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2026
4 articles on this page- Automate the Boring Stuff: Setlist to Playlist I love concerts. I love setlists. I hate building the playlist manually afterward. But do I really? A small automation project, a Deftones show in Dortmund, and the question of whether you should automate something you kind of enjoy.
- Your Encryption Keys Are in Virginia: On BitLocker, the FBI, and Why European Universities Need Sovereign Software Microsoft confirmed last week that it produced BitLocker recovery keys to the FBI after a valid legal order. On eligible devices, Windows can back a recovery key up to a Microsoft account during setup. For European universities that handle research data, student records, and HR information under GDPR, this is not an abstract concern. It is a structural problem. The answer is not a technical workaround. It is sovereign, publicly funded, openly licensed software — and a principle that the EU has articulated but not consistently practised: public money, public code.
- Should I Drive to the Car Wash? On Grounding and a Different Kind of LLM Failure A viral video this month showed an AI assistant confidently answering “should I go to the car wash today?” without knowing it was raining outside. The internet found it funny. The failure mode is real but distinct from the strawberry counting problem — this is not a representation issue, it is a missing-context issue. The words posed no special tokenisation difficulty. What the system lacked was access to the state of the world the question was about.
- Try to Relax — and Other Things That Prevent Themselves “Try to relax” can recruit the monitoring that keeps tension salient. Traversable wormholes face a very different constraint: sustaining their geometry requires stress-energy that violates classical energy conditions. The comparison is an analogy about constraints, not one mechanism shared by psychology and spacetime.
2025
6 articles on this page- A Christmas Star (Minus the Star, Plus a Moon Nobody Asked For) A browser-based simulator for exoplanet transit photometry, binary eclipses, and exomoon scenarios — with Keplerian and N-body paths, limb-darkening models, and timing diagnostics. It is an educational simulator, not a validated research pipeline. I spent Christmas on this. You’re welcome, science.
- The Golden Bead Cube Weighs One Kilogram Bruner described enactive, iconic, and symbolic forms of representation; Montessori materials make a useful, but not historically direct, comparison. Physical materials can support particular learning tasks, while evidence does not justify treating a touchscreen as a universal developmental failure.
- Constraining the Coding Agent: The Ralph Loop and Why Determinism Matters In late 2025, agentic coding tools went from impressive demos to daily infrastructure. The problem nobody talked about enough: when an LLM agent has write access to a codebase and no formal constraints, reproducibility breaks down. The Ralph Loop is a story-driven harness intended to bound that variability through one model invocation per attempt, scoped writes, and atomic state. These constraints make runs easier to inspect; they do not make an unpinned model deterministic.
- A Gas at Temperature T: Xenakis and the Physics of Stochastic Music Iannis Xenakis used probability distributions, Markov processes, and game structures as compositional tools. Pithoprakta maps a Gaussian law derived from kinetic theory to glissando slopes; the orchestra is an analogy to a gas, not a thermodynamic system with measured temperature.
- From Oxide to Oversampling: The Physics of Recorded Sound ‘Analogue warmth’ and ‘digital coldness’ are not aesthetic preferences alone — they involve different physics. Magnetic tape saturates and compresses in level- and machine-dependent ways. Delta-sigma modulators push much quantisation noise out of band. Both effects are calculable.
- Can the AI Friend Make You Lonelier? AI companions promise to address loneliness. Daniel Wegner’s ironic process theory offers one speculative account of why companionship use may be risky for some people; current studies do not establish that companions cause loneliness.