I wanted to have the most accurate timepiece possible mounted in my mini rack. Therefore I built this: This is a GPS-based clock running on a Raspberry Pi Pico in a custom 1U 10" rack faceplate. The clock displays time based on a GPS input, and will not display time until a GPS timing lock has been acquired. When you turn on the Pico, the display reads ---- Upon 3D fix, you get a time on the clock, and the colon starts blinking If the 3D fix is lost, the colon goes solid When t...

The other day I went to an AI hackathon organized by my friends Lucia and Malin . The theme was mech interp , but I hardly know PyTorch so I planned to do something at the API layer rather than the model layer. Something I think about a lot is cognitive architectures (like Soar and ACT-R ). This is like a continuation of GOFAI research, inspired by cognitive science. And like GOFAI it’s never yielded anything useful. But I often think: can we scaffold LLMs with cog arch-inspire...

Learning to appreciate different flavors is something that comes very hard for me. And yet, for some reason, tea is one of those things that no matter how hard it is for my tastebuds, I’ll constantly come back to. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs Learning to appreciate different flavors is...

1) Smells Like... Something In many TV shows having to do with murder (and there are plenty of them), I’ve heard the following exchange:         His breath smells like bitter almonds. So he was poisoned with cyanide They’re either saying         bitter almonds smell like cyanide or         cyanide smells like bitter almonds. If you say X smells like Y, you mean that X is the new smell and Y is the familiar one.  However, on these shows, people seem to smell cyanide a lot, yet...

I love writing software, line by line. It could be said that my career was a continuous effort to create software well written, minimal, where the human touch was the fundamental feature. I also hope for a society where the last are not forgotten. Moreover, I don't want AI to economically succeed, I don't care if the current economic system is subverted (I could be very happy, honestly, if it goes in the direction of a massive redistribution of wealth). But, I would not respect myself and my int...

So, I guess there goes 2025. I’m a bit late on the wrap up post, though as much as I’d like to blame a cold I’ve been dealing with for a while (lol I wrote that several days ago when drafting, and I’ve still just now gotten around to posting my finished draft), it’s mostly just laziness. All things considered, it’s been a pretty eventful year for myself - namely that I left my job and returned to my home state. So, I guess there goes 2025. I’m a bit late on the wrap up post, thoug...

Converting the performance of a stock between currencies naively does not capture currency effects, even though they play a secondary factor long-term. Converting the performance of a stock between currencies naively does not capture currency effects, even though they play a secondary factor long-term.

My favorite albums from last year. Balkan brass, an acoustic favorite of 80s returns, Ethio-jazz, Guatemalan singer-guitarist, jazz-rock/Indian classical fusion, and a unique male vocalist. more… My favorite albums from last year. Balkan brass, an acoustic favorite of 80s returns, Ethio-jazz, Guatemalan singer-guitarist, jazz-rock/Indian classical fusion, and a unique male vocalist. more… My favorite albums from last year. Balkan brass, an acoustic ...

New year, new builds, right? This time for me it's a workbench that is highly practical and suited for what I need. Space for me is extremely limited, but I am lucky to have the option to mount structures to my walls. This build is for my garage setup, with several different components involved. Make sure to check out the video link below where I talk about this build! Limited Space I feel lucky to have somewhat conditioned spaces after fighting with the seasons in a garage with no insulatio...

I have not been shy talking about my love of Xfce over the years here. The desktop environment has been a trusted friend ever since I first loved it on the late Cobind Desktop (still the high water mark of desktop Linux, as far as I’m concerned). I’m glad to see I’m not the only one. David Gerard of Pivot to AI fame recently shared this post he wrote in 2012 : The question with minimal desktops is the fine line between as simple as possible and just a bit too simple. How much ...

Yesterday I read Code and Let Live , an article covering fly.io's new(ish) Sprites offering. Sprites (sprites.dev) offers persistent VMs that feel like ephemeral VMs—offering ~1s latency to fresh shells, state snapshotting, and a CLI that makes remote code execution a breeze. I created an account, received an API token, installed the Sprites CLI, then ran the example quick-start commands: Post-install quick-start commands available after signup on sprites.dev Since AI is hot right now, my fir...

Last month I wrote about porting JustHTML from Python to JavaScript using Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in a few hours while also buying a Christmas tree and watching Knives Out 3. I ended that post with a series of open questions about the ethics and legality of this style of work. Alexander Petros on lobste.rs just challenged me to answer them , which is fair enough! Here's my attempt at that. You can read the original post for background, but the short version is that it's now possible to po...

As a follow-on to yesterday’s post , I’m trying to figure out why the code in the tracing-sleeper branch of https://github.com/gvwilson/asimpy actually works. The files that actually matter for the moment are: src/asimpy/environment.py : the simulation environment with the main event loop and the _Sleep action (described below). src/asimpy/actions.py : the base class for actions (described below). src/asimpy/process.py : the base class for active processes. examp...

Introduction Donald Knuth wrote his 1989 paper “A Simple Program Whose Proof Isn’t” as part of a tribute to Edsger Dijkstra on the occasion of Dijkstra’s 60th birthday. Today’s post is a reply to Knuth’s paper on the occasion of Knuth’s 88th birthday. In his paper, Knuth posed the problem of converting 16-bit fixed-point binary fractions to decimal fractions, aiming for the shortest decimal that converts back to the original 16-bit binary fraction. Knuth gives a program nam...

I found some vulnerabilities in Cashu's protocol for deterministic wallet recovery. I found some vulnerabilities in Cashu's protocol for deterministic wallet recovery.

When I was younger, in my 20s, I assumed that everyone was working “hard,” meaning a solid 35 hours of work a week. Especially, say, university professors and professional engineers. I’d feel terribly guilty when I would be messing around, playing video games on a workday. Today I realize that most people become very adept at avoiding actual work. And the people you think are working really hard are often just very good at focusing on what is externally visible. They show up to the right...

While I was writing “ Publishing my citation preferences ”, I consciously decided that the blog post should include a screenshot of the website feature described in the post – the new “Reference this post” section on my blog pages. I knew that I might change the design of the widget I designed in the future. If I did, how would that affect the readability of my blog post? I thought to myself. By including a screenshot of the widget I had designed in my blog post, I knew that there wo...

Artemis updates galore Three of four Artemis II astronauts are seen here practicing entering their Orion spacecraft for a pre-launch countdown test on December 20, 2025. Image: NASA / Joel Kowsky The US Senate voted and confirmed Jared Isaacman as NASA’s administrator on December 17, 2025, closing a long drawn process of having the entrepreneur, pilot, astronaut, and Trump’s original but later withdrawn nominee be the person leading NASA. In parallel, the US White House issued an E...

Last year's annual review post observed that cargo-semver-checks ' lint library is undergoing exponential growth, doubling each year: 30 lints at the end of 2022, 57 lints in 2023, and 120 at the end of 2024. We bring 2025 to a close with 242 lints, more than doubling last year's total — and that's just one facet of what we accomplished. Let's look at the full picture, and the path for 2026 and beyond! Last year's annual review post observed that cargo-semver-checks ' lint library is unde...

Bubble chamber scanner, via Reddit . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at Waymos as kid shuttles, naval reactors for data centers, welder’s anthrax, flood buyouts, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. LA fridge law One annoying aspect of moving is that it’s often hard to coordinate your move to take place exactly w...

My coworkers really like AI-powered code review tools and it seems that every time I make a pull request in one of their repos I learn about yet another AI code review SaaS product. Given that there are so many of them, I decided to see how easy it would be to develop my own AI-powered code review bot that targets GitHub repositories. I managed to hack out the core of it in a single afternoon using a model that runs on my desk. I've ended up with a little tool I call reviewbot that takes GitHu...

Hey. It's been a while. I've been meaning to reach out, but work and the kids -- you know how it goes. I think about you surpringly often. Yesterday I saw a lone coconut at the grocery store and I literally guffawed . After all these years, I still don't know how to open a stupid coconut. I hope coconuts still baffle you too. I miss being idiots together. The truth is, I've been avoiding you. I miss you, but I'm afraid that you've changed as much as I have. I don't want to admit that mayb...

A summary of my personal tech stack as we start 2026. I previously did one of these in 2024 . I was prompted to write this one by David Bushell and Robb Knight ’s App Defaults 2026 posts. My desk in late 2025. Software My dotfiles are public so if you’re curious about the configuration of some of the tools mentioned below check out github.com/wezm/dotfiles . Operating System: Arch Linux on my desktop, Chimera Linux on m...