Robert Smallshire

Sometimes us dual nationals are faced with difficult questions, such as, "Will you be supporting England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 or Norway 🇳🇴?" "Yes."

Just cancelled 75% of our JetBrains IDE licences. Elegant weapons for a more civilised age.

Two-player #BBCMicro #Elite is coming along nicely. It now supports two pilots in two ships with two controllers and a split-view screen Here are some work-in-progress videos - see the thread for an explanation There’s lots to fix, but at least we have a proof-of-concept… (1/6) #retrocomputing

I’m delighted with this gift I received for speaking at the @tnmoc.bsky.social Econet LAN Party event. Wonderful!

I enjoyed the Project Hail Mary movie, but the ship's computer 'Mary' talking in stilted non-sentences seemed immediately anachronistic by 2026 standards. Red Dwarf's 'Holly' was much closer to where we are today.

Clever and interesting rhetorical form from George Robertson, former Secretary General of NATO, on the topic of UK defence policy: “We are underprepared. We are underinsured. We are under attack.”

“If Europe wants change, it cannot simply recreate the same model under a different logo. It must move beyond the document-and-format architecture altogether.” ia.net/topics/trapp...

This should be a hugely dynamic time for Europe. The democratic world need new energy and leadereship, it needs alternatives, it needs nations with global outlooks that are also resolutely non-imperial. This challenge/opportunity is not being met.

bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-man... a) amazing investigation of something you won't have consciously noticed but immediately realise is true and b) brilliant example of how game design is interaction design is safety design

After 18 years, Shantanu Narayen is stepping down as CEO of Adobe. Sources say he finally found the “cancel leadership” button, though it’s only available for 30 days before his annual contract renewal, so he'll be staying on for another 10 months.

Interesting to come back to C++ after over 15 years. While I've been gone they've finally admitted that operating systems exist and provide enough useful OS integration out of the box to make it a half-reasonable platform.

This would be a very good week for anyone who has not already abandoned the Mercator projection for maps of the world to do so

Finally, finally getting off my butt and getting off all possible US goods and services. Some will just take longer than others! www.goeuropean.org

First US tech company/service dropped from my life, long overdue: Backblaze. Lets go for Norwegian company Jottcloud instead. 10 minutes work to change my rclone backup script over to use Jotta instead for backups, and hey - a waaay nicer UX in their web console, to boot 🙂🪄

The best use of American AI today would be to help Europe build its own sovereign technologies: operating systems, social media, communications, semiconductors, defence, and yes, more AI. While the subsidies are flowing, let them underwrite a future of genuine technological independence.

I worked in C++ from 1995 to 2010, then in Python from 2010 to 2025. I've been building complex native application in C++ again recently, almost entirely mediated by AI. It's hard to leave a 100x performance gain on the table when the dev- experience of interpreted versus native code is eliminated.

One Earth radius of cycling in 2025 achieved. For the other geo-pedants out there, a distance slightly greater than that from the summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, which at 6384.4 km is the furthest point from the centre of the Earth. 🌍 🚴‍♂️

On zero-sum thinking. www.ft.com/content/30a4...

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely? hey.paris/posts/appleid/

"I hate AI because it states blatantly wrong things confidently sometimes. And also because it uses 50 gajillion gallons of water per query."

Slop in, slop out.

Why are Apple emulating failing eyesight with their new Liquid Glass app icon filter?

Empire of AI by @karenhao.bsky.social contains serious errors regarding data centre water use. I thought it was an important book which I’ve recommended to folks, but I won’t be recommending it further unless a heavily revised second edition is published. andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-...

The people making a pig’s ear of programming _with_ AI are mostly the same ones who made a pig’s ear of it _without_ AI. Still talking only about features, still ignoring system qualities. Same mindset, new tools, same outcome.

When you realise that the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect applies to all of Wikipedia.

Status: Fixing Human Slop on Wikipedia.

From 1998: “An [SGI] Octane system featuring 250-MHz R10000 processor, meanwhile, will drop from $38,995 to $24,995.” I was coding on systems like this around the turn of the millennium. There’s a huge upside in how much money we’ll be prepared to pay for AI tooling. $200/month is nothing.

I can't help but wonder if this post would have got more attention on his platform if I had omitted the word 'vibe'.

To all the programmers out there, TIL that the number of centiseconds in a day is divisible by 256.

Fractal yak shaving status: Annotating the disassembly of an operating system at well past my bedtime.

Convinced the crisis of app UX is a result of a generation of designers who have never experienced computers being used (and needed!) for serious work. A fucking avalanche of triviality.

A new personal best.