Alasdair Watson

This is an absolutely wild story. A man who has built a business out of helping other businesses run dodgy tax avoidance schemes (with a sideline in helping Mafiosos avoid capture). It's a staggering level of not-quite-prosecutable criminalty.

This is a sobering analysis of how "the poverty line" is calculated, and what it means. It's focused on the US and the numbers and suppositions are all drawn from there, but the lessons from it are definitely universal.

This is a good and well articulated look at the ways in which AI might change things.

The absolute rock solid key insight: do not let AI do anything for you that you do not already know how to do yourself. Within that frame, it's an incredibly useful tool. Outside that frame, it's unsafe at best.

Oh look, I'm bookmarking yet another laravel package with a note that "this will be useful for work in the near future". Because it will.

I've been dicing onions all wrong. And I finally understand why chefs make that horizontal cut into an onion, prior to dicing!

No. No we don't. This is a really good primer on the reality of working with LLMs – that we just don't really know how they work.

And here is that list of 102 cocktails. And being me, rather than setting out to go to bars and try them all, I wonder about setting out to make them all, at home. That could be fun.

So it turns out that the International Bartenders Association maintains a list of cocktails (presumably in an effort to standardise training a bit. While I've got books containing hundreds (if not thousands) more on my shelves, this is probably the closest thing the world has to an "official" list of cocktails, and this chap tells the story of his setting out to drink them all.

If this adds Gitlab integration (and there's already a PR for it, so here's hoping) then installing this is going to be a no-brainer for me.

Someone out there is writing a comprehensive quide to making software, stating from first principles. At present, there's only one chapter available, on how displays work (because almost all software invovles something being displayed to someone at some point, and without them, there'd be no software). If the rest of the book is up to this standard, it'll be amazing.

These are great. There are several in here I believed, and I'm probably going to start adding oil to pasta water again, if it really does stop it boiling over. And I'm going to stop worrying that I'm not drinknig enough water.

Fascinating set of insights into how far an AI agent can go, and how it breaks down. The other thing I find refreshingly honest, is the tone of the company who make the thing, openly saying "we have no idea why it did this". That bedrock fact underlies all LLM development, and any "AI" company who claims to truly, properly, understand their product is lying.

A little good news – thanks to dropping battery costs (with even cheaper to come) there are now parts of the world where there's absolutely no chance of non-renewable energy being remotely competative with solar power. Hell, per this article, event somewhere grey and miserable like Birmingham could meet 60% of it's needs, cheaply and cleanly.