24 January 2026

35 links · Saturday

Week 3: The Trojan Horse

A PR hid vote manipulation in plain sight. Democracy overruled the maintainer. So the maintainer wrote a constitution.

Doing Gigabit Ethernet Over My British Phone Wires

Disclaimer: None of this is written by AI, I’m still a real person writing my own blog like its 1999 I finally figured out how to do Gigabit Ethernet over my existing phone wires. Powerline adapter…

Why I’m Ignoring the Prophets of Doom – Coding Is My Craft

The AI Revolution in Coding: Why I’m Ignoring the Prophets of Doom Every day, we are bombarded with headlines about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is "disrupting" every industry in its path. Software development is at the epicenter of this hype. With the ris…

Forecasting the death of StackOverflow

You've probably seen the news: StackOverflow is almost dead If nothing extraordinary happens, the site's run is basically over and it may end up as one of the first high-profile casualties of the LLM era. The only real question is when.

How to Build a Social Network as an Adult - Thomas Unise

Making friends as an adult is a problem nobody prepares you for. So here is a strategy no one seems to talk about. When you’re young, friendships happen automatically due...

We have to re-learn to walk alone

Reading the article about Nexus that Obie has posted I got absolutely struck. Yes, it can be said without a shade of doubt that the modern way of building software, the late-2025-way with Opus 4.5 in the picture, is markedly different from the one we operated …

Backseat Software – Mike Swanson's Blog

What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:

AGENTS.md as a dark signal

Is an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md file in a repo a sign of possibly poor code quality?

The Long View of History

History as a subject is often viewed by students and the public at large as a domain without a use, a pedantic study of dates and names with some vague mission to remember the past—a memorial to ages past but neither a forward-looking or useful endeavor. The s…

A Third Conversational Pattern in BDD

It’s been a moment! COVID disrupted a lot of things, not least my writing. More recently I’ve been busy with my new employment with the amazing Assent, focusing on sustainability in man…

The Future of Software Teams in a Claude Code World

How AI is changing software team structures: from specialists to product engineers, full stack builders, and small teams that ship faster. What's happening now and predictions for the future.

Downloading a podcast to create an audiobook

If a podcast has an RSS feed, we can download it, parse it, and then download all the content into a single folder, which can then be played by any audio player.

Avoiding Duplicate Objects in Django Querysets

When filtering Django querysets across relationships, you can easily end up with duplicate objects in your results. This is a common gotcha that happens with both one-to-many (1:N) and many-to-many (N:N) relationships. Let’s explore why this happens and the be…

Time Management for Anarchists

I did a seminar at Canzine, a zine fair in Toronto. It focused on the paradoxical notion that if you want to live without bosses, you have to be self-disciplined. I attribute my productivity to bei…