Ross's Micro Blog

Here’s my Puzzmo profile link if you want to follow/connect:

https://www.puzzmo.com/user/ki/magicroundabout#follow

Puzzmo is an excellent puzzling app. I’m super happy to be a Puzzmonaut. This looks like a great time to try it out!

(I thought it was independent but it’s owned by Hearst! TIL)

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:p5ode5bkf6vjtt6ahtssuxui/post/3mxrgegqg622d

One more #thankYouToday to make up for that rant.

I got a Nebula subscription for my birthday and it’s been wonderful.

I got it to support Tom Scott and his delightful “England” series. But my whole family are binge-watching Jet Lag, and I’ve enjoyed the chaotic comedy of Abolish Everything too.

Friends, we have a super-efficient way of encoding this that needs no cloud-based inference.

This can work tens of times faster, offline, zero cost.

Allow me to introduce you to… “programming”!

🤪🙄

Having done my thankfulness… 😆

Today I saw another classic example of ridiculous LLM use. A “skill” that contained a bunch of plain English instructions:
– ask the user to make this choice
– store the choice as “something”
– if “something” is this then do this thing

Sort of a #thankYouToday (perhaps I need a different tag?) is for the BBC’s “13 Minutes” space history podcast. Real quality radio about the race to space and beyond. Every series has been massively interesting and very well produced and story-told. This season is about the Hubble Space Telescope.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2

Today I’m reading about how ICANN works and, while TLD’s are a bit of a racket really, my #thankYouToday is for the un-seen, back-room work that makes the internet work. It truly is an amazing, global endeavour and it’s been a privilege to grow up alongside it.

https://www.wired.com/story/icann-top-level-domains-meow/

Wait, what? All the supermarket fridges are on the internet?

https://chaos.social/@jonty/117428072074406675

This needs to be immediately followed with:

#thankYouToday for kind, generous friends, that accept me as I am, encourage me, and welcome me into their home.

#thankYouToday for swimming and hot chocolate with my kid, and some much-needed new clothes (with style advice from the same kid!)

https://crikey.social/@ross/117424740928374102

Did some writing… it’s a bit personal, but it seems important and it might resonate with some.

"Things are over-happening. I've been wallowing. It's time to re-focus.”

https://rosswintle.uk/2026/10/the-search-for-joy/

Might just make this my new bio!

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dvvvi2lfda3eq46zikkozitb/post/3mxgfji7zd22g

They continued with the script.

A few minutes later I started asking if they used their own AI tools and if it had given them any idea of how likely I was to convert. If their AI saved time then was it worth talking to me?

They totally missed the joke.

I bailed after 10 mins.

2/2

Oh. I didn’t tell you. I had a very fun not-a-sales call the other day for an AI automation platform for business. Sometimes I play along a bit to see what happens.

A few minutes in I declared that the thing I most wanted to automate was blocking of cold sales calls.

1/2

This is not good. Curl is EVERYWHERE!!

https://mastodon.social/@bagder/117398235777756798

Long chat with my wife tonight about what on earth my career looks like right now.

Pretty sure there’s a correction coming at some point. But what’s left after the correction is what’s important. And that’s crystal-ball stuff.

I’m lost. But clinging to the things I have and am good at.

Like, sure, I’ve built some dumb shit in my time. But I was thoughtful and learned my craft while I was doing it. These people burned the planet, created slop and learned nothing! This is not fun or interesting. It’s probably irresponsible.

3/3

https://youtu.be/ku83Cdoj_G0

– A vibe coded app that you manually input a bunch of health data into, with zero discussion of security or privacy? That’s fine then!!
– And wait. Is that… really… an app that… calculates the mean average of two provided numbers??? 🤦‍♂️

2/3

I know this was meant to be fun, but The Vergecast getting people to pitch vibe-coded apps at them just showed why just-because-you-can-doesn’t-mean-you-should.

– A vibe-coded app that collects photos of dead people. Nothing could go wrong there, I’m sure.

1/3

My daughter is away for the week on a school residential and my son is old enough to be pretty self sufficient and OH MY GOODNESS WHAT DO ALL YOU CHILDLESS ADULTS DO ALL EVENING LONG???