I've really not done much reading or thinking about tech in recent months, so this will be very brief!

Things that happened

• I've tasked Claude with writing explanation of a few codebases I work with. The documents, as always, look good. The problem is that I want the documents because I am lacking in domain knowledge, but this also makes it difficult to evaluate the accuracy of what Claude has written. I'm optimistic that the documents will still be useful for giving me a starting point in understanding these unfamiliar domains, but I plan to be sceptical of the details. Hopefully I'll be able to treat these as living documents, updating any errors as I find them.

Things I've read / watched / listened to

These are my own reflections from the content, not necessarily the main point of the content.

• Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI - Lalit Maganti

  • An interesting write up of a software project which was enabled by AI. I like the level-headed evaluation of AI for this task. It was clearly complex, and the author notes both what did and what didn't work well.

• Anthropic’s Project Glasswing—restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers—sounds necessary to me

  • This is a concrete step towards the sorts of security problems that people have been predicting for a while. Given our huge reliance on computers for everything, it is a worrying thought to imagine a dramatic increase in the number of serious security vulnerabilities being found in everyday software. Having said that, it's not something I can do a lot about, so I just have to trust that people in the security industry are working on solving these problems.

Things I haven't published

Most ideas I have for blog posts never see the light of day because I don't find the time to write them. Here's what I didn't get round to.

• Google form email certificate

  • I helped my wife set up an automation based on someone else's blog post, and we took it a step further. I'd like to put online what we did so that it might help the next person with the same problem.

• Using multiple desktops in windows 11 breaks the ability to set different monitor backgrounds