The G5
Thursday, April 16, 2026
After a disappointing experience with a PowerMac G5’s design flaw, the author now carefully selects durable technology to ensure it lasts for five years.
Longform Reviews & Essays
Small language, big world
Sunday, April 12, 2026
I’m a big fan of Small Language Models. The technology to distill a Large Language Model down to something that generates tokens at decent speed is now there. I had a Python application costing me 17 cents per run in API calls, so I started to muck about with Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512 under llama.cpp, and after some tuning got good results. Ministral is energetic and verbose. I had to be clear that inventing answers when the input was thin was not acceptable. Once we were past that, it started performing well.
AI coding as VB coding
Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Rachel Thomas over on Fast.ai.
Vibe coding provides a misleading feeling of agency. The coder specifies what they want to build and is often presented with choices from the LLM on how to proceed. However, those options are quite different than the architectural choices that a programmer would make on their own, directing them down paths they wouldn’t otherwise take.
Much as people might hate reading it, AI coding strikes me as the best version of Visual Basic that could ever be created..with all the problems VB brought to software development. VB lowered the barrier to entry and produced a great deal of awful software, written by people who never grew past being novices, deployed in places it had no business being. AI coding lowers that barrier further still, on the assumption the model itself will compensate for the inexperience of whoever’s driving. We’ll see if that happens.
Artemis II is heading home
Tuesday, April 7, 2026
From CNN:
After 7 hours, the Artemis II flyby is wrapping up.
Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman thanked the NASA science team for putting together such an exciting observing program for them, as well as “some great, truly human experience moments here.”
“We were well prepared, and we appreciate all of you, and this is what we do best when we all come together and work as a team,” Wiseman said. “So y’all knocked it out of the park. Thank you for giving us this opportunity.”
PostgreSQL has performance work to do
Tuesday, April 7, 2026
My initial reaction to reading that Linux 7.0 had halved PostgreSQL performance was that the kernel team had broken userspace and would revert it. Then I read this:
“The fix here is to make PostgreSQL make use of rseq slice extension: lkml.kernel.org/r/2025121… That should limit the exposure to lock holder preemption (unless PostgreSQL is doing seriously egregious things).”
Moonraker at the half point
Tuesday, April 7, 2026
I’ve been drawing out reading Moonraker because of how much I’m enjoying it. The first third contains a high-stakes gambling sequence better written than most suspense set-pieces I’ve seen elsewhere. Bond is very low-tech here. The buttons he pushes aren’t on devices, they’re on people.
He isn’t quippy. He smokes a lot, and you know he’s tough. Not because he says so, but because he acts when required. No second-guessing, no hesitation. Being a hammer is his personality: you hit him and you hit steel; he hits you and something breaks. And Hugo Drax on the page is far more interesting than his film counterpart.
Black Nail Varnish
Monday, April 6, 2026
Influencers. A bigger, messier sequel that loses its way in a pointless romance arc, but CW remains a compelling villain and the franchise still has legs.
The Sword and the Salmon
Saturday, April 4, 2026
Russia’s shadow fleet is rerouting along the Irish coast to dodge Royal Navy seizures. Ireland’s military intelligence are talking about the consequences. Ireland might need to dust off some mythology.
AI's Database Moment
Friday, April 3, 2026
AI is like databases. They started on the mainframe, now you have a half dozen on your phone. The same shift is coming for AI models.
Stranger Things Ends with a Shrug
Friday, January 2, 2026
The finale of Stranger Things is a mixed bag, balancing character resolution with structural flaws and criticism over inaccessible storytelling.
The Weight of Failure (When Failure Costs Nothing)
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Lola Kirke’s memoir reveals her struggles with failure, familial expectations, and the harsh realities of the arts while exploring themes of privilege and personal identity.
Oliver Sacks’s sin wasn’t the literary license he took with patient accounts, it was allowing his exaggerations and fabrications to be treated as medical fact. He had a responsibility to his profession and the scientific community. He shirked it.
Not in Kansas Anymore
Saturday, December 6, 2025
The Wizard of Oz reformatted for the immense 16K wraparound screen of the Las Vegas Sphere is a technical marvel. Very flawed, but worth seeing.
To start with, the screen is amazing. It’s not a full hemisphere but as your neck won’t go back that far without you falling out of the seat it doesn’t matter. It produces enough light to illuminate the entire space and that first moment you see the sepia coloured skies of Kansas expand around and above you it’ll bring a smile to your face. It did to mine. The sound is clear and feels hefty. All of this comes together well in the immersive tornado sequence that delivers Dorothy to Oz.
re:Invent 2025: Treachery, Cunning, and Werner Vogels
Friday, December 5, 2025
Inside AWS, re:Invent starts sooner than you’d expect and you end up working on it for longer than you’ve planned. Through treachery and cunning, I avoided going for years. There was always someone else to pass my ticket to until 2024, when there wasn’t. After an extended professional breakup, which I initiated, Las Vegas and I were back together again. I swore the place off years ago after too many other tech conferences, but Vegas and its infinite hotel beds are inescapable.
Dracula: A Love Tale
Monday, November 17, 2025
“Dracula: A Love Tale” presents a visually appealing but ultimately shallow romantic narrative that fails to capture the depth of female empowerment found in the original story.
F for Fake
Thursday, November 13, 2025
Orson Welles’ docudrama “F for Fake” explores themes of authenticity in art through the charming yet deceptive stories of fraudsters, blending soulful monologues with moments of self-indulgence in a creatively low-budget production.
The Institute
Sunday, November 2, 2025
Television adaptations of Stephen King’s works often struggle with character development, but the engaging cast in the new series The Institute provides a refreshing take on familiar themes.
Talamasca: The Secret Order
Monday, October 27, 2025
The show fails to deliver a compelling supernatural spy thriller, lacking tension and engaging storytelling, ultimately making it unworthy of viewers’ time.
Tron: Ares
Friday, October 10, 2025
Tron: Ares features a simplistic plot with underwhelming action and characters, failing to live up to its predecessors while lacking memorable elements.
Thomas Harris: Red Dragon
Saturday, August 16, 2025
Media has made killers cute. We've given them sardonic voice overs in TV shows. Some have become "I can fix them" characters in books. They'll kill only the bad people, or so the authors would have us believe. That's not how these people work. The reality is that everyone around a serial killer will be in some way damaged or destroyed by them. Other people's pain is their point.
Red Dragon, written in 1981, doesn't do cute. In this book anyone who brushes by evil or confronts it ends up in a worse position afterwards. How could it be otherwise when facing sociopaths and sadists? Someone has to take the blows from these people and in FBI Profiler, Will Graham's case it's him. Graham is intelligent, empathetic and a sacrificial lamb.
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
When Dante wrote this narrative poem he did so in Italian instead of Latin to make it as accessible as possible. Alas, I can't read 14th century Italian so I have to depend on translators and their copious amount of footnotes. Over the past 700 years the footnotes have piled up at the bottom of the page like centuries of snow. Dante would be horrified.
Ignoring the opinions of academics and slogging my way through the translated poem, this is a groundbreaking piece of creativity. Dante the author was convicted and sentenced to death by burning on invented charges. He fled his native Florence and never gets to return. In the poem Dante the character, one of literature's most famous self-inserts, considers suicide because of his miserable circumstances. The spirit of the Roman poet Virgil appears to Dante at the request of Dante's great unconsummated love, the deceased Lady Beatrice.
The Naked Gun (2025)
Saturday, August 2, 2025
In 1996, Liam Neeson starred in the historical drama Michael Collins; likewise, Pamela Anderson was in Barb Wire. If you had told me at the time that they’d reboot The Naked Gun franchise together, I’d have laughed at you.
In this reboot of a franchise that first started in 1982 with the six-episode Police Squad!, Neeson’s Frank Drebin Jr. takes on Danny Heuston’s reverse effective altruist green technology billionaire. Anderson’s crime writer has a family connection and a score to settle, which brings her into Drebin’s life.
Superman (2025)
Saturday, July 12, 2025
Superman (2025) isn't a movie by someone who studied Richard Donner's Superman. It's a movie by someone who studied Christopher Reeve's performance in Superman. David Corenswet gives Clark Kent/Superman a Reeve's like charisma even though he falls short of giving his Superman a Reeve's like presence.
The cast here outstrips the dialogue. Unlike prior Superman movies everyone can act. Rachel Brosnahan is a modern update to Hildy Johnson's fast talking 1940s reporter in His Girl Friday. She's sharp, a bit spikey, and wants the scoop. Her chemistry with Corenswet sparks on the screen. Nicholas Hoult impresses as the malignant narcissist Lex Luthor. This is Luthor as a long term strategist. The Luthor who looks at Superman and sees the end of human progress. Why strive and claw your way forward as a species when entities with the powers of the gods of legend can solve your worst problems? If they choose to, that is. Luthor is evil but his argument that in a world of super beings the future of humanity bends towards decline and helplessness gnaws away at you when the movie focuses on it.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Monday, June 2, 2025
The Devil’s Candy doesn’t need a review. People set out with the best intentions and a lot of money. They made an unloved movie from a popular novel. That’s it.
But I’ll mention that Melanie Griffith puts in a better performance in film version of The Bonfire of the Vanities than Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis. Needy and damaged in the book, but dynamite on the screen.
Tom Wolfe despised the characters he wrote about in his novel. De Palma is ambivalent about the characters in his. Perhaps that’s why the book reading audience rejected the movie. The movie characters weren’t reptilian enough.
The Phoenician Scheme
Friday, May 30, 2025
A stronger entry than Asteroid City, but it’s smaller scale than The French Dispatch. It’s a three-hander film where the interplay of three characters drives the narrative.
Benicio del Toro gives a charismatic performance as magnate Zsa-Zsa Korda. A shrewd entrepreneur of strategic foresight who is amoral. But he’s a striver, and he’s so likeable that even enemies who want to see him dead can’t help but like him.
Liesl, Korda’s 21-year-old estranged daughter played by Mia Threapleton is the morality absent in the Korva genes. Threapleton plays the role of a pipe smoking trainee Nun deadpan and it works. She has moments where she looks like her mother, Kate Winslet. That passes when she pulls a knife on someone while giving them a dead eyed stare down.
When The Going Was Good by Graydon Carter
Friday, May 30, 2025
I finished reading Graydon Carter’s memoir “When The Going Was Good” last weekend. Committed to getting the most value out of the least amount of personal effort, he succeeded. Carter’s lazy ambition is impressive. I couldn’t guess to how many hours of the week he spent eating at some work related event. The man’s social battery appears endless.
The book, true to its title, recounts the magazine industry’s fall from influence and subscribers. Tech’s peak: TikTok boasts of free workplace wine. In publishing before the 2008 crash, it was how many months a writer may need to spend living at the Beverly Hills Hotel to cover a courtroom case.
Regardless, the title “When the Going Was Good” reflects some current tech industry sentiment. If AI holds even a quarter of the promise hyped, a lot of executive types in tech will pack a cardboard box the way executive types in glossy publications had to. Having destroyed so many industries, AI will speed up tech's self-cannibalization.
Until Dawn
Friday, May 30, 2025
Horror movies done well are cheap to make, pack in viewers and make much more money than they cost. The good ones leave an impression. Neither "Death of a Unicorn" nor "Drop" left enough of an impression for me to write a review but Until Dawn is different because it doesn't try to adapt the source material. It does its utmost to ignore as much of the source material as possible.
The Monkey
Friday, May 30, 2025
This movie is a surreal and absurd look at death. Deaths so terrible that sometimes you can only laugh. It doesn’t make you uncomfortable, nor does it look to hit you with jump scares. It’s a typical cursed MacGuffin movie that knows its to be laughed at no matter how high the body count gets.
Yes, the clock work driven, drum playing, malevolent looking toy monkey of the title is evil. But the monkey itself is a means. The main character gets bullied in school by a gang of girls. Girl cruelty is different to boy cruelty, but here they are cruel in a way that boys are to one another. He’s hurt and wants to hurt the source of his school problems. The monkey doesn’t make the main character turn the key in its back. It makes sure it is around when he might consider turning the key. Whatever happens after the key turns and the drumming starts, happens.
The deaths, when they occur, are bizarre, sometimes nonsensical, and often hilarious. There’s unexpected and expected torrents of blood. Immolation. Explosions. Decapitation. There’s even a death in a sleeping bag that doesn’t involve the hockey masked killer, Jason Vorhees. Which is a change because sleeping bag murders are a Friday the 13th thing.
This is a 90 minute dark comedy that falls apart in the third act but ends strong. For those wanting a slasher movie that speaks to their inner teenager, last week’s release, Heart Eyes, might be a good choice. For your fill of ludicrous death scenes, there’s a new Final Destination on the way. But if you want to laugh at death and have death laugh with you, go see The Monkey.
The Gorge
Friday, May 30, 2025
Two charismatic leads can carry a lot. Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller are two charismatic leads and the burden they carry is the flimsy story of this movie.
There is a mist filled gorge somewhere where two concrete observation towers face each other from opposing sides. Opposed geographically and politically. Each tower has a top tier shooter responsible for maintenance of the automated defences preventing what is in the gorge from escaping. These lethal maintenance people are not to have any contact with each other.
The Last Dangerous Visions. Edited By Harlan Ellison.
Friday, May 30, 2025
By the time I had read Harlan Ellison’s work, his talent had deserted him. A lifelong career isn’t guaranteed, but watching one’s career fade must be a terrifying, waking nightmare. The Last Dangerous Visions, the irrevocable part of a once ground breaking trilogy of short story collections, explains why the talent evaporated and for those 60 pages it’s worth the read.
In this book, I found two interesting pieces under glass in a museum of the mediocre. Short story anthologies are like that, but "Dangerous Visions" was a career making anthology for emerging writers. It was such a success its sequel, “Again, Dangerous Visions”, had established authors knocking on the door to get their story in. This third book has none of the cachet of the first two and, as Straczynski points out, some people he reached out to did not want their work included.