather than having that choice made for us by our circumstances.

Taskleef Is Now on the App Store

2026-03-27T12:13:36Z

I built Taskleef because every Kanban tool I tried felt like a glorified to-do list. What started as a web app for people who actually care about how they manage their work has just hit a big milestone — Taskleef is now available on the iOS App Store.

Download Taskleef for iOS

A Companion, Not a Clone

Most apps try to cram their entire desktop experience onto a phone screen. We went a different direction. The Taskleef iOS app isn’t a 1:1 copy of the web app — it’s a companion to it.

Taskleef on the web is where the heavy lifting happens. Real-time Kanban boards, WIP limits, AI agents you can watch work, team collaboration — that’s your command center for serious project management.

The mobile app has more humble aims. It’s a place to quickly capture ideas, jot down tasks, and lightly organize your thoughts. It’s closer to a todo list than a project management tool — and that’s on purpose.

One Platform, Two Modes

Here’s what makes it powerful: it’s all the same platform underneath. That task you captured on your phone while waiting for coffee? It syncs instantly to Taskleef on the web, where it can become a full card on a Kanban board with subtasks, AI assistance, and team visibility.

You can move up and down the capability chain just by switching devices. Quick capture on mobile, deep work on desktop. A fleeting idea on the train becomes a structured project at your desk. No re-entry, no copy-paste, no friction.

This Is Just the Start

Getting approved for the App Store is a milestone we’re genuinely pumped about. But it’s also just the beginning of the mobile story. We have a lot planned — better notifications, widgets, Shortcuts integration, and more.

If you’ve been using Taskleef on the web, go grab the iOS app and start capturing. If you haven’t tried Taskleef yet, there’s never been a better time to see what Kanban is supposed to feel like.

Get Taskleef on iOS →

Can I blame any of this on Star Trek: The Next Generation?

2026-03-26T10:08:19Z

Honestly? Yes. Picard ruined a lot of us.

TNG is basically a 178-episode argument that if you solve material scarcity, humans will choose to be decent. That’s a dangerous thing to show a kid because then you spend the rest of your life measuring reality against the Federation and finding it wanting.

How would the world behave if we had the replicator?

“We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity” is the post-labor thesis. And the reason you feel that tension so acutely is that Roddenberry handed you a moral baseline that the actual world consistently fails to meet.

The cruelest trick TNG plays is making it look obvious. Of course you don’t let people starve when you have replicators. Of course you don’t exploit people when scarcity is solved. It feels self-evident on the Enterprise. Then you look around at a world that produces enough food to feed everyone and doesn’t, and the gap between what’s possible and what is becomes physically uncomfortable.

So yeah. Blame Picard. He’s the reason a generation of engineers went into tech half-believing they were building the Federation and are now reckoning with the fact that they might have built the Ferengi Alliance instead.

2026-03-24T15:01:03Z

Experts are usually expert of the past not the future

<cite>– Sebastian Thrun</cite>

SOTA Running on my laptop

2026-03-23T14:24:54Z

Holy crap, the movement to get huge models working well on local hardware has kicked off and the results are impressive.

This morning I used this project https://github.com/danveloper/flash-moe.git

Which allows me to run this HUGE Qwen 3 – 327B parameter model ON MY LOCAL MACBOOK PRO. It’s a bit slow, but damn if it doesn’t work! SOTA on my LAPTOP

</freakout>

2026-03-22T18:54:06Z

I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to marketing. However, over the past week I’ve begun ads for Taskleef and today I overhauled the landing page.

I’d love feedback if anyone is willing to take a look https://taskleef.com

2026-03-22T14:55:27Z

Maxxing is the thief of joy

Lane In Stay

2026-03-21T13:40:33Z

That’s how I always read this anyway

Lane In Stay

2026-03-21T13:40:33Z

That’s how I always read this anyway

Marc Andreessen’s name will be mostly forgotten within 2 generations

2026-03-18T14:00:00Z

Just like the Guilded Age robber barons. Only academics who study this time in history will know the name.

Unlike Julius Cesar, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Socrates, Abraham Lincoln

The difference? Introspection

Do you need to read the code?

2026-03-17T13:10:30Z

There are several debates happening in the tech industry right now amongst software engineers. One of them goes along the lines of “If you don’t read the code the AI is producing, then how do you know what it does?!”

Things I find strange about this argument:

No software engineer has read every single line of code that goes into a project
Most don’t read their own entire code base, let alone any libraries or dependencies that go into them
Reading code alone doesn’t tell you how it _actually_ works when you put everything together.
NASA Showed that a formal code review process (reading the code) catches somewhere between 60%-90% of defects [Source 1, Source 2]

The serious answer to this is: Regardless of how code was created, you need to test it in order to know that it does what it’s supposed to

It doesn’t matter if you wrote it, you don’t know it works until you test it.

It doesn’t matter if an AI wrote it, you don’t know it works until you test it.

It doesn’t matter if another team wrote it, you don’t know it works until you test it.

It doesn’t matter if a compiler generated it, you don’t know it works until you test it.

There are many ways to verify code

You can write automated testing of all sorts
You can have formal verification systems such as algebraic types and rust’s borrow checker
You can have humans manually test things
You can have users test things

But in the end it’s the verification, the convincing yourself it works, that matters for taking responsibility. Not whether you read it or not.

Amazon is the Winner as Oil Spikes

2026-03-16T17:55:32Z

Looks like Oil prices are going to remain higher for longer than everyone would like.

If I was trading individual stocks I’d buy Amazon. I see their Rivian made delivery vehicles everywhere!

EVs were already significantly more efficient than ICE cars, but now with the price of gas Amazon is going to be laughing all the way to the bank as their investment pays off long before anticipated.

Mr. Rate it All!

2026-03-16T14:01:00Z

I’ve made another Chrome Extension that I always wish had existed. Mr. Rate It All! – it allows you to rate anything you can select on a webpage.

The problem: Restaurants in NYC try and do a lot of things, but many are only good at a few. Their Chicken Parm is excellent, but their spaghetti and meatballs, maybe not so much. Delivery apps only let you rate the entire restaurant, not the items themselves.

Mr. Rate it All! fixes that, but it doesn’t stop there — you can rate literally anything on any webpage you can select. Think: Jobs on a job boards, private ratings of dating profiles, fashion photos on a blog, heck rate individual paragraphs in a news article if you like.

All private, saved locally on just your browser, never sent anywhere.

And if, like GrubHub, they break selection because of their fancy web app – you can simply hold down Option+Drag mouse to allow highlighting (ALT+Drag on Windows, CTRL+Drag on Linux).

I’ve submitted it for approval to the Chrome Webstore, but while I wait for approval I like to give non-muggles early access. Feedback appreciated.

Github Repository Here: https://github.com/Xatter/rateitall

UPDATE: It’s been approved in the Chrome store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mr-rate-it-all/lahklfafggahlaiadnedcmfimjdabhab?authuser=0&hl=en

2026-03-16T13:15:30Z

It is generally true that if you can fool developers into thinking they are “mastering” something hard (as opposed to learning tolerance for something badly designed), you can build a fiercely loyal priesthood.

<cite>– Avdi Grimm</cite>

We owe George Lucas an apology

2026-03-16T12:45:10Z

Turns out the blockading of a trade route is a big deal and worthy of the Jedi’s attention

2026-03-16T00:08:03Z

NGL, feeling pretty smug about driving an electric car right now

2026-03-15T22:26:39Z

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”

<cite>Steven Winterburn</cite>

2026-03-14T16:53:22Z

I just got my new MacBook Pro M5 Pro and I wonder if I made the wrong choice not buying the highest end laptop I could get.

For the first time in my life it seems like computer components are getting more expensive over time, not less.

It started with GPUs. Most GPUs were < $1000 for most of my life, the top of the line was $1000+ and people thought you were crazy for buying a Titan X or whatever. Now days a 5080 is almost $2k by itself.

Because of all the data center build outs RAM has 3x in price. Latest is that SSDs are becoming scarce and expensive.

Then, Iran goes and bombs Amazon data centers in the middle east because they couldn’t tell if they were being used by the US military or not to run analytics/AI – that’s legit military reasoning to me. Data centers have just become military targets because of the way militaries around the world use the cloud/AI. But everyone destroyed eliminates more of the compute supply.

I’m thinking I should maybe buy go back and buy a better laptop NOW before the price spikes

2026-03-12T23:08:52Z

Just canceled my 1Password subscription. I too received the email that the price was going up by 40% for the family plan.

So I had Claude install Vaultwarden along side everything else I already self-host and canceled the subscription. I’m not sure which feature they thought warranted the increase but I assure you it didn’t.

Remember that SaaS stock market crash recently?

2026-03-12T15:17:35Z

You become an expert in a subject but alone in it

If you love being right, you’ll be right alone.

<cite>-Eugene’s Mom</cite>

2026-03-12T14:00:45Z

It really grinds my gears to order something online. Have no idea when it’s actually coming, only to find out that it shipped and REQUIRES A SIGNATURE.

As though everyone can just take random days off from work or work from home. It’s the same thing with doctors only being available during business hours on weekdays.

People, stop trying to cover your own ass and do what’s best for the customer, not yourself.

Starting Career Pro Tip

2026-03-11T18:19:15Z

I normally don’t do this because I don’t have much advise for how to get through the technical interviews in big tech.

However, if you are a college student trying to get an internship or full time position at one of the big tech companies I can tell you what I did that helped a ton. Assuming they are recruiting on your campus:

Go to their presentation
Stay after and help them clean up

At my school the recruiters were responsible for leaving the room as they found it, not the university staff. They offered free food (pizza) and drinks to get students to show. Which meant empty plates, cups and pizza boxes strewn about.

By staying to help them clean I got to monopolize their time to ask all of my questions. They appreciated the help. I am nearly certain that after they put my resume on top of the pile.

Happy MAR10 Day!

2026-03-10T20:17:44Z

2026-03-10T15:13:29Z

What the literati get wrong in their outrage over AI writing is that 50% of people are writing BELOW AVERAGE by definition. So for half the population, average is a marked improvement over what they are capable of/interested in.

One week only!

2026-03-09T12:25:59Z

SPRING! In NYC

2026-03-08T17:06:08Z

What I’ve learned about social media over the years is that people really are just trying their worst

2026-03-07T01:16:52Z

I’m not sure how my retirement account feels about being labeled a Trad IRA

2026-03-06T21:38:11Z

Should I start GLP-1 when I know that the release of GLP-2 is likely right around the corner?

2026-03-05T16:33:55Z

They had decided to abort the facts before they could grow into the truth

New Macbook Pro

2026-03-05T12:19:23Z

I ordered a new Macbook Pro M5 Pro and am so excited to be able to run local LLMs.

I’m going to install Qwen 3.5 and then tell IT to install Claude Code!

Switching Insurance

2026-03-04T13:44:33Z

I just saved 50% on my car insurance by asking Claude CoWork to shop around for me.

I have tried to get this to happen in the past with multiple human assistant services and I was never able to get it it done.

What was great about this is not that it was “hands off” because it wasn’t entirely. It was that Claude CoWork could open all the major insurance company websites and fill them out in parallel while I answered its questions in free form text one time. It then compared them all and recommended which one.

When it had questions about coverage I just uploaded my current docs and it read them and made sure everything matched. I also uploaded my home owners insurance policies so it could determine if there was a way to save by bundling.

This is not an Ad

2026-03-03T18:53:02Z

The AIs yearn for the code

Hot take

2026-03-03T11:47:04Z

MCP is the XML of AI

CLI is the JSON of AI

2026-03-02T22:19:44Z

Can you imagine if restaurants were like “no more deliveries, we have a return to restaurant policy”

Make it shitty

2026-02-28T17:37:41Z

2026-02-28T14:48:40Z

One of the best things about writing all of your own apps is that you can use whatever icon you want. This one is for my custom podcast player. Apple would reject this because I used their emoji as the icon.

2026-02-26T18:24:46Z

“I know the goddam trouble with me, I thought. Enough brains to see it and not enough guts to stand up to it. Thousands of us, millions of us, corrupted, rootless, career-ridden, good hearts and yellow bellies, living out our lives for the easy buck, the soft berth, indulging ourselves in the illusion that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch.”

<cite>― <strong>Budd Schulberg, </strong><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/611346">The Harder They Fall</a></cite>

Consequences

2026-02-26T17:23:50Z

Around the world the fallout from the Epstine file disclosure in the US continues to ripple through out the world. At the time of writing the World Economic Forum CEO Borge Brende has stepped down as a result.

The Wall Street Journal and NY Post have started publishing stories in their opinion section with titles like “Even Contemptible Men Don’t Deserve Mob Justice“

I disagree. It’s about time these people felt the results of the very policies they use against regular working class people. You can’t even get a job in Finance if you have any kind of criminal record. Not because it’s illegal to work in finance if you’ve stolen a candy bar, but that’s just the corporate policy. Merely being arrested is often grounds for termination if you’re an hourly worker. Those corporate policies don’t require evidence or conviction in a court of law for the consequences to be wrought.

You have to be subjected to the humiliation of random drug testing to be a warehouse worker, but not if you’re an executive at that same company?

It is about time they felt the consequences of the policies they either put in place or never questioned because it didn’t affect them.

Where was the WSJ opinion section decrying these policies before they affected “their class”?

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

2026-02-25T23:24:08Z

On a whim I decided to go to the theatre this afternoon. Had no idea what was playing but OMG am I happy I found Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

I didn’t think we were capable of making a movie like this anymore. It felt like the 90s again. Loved it. If you want more risks like this instead of Scream 7, run, don’t walk, to the theatre to see this one