Chapter XXI, an intermezzo where the rules matter and I stray into the world of AI

The more we focus on a particular technology, the more we lose sight of what normal people actually care about.

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Well over a decade ago, hundreds of conversations over a period of years crystalized into a book called The New Kingmakers. The core thesis of the book was simple: a constituency long thought to be…

On 10 August 2024 Debian bug 1078208 reported that the fail2ban SSH filter no longer worked with OpenSSH 9.8: part of the daemon had moved into a process called sshd-session, and with the changed name on its log lines the patterns stopped matching without reporting any error. Text has been the universal interface since Doug McIlroy wrote in 1978 that the output of every program should be expected to become the input to another, and it works between people and machines because the person at the keyboard notices when a sentence changes. fail2ban removed that person long ago, and on FreeBSD 15 its sshd filter carries 27 regular expressions where the first sshd support in October 2004 matched two phrases. Agent pipelines rebuild the same arrangement with models, one writing prose and another interpreting it, with no agreement about the words. A UC Berkeley team annotated 1,642 traces from seven multi-agent frameworks for NeurIPS 2025 and found task failure rates between 41 and 86.7 per cent, with 32.3 per cent of failures attributed to inter-agent misalignment. OpenAI reported in August 2024 that gpt-4-0613 followed a complex JSON schema less than 40 per cent of the time when asked, against 100 per cent once the platform enforced it. The strongest objection is granted in full: natural language is why these systems compose at all, and many teams already use structured outputs and the Model Context Protocol. The FreeBSD base system met a version of the problem earlier with libxo, which first appeared in FreeBSD 11.0 and lets 25 base programs print text for people and JSON for programs from the same code, while jc needs 220 parsers in 57,683 lines of Python to convert output after the fact. The limit starts at home: ifconfig does not speak libxo, and jc parses it with 728 lines and 31 regular expressions.

Measured on FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE-p3 with helm 3.21.0: helm create writes twelve files with 539 lines for the scaffolding of one web service, 214 template directives sit across nine of those files, and helm template renders 100 lines of YAML from them. Every programming language in common use was designed by a mathematician, from Turing and Church in the thirties through Backus with FORTRAN in 1957 and McCarthy with Lisp in 1958 to Hoare and the null reference, and their metaphor was the equation. Three devices of human language never made it into that notation: inflection, contextual scope, and mutual agreement between parts. All three came back one layer above the language, in configuration files: inflection as templating, contextual scope as a stack of overrides four deep, and agreement as schemas, in a format whose 1.1 specification reads the bare word NO as the boolean false. A values file with region: NO renders as region: false in Helm 3.21.0, and a key moved two spaces to the right renders silently into the wrong parent. The same service in two environments comes to seventeen lines of jail configuration in one notation on FreeBSD. The piece argues for a surface designed by people who study how meaning is read, with the formal machinery kept underneath where mathematics excels, and credits KYAML, stable in Kubernetes 1.37, as the platform correcting itself.

What I learned from building a less-is-more self-hosted rig in the most normie way possible.

What is a developer to do when they need something more tangible than a chat box? Enter canvases.

A member-governed cooperative for AI inference. Direct the models, the values, and the direction — together.

A follow-up to Donut Lab: a study in deception in venture-backed technology, published 25 March 2026. If you haven’t read it already, go and have a look (please do, it’ll make what’s below make a lot more sense) then come back here. There is a German company called CT Coatings whose patent portfolio covers screen-printed […]

The 747 shaped how I understood distance, family, and wonder. As it disappears from the skies, I'm trying to figure out what to hand my son instead.

The way we write code is changing. How do we retain control over the integrity of the things we build?

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for awhile. How do you think of the Internet? Is it social for you? A source of information? A simple tool? A burden? A toxic place filled with assholes? All of the above? For me, I have a hard time narrowing down what the Internet even is. Oh, I know the technologies behind it, the hardware and software that are actually “The Internet”, but like many things that have spawned from the human condition, The Internet has taken on a much more transcendent place in our world. It is less abuot the technology, and how you experience the technology.

One of the first commands I learned to use on a PC was the tree command in DOS. This was a command that let me see what files and subdirectories were present in a particular directory in a structured, visual way. The tree-like nature coming from the way folders were represented as branches and files as leaves on that branch. At the time, it was just a fun and useful way to visualise the files on the PC. However, I still find myself wanting to represent file and folder structures in documentation that I write and information that I provide to others. Sometimes this isn’t even on a PC, but rather on my Mac. Fortunately, there’s a way to reproduce this functionality, and furthermore, I can have it right at my fingertips thanks to the power of Keyboard Maestro.

My small space on the internet where I share some local happenings, my projects, some of my photography, perhaps some commentary on the absurdity of the world...

Most people, when asked why they do what they do, lie. This isn’t because they’re malicious but it’s because the honest justification for a career is rarely noble. It’s usually a combination of a decent paycheck, tolerable hours, and whatever neurosis you were nursing at that

My twenty-five-year-old Intel Play QX3 microscope had no software that would run on a modern Mac, so I used Claude to write one in a morning. When an app takes a morning instead of two weeks, software can stop being a product and start being personal.

My own photo. Not AI. Everything is real, including the ?. I posted what follows more than twenty-six years ago on Searls.com, which now brings up a danger warning because it’s still http and…

A crude visual representation of what Jefferson called “the combustive power” of an idea, explained below. Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would e…

Routers for the Internet of Stuff We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmi…

Elemental differences Look up graphite, graphite company, or graphite the company, and you’ll mostly get geological and industrial answers. (Unless, of course, your search history suggests th…

Newsletters turned into daily newspapers chasing recency. Magazines, with editors, themes and a slower cadence, are better products.

The AI brain worms have been spreading and I don't have a solution, I just want to get off this ride.

Although everyone has their own reasons for exploring a new hobby, one of the driving factors behind the popularity of Meshtastic and MeshCore has been the incredible accessibility offered by off-g…

My guest on this past week’s Live with Tim O’Reilly was Emmanuel Ameisen, a researcher on Anthropic’s AI interpretability team. I’d heard him give a short talk