2026-08-06 00:00:00
Sean Goedecke: LLMs reward expertise
the idea here — that domain knowledge makes you better at using LLMs — is something I’ve also experienced in my own work. If you have a good theory of your codebase, you can push the LLM much harder than if you have no familiarity. Because you have your own sense of what a good solution might look like, you can say “no, I think it could be simpler here”, or “but don’t we already do X?”, or “can we express this problem in these familiar terms?“.
Sean is right on the money here. It's really cool what you can do with coding agents, and they allow less technical people to create code. However, interacting with these models when you have no idea how the code works and when you do know how the code works are completely different experiences.
As time goes on, I feel quite strongly that those who will benefit the most from coding agents are those who have a good combination of technical understanding, a good design eye, and excellent product intuition/research.
2026-08-05 21:32:34
I don't obsessively check the metrics on this blog, but I do every now and again just to see how things are generally going. I don't run ads anymore, so page views don't really equate to much more than a vanity metric. But hey, who amongst us isn't a little vain?
Anyway, I noticed there was a spike yesterday. This blog gets a couple thousand visits per day, so a spike to to 30k views in a day, half of which were this post from a week ago is pretty notable, to say the least. But like I said, I didn't even notice until now.
First, I continue to be happy with my decision to move hosting to Ghost Pro. I very rarely had issues when I was hosting this blog myself, but when something like this happened back then, those days turned into me monitoring my server load for hours to make sure everything was holding together. Now I don't even think about it, which for where I am in my life with priorities, is just right for me.
Second, this didn't trigger any alerts for me. I don't have any alerts set up for traffic spikes. Maybe I should, but as I said above, raw traffic doesn't really do much for me. In fact, the reason I didn't notice this is because the only sort of notification I get for activity on my site is when someone signs up for More Birchtree. Despite getting tens of thousands of people hitting the site yesterday, not a single one converted to a paid subscriber. I'm not at all surprised by this, of course. Subscribing to a blog is something people do after following it for a little bit, not something you do when you first come across someone you found on Hacker News.
Third, looking at where people come to my site from is interesting. Google Zero clearly hasn't hit me yet, but this report also shows something that I find quite frustrating about all analytics services, which is that a substantial number of items are marked as "direct". What the hell does that mean? My understanding is it's basically everything it's not able to categorize, including things like people opening pages from their RSS reader, coming to the site from a bookmark in their browser (shout out if you do that), or from users who have privacy tools installed that strip any referral information.
But besides the semi-mysterious direct category, I do think the other sources are kind of fascinating. For example, my Bluesky account is effectively an automated bot at this point. I don't really use the platform, but all of my posts are automatically syndicated there, and I got 3x more traffic from those automated bot posts than my human written posts I share to Mastodon where I'm actually engaged. Hey, in this window, ChatGPT drove nearly as much traffic to my site as Mastodon 😵.
2026-08-05 21:00:00
Linus Torvalds (the creator or Linux) was spitting fire in a post to the Linux kernel mailing list just a few weeks ago:
Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
And:
There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.
And:
But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem to do.
Hell yeah, preach, Linus! I also came across this bit from a post from him in 2023:
I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.
And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.
Oh no, am I about to install Linux?
2026-08-05 19:00:00
Just for fun, I've use quicksubs' benchmark mode to see how fast the 4 Macs I have access to are and how they heat up when under load.
For repeatability, I ran the following command on this file.
quicksubs bench --warmup 0 --runs 20 --csv benchfile.csv bench.mp3
The overall average times are about what you might expect. The M5 Pro is a bit faster than the M4 Pro, and they're both way faster than the M2 and A18 Pro.
So a couple interesting things here looking at the times over all 20 runs.
The Neo gets real hot real quick, the Mac mini gets kinda warm, and the MacBook Pros just kinda hang out at the same point. All 3 laptops were sitting side by side and didn't have anything else running, so I'm not sure if it's expected for the M5 to run hotter than the M4, but that's what I saw here.
Anyway, no real takeaways here, benchmarking is just fun.
2026-08-04 20:30:04
2026-08-04 19:39:53
Josh Ginter: The Titanium Milanese Loop Apple Watch Band Review: The Best Apple Watch Band Ever Made
At $200 USD it's expensive for a band, but it's a buy-once purchase that kills any desire to own another. Best Apple Watch band ever made.
This is my watch band as well, and I absolutely agree with Josh here. It's supremely comfortable and looks really nice. I work out in it, I go to formal events with it, and it's my day-to-day standard. It has completely killed my desire to browse for new watch bands.
My only gripe is that while the clasp is great once it's locked in, it is by far the most annoying watch band clasp I've ever personally used to actually lock in. But that's 5 seconds of annoyance every day to get an otherwise perfect band experience.