Before reading about their experience I was a firm, almost dogmatic, skeptic about anything of the sort. People who believed in UFOs were in the same camp as people who hunt ghost, bigfoot, and the loch ness monster, or so I thought.

After looking into the subject, something which I strongly invite every skeptic to do, I found that there are a few key differences between UFOs and other unbelievable supernatural sightings. First and foremost being the large number of sightings by credible witnesses. Second would be the extremely suspicious behavior of the US government around the topic. We've spent millions of taxpayer dollars over the decades investigating the topic, while at the same time saying that there is nothing worth investigating.

You can't say the same thing about ghost, or bigfoot.

Over the last few years there have also been a handful of congressional hearings on the subject of UAP, you would think that if there was nothing there that this would quickly be cleared up with a top secret closed door meeting or two, but in fact the opposite has happened. There have been several top secret meetings in secure facilities and while the congresspeople can't say what they've seen it is very clear that they are coming out with even more questions.

In recent months the increasing political pressure has gendered a response and the Whitehouse has directed the DoD (Department of Defense) to begin declassifying and releasing UFO information. The announcement was made in kind of a tongue in cheek way, and because Republicans are generally seen as anti-science and the kind of people who believe in bigfoot and ghosts anyway it still hasn't gotten the attention of the general public.

As of yesterday the government has dumped four tranches of content, one every month or so since the announcement. There are lots of documents and several dozen videos, mostly low quality military grade stuff that you would need to be a trained observer to interpret. There's definitely some weird looking stuff in there, but nothing that I've seen so far that feels definitive.

A couple of weeks ago the notable skeptic and very popular public science figure, Neil deGrasse Tyson quite suddenly changed his tune from, "If UFOs were real, why in the age of the iPhone don't we have more than a few blurry pictures of them" to, “The real question is not ‘are we alone?’ it’s ‘are we ready?’ Are we?”

When asked why he is suddenly more open to the topic he cites a recent shift in the level of credibility of the people who are making the claims, but really credible people have been blowing the whistle for decades. So this makes me wonder if he's been given some inside information.

This morning I woke up to headline where Dr. Phil says that he has been given insider info and that "our government has been lying to us for 79 years", raising my suspicion even further.

When you zoom out and look at how all of these individual gears and cogs in the government are slowly moving in the same direction it starts to look like we might be seeing a coordinated government disclosure of...something.

The alternative is that we have a truly epic story of waste, fraud, and abuse on our hands. One where some clever clogs in the military figured out that the best way to steal money from the government was to claim to be studying UFO technology, and that they somehow got away with it for 80 years.

I'll be continuing to follow this closely as it unfolds, until next time, watch this space.

It has been a journey, sparked by a conversation between my wife and I about how insecure the system one of our homeschool co-ops uses for registration and I said (with much bravado), "I bet I can do a better job than that in a month!".

Checking my notes and git commits, it's been almost exactly a year since the initial commit (July 14th 2025) so I'm right there, in the ballpark 😊

The standalone product, an open source student registration system was technically built in about 2 or 3 months, but access to increasingly powerful large language models tempted me to try to turn it into an enterprise level product, and that's where the rest of the time went.

There is a lot of talk online about whether AI is really a game changer or not, and to me the proof is in the pudding. While most folks have been asking the question and wondering, some of us have been quietly building. That's really only one way to answer the question.

I can say without any doubt that ruff registrar as a product would only exist in my head as something nice to do "when I have some free time". At best I would have completed the community edition and shared it with some friends, maybe step in to replace the legacy app I mentioned earlier, but I definitely never would have had the time to launch it as a SaaS offering.

The biggest takeaway I learned from this experience of going from idea to launching a product is the amount of time and effort that goes into it. I used to think that me not being able to launch any of my solo efforts in the past was purely a skill issue, but now I understand that I had the skills all along.

I just didn't appreciate how much work it would be, I was looking at the foothills and finding those daunting without even seeing the mountain peaks soaring behind them.

My last refuge was the news podcast feature built into Android OS, you could select from a lot of different news sources and hear their morning headline readings to get a good sense of what is going on in the world. A couple of days ago that feature stopped working and the only thing Google News will give me is an AI readout of the days headlines, it's not the same and it caught me off guard. In hindsight I shouldn't be surprised, google does love to kill a good product.

I'm really not sure what it will take to set up a similar experience, but ironically I'm tempted to use AI to re-write the podcast news feed the old fashioned way.

It's early summer so my garden is humming, most of the summer bloomers are pushing petals out now and I've been spending a lot of time scratching in the dirt and preparing for their arrival.

I've also been working on ruffregistrar.com and that is coming along very nicely, I'm close to launch and getting tiny butterflies because I have real skin in the game. Every second the site runs costs me and it may take a while to get my first paying customers, so until it really launches it has been taking a lot of the rest of my free time. Meanwhile I've been working with one of the co-ops my kids are in to start alpha testing things to make sure they work.

Real work at seekr has also been busy, but fun. I don't want to talk too much about what I work on, but I'm on the platform engineering team which means a lot of my work touches every engineer in the company.

The Knicks are NBA champions! 👀

I'm an extremely lapsed basketball fan, mostly thanks to growing up a fan of the Knicks and the 76ers, I can't be blamed for checking out after the Marbury and Carmelo Anthony eras. I'm happy for them though.

We have all the ingredients we need for an amazing summer, but the political and economic tensions continue to provide a bleak backdrop of storm clouds off in the distance. The US/Israel war with Iran seems all but certain to go on indefinitely in a truly Orwellian fashion where we are always in a ceasefire and "days away" from a peace deal, but we're still attacking them, they are still attacking us, and the Strait of Hormuz is "open", but only if you're friendly with Iran and willing to pay a toll, or you'd rather roll the dice with an American Navy escort.

I've always been a close follower of the news, and never in my life have I ever been more tempted than right now to just tune it all out. But then I remember all of the people who are suffering at the hands of my government, and I realize that the least I can do is not look away.

I find myself shocked that after 10+ years of Trumps constant lying that now the entire worlds economy is being propped up by the idea that maybe this time he is telling the truth.

It can't last though, the Strait remains closed, the ceasefire remains a ceasefire in name only as Israel continues to brazenly annex Lebanon, flattening every square inch of housing so that no one can return. They aren't even bothering to make up excuses, they don't have to because the crisis they duped Trump into manufacturing is sucking all of the air out of the room and providing Israel with all of the cover it needs.

I'm worried about what happens next.

A lot of the economic damage has already been done, we can't plant fields now that were left unplanted due to the high cost of fertilizer. If the Strait opens tomorrow tankers won't magically appear in American ports. I'm sure you're reading the same headlines that I am.

Kitchen table conversations at my house lately keep coming back to whether we should plan our summer vacation knowing full well that by early July gas might be $7 a gallon. Or will we be glad we held onto the cash during the coming economic storm? Will this be the last vacation we can afford for a couple of years?

I'm sure we're not the only family having this debate, booking late, quietly impacting the economy downstream from us. The little cottage we've been staying at for the past three summers had maybe just gotten to the point where they could count on seeing us, now maybe they are delaying expenditures of their own.

There's no taking any of that back, it's no longer a question of if it's going to hurt, people are already feeling the pain. The only questions left are how much it's going to hurt, and for how long.

Now, in my defense, the scope back then was much smaller. I was going to self host my home grown student management system, a more secure version of the registration system a co-op my family is a member of uses now. That old system was donated by some previous parent who was a a programmer, but by this time that family was long gone, their kids are graduated, but they still support the website out of the goodness of their hearts.

I planned to use the old site as a spec and rebuild it using modern tech, I did some perfunctory searching and didn't see any open source tools that did what I wanted and I dove in.

I faced the usual challenges of agentic coding, I'm sure I talked about those in detail in my previous post, but towards the end I started to bump up some more subtle problems that I knew existed but didn't realize how annoying it could be until I really experienced it first hand.

First, as the project gets bigger and more complex it becomes more difficult to get Claude or Codex to stick to a problem solving style. Most programmers have a handful of patterns that they like to apply, and generally you'll see problems throughout a project that is maintained by one person or a very small team, that you see the same patterns applied to various problems throughout the codebase.

LLMs know all of the patterns though so they tend to use them all and sometimes they will use one pattern to solve a problem in one place, and then an entirely different one to solve a nearly identical problem elsewhere.

The other issue I ran into this past month was LLMs weird inability to say "No", or "That's a bad idea".

It seems that even when provided with very large context windows LLMs are still lacking the ability to understand the goals and overlay that on top of the context window so that each iteration pulls us closer to the solution. Since LLMs lack that, working with them feels like pulling a random, very talented, CS student off of the street to work with every couple of hours. Just as it feels like they are beginning to understand the project you have to dismiss them and grab another random student and start fresh.

I'm going to say upfront that the following example is, in hindsight, on me. But I asked the most advanced agent I have access to at the moment (CODEX 5.5) to basically solve one of those triangle problems where you can only have 2 of your 3 needs met. You want the job done, right, fast, and cheap, you have to pick two. Agents don't really understand that paradox and will happily burn a lot of tokens trying to oblige. Eventually it will present the problem as solved, having only actually done 2 of the 3 things and when you take a look at the code for the 3rd requirement you will inevitably find some kind of awful hack job.

When I was a very junior developer I used to get myself into messes like this all of the time, but as I gained more experience I learned to spot problems shaped like this and avoid the pitfall. The only way to really spot these problems though is to fully understand how your tools work, what their limitations are, side effects, etc. This is something that can't really be handwaved away by a general purpose coding agent.

At the risk of repeating myself, building complex things is still hard.

I grew up in a religious home, mostly Christians (Dad's side) and Muslims (Mom converted and remarried), all firm believers in God. I have to credit my mothers midlife conversion for planting the seed that eventually blossomed into atheism and agnosticism. It is very easy to indoctrinate a child into the culturally dominant religion, but it's a lot more difficult than you would imagine to convert a child who was in the process of building a logical framework on top of their foundational religious beliefs.

It obviously leads to a lot of questions, children are naturally logical and I was no different. I ended up rejecting religion so strongly that, without realizing it, I self indoctrinated myself into the materialistic world view. Only now am I starting to realize that I may have overcorrected, science doesn't have all of the answers and there are some rather large elephants in the room that science tends to ignore.

For me, the biggest problem with a purely materialist worldview where we're all meat robots and our conscious experience is simply an illusion, a byproduct of neurons firing off in our brains, is that it takes away our free will. It means our actions can be predicted deterministically by parameters outside of our immediate control.

This leads to my second issue: that in a universe without consciousness or free will there is also, fundamentally, no meaning. It's all just a happy accident, right down to the fact that we happen to be experiencing it, pure coincidence.

I don't know about you, but I find it a little suspicious that a purely materialistic world view robs us of our free will just a surely as an omnipotent and omniscient deity does.

A conscious universe represents another philosophical path where, by accepting that conscious experience is fundamental I can regain my free will and inject meaning back into my existence. Instead of feeling that on the timescale of the universe, my 40 years of life are meaningless, as a conscious being whose purpose is experience conscious awareness, then every millisecond that I'm awake matters.

The trade off is that I'm able to choose to accept that the universe is not completely deterministic, and that we can't know in advance what the universe is evolving into.

I think I'm okay with that.

If you ignore the news you could be forgiven for thinking that, outside of the recent war and subsequent gas price increases, things are pretty good. As I putter about in my garden this spring I find myself focusing inwards on this small patch of space that I can exercise control over. In those moments digging in the dirt I understand the temptation to put our heads into the sand.

War? What war? There is no war in Ba Sing Se my garden.

I guess I have this fantasy where, no matter how bad things get, if I just keep taking care of the garden that I'll be able to keep my house, and my job, and hold my life in place while the rest of the world spins out of control around us. By digging my hands into the dirt I'm trying to put down roots and bind myself to this spot, this place in time.

When we moved in I found it easy to picture the next 30 years in this house, now, only a decade later, it all feels so precarious.

The talking heads are saying that we're a week or two away from the worst fuel crisis in the history of the world. I don't think anyone in my age group can appreciate the significance of that because we have no working memory of the last fuel crisis in the 70s. I've seen pictures of the lines at empty gas stations but even during the worst recessions of my lifetime, we were always able to get gas, even if many of us couldn't afford it.

Right now we're all still driving around using fuel that was delivered before the strait was closed, and even in a best case scenario where the ceasefire hadn't failed, it would have taken weeks to bring things back online, so there was going to be pain one way or another, the only question was how bad it was going to be.

Small tangent but worth noting here, China is sitting on massive oil reserves, and they have the greenest energy grid, they will remain largely unaffected by this crisis, so put in a pin in that.

Everyone else though, now that the ceasefire has most certainly failed all we know is that we're careening towards the edge of a cliff, and the US leadership is still operating on vibes and a strong sense of invincibility.

What am I supposed to do with that information? Fill my spare gas can?

Rather than try to plan for that it's easier to just plant another tomato plant, pull more weeds, and pretend that nothing else matters.

So, how's your garden doing this spring? My basil is already popping up and it smells like heaven.

Since this most recent firing, Trump spent a week threatening to end the Iranian civilization, if they don't "Open the fucking strait, ya bastards". I had to log on to truthsocial.com for the first time in my life to verify that he really said that...

Just before the (taco) Tuesday deadline that he set for their annihilation, he decided to accept a ceasefire deal that the Iranians had sent over a week earlier. The next day Israel violated the ceasefire agreement by unleashing a massive coordinated 10 minute attack across many parts of Lebanon and especially Beirut. They then claimed that Lebanon was never part of the deal, the US agreed, and just like that the ceasefire was over practically before it started.

Ed Note: At the time of this post the ceasefire is technically still in effect, but the US is also now blockading the Strait of Hormuz, another clear violation.

All of it is exhausting, conspiratorially I wonder if maybe that's the point? Rationally I think that's giving these fools too much credit. No, there's no 5th dimensional game of chess being played here.

What we're watching is just the random gyrations of selfish, narcissistic, self-absorbed, assholes with too much power and an inability to self reflect being enabled by a mass of citizens who think that these are good qualities to have, actually.

They are going to break the world trying to mold it into their warped vision for the future of humanity, and then, if we let them, they'll blame someone else and walk away, leaving the mess for future generations.

We shouldn't let that happen, they are committing war crimes, and they should all be held to account.

The most notable of these is a new garden dashboard page. I thought it would be nice to know for sure when the seasons changed, and what to plant when, so I used the weather data to build a monitoring system that will keep track of the number of warm/cold days and nights so that when a certain threshold is reached we can officially declare the start of a new season.

I also included a database of all of the plants I grow, and the seed packet data will be used to automatically notify me when it's safe to sow a given seed, or when to transplant, etc.

Eventually I'll work my way back to the ruff-registrar project, I left it in a pretty good spot, but I tried to launch it to production pre-maturely and got burned by an Azure bill I wasn't expecting so I haven't looked at it after spending a couple of days scrambling to try to shut everything down.

I have a spending limit in place so it wasn't the amount that hurt, the issue is that once I hit the limit all of my other sites got turned off, lesson learned.

In other news, the Yankees are off to a decent start. They just opened the season with a 5-1 trip out west, it's been a while since they've done that, in recent years they've been happy to get out with a split. Opening day in the Bronx is tomorrow and I'm excited for that.

Summer is my favorite season but the way spring heralds all of my favorite things to come makes is a very easy close second. I'm going to get back into the dirt while there's still a bit of sun and warmth left and try to soak in as much as I can.

I feel bad centering myself at all, as an American I know I'm responsible for the actions of my president. I know that, for the most part, I'll be insulated from the levels of pain that are going to be felt across the globe. My anger that the people in charge the bombing campaign are demonstrably incompetent ignoramuses obviously is nothing compared to the anger of the people whose home are being bombed by those same idiots.

Today after a 5 week campaign where no real objectives were declared, just incoherent rambling, Trump has declared victory and says that the closed Straight of Hormuz isn't really his problem, America never needed that oil anyway, and if other countries need the oil they "can just go in and take it".

I know I keep repeating this, but even though I knew that America was on the decline and I thought I understood what that meant in academic terms. I always imagined that it would be a slow, inexorable decline, this feels like we're going over a cliff.

Trump and his Department of Defense, all staunch GOP members who in saner times would bitch and moan about every penny added to the deficit are blowing hundreds of billions of dollars per week on this war that is getting us absolutely nothing in return. Just lighting money on fire with no plan, no victory conditions, just fucking vibes man.

I feel equal parts ashamed, enraged, and dumbfounded that someone this stupid managed to take over our country.

I'm also afraid, I'm very worried about what's going to happen next.

I think that the reason I have such a hard time finishing things, even with the help of these powerful agents, comes back to the old 80/20 problem, where the first 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and the last 20% takes the remaining 80%. LLMs haven't solved the last mile problem, not yet anyway, the unintended side effect is that the cognitive load on the human developer is dramatically increased.

In my experience the best way to develop software is to make something very, very small, that works, and then you iterate on top of that. As you do so the kernel of the way the code works becomes cemented in the developers mind slowly over time beneath the layers that are built on top of it. This helps me develop a good mental model of how the code works, and agentic coding short circuits this in a couple of ways.

First, they tend to generate way too much code to start with, and it's getting worse as context windows get larger. Second, they have no problem re-writing whole swathes of code from scratch to solve a problem, which prevents me from developing a good mental model of the code, so I frequently have to ask the agent to explain to me what is going on.

This reminds me of the quote

Complexity can't be eliminated, it can only be moved.

I think this is true in the case of agentic development as well, we've sort of taken the complexity out of writing code and transformed it into a different kind of complexity. Where I used to have a small number of projects that I knew well enough to jump back into at any time, but was blocked for lack of intelligence. Now I've unblocked all of those projects, plus added a half dozen more, except I don't "know" the codebases of any of them.

So while before I didn't want to work on a project because of whatever known issue was blocking me, now I don't want to work on projects because I'm low key dreading the process of re-mapping their complex code bases into a mental model in my mind.

Sometimes too, I feel like watching the agent burn through tokens while it's "thinking" is just as frustrating as banging my head against the wall myself, just frustrating in a different way. Instead of whitling away at the problem and slowly reducing frustration by increasing understanding until the problem is solved, now I watch an agent re-write a couple of classes before prompting it with something like, "the code couldn't have been that wrong before, could it?" and getting a response like, "you're right, this could be done more concisely" and changing 10 lines instead.

So what's the verdict?

Even after saying all of that I don't think humans, generally speaking, will ever write code again, I'm still going to continue generating all of my code as well. But I wanted to report back from the field and give a realistic view of what LLMs are capable of. Even in my day job, I spend a lot of my time applying the latest models to a variety of problems, this week Codex 5.4 dropped, and I've never felt more secure in my role as a developer.

One part of the argument is that whatever your produce will simply be consumed by the machine. The other part is that the machine will then generate so many copies that your original will never be found, so why bother?

I think that humans will always value stuff made by other humans because we are all connected to each other as conscious beings in a way that we are not connected with rocks and machines, not yet anyway.

Philosophically I find myself leaning towards dualism and panpsychism, I think there's more to reality than just the "stuff" around us, and I suspect that consciousness is fundamental and I can't draw a line in the sand where I would say, "at this level things are too simple to experience consciousness".

So I say all of that to say that conscious creations come with something extra, maybe it's simply the ability to "re-train" our own mental models on the fly. I can't prove it, but I have a very strong feeling that the words I'm writing right now aren't being driven by a non-deterministic algorithm bouncing through a matrix of weights, even if those weights are constantly being updated as each Planck second of my life ticks by.

I think it's our ability to experience consciousness that allows our models to continually update and generate new thoughts and ideas, or put them together in novel ways.

That's a very long and complicated way of saying that conscious beings have the ability to experience and enjoy their own creations, and tell you whether they think its subjectively good, in their experience or not.

In my opinion this puts the ability to create stuff that is uniquely new and good solely into the domain of conscious beings, because if you force the model to only generate "new" stuff, it will be effectively random because if you ask it to write 100 songs and pick the 10 it likes the most, it can't.

Meanwhile, actual good new content blessed as such by a conscious mind will become more and more rare, and simple supply and demand tells us what happens next.

Finally, I don't mind being consumed by the various models of the world as they inch their way towards possible consciousness, in fact I'm honored to breath my own soul into their corpus. If we are giving birth to a new form of life, my little blog posts will live forever, my own little ghost amongst many others in the machine.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we're like

• Hand out as many copies of the latest models to as many people as possible
• Make sure the models have as much autonomy as possible, we don't want to get in the way of the model
• Let's use the model for military purposes, with no restrictions

Are we mad?

Now that we're in there, they also haven't bothered to explain what the objectives are. On day one it was to prevent a preemptive nuclear attack, the next day it was regime change, and then the day after that it was "definitely not regime change", and yesterday it was, "There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!".

It should go without saying that this is an illegal war, congress hasn't authorized it but they have voted down a resolution to constrain Trumps power. They are too cowardly to vote for war themselves, they must think they are avoiding getting blood directly on their hands by letting Trump do the dirty work, but they will never wash this off.

I remember going to anti-apartheid protests and AIDs marches in the late 80s and early 90s with my mom when I was growing up in Harlem. Later I would join marches to protest the Iraq war and I took my own kid to Occupy DC, back when it felt safe to participate in anti-government demonstrations.

As the political climate started to shift after 9/11, when new laws about where and how to legally protest started to be handed down in the name of safety and security, it became less safe to participate in public protests in the streets. The police used to be at demonstrations to protect the protestors, now they are there to fight us.

Not only does this have a chilling effect on free speech by limiting the types of people who show up to protests to those of us who are ready to fight. It also invites violent counter-protestors to bring their guns out and drive cars into crowds of people, ratcheting up the violence even further.

If I were to bring my kids to an event now and, god forbid, they got hurt, the government would call me a terrorist lunatic for bringing them to a "violent anti-government protest". Completely ignoring the fact that the government creates the conditions that make the violence and anti-government reaction inevitable.

It feels like if you want to protest against this madness that you would have to make it your full time job. Every day the Trump regime commits, seemingly, multiple impeachable infractions so the dizzying pace makes it hard to organize. By the time you geared up to protest the illegal kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro from his home in Venezuela Trump would have moved on to invading Greenland.

That was just in January, in February it was the Epstein files, which are really nasty by the way, and here we are in March wondering whether we're in the early days of another 20 year war in the Middle East, how many more of these do we have in us anyway?

Who really wants this war? Why?

I can't believe that anywhere close to a majority of Americans want our tax dollars blowing people to bits because Trump had, "a feeling they were gonna hit us first". Left to speculate as to the "why" I can only imagine that the religious hard liners are finally getting their wishes granted and they really think this will be the "last war".

Growing up in a strict Muslim home I have some experience with true believers and I recognize the look in the eyes of a person who thinks they are seeing their god make one of those mysterious moves, and I can see that look on the faces of some of the men and women leading us into this quagmire.

Writing these weekly blog posts feels like the only "safe" way to exercise my right to speak out. I wouldn't dare to post on social media, part of me feels safer yelling into the void here, where I control the algorithm than getting censored and then reported to the appropriate authorities; on platforms controlled by billionaires.

It's been a farce from the very beginning.

The US was trying to put Iran in a lose/lose situation by asking them to disarm so that they can be attacked by Israel later, or, they can be attacked by us now. So obviously that went nowhere, a clear non-starter. But later Trump will be able to say, "we really wanted peace, we tried, but they wouldn't make a deal"...

Early this morning Israel, predictably, launched a pre-emptive strike against Iran, who immediately retaliated hitting US and Israeli targets, and just like that, the US is once again at war in the Middle East.

I guess we never really left.

It's a pretty terrible time to be a peacenik, I feel for all of the people who are hurting right now because a tiny minority of individuals who are driven by some inner demon to lust for power have decided to spend our blood and treasure in an attempt to seize even more power and control.

I'm angry and I wonder if they ever stop to consider the waves of trauma and pain that they are unleashing into the world?

As a citizen of a governed society one of the tradeoffs we make is that we give our rulers the power to make war in our name. They get to do the dirty work of getting blood on their hands, and we get to have a clear conscience because of the implication that if our rulers do decide to use the power of the state to take a life, that it will be carefully considered and only done when there were no other options left.

When that contract is broken you can no longer claim that you are killing the defense of our people, or justice, or our way of life, you simply become a murderer. The Trump regime has already shown us, time and time again, that they are perfectly okay with killing people, US citizen or not.

Just the other day a man whose family had been looking for him for days after he had been arrested by local police and handed over to ICE, was found dead in the street. ICE agents claim that they dropped him off near a coffee shop a "location that was determined to be safe" near where he lived. Security footage later showed that the ICE agents dropped this poor man off in the middle of the night, after the coffee shop had closed.

The temperature that night was 36F (2.2C).

Oh, and if you're wondering why he'd been arrested in the first place? It was for the crime of being legally blind and using curtain rod as a walking stick...apparently someone reported a man walking around with a weapon and the justice system sprung into action and did what it does.

Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does. -Dr. W. Edwards Deming

It's fucking terrifying to have people like this in charge. People who I'm certain don't lose any sleep at night over a casual decision to enter a war that is going to kill and hurt so many people, and cause so much pain and suffering, and to do it with a smile.

It's just another day at the office for these ghouls. They'll probably discuss the casualty numbers over a round of golf later, meanwhile I will sit and seethe.

At first the goal was to build an open source solution that could be checked out and deployed by anyone, I would be user 0 and deploy it for a couple of the co-ops that we're in, maybe it would get a few stars on github? Maybe people who liked it would reach out for consulting work, I don't know, I had a lot of ideas kicking around when I pushed the initial commit back in July 2025.

I spent 6 months on it, on and off, nearly all vibe coded using co-pilot + whatever my favorite agent of the moment happens to be (tied between Codex 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.3) and I finally got it to a point where it was feature complete and ready to deploy. It's an MVP but it covers the basics of what I wanted to do. On a whim I decided to take things to the next level and turn it into a SaaS offering.

I guess I shouldn't really say it was on a whim, part of the thought process that influenced my decision came from seeing a real product take shape over time, and knowing that it fills a real need. The other part comes from pushing the envelope with LLMs and coding agents and starting to see the writing on the wall. Coding agents are going to enable a lot of people to become entrepreneurs in their spare time, and with the way the economy is looking a lot of people might have to become entrepreneurs, so I may as well get ahead of the curve.

I know I'm not the only person to see this sea change, but I do think I'm pretty close to the leading edge as far as adoption and use goes. And while I'm not a doomer here to tell you that the programming profession is dead, there are a lot of my peers out there clinging to "pure programming" and memorizing manuals and documentation, and I am here to tell you that those folks are dinosaurs, and coding agents are a meteor.

The first time I tried to build a blog I was 19 years old, penny-arcade was wildly popular and it seemed like anyone with a modicum of talent could make money by building a blog and a comic strip. I taught myself php, learned to draw, learned photoshop, the ins and outs of self hosting, and eventually petered out, while never really getting good enough at all of the skills I would need to make anything worthwhile.

Now, with 25 years of experience under my belt I can easily accomplish the kinds of builds I struggled with in my early days, I could probably get something really solid to production in a day or two. But for perspective, an LLM can do the same thing in about 20 minutes. If that math holds then equipped with an LLM I can do a solid weeks worth of work in about an hour. This isn't hyperbole, this is the first time productivity gains like this have been put directly into the hands of the people.

Before agentic programming turning a weekend hobby project into a SaaS offering would have been a major decision, not something done on a whim, only if you have a really good idea. Because the thinking back then was that if your side project got popular you would have to make a hard choice about your future. Do you really want to commit a huge chunk of your life to this project? Is it even worth it? Now it has been trivialized to the point where one could feasibly run several SaaS side businesses without quitting their full time job, what a time to be alive.

• US warships are days away from Iran, Trump strongly hints that there will be kinetic action when they arrive
• New Epstein files
• Partial US Government Shutdown Speaking of the shutdown, I want to provide an update there because my last post sounds hysterical in hindsight. The houses have agreed to partially fund the government, except for DHS, which they will debate and come back to. They are kicking the can, but more importantly it doesn't seem like the GOP wants to shutdown the government.

I'm writing this on a Monday so we'll see how the week turns out.

In other news, our weather station has gone down once again, right in the middle of a historic freeze here in Alexandria VA. I think I mentioned this last time but I need a backup device so that I always have one that's running to minimize the downtime.

We've made a number of improvements to the LLM service, the website itself, and the way we store data, so we should be able to do historic record keeping, lowest and highest temps we've ever recorded for a given date, things like that. We've gotten it to a place where I can really hand off the project to the kids and let them make improvements as needed.

Also, the Ruff Registrar open source student registration system designed for homeschool co-ops has been making really great progress. I deployed an alpha version to production over the weekend and I'm working on hardening it and preparing it for a beta release soon. I'm wondering if I should bite the bullet and make this a SaaS product instead of giving it away completely for free.

We are entering the next phase of class war where the machinery of the state that has long been used against poor people of color here and around the world is now being turned against middle class white people. The ICE agents are saying he "brandished" a weapon at them, but we can see clearly in the multiple camera angles that are flooding our feeds that they disarmed him and then murdered him in cold blood.

The Trump regime has been acting like they aren't afraid of electoral consequences and that is absolutely terrifying. I still think their ultimate goal is to shut down the government. The democrats are calling for the defunding of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), something that is long overdue in my opinion, but the only way to achieve this in the immediate term is through a government shutdown.

We're well past the point of no return here, Stephen Miller and his cronies have to know that if they fail to completely pull off this self-coup they are going to jail, so at this point they are all-in. The popular line is that they plan to just ignore the results of the midterm elections but I think that's just plan B if the coup fails.

I've been listening a lot lately to Robert Reich, Professor Joanne Freeman, Professor Hilary Cox Richardson, etc, and their optimism is helping me get through this. They believe that things will get worse before they get better, but they really believe in America and that our values and systems will hold against this onslaught.

I'm more pessimistic, granted way less knowledgeable than all of these people! I think the difference in perspective comes from my background growing up as a poor Black man where I've had a front row seat to state violence since I was a child vs their upbringings where I can only presume by listening to them talk in reverent tones about what is and what isn't "American".

Police brutality is as American as apple pie.

I remember when Philando Castile was murdered by the police, he was a registered gun owner and he let the cops know that he had a gun in his glove box and they still murdered him in front of his child. The officer was acquitted on all charges. I'm not surprised that the same sorts of thugs, now empowered with federal immunity, are even more brazen, more disgusting.

I'm posting this early because as I write a major snowstorm is tearing across the south eastern US and here in the DC metro we're supposed to get around 11 inches of snow followed by sleet/freezing rain, so sustained power outages are likely, I hope everyone stays safe out there.

Where are the checks and balances? Who are the adults in the room trying to stop this? Why does it feel like protesting against this regime is screaming into the wind?

At this point we can say with certainty that the US is not going to go back to the way it was before, our standing on the world stage has been utterly destroyed and all that we need now is an illegitimate election, or two, to seal the deal.

It's hard not to be a doomer about the way things are going, all I know is it feels like things are moving in the wrong direction, and way too quickly.