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March always seems to be my life’s busiest month.

Things I wrote and made

“The two kinds of error”: in my mind, software errors are divided into two categories: expected and unexpected errors. I finally wrote up this idea I’ve had for a long time.
“All tests pass” is a short story about a strange, and sorta sad, experience I had with a coding agent.
Inspired by others, I published a disclaimer about how I use generative AI to write this blog. My main rule of thumb: the final product must be word-for-word what I would’ve written without AI, given enough time. And I have discomfort about its use.
Built llm-eliza, a plugin for LLM that lets you use the ELIZA chatbot at the command line. I think this is my first satirical software project. (Also the first thing I’ve published to the Python package registry, PyPI.)
Found the human.json standard, which is “a protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others.” I added it to my site this month.
Scraped Rosetta Code and built a stupid little website that picks a random programming language.

From a tale about vibe coding: “I’d be embarrassed to show it at a code review. I’d also be embarrassed to admit how many times I failed to ship the ‘clean’ version.”
“Claude is the only AI model that has actually been deployed inside classified [American] military systems. So to the extent that AI is having an effect in Iran, it is probably Claude.” From a Hard Fork podcast episode.
From “AI’s Enthusiasm Chasm”: “people—well, again, most people—don’t enjoy existing in a strict state of quantification. Pursuits and pastimes—joy—are underpinned by qualitative thought, and those considerations make people less likely to want to involve AI just to get something at a tenth of the cost or five times faster.”
“The Cognitive Dark Forest” posits that AI forces us, socially, to close down the open web. “The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger.”
This post has a good—if incomplete—list of all the downsides of generative AI: perpetuation of bias, erosion of critical thinking, harm to artists, and more.
Uber used to be inexpensive because it was subsidized by VC money. Now it’s more costly because they needed to stop losing money. “Don’t get used to cheap AI” posits that the same will happen with AI. Similar ideas are presented in “Is the Future of AI Local?”.

From “It’s time to embrace climate conspiracy”: “the actual story of climate change—the one we’ve reported exhaustively—is one about coordinated power, deliberate deception, and a bought-off government that repeatedly acts to promote an industry that is poisoning humans and the environment for profit. It just so happens to be a real conspiracy.”
Really liked this short piece about what’s lost when new technology becomes commonplace. Few people today remember what we lost when we switched from candles to lightbulbs.
“we don’t need more ram, we need better software” had me whispering “hell yeah” to myself.
I’ve long pondered a blog post called “Why I’m afraid of YAML”. This post from a former colleague says it better than I ever could.
“Costs of War” highlights the costs, financial and otherwise, of the United States’s wars.
The US FBI is buying location data for surveillance, as is our Secret Service.
This review of the new Marathon shooter game was surprisingly poignant. “It’s just thoughts and if I don’t get them out, my tummy hurts.”
As a Legend of Zelda fan and programmer, I was happy to discover YouTuber Skawo. Their videos explain Zelda quirks by delving into real source code. I especially liked this explanation of why some players were experiencing rumble in a game that shouldn’t have it.
The US effectively bans foreign-made routers.

Hope you had a good March.