2026 Week 6
TL;DR: Hid 3D printed critters around the house for my wife to find, got late-night Skyrim modding working on Linux (with Dagoth Ur!), and deeply related to that LLM alarm clock burning $20 repeatedly asking "is it time yet?" - because that's exactly how afternoon meetings feel with ADHD.
Meta
Kind of a slow, sleepy week. Probably not much to report, this week.
Update from future-next-week-me: I also just realized that I never quite got this post published on time. But, through the magic of doing whatever I want on my own blog, I'm going to post-date it to the correct week. 😅
3D Printing Adventures
I've been hiding little printed critters around the house lately. Out of reach of cats, but my wife likes finding them:
It's like leaving tiny surprises for future-me and my-wife-me to discover. Except I know where they all are. But I'll forget. So it still counts as a surprise, right?
Late Night Linux Gaming
Why did my brain convince me it would be fun to try to get Skyrim running on Linux with the Dagoth Ur follower mod installed? And why did I do this at bedtime? Still, I did get it working in the end and it was kinda worth it?
I think I've decided that learning a game has mods is a cognitohazard for me. Last time I played Skyrim about 5 years ago, I installed like 100 mods, giggled at it, then wandered off entirely. My brain just wants to mod things, not actually play them.
The $20 LLM Alarm Clock Incident
Stupid shower thought: Remember that guy who spent $20 using an LLM as an alarm clock that just repeatedly asked "is it time yet?" all night until the tokens ran out?
I'm actually sympathizing with the LLM here, because that's what it feels like to me when there's an afternoon meeting scheduled. Just sitting there, repeatedly checking: is it time yet? Is it time yet? How about now? What about now?
Like sure, "just set a reminder alarm for the calendar event" like that's a real thing that actually works. (Duh.)
Media
Meanwhile, everyone must watch this latest Technology Connections video:
And, here's a live show by Information Society from way back when. It's pretty keen.
Miscellanea
My wife bought a bag of like 50 small soft mice cat toys and dumped them all out in the living room. Miss Biscuits spent all night gradually distributing them throughout the house. I just threw three down the hall and I think it blew her mind trying to figure out which one to chase. This is peak cat content, folks.
Friendship Skills for Neurodivergent Adults - book providing practical strategies for neurodivergent adults with ADHD, autism, or anxiety
Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle - helping an accounting firm escape legacy software locked behind ancient hardware
Decentralizing My Smartphone With Single Purpose Devices - replacing the everything-device with focused single-purpose gadgets
Turns Out They Didn't Really Want You To Bring Your Whole Self To Work - whole self was just the price of admission in a seller's market; now it's a buyer's market
No. You can't tell it was written by AI and I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT - important pieces about how AI detectors flag non-native English speakers
My AI Adoption Journey - Mitchell Hashimoto's nuanced, measured approach to finding value in AI tooling
Speedrunning Agentic Software Engineering Management - we're speed-running through software engineering history; agentic methodologies are somewhere around the 1970s
Programming is Dead - the loom metaphor: this is the worst these tools will ever be
What, then, are we paying for? - paying for software isn't paying for a solution, it's paying for someone else to own a problem
Latent Space Engineering - actively managing agents' vibes and feelings, treating them as having mental states rather than just token prediction engines
Server-Sent Events Beat WebSockets for 95% of real-time apps because bidirectional comes with a complexity tax
maptoposter - transform cities into beautiful minimalist map posters with code