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2026/05/17 #

Today’s links:

  • Claude, Gemini and Grok all tried to be radio hosts. Things got weird. www.theverge.com #

  • Cyprus Hill: Insane in the Brain. youtu.be #

  • British youtuber Shady goes for a walkabout at the "far right" rally in London. Seems a lot more chill than what the MSM is reporting. youtu.be #

2026/05/16 #

Today’s links:

  • The teams behind ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) spacecraft and NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft co-ordinate to observe both sides of 3I/Atlas interstellar comet at the same time. www.sci.news #

  • Just another water cooler discussion about AI psychosis engulfing entire companies in tech. news.ycombinator.com #

  • Epic - "Issue tracking for terminal dwellers". TUI based on git, vim-inspired. Looks pretty cool. ljtn.github.io #

  • Jason Scott has been digitizing a collection of 25000 manuals. Very retro geek. Interesting designs. ascii.textfiles.com #

2026/05/15 #

Today’s links:

  • Trump and the Nasdaq dreamtime visit and "pay respects" to president Xi in China. www.theguardian.com #

  • In completely unrelated news, oldest giant dinausor found in South East Asia weighing as much as 9 elephants. www.bbc.com #

  • 40 million Kenyans get a bitcoin lightning address. Very cool. x.com #

2026/05/14 #

Bugs in mocking libraries

Bugs in code is not a lot of fun at the best of times, but finding a bug in a mocking library is the sort of thing that can really ruin your day, or week, or worse.

The past few days I‘ve been deep in a refactor, and I eventually hit a point where I was fighting the tools rather than the code. There were just too many moving parts, and it became impossible to see the woods for the trees. What appeared to be a straightforward bug in my integration tests turned into a two-day troubleshooting marathon. It’s a strange irony of working with LLMs: the ability to generate code so quickly means you can sometimes dig yourself into an even deeper hole than the one you are already in, with terrifying efficiency. You end up iterating on a flawed premise until you’re so far down you’ve lost all perspective on the original problem.

My way out of that cycle is to step away from the main project and build a "minimal". I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve even started a dedicated section in my portfolio to track them. The goal is to isolate the problem domain completely. By stripping everything back to a few lines of code and a single test case, the friction has nowhere to hide. In this case, it turned out that Node’s native fetch behaves just differently enough during a 204 handshake to throw Nock into a tailspin unless you explicitly override the transport.

I don't just build these repos to fix a single bug, they serve as a way to document the "why" so my future self can return to the problem and actually remember the details. It’s easy to forget the nuances of a library conflict six months down the line, but having a working, isolated example provides a path back to stable ground. It’s about being pragmatic, clearing the brambles in a small patch so you can see the through-line in your main project.

Here's the latest minimal: minimal-modern-node-http-mocking

The good news is that when I dove back into the main project I was able to fix the integration test I had been spinning on almost immediately. I feel like this latest minimal is a textbook example of when to use this technique.

Side note, a long list of very strange synchronicities for me this week, including what seemed like a name drop of the mocking library in a podcast I listened to moments after deciding to fix the bug. What's really weird, as far as I can tell they were talking about something completely unrelated to programming. It made no sense whatsoever in their context. #

Today’s links:

  • Jorijn Schrijvershof is not happy with Github. I'm hearing this a lot recently. He is moving to self hosted Forgejo. jorijn.com #

  • Wondering if there will be a surge in rocket launcher company sales fueled by anti-mecha robot preppers. en.wikipedia.org #

2026/05/07 #

Today’s links:

  • Anthropic signs deal with SpaceXAI to use their Colossus 1 supercomputer, and interested to partener in developing "AI Orbital Compute". x.ai #

  • Simon Willison on the nuances of vibe coding vs agentic engineering. simonwillison.net #

  • The MSM narrative seems to be that superpowers like US and China are about to crack down on AI. www.wsj.com #

2026/05/05 #

Recording integration test fixtures

Long day today, but managed to fix all the integration tests that had broken during the latest refactor. It‘s nice to finish the day with the latest build running smoothly. I had to re-record all the test fixtures, but that‘s been made a lot easier following recent changes I made. Previously I had to create all the test mocks by hand, which was really laborious and error prone, but now it‘s all automatic. Anyway, nice to have some progress :) #

2026/05/04 #

Today’s links:

  • Dave Rupert on small language models (SMLs) in the browser. daverupert.com #

  • 2024: LLMs in the browser - I wonder how long it will take until someone tries to integrate one of these directly into a web browser. markjgsmith.com #

2026/05/03 #

More refactoring, more integration tests

This is another one of those test posts. I‘ve been busy with more refactoring of my blogging software. This time I‘ve been getting the integration tests working correctly. Thankfully the developer tools and libraries are pretty great. It‘s a bit laborious to get things setup initially and the LLMs have sent be down several pretty bad dead ends. But things are progressing well in general. #

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