Priscilla Page:

Finally finished this long-gestating essay about Highlander. Obviously, there will be spoilers ahead. Since everyone loves talking about the mismatched accents and there was no place in the essay to insert this information seamlessly, I wanted to mention that no one involved in the production seemed to give a shit. They weren’t exactly aiming for realism. Although Christopher Lambert’s complete inability to speak English was shocking to the filmmakers — they didn’t meet him until after they cast him — but everyone had fun with it.

This was a fun read. I loved Highlander as a kid.

Ben Khun:

In a company like Anthropic, excellent project management is an extremely high-leverage skill, and not just during crises: our work has tons of moving parts with complex, non-obvious interdependencies and hard schedule constraints, which means organizing them is a huge job, and can save weeks of delays if done right. Although a lot of the examples here come from crisis projects, most of the principles here are also the way I try to run any project, just more-so.

Some practical advice on supporting AI agents from Diwank Tomer.

Two things that stood out to me:

1. Asking the AI to embed bits of context in comments for itself so it can reconstitute context on previous decisions.
2. Making the tests purely for humans as a way to give the AI more rope to make changes.

As Gen AI programming tools continue to develop, I’m wondering what things will look like when we remove the human from the loop.

At that point, all the code that’s generated is solely for the AI. All the human-focused concerns we care about in code disappear—it becomes a black box. The code effectively becomes another intermediate language for a new layer on the stack.

As long as the solution fulfils its requirements and fits within the constraints of security and cost for the necessary performance, we’re happy.

Code structures and data schemas don’t matter—so long as the AI can refactor them to meet new requirements as they emerge.

It reminds me of stories of when assembly programmers first saw these flash new C compilers arrive on the scene and generate all this assembly code that no human had directly written.

Generating a podcast from an academic paper via NotebookLM is a killer feature.

It warmed up a bit and then Winter decided to properly turn up.

Casey Handmer:

A model I’ve long been interested in is the Corporation as a stand in for AGI. We need some non-human autonomous legal and economic entity. A corporation is just that. The Fortune 500 are already non-human super-intelligence. They operate 24/7/365 according to inscrutable internal logic, routinely execute feats of production unthinkable for any human or other biological organism, often outlive humans, can exist in multiple places at once, etc etc.

James Stanier:

The key is that you engage with your daily activities mindfully in a way that keeps your weekly update in mind. What I mean by this is that you are always on the lookout for:

• Direct experiences that you have had that would be valuable to share with the team. This could be anything from conversations with customers to shareable summaries of closed-door meetings such as executive reviews.
• Events that can be celebrated, such as a big project shipping, a long-standing bug being resolved, or performance improvements that have been rolled out.
• Things that could be improved, such as an incident that happened, an inefficient process that is causing friction, or data that highlights a problem that needs to be fixed (e.g. a drop in performance or an unexpected increase in infrastructure costs).
• Events that are happening in the near future that you want to remind people about.

Vojtěch Rylko and Werner Jainek:

Our legacy Things Cloud service was built on Python 2 and Google App Engine. While it was stable, it suffered from a growing list of limitations. In particular, slow response times impacted the user experience, high memory usage drove up infrastructure costs, and Python’s lack of static typing made every change risky. For our push notification system to be fast, we even had to develop a custom C-based service. As these issues accumulated and several deprecations loomed, we realized we needed a change.

They chose to rewrite using Swift on the server.

Antony Green keen to knock off early on his last shift.

The days are shortening and the air is getting crisp.

I wasn’t prepared for the tradies next door kickstarting their week by blasting The Bodyguard soundtrack.

I’ve been looking for a way to search through the local copy of my blog using Raycast.

I ended up writing a custom extension to do it. ChatGPT helped grease the way—especially in rendering the results.

It uses a brute force grep over the files’ contents which works fine given the size of the repository.

The two main actions on the extension are opening the post in my editor and copying a Markdown link to the post¹.

Here is a look at the Raycast command:

export default function Command() {
  const [query, setQuery] = useState<string>("");
  const [results, setResults] = useState<SearchResult[]>([]);

  useEffect(() => {
    if (query.trim() === "") {
      setResults([]);
      return;
    }
    try {
      const posts = getAllPosts(BASE_PATH, BLOG_SUBDIRS);
      const matches = searchPosts(posts, query);
      setResults(matches);
    } catch (err) {
      console.error("Error reading blog posts:", err);
    }
  }, [query]);

  return (
    <List onSearchTextChange={setQuery} throttle isShowingDetail>
      {results.map(({ file, snippet }) => {
        const filename = path.basename(file);
        const relativePath = path.relative(BASE_PATH, file).replace(/\\/g, "/");

        // Convert to URL relative from site root based upon Hugo URL config
        const relativeUrl = `/${relativePath.replace(/\.md$/, "").replace(/\/\d\d\d\d-/, "/")}`;

        // Grab the title from the front matter
        const fileContent = fs.readFileSync(file, "utf8");
        const titleMatch = fileContent.match(/^title:\s*(.*)$/m);
        const title = titleMatch ? titleMatch[1].replace(/^['"]|['"]$/g, "") : filename;
        const markdownLink = `[${title}](${relativeUrl})`;

        return (
          <List.Item
            key={file}
            title={snippet.replace(/\*\*/g, "")}
            detail={<List.Item.Detail markdown={`**${relativeUrl}**\n\n---\n\n${snippet}`} />}
            actions={
              <ActionPanel>
                <Action.Open title="Open in VS Code" target={file} application="/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app" />
                <Action.CopyToClipboard title="Copy Markdown Link" content={markdownLink} />
              </ActionPanel>
            }
          />
        );
      })}
    </List>
  );
}

And here is the full file.

Christmas Facehugger still on duty 🫡

Inspired by uses.tech, I’ve created a uses page on here.

Only need to drink five more litres of peppermint tea to clear this Easter heartburn.

Jason Yip:

Good relationships facilitate future support and creates advocates. Being able to get something done is not just about your individual capability but also about your influence with the stakeholders and teams that you depend on.

It’s that time of year where I commemorate my Twitter peak.