Weekly Thing 330 / Music, Intervals, Nanochat
Good morning — or mostly morning. ☕️
We are in the midst of the arrival of fall. The trees are filled with wonderful reds and oranges and the evenings are crisp. I love this time of year. Hikes, campfires, and cool breezes are on the offer. 🍂
Hope you have a great rest of your weekend! 🙌
Beautiful morning on Duluth Harbor with the Lift Bridge in the background.
October 12, 2025
Duluth, MN
Notable
Vibe engineering
As a practice matures the language matures too…
I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI--entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how the code actually works. This leaves us with a terminology gap: what should we call the other end of the spectrum, where seasoned professionals accelerate their work with LLMs while staying proudly and confidently accountable for the software they produce?
I propose we call this vibe engineering, with my tongue only partially in my cheek.
Willison is on the tip-of-the-spear with this tech and working with it everyday. To me he is starting to define what the post-agent environment will really look like for a future engineering team that is fully embracing AI practices.
Customize Claude Code with plugins Anthropic
Obligatory insert about holy crap is everything moving along so fast in this space!
Agentic Coding is full of acronym soup and new concepts and here is another one. This is super interesting and potentially very powerful because of the way that these "plugins" can be distributed. I found this callout interesting…
Open source maintainers, for example, can provide slash commands that help developers use their packages correctly
And of course there is a plugin marketplace loaded up with stuff to try.
You would literally have to do nothing other than work on coding agents to keep up with just this one stream of AI innovation.
Write It Down
DIY feeling personal finance tool. We are big users of YNAB and I'll be sticking to that but this is interesting because tracking your finances is absolutely something that folks should do and secondly I don't know that I've ever seen something so polished that is entirely built out of a cloud app, in this case Google Sheets.
The Movies That Defined Gen X - Mark McInerney
So many great movies on this list and this one hits squarely with me — firmly Gen X.
These were our movies. Not galaxies far away, not fairy tales. Parking lots, parade floats, dead ends, second chances. We were always almost—almost boomers, almost millennials, almost grown up before the world caught fire. The reel runs out, and all that’s left is the ache of time passing, and the hope somebody was watching with us.
Movies are stories and stories are how people share the best. Do the stories shape us or we shape the stories? Of course both. As I read this list so many of those movies lit up my brain with deep memories.
Herd - Browser Superpowers & MCP Servers for AI Agents
Interesting "reverse" mode for MCP server, if I’m understanding this right. Any website you are logged into can be "scripted" via a "trail" and then those can be accessed via MCP by AI agents. So, you fire up the browser and log into LinkedIn using your credentials. You then install a module that has defined "trails" for LinkedIn and you have an MCP server to talk to LinkedIn.
Pretty smart idea really. In a super goofy way it reminds me of old TN3270 stuff that we used a long time ago to make mainframes accessible via APIs!
Album Cards: Rebuilding the Joy of Music Discovery for My 10-Year-Old
I need to set the stage for this article. If you would have stopped by before the era of digital music you may have taken a moment to browse the 1,800+ CD collection that I had alphabetically organized on display. I distinctly remember finding these very clean, modern looking CD racks with silver rods. The jewel cases fit perfectly at an angle that made them easy to read. I would go find five CD's and load them into the 5-disc CD changer and have a great time. Thinking back on it I enjoyed that music collection in ways that I get nothing from today's world of streaming.
So with that I found this article just awesome…
I could combine my old CD-collector brain with today's tech: take something fun and collectable (trading cards), dress them up with album art, and add NFC tags so they can be tapped to play the album on our home speaker system, all without a screen.
How to do it?
The process was simple: open PlexAmp, navigate to an album, tap the three dots menu, then Share, and there's a "Write to NFC tag" option. Hold your phone over the blank NFC tag and it writes the deep link. That's it. The tag just contains a URL that opens PlexAmp and starts playing that specific album when tapped.
I am so in love with this concept that I want to start printing Music cards right now!
At our cabin we have a record player and a small collection of vinyl LPs. It is great and a wonderful way to listen to music. I have Plex servers and still have all the MP3 files that I ripped from those 1,800+ CDs. By the way, I still have all those CD's in archival cases as well. I regularly think when listening to records that it is awesome that no service in the cloud knows what we are doing. No company is monetizing the fact that I’m again listening to this beautiful colored vinyl Brandi Carlile album.
Maybe some NFC tags and fancy cards are the way to create that feeling even more.
The Great De-Leveraging: Friday Flash Crash - Tanay Ved
I find it fascinating to read about crypto market volatility because these markets are "pure" in ways that the financial markets are not. There are no trading curbs. They are all global markets. They never close. They are public chains with full visibility to all transactions. And on top of that they are, typically, incredibly fast and highly liquid. These events are also opportunities for the blockchains that underpin them to test their durability, performance, and resilience.
There are many orders of magnitude of difference in the total asset value of course, but these are multi-billion dollar movements as well. In general crypto markets tend to be more volatile but seem to recover very fast. I’m not an expert in this domain but in general I wonder if increased fluidity and resilience of a market can support reduced manual interventions.
nanochat: The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy.
Maybe I found my use case for that new NVIDIA DGX Spark. 😁
This repo is a full-stack implementation of an LLM like ChatGPT in a single, clean, minimal, hackable, dependency-lite codebase. nanochat is designed to run on a single 8XH100 node via scripts like speedrun.sh, that run the entire pipeline start to end. This includes tokenization, pretraining, finetuning, evaluation, inference, and web serving over a simple UI so that you can talk to your own LLM just like ChatGPT.
I totally dig this project and love the idea that I could train my own "good enough" model that would run on my infrastructure maybe even in my home. Reminder, I run a Gnosis Chain Validator at home and think that is incredible. Democratizing LLM capability? I like it.
Now give it a couple of weeks and I bet this is a one-line installer for that new Spark.
Beads - A memory upgrade for your coding agent
New project from Steve Yegge that seems pretty wild on first blush.
Beads is a lightweight memory system for coding agents, using a graph-based issue tracker. Four kinds of dependencies work to chain your issues together like beads, making them easy for agents to follow for long distances, and reliably perform complex task streams in the right order.
If you aren't close to software development let me just highlight that all software of any size uses an issue tracker of some sort. Think of it like a database that has probably thousands of issues — features, bugs, stories, what have you that are all work "to be done" on a code base. They often have all sorts of metadata. This is key to getting several developers organized to build something. There has been a ton of work via MCP to get coding agents access to these databases so they can better work alongside developers.
I've mused for a while that I wonder if that isn't all backwards and in reality the developers and people should just move into the code. Create a stories directory and write away. This is now labeled spec-driven development.
Beads is a whole different thing and instead is an issue tracker built for agents. It is a novel approach and notable because it in effect relieves context window issues from your agents — just like people. Developers use issue trackers because you cannot possibly remember all this stuff. Same thing for agents. But instead give the agent a super-fast local data store that is command-line available.
You don't use Beads directly as a human. Your coding agent will file and manage issues on your behalf. They'll file things they notice automatically, and you can ask them at any time to add or update issues for you.
Beads gives agents unprecedented long-term planning capability, solving their amnesia when dealing with complex nested plans. They can trivially query the ready work, orient themselves, and land on their feet as soon as they boot up.
He also wrote a full introduction and an article about how he built it.
Fascinating stuff!
Switch to Jujutsu already: a tutorial - Stavros' Stuff
I’m "of an age" where I remember version control very well before the days of git. I cut did a lot of early work using Subversion svn and go way back to cvs and SourceSafe. The days before distributed version control sucked by the way. You couldn't code unless you were connected online and they were so, so, so slow. Git was a miracle when Torvald's made it. And notably he made it out of necessity because nothing else could handle the Linux kernel, at least the way he wanted to do it.
Now though we have entered the vast monoculture. Git is everything and everywhere. It is the single tool everyone uses and that has benefit of not having to learn new things. Remember Mercurial hg? No switching costs. But it also limits the view developers have of how code is managed and new, novel approaches are good. We need code diversity to encourage creative new approaches. So Jujutsu is interesting!
Journal
In Duluth at Wild State Cider. Delicious cider. Amazing Wrecktangle pizza. One of the best pretzels we've had. And crazy good Creemee's to end with. Wow!
Starting our day on the North Shore with my brother and his family with some World's Best Donuts.
On Artists Point in Grand Marais. Today's meditation spot.
Beautiful morning in Grand Marais at the lighthouse.
I always make a stop at the Lake Superior Trading Post.
Delicious non-alcoholic beer from Untitled Art. Wow!
We had a great hike on the Oberg Mountain Loop. This is Tammy’s sister’s favorite fall hike and it was our first time doing it. I can see why it is so highly recommended. Sadly the Maple’s had nearly all lost their leaves but the Birch were still doing their thing. Highly recommended!
Sunrise on Duluth Harbor. I thought it was cool how the blue in the sky came out as the sun went up.
Delicious coffee this morning at 190° Coffee & Tea with Isaiah.
100 TON mooring bollard in Duluth Harbor.
Tooling around in Duluth on bikes a bit.
Before we departed and went our separate ways we setup the Kubb pitch by the PIer B parking lot and showed my brother and family how to play. We put the first grass stains on the new set from JP’s Backyard Games. Everyone had a great time! Kubb for the win!
The World is Waiting by The Long Honeymoon
Oct 12, 2025 at 9:33 PM
My friend Lee Zukor has been playing in The Long Honeymoon for a while. Sadly Tammy and I have not made it to one of their shows, yet, but a couple days ago I got an email that their first album was out. I checked out “The World is Waiting” and liked it a lot so I bought a copy on Bandcamp.
We all listened to it twice on our drive this weekend up and down the North Shore. We thought it had a distinctly Minneapolis sound. It gave us Jayhawks, Gear Daddies, Honeydogs kind of notes at times. Jangly with good hooks. 🎶 Grab a copy and give it a listen!
Got a 5-star chest in Clash Royale!
My cousin Josh’s most recent essay Can-Can is a great read told from his own experience as a college professor.
So, in 34-years of bumbling towards being as overly educated and as idiotic as my oft concussed cognition will allow, the prevailing wind on college campuses has carried the message of learning how to think, rather than being told what to think, and never accepting a set of beliefs, or most anything, uncritically. Question everything, and more importantly, everyone…especially yourself.
Delightful.
Tron: Ares
Oct 15, 2025 at 10:00 PM
Tammy, Tyler, and I went to Tron: Ares tonight at Emagine Willow Creek. I’d been wanting to see this since the day it came out.
I saw the original Tron when I was 10 years old living in Jamestown, ND. As a kid that loved computers and spent hours writing mangled BASIC programs the movie was amazing. Some friends and I liked it so much that we wanted to be in the movie. We got frisbees and painted them to look like Tron discs and attempted our own version of disc wars at night. Note, it hurts to get his with a frisbee in the head. 😬 I also put a ton of quarters into the TRON arcade game back in the day. Since then I’ve seen all the Tron movies and shows including Tron: Legacy, Tron: Uprising (series), and now Tron: Ares.
In short, I’m going to like this movie if for no other reason than I enjoy seeing the Tron “world” continue to exist and grow. The production and SFX for Tron: Ares were incredible and in general I find their nods to tech to always be fun. It made me chuckle that while Tron envisions a world where a program can materialize in the real world, you would still have people running killall on something that is for sure a Unix shell. I thought Ares did a good job of also illustrating how simple tasks given to an AI with “by any means” could go terribly wrong. I also liked that Ares himself goes through a process of determining right and wrong and starts to express feelings.
The high point for me was Ares going back to the original Tron grid and meeting Flynn. This was a high-point of nostalgia and I could have stayed in that scene for a while longer.
With that said, and I did like it, some things I didn’t love:
- The storyline took a hard pivot in my view to get to a good v. evil plot point. We now clearly have Encom framed as the Rebel Alliance and Dillinger Systems as the Empire. I’m straining the metaphor but it feels like Ares specifically wanted to get those archetypes setup for future releases. I could gripe a bit about the overt multi-channel product planning being pushed into the story line but all the Star Wars fans could just say “yeah, been there, done that”
- There was no revisit to the ISO’s from Tron: Legacy, short of Quorra’s picture being referenced in the very last scene.
- The premise of things in the “grid” (aka cloud?) coming into the real world is a bit like time travel. It opens up all sorts of “yeah, but what about” story line issues.
Overall a good movie either way. I’m completely and positively sure they are already working on another Tron movie, and I’ll be there for it. 🤓
Good Fortune at Twin Cities Film Fest
Oct 16, 2025 at 10:00 PM
Tammy and I have went to the Twin Cities Film Fest showing of Good Fortune tonight at the Edina 4 theatre. It was our first time at a Film Fest event and we got to be all official and vote on the movie. Also, the Edina 4 theatre is just a great place to see a movie in general, but an even better place to see a movie during the Film Fest with tons of dining options nearby to make it a great evening.
The movie itself brings tons of star power with Keanu Reeves, Aziz Ansari, Seth Rogan, Keke Palmer, and Sandra Oh, with Ansari writing and directing it.
The movie tells the story of Arj who is struggling to get by and living out of his car and Jeff who is wealthy from tech investing and has whatever he wants. Their lives get switched by Gabriel the Angel and they get to experience each others reality.
We both gave it ★★★★ and enjoyed the quirky and funny takes while telling a meaningful story.
Briefly
I’m not sure what I would necessarily use this for, but it is sort of mesmerizing to move the time around and watch the shadows move. → ShadeMap - Simulate sun shadows for any time and place on Earth
I'd love to see Waymo start operating in the Twin Cities. I wonder how they would do with Minnesota winters? → Waymo, the company behind driverless taxis, is pushing to expand in Minnesota | MPR News
I've been a Fastmail user for years and have grown to like their web interface. This app brings it to the desktop and on initial use I’m liking it a good amount. → Introducing the Fastmail desktop app | Fastmail
Nice speed improvements for the newest version of Python. → Python 3.14 Is Here. How Fast Is It? - miguelgrinberg.com
Loved to see Sparks playing with this and I’m still hopeful that OmniFocus adds MCP server support. This test shows why it is so powerful and what you could do. There are certain domains that I see so much capability for AI and my task manager and GTD system is key amongst them. → Automating Project Creation using MCP with OmniFocus - MacSparky
Two incredibly impressive and extraordinarily different leaders that definitely "put a dent in the Universe". → Steve Jobs vs. Tim Cook: How the Tenures of Both Apple CEOs Compare
Interesting extension for the Wikidata project. → Wikidata Launches Free Vector Database as Open Alternative to Closed AI Systems
Interesting research on a real threat vector. → A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size Anthropic
Lovely deep-dive into a common coding problem. → How to check for overlapping intervals - zayenz.se
This new little machine from NVIDIA would be super fun to run models on. Would be a super fun toy to have but wouldn't make sense for anything I do. Also see Willison's write up on it. → NVIDIA DGX Spark Arrives for World’s AI Developers | NVIDIA Newsroom
For small data migration tasks from one app to another I’m inclined to just "do it by hand". Now with LLMs in the middle you can do much larger jobs that way. → LLMs As Conduits for Data Portability Between Apps - MacStories
Deeper dive on Signal's recent improvements. → Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement - Ars Technica
SPS Tower. 🏢 → SPS Commerce renews lease at Minneapolis tower for 15 years - Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal
Here is your haiku…
Write dreams on the page,
Movies of Gen X unfold —
Nostalgia rewinds. 🎬
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