Aidan Harding

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

Cows and bulls, Soldiers diddies, Priest's pintle, Cheese and toast, Arum, Arum lily, Bobbins, Naked girls, Naked boys, Starch-root, Sonsie-give-us-your-hand, Adder's-root

I was checking the id of a plant this morning. Come spring, it's easy to id and harmful. What a list of aliases!

Cuckoo pint
Also known as: Lords and ladies, Snakeshead, Starchwort, Adder's root, Jack in the pulpit, Devils and angels, Adam and Eve, Wild arum, Wake robin, Friar's cowl,...

2000s: code is free (as in speech)
2010s: code is free (as in beer)
2020s: code is free (as in puppy)

Doll would really love it if everyone got chainlink to the required levels so doll could quallify to get this. github.com/dollspace-ga...

A Labour leadership with both says "you must listen to these voters who don't share your values and take them seriously" and "you must NOT listen to *these* votes who *do* share your values - their preferred party should be dismissed as extremist" is headed for electoral disaster, and deservedly so.

Its doubly galling because Starmer and Labour have (and not without reason) spent years insisting Reform curious voters should be respected and taken seriously. Then with the Greens they're all "LOL you've been taken in by those nutters, U morons, don't be daft." Its playground level ignorance.

This is not a reasoned political response. Labour has spent two years making all the voting groups who backed the Greens feel unwelcome and unheard, and now attacks them for daring to back someone else. They believe Labour isn’t listening and Starmer seems determined to prove them right

Hey.

Tell people when they do good job.

When you like the stuff they make.

When you like the characters they’ve created.

The stories they’ve told.

Nobody hears it as often as you think bc everyone thinks everyone hears it all the time.

Trust. They don’t.

Tell. Them.

Both types helpful to decide what to do next when idle, again perhaps like agents

But also sometimes lists like a coding agent: subtaks that, when they are all complete add up to a larger goal

We get anxious with too many to-do items floating around in our heads, so we calm that by writing a list. Note: this is a handy way to feel calm without doing any tasks, the tasks are often unrelated e.g.

- chop wood
- fix bikes
- change bedding
- re-seal shower

Etc

Wait till you see our to-do lists!

Wikipedia entry for dinkus In typography, a dinkus is a typographic device or convention that typically consists of three spaced asterisks or bullet symbols in a horizontal row, e.g.   ∗ ∗ ∗   or   • • •  . The device has a variety of uses, and it usually denotes an intentional omission or a logical "break" of varying degree in a written work. This latter use is similar to a subsection, and it indicates that the subsequent text should be re-contextualized. Such a dinkus typically appears centrally aligned on a line of its own with vertical spacing before and after the device. The dinkus has been in use in various forms since c. 1850.[1][2] Historically, the dinkus was often represented as an asterism, ⁂, though this has fallen out of favor and is now nearly obsolete.

perennial reminder that this typographic thing:

* * *

is called a "dinkus"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinkus

its insane that drafting as an occupation used to just involve countless huge rooms of dads in shirts and ties, scattered all over the country, leaning over tables with their asses perked up all day as their 9-5 job

"it's just probabilistic math!!!"

have *you* tried to grasp probabilities in a multibillion-dimension vector space? if not, maybe consider that there's a lot of shit going on here that you don't fully understand

You can vibe code your way to a working prototype. You cannot vibe code or one-shot your way to a competitive product that works at scale. The hard part isn't writing code; it's the architectural supervision.

And I guess this may be where multi-agent, adversarial, approaches may work well

A lot of my rules and follow-up for Claude (as it has often been for human code, too!) cluster around making it smaller, simpler, and removing the unnecessary. But with Claude I still have to push it there

More is more: Addition bias in large language models In this paper, we investigate the presence of addition bias in Large Language Models (LLMs), drawing a parallel to the cognitive bias observed in huma…

Thinking about how to help colleagues to get the best from Claude Code and additive bias is high on my list of things they should know www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ashby taught us we have to fight fire with fire There’s an old saying in software engineering, originally attributed to David Wheeler: We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection. The problem is that indirection a…

Wrote some thoughts about complexity and LLMs:
surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/31/a...

It just remembered a warning it should give you with AI driven coding, it is mentally taxing in ways you will not notice.

You must madate breaks even if you dont feel like you need them.

TMNT logo that says, not another standup meeting.

8 hours of daily syncs to make sure I'm up to date with all the work everyone else is getting done

A sheep skull in the foreground on green moorland with skeletal trees behind and heavy grey skies

A rough track winding away around a moorland hill as it descends into a valley. In the near foreground, a German Shepherd runs ahead of me

A German Shepherd standing proud and attentive on Exmoor

Sunday run day was cold, wet, windy, and brilliant up on #exmoor #trailrunning

AI Agents Are Poised to Hit a Mathematical Wall, Study Finds LLMs have their limits.

Jesus Christ, AI journalism is so bad right now.

Exhibit one, Gizmodo is raving about an article that 'proves' LLMs have a "mathematical limit" and can't possibly do tasks that are too complex.

Let's look at the actual paper, shall we?

gizmodo.com/ai-agents-ar...

The year everything changed Far from my best years being behind me, it feels as though everything in my life has been leading to this moment: building a completely new category of product where the most useful lessons come not f...

This from @daniloc.xyz is so damn good at explaining why AI agents are exciting for people who love to build stuff.

It has many great insights, not least of which comparing agents to octopi and that puts me in mind of "Other Minds" by Peter Godfrey-Smith

networkgames.fyi/the-year-eve...

I don't think she knew what all the fuss was about. But she enjoyed the fuss she got while we looked at her namesake

The aurora was strong in North Devon last night. It was the first time I've seen it down here!

Overworked, like dough. Dense and unappetising.

One of those captcha things. This one says ‘select all images with bicycles. Click verify once there are none left’. There are 9 squares - 4 contain photos of bicycle seats, with the remaining 5 showing the beautiful head and face of a grey greyhound with a white stripe going from the top of their head to the tip of their nose.

Hats off to whoever did this (and the beautiful model).