2026 W06

This week the weather has been miserable. I’m all for cycling in the rain but this week has been tough going. The rain and the wind are one thing, but the killer was the timing of high tides. It’s not so much the flooding that’s a problem, we have a couple of alternative routes. As the water subsides, it leaves the road covered in waste. There’s the mud, the twigs, the occasional tree branch, and of course the plastic. Cycling along in the dark it’s not easy to avoid and we’ve ended up with our fair share of punctures.

Huddled by the side of the road, in the rain, hands covered in mud and oil I pulled out my phone and ordered a portable electric pump. It arrived the next day, just in time for our second puncture of the week. And so, rather than repair or replace the inner tube, out came the pump and in under a minute we were back on our way. Re-inflating the tyre buys us just enough time to get home again so that I can repair it in relative comfort. This wasn’t the only bike related drama this week. Brake pads finally wore down until there was nothing left. I’m used to feeling these gradually fading but these ones went suddenly. More than a little scary.

Experimenting with AI

Back at the safety of my desk I decided to bite the bullet and challenge my thinking on AI. Specifically, I’ve been using local models to analyse Chinese text for readability. Results have been mixed but I’ve had fun exploring the difference between system and user prompts, model temperature, and learned that ‘few-shot’ does not mean iterative refinement. It relates to the inclusion of examples in your prompts.

I used Antigravity to build an MCP server for my task list app, Things from Cultured Code. I’m not sure that I’ll use it much but it was a fun exercise. I learned that coding agents, whilst impressive, are relatively crude in how they approach the language toolchain; they don’t use the debugger, they don’t use the language server, they don’t use an abstract syntax tree. Instead, the rely on liberal use of print() functions, grep to search code, and good old fashioned trial and error. Impressive, yes! But these tools are still far from intelligent.

Consumption

I’ve been enjoying listening to Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis.

“Why did we ever allow ourselves to be lured into the soothing delusion that the death of something bad would necessarily deliver something better?” – Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism

Something prompted me to re-visit the Avril Lavigne albums that have followed me around since university. I enjoyed these a lot more than I thought I would and boy do they bring back memories.

I haven’t found the time to continue watching Senna on Netflix.

In Photos