Enjoying the new Luli Lee EP “Brave New World” 🎶

Anthropic suggests how AI coding impacts developer learning. Takeaway: use AI to learn as you go; favour inquiry over generation. Exercise your brain!

In an AI-augmented workplace, productivity gains matter, but so does the long-term development of the expertise those gains depend on.

Interesting technique from Vercel on providing context via a compress docs index in Agents.md vs providing a skill to look up the same.

🔗 Why Talking to LLMs Has Improved My Thinking, Philip O’Toole

the model is not improving my thinking directly. It is improving the interface between my thinking and language. Since reasoning depends heavily on what one can represent explicitly, that improvement can feel like a real increase in clarity.

🔗 The Human in the Loop, Adventures in Nodeland

When I ship code, my name is on it. When there’s a security vulnerability […], it’s my responsibility. I can use AI to help me move faster, but I cannot outsource my judgment. I cannot outsource my accountability.

Responsibility is key. Using AI has made me more paranoid about merging code - I don’t want the embarrassment of having yolo’d something into production without having understood what has been written. Part of the solution to this is likely to write better tests and validations and be responsible for those instead.

Thinking about automation - I think some processes should remain manual. Every Monday I sit down and do my timesheets and invoicing. I could easily set this up to be automatic, but it’s useful for me to type out my working hours to get a sense of effort, time spent and distraction.

A wee stop at Dunbar Beach yesterday on our way back up the A1 📸

Had a fun time hosting the GlasgowJS Code Jam last night - I think the format worked well. Might run some more of these this year!

Peaceful icy Porty this morning ❄️📸

Just finished On the Calculation of Volume III, Solvej Balle 📚

Just aded a “Previous Bulletins” section to the Scottish Technology Club homepage, plus a link to the archive.

First read of 2026 - Human Acts, Han Kang 📚

🔗 Why Self-Improvement Starts With Maintenance, Tim Harford

Maintenance is meditative — one of Brand’s heroes, the great French philosopher/round-the-world-sailor Bernard Moitessier, told him “My rule is, a new boat every day.” By that he meant that everything on his one-man boat should be as good as new; no repair job was so trivial that it could be postponed.

It’s half seven in the morning and we are already on our second listen-through of The Highway Rat

Happy 2026! Kicked off the year with a lovely walk and called by Sprogmanay at the National Museum

Started reading: Human Acts by Kang Han 📚

Wallington House and Gardens for a festive walk with friends and the kids 📸

Currently reading: English Pastoral by James Rebanks 📚

🔗 The Hidden Risk of AI Compute, Dave Friedman

Once you view compute as risk, the strategic map changes. The service-first instinct is: “We’ll abstract this away for users, eat the risk ourselves, and charge a margin.” So you get GPU Airbnbs, fancy schedulers, nicer dashboards. Useful, but fundamentally linear. You have a better middleman in a broken market. The market-first instinct, on the other hand, is: “We’ll surface the risk, standardize it, and make it tradable. Our moat is the market structure, not the interface.”

Bamburgh Castle 📸

Menorahsaurus at a lovely Chanukah dinner last night 🦖🕯️

🔗 You’re Overspending Because You Lack Values, Sherry Ning

Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time. I was standing in front of the metabolic waste of my existence, materialized. I was looking at the amount of my time, therefore my life, that had been turned into garbage. And the worst part is that I could’ve prevented it.

Vibe coding small tools - I’ve made a couple of quick plugins for Obsidian to help me manage my workflow. Really great that it can be quickly extended and customised. I’ve made a “task forwarder” that integrates with Obsidian Tasks and a “Copy as a formatted quote” for Readwise to Micro blog.

📚Finished reading Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman. My review:

Meditations for Mortals is a book of short reflections I read slowly over the course of a year. It’s ideal to snack on when you want a small shift in perspective or quotes on how others approach their lives.

If you’ve read Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks or The Antidote this will feel familiar. Burkeman avoids grand all encompassing frameworks and instead offers a calmer way of thinking about how to live.

I don’t feel the need to pick up too many self help books - but Burkeman is worth having around.

Currently reading: Matrescence by Lucy Jones 📚