March 30th, 2026

Combining Handheld and TV views

In my eternal "wood-carving" project, project blue, I am now attempting to whittle my two root view application (one for TV and one for handhelds) down into one view: the view will automatically assume the split-screen "Browser"/"Now Playing" view when the canvas is wider than it is tall; otherwise, it will still be split, but the Browser and the Now Playing view will be two pages that you swipe between. I'm hopeful that this brings the entire design into one single design that is easier to maintain and use. My plan so far.

March 8th, 2026

When Cory Doctorow speaks of AI, he usually uses a "centaur" metaphor, split into two separate concepts: the "centaur", where the human is assisted by the machine, and the "reverse centaur", where the human has to help the machine. The "centaur" is preferable; a machine helping us do our jobs is the entire point of these things.

Code review is one such case where a language model is a useful tool that assists the human instead of demanding the human help it. Deepseek r1:14b hits a sweet spot for me ― useful feedback that runs quickly on a local GPU with 12GB of ram. I've also found that if the changes are so large that it starts spitting out nonsense, then that probably means that the changes in the commit are too large in the first place!

Keep this quote in your back-pocket

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs