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I’ve been experimenting with a new Claude workflow as an alternative to doom scrolling. It leverages what LLMs do best: non-determinism and text. I call it “Teach me something”. The idea is: if I’m bored, instead of going on Reddit, I can ask Claude to teach me something. This might not be the most efficient learning method, but it beats scrolling Reddit. In Claude I’ve set this up as a project with custom instructions. The prompt I’m currently using is: Project Instructions: Socratic Teaching S...

Sideloading has been a hot topic for the last decade. Most recently, Google has announced further restrictions on the practice in Android. Many hundreds of comment threads have discussed these changes over the years. One point in particular is always made: “I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own”. I agree entirely with this point, but within the context of this discussion it’s moot. “I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own” When Google restricts you...

I started using Rust in 2017, before the stabilisation of async/await. When it was stabilised I managed to avoid it for a few more years before it was time to grapple with it. It’s fair to say that async Rust is one of the hairiest parts of the language, not because the async model is poorly designed, but because of the inherent complexity of it in combination with Rust’s goals. There have been many blog post written about async and its perceived shortcomings, as well as excellent explainers and...

The other day at work I, accidentally, roped myself into upgrading some dependencies in our Rust services. These were breaking changes, so not just a case of running cargo update . I had to understand the changes and make the appropriate modifications to our code. Adopting breaking changes can be frustrating in the best of times, but it was particularly annoying this time because none of these projects kept a CHANGELOG.md files, although they all had release notes on GitHub. GitHub’s releases fe...

17 odd years ago when I stared programming, PHP was all the rage. Javascript was steadily gaining traction. Django and Ruby on Rails were in their infancy, but promised greatly increased productivity. A few years later, inspired by Ruby’s fame, Coffeescript became a mainstay in the Javascript ecosystem. Statically compiled, typed languages, used to build monolithic web applications, were rapidly falling out of favour. In 2023 the trend is reversing, static compilation and types are cool again. M...

Freaking magnets NFTs, how do they work? In this post I’ll try to explain NFTs in a way that’s mostly accurate, but requires minimal technical understanding. I’m going to assume the reader is familiar with excel style software and Google Sheets in particular. At its core every NFT project is like a single Google Sheet. It has a creator who has some special permission to modify the sheet. An NFT within the project is like a single row in the sheet. Each row contains only two things: a name and an...

NFTs exploded into mainstream popularity in the latter half of 2021 and if you follow me on Twitter you’ll know I’m not a fan. In “crypto”-speak I’m NGMI(not gonna make it) . But what are NFTs anyway? The common meme is that NFTs are kind of like receipts or, more charitably, certificates of ownership. The ugly monkey you buy is actually a piece of state maintained in a smart contract on a Blockchain, typically Ethereum. Ethereum based NFTs implement the EIP-721 standard. This standard describes...

A while back I had to re-activate my deactivated Facebook account to participate in a Messenger group chat. I wasn’t exactly happy about this, but being an absolutist about these things is not worthwhile either. After re-activating my account I decided it would make me slightly happier about the situation if I wiped all the content from my account. A digital detox if you will. Ever since then I’ve had a nagging feeling I should expand this idea to other platforms. This blog post is about how I d...

An oft discussed hypothesis is that certain apps, usually Facebook, listens to and analyses your surroundings for ad targeting purposes. It has never been conclusively proven that Facebook does this, but there are plenty of people on the internet with anecdotal stories of ads appearing for products they’ve only discussed IRL. In iOS 14 Apple added indicators to highlight when an app is using the device’s microphone or camera. Since I have access to a decently sized collection of app privacy deta...

In iOS 14.3, Apple added their new app privacy details to App Store listings. App privacy details, which are sometimes compared to the nutritional labels on foodstuff, are details about the data an app collects and the purposes and use of such data. What can we learn by analysing this data? From the 14 th of December 2020, all new apps and app updates have to provide information on the data the app collects. This is used to power the app privacy details labelling. On Twitter, videos scrolling th...