Author: Ross Wintle

I’m in a mood. Just as well my main co-worker is in the US and gets me in a few hours time!!

Yo! Frickin, B-Corps and “healthy” food companies. Please please please make recycling instructions for you weird might-be-paper-might-be-compostable-might-not-be-recyclable-at-all packaging REALLY CLEAR. Because the people eating this stuff also want to do the right thing. And you’re not helping them.

B-CORPS!!!

😩

A prediction: After plugins that use skills that use MCP servers backed by APIs finally let people take actions by chat, people will decide they don’t actually like typing potentially-ambiguous commands in human language, and will ask if some visual interface can be built on top of the chat bot to allow them to issue it more precise commands.

I’m one idiot who’s often wrong. But I believe people only want chatboxes because UIs suck.

We should just build better UIs!

From BlueSky: "The Child, aged 17, witheringly asks "where did you hear that? ChatGPT?" when I've said something she thinks is stupid."

I don't understand why it isn't more telling that we can detect AI by looking for low quality. I do it at work. Kids are doing it everywhere.

Low quality images. Rambling, incorrect text. Poorly structured code and software that breaks.

🤷‍♂️

After completing a popular, daily, online, letter-based puzzle with two moves to spare, I have suggested to my son that “Wördlinfor” would be a good D&D character name.

He is totally running with this idea.

I mean… Relatively we're doing well. We are in a very fortunate position. But I'm looking at state pension ages going up and lower birth rates meaning the old outnumber the young, and increasing life expectancy and kids being at Uni (maybe) when I'm in my mid-to-late-50's. There's a lot of life to come! And I can't be working for all of it.

I was talking to someone about money today.

I'd love for us to talk more about money. Like… in detail. But it's such a taboo.

I’d love a way for people to be able to anonymously share their financial situations so I can compare because I have no idea if our future is good or bad or what.

Does this exist?

I wanted to get a re-worked Turbo Admin command palette using native HTML dialog in the next release, but it's really fiddly (not because of dialog, but because I need two different implementation of it now).

I really want some of the new features I've built. So I might have to do an interim release without <dialog>.

Hmm…

Ugh. Customer support for my merchant-of-record eCommerce system seems really broken. Haven't heard from them in a week. Only social channel seems to be Twitter.

Not acceptable for such a critical SaaS.

I'm on a pay-as-you-go plan, but even so.

Does anyone know if Lemon Squeezy is alive?

RE: https://crikey.social/@ross/116432820645230306

Do I know any camping/caravan/RV folks who can take questions on a portable solar panel + battery set up. Wondering if I can use something like this for my some power for my south-facing garden office (which is very much like a static caravan!)

It pays for itself in a couple of years. Assuming good use in winter. But that's a lot of daily hassle.

Probably not worth it.

But something in me wants to try, even while I wait for plug-in solar!

Aldi are going to sell a 40-watt, 3-USB output portable solar panel next week. My office at the end of my garden is almost south facing and gets so much light.

I wondered what I could power from this, perhaps with some power banks in the loop too?

Is it even with it?

If I get just over 30W from it for 8 hours a day, that's 250 Watt-hours. 1kWh every 3 days. 10kWh/month. I'm on 22.17p/kWh. So I'd save £2/month.

Hmm…

I finally read "The Last Quiet Thing”. It has a lot to say. But I have no idea what to do with it.

https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing

But I have said some things about software being finished that maybe give some direction – some "what now?" for some people.

https://rosswintle.uk/2025/10/software-can-be-finished/

Today I read about Jetbrains making AI orchestration tooling and then Mozilla are doing the same.

And I read about techniques for getting LLMs to build their own Wiki as a summary of a knowledge base and it makes me say “this is called ‘thinking’, this is what you use your brain for”.

And I hear about models getting stupider and how you can get your LLM to talk like a caveman because it turns out they are really verbose because you pay for output tokens.

And it’s JUST MADNESS!!!

Did someone here make or share a web app that tells you where a given TV show is streaming?

I also think I'm all in on @Vivaldi now. I might need to switch from Zen.

It's taken a while to get it set up how I like it, but it seems way faster than Zen, and I'm so used to working with Chromium's dev tools.

Thanks to @mike for the tips on getting set up.

I know it’s, like, the most trivial thing. But not only am I on team “vertical tabs” but I’m team “right-side tab bar”!

I’ve not seen anyone else do this. But I heard a great argument for right-side nav in a code editor: a left-hand sidebar moves all your code around when you minimise/toggle the sidebar; a right-hand sidebar does not.

I like this. So I applied it to my browser too!