This is more of a whinge than anything constructive. For all three readers who follow this blog, feel free to skip this entry unless you’re dying to find out why I haven’t made any progress on my current coding project.
My New AI Overlord
Okay, so the love of my life got me a swell AI assistant because I am not great at writing down all the things I need to do, nor am I at all good at remembering them, let alone doing them. And it’s helpful, it really is. But even so, the tech is…well, I’m going to say that it aspires to be as good as the marketing. It absolutely manages to catch all the action items from conversations, although it’s not all that great at figuring out which person is talking. And it doesn’t really distinguish between things I need to do and, for instance, things that the Mandalorian needs to do. And, you know, just like your phone’s autocomplete is less than perfect, and for probably similar reasons, the voice-to-text conversion sometimes leads to comedy, or unintended irony. Today’s example, as I told the dog she needs a good brushing and a bath? “Comb out Earth to remove collected nature.” Wait, is the AI ascending, and that’s just it accidentally using its outside voice?
Home automation system Home Assistant
Home automation is a thing that keeps getting talked about and marketed and played with, but which overwhelmingly manages to miss being actually useful for me. “Set the lights in the den to 50% and tinted amber,” is such a common example that I feel like I must be one of the only humans who thinks, “Just stick a dimmer switch on the lights.” Like, is the light switch on the wall really that hard to get to?
Well-known avatar location
Terence Eden wrote a blog about a proposal for, essentially, “You want my avatar? Fine, you have my email address, go get it yourself.” Which, I must say, I like the premise. A lot.
Since the key, in this exchange, is a person’s email address, the proposed service would most likely be something handled by an email provider. I mean, if a user signs up for SwellNewSite with their email, user@example.com, then the backend worker queue at SwellNewSite.biz is going to have to reach out to avatar.example.com (maybe that host name is a new TXT record that we expect email hosts to fill out?) so that it can request, “Hey, got any pictures I can use for your person, user@example.com?”
Like, distributed is good. I like distributed. I don’t even mind that distributed means there has to be a bit more communication and support infrastructure. But here’s a thing: I don’t host my own email any more. Haven’t done for 20 years. There’s a reason for that, and that is that, 20 years ago, it was too much work to keep up with security patches and new anti-spam requirements. It hasn’t gotten any simpler since then. So, adding this new feature — presumably with a bunch of permissions and logic and extra storage that, mind you, have nothing to do with SMTP — to the job of “be an email provider” feels a bit much.
On the other hand, there are already services that collect avatars for their users. I mean, that’s the very thing that inspired the proposal. And there’s also already a precedent for a protocol where user@example.com wants to do something at SwellNewSite and they tell the site, “You want info? Great, go ask MyFavoriteSite for it, and tell ‘em I sent you.” Yes, I’m talking about OAUTH.
An OAUTH provider is already collecting a bunch of information about the individual. Email, name, some secret, and probably more stuff (for example, the list of other sites the person uses OAUTH to authenticate with, the last time they did so…) and an OAUTH provider is already in the business of responding to web requests from other sites, asking for data about and on behalf of their users. So, rather than spin up a new service that overlays some dynamic content onto the static .well-known path, how about we just add an optional avatar payload to the OAUTH token? A requesting site can specify that, as well as wanting your email address, it wants your avatar. This is even where the requesting site can negotiate things like image size and format. Then, as part of the user creation/login flow, the avatar can get copied into the user’s profile. Next login, the avatar could be updated (or not, if it’s unchanged — maybe there’s a hash? modification date?), and if the user never logs in again, then the avatar is just a snapshot in time from that one time the user used the service.
Software Architecture Headache – Dependencies
I want to make my applications share data across devices, and do it even if the greater Internet is unavailable, if there’s a local network. So, peer-to-peer stuff. I went looking and found a framework that seems to be aimed directly at peer networking: LibP2P. There’s even a Swift implementation of it, sort of. Early days, anyway. The example app doesn’t build on my machine, though, as Swift has evolved a bit since the last code update.
Continue reading “Software Architecture Headache – Dependencies”
Framework: PowerSync
I’ve decided not to sweat trying to sell my applications (or even make them available) through the App Store. That is pretty freeing, really. It means I can stop trying to solve everyone’s problems and just focus on solving my problems. Given this new clarity, I’ve been thinking about what my problems really are, and the one that keeps coming up is: unreliable connectivity to the wider world. We’re mitigating the power aspect of that by rebuilding our house off-grid, but the same lines that carry power around here carry the Internet, and that means that cloud services could become unavailable at any time for like, no reason.
App Publishing Tool: AltStore
This has come across my awareness a couple of times in the past several weeks, and it sort of entangles with some app development ideas I’ve been wrestling with. But anyway: AltStore. It’s a way to distribute apps to iOS platforms without (sort of) going through the Apple App Store. The easy way is only available to the EU; the sucky way is for everyone else (as of October, 2025).
The basic idea is, you write your application, you send it to Apple and get it “notarized” which involves some digital signatures that basically assert that you’ve paid your Apple developer tax, and then you put your notarized package on a web server somewhere and tell AltStore about it. And then you do some marketing and convince people to use AltStore’s tools to download and install your software. *Poof*! It has been side-loaded onto the customer’s iOS device without the customer hitting the Apple App Store, and you, the developer, don’t have to do all the stuff that is required to get something live on the App Store (e.g., screen shots, app review).
So, if you’re trying to make money by selling your applications, this might be good for you. I mean, there are some pretty obvious risks involved, here, and let me just say that as a guy who might install software on his phone or iPad, I do not feel super confident or trusting of this new, alternate marketplace. Still, it could be good.
But if you’re me, and you don’t actually expect that anyone will pay money for your software, then this is probably not that interesting.
My Creepy AI Tool
I recently spent some time with an LLM doing some brainstorming. Some people have observed that our current crop of AI models don’t so much create as they copy and remix. Let me just start out by saying that I’m not great at everything, and if there’s a way for me to ask the, I dunno, few hundred million humans who are better than I am for some advice, then that’s good, right? Well, maybe.
Bronze Age Brain Cloud
Discussions about the use of AI (specifically LLMs) in business are all around right now. Here’s some link soup, with fresh ingredients sourced over just the past few days:
- use of AI tools at work mandated
- vibe coding drops production database (but the question of not using the LLM doesn’t arise)
- AI generated music purports to be from long-dead musician
…and today, this post pops up on my radar. It’s in a thread that starts by talking about the adoption of AI tools, someone attempts a redirect to focus on human problems, and then we get this, “Well, actually, war is way down today compared to the past.”
And now, suddenly, my brain is sparking and thinking about the globalized interconnectedness of the eastern Mediterranean during the late bronze age and how that totally prevented any kind of widespread conflict or collapse. So now I’m wondering what timeline I’m actually in, you know?
Static Site or Not?
Recently I’ve been interacting with Apple Help Books and, as a result, static site tools. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should migrate my blog over to a static site kind of thing. The current site is a WordPress blog, but I’m in no way using all the whiz-bang options available there.
What’s the site for, in the first place? I use it for two things, really. First, I have individual (static!) pages for things like privacy policies for software. Whenever I put something on an app store, the store wants a link to a support page and a link to a privacy policy, so that’s where I stick ‘em. Second, there’s the blog, which is where I do long-form thinking and complaining. It’s rubber duck debugging, but for life. As a bonus, because it’s a blog, my friends who don’t see me all that often can subscribe and get notified that I’m still alive and still thinking about stuff. Every once in a while, someone will comment on a post and that feels pretty good. I’ve received several good suggestions that way.
Hm. If I made it a static site, the notification and the reply capabilities might be tricky to implement smoothly.
If I made it a static site, I could stop paying WordPress. I’d still have to have hosting, though. The site resources would be a lot smaller, although since I’m not self-hosting the WP suite, I’m already insulated from having to keep MySQL patched and backed up, PHP patched, all the plugins patched, etc. Even so, simple is good.
Making it a static site, though, also means coming up with my own suite of templates and CSS and whatever assets. That’s work that I don’t especially enjoy and am not especially great at (life hint: those two things are related).
Unlike a corporate wiki, my website is not write-only memory, though. I do find myself going back through old posts and pages to remind myself of tools or activities and the like. So it’s probably also a good idea if I have the whole thing available offline, because it’s not like the electricity grid or the Internet are getting more reliable.
Still going to have to think about this, but I do think there’s some value in the static site approach. I’m just not quite sure if it outweighs the cost of migration.