Snappish Productions https://snappishproductions.com/ I just can't help believing, though believing sees me cursed… Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Then And Now. Plus, BIRDS! https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/07/12/then-and-now.-plus-birds.html.html Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/07/12/then-and-now.-plus-birds.html.html This episode of Horizon from 1978 is an interesting historical look at microprocessors and how they were starting to filter through into the world at large. As a piece of its time, it’s an interesting documentary all by itself, but I was intrigued/amused at the back half, which was all about how white and blue-collar jobs will be eliminated by our 6502 overlords, showing examples of a doctor creating an expert system that would replace consultants, and a building contractor who only had to tell a system how to do something once and then a robot would be able to perfectly replicate the process. Again, 1978. It’s interesting how we now seem to be in the same position, only this time…maybe it’s more real? Or are we getting ahead of ourselves once more, and the advent of Claude/etc. just means a new normal, like how coding in C or Pascal is often much faster than trying to write assembler.

I find I can do more; this weekend, I trained a new model for work, yes, but I did two other things that I could have done myself, but it would have taken weeks and weeks of effort. Firstly, I finally started setting up the smart solar bird feeder I bought during a recent sale. But it wasn’t the brand I somehow assumed it was, and the only way to communicate with it is to use an iOS or Android app, and they want an extra $20/year for sharing the account. I sat down with Claude just after 13:00 on Saturday, and by 15:00, we had mapped out the entire API, pulled out a long-lived JWT token that allows me to authenticate whenever and where-ever, and built a small web server that produces a child-friendly set of HTML cards ready to show Maeryn just what birds have visited today, and hooking up the audio to BirdNET so it’s strictly speaking better AI than what the company is offering through the app alone.

Then, for a laugh on Sunday afternoon, I pointed Claude at the source code for Grid Wars. Every so often, I remember how fun that game was and then I rediscover that the Intel builds currently crash on MacOS. I told Claude to port it to a Rust WASM runtime that could be played in the browser. And damn if it didn’t just go ahead and do it. It required a little hand-holding to get the blur and gravity mesh effects just right…but I can now just play Grid Wars by serving up just a few files on a website1. It is very strange having all these horizons just open up in front of you. And it is something of a siren call; just one more idea that you can run before bedtime, just one more run and you’ll be fixed. I feel like I have stepped away from the edge a couple of times already, but every Friday night, the AI abyss comes around again…

(Next week? Back to the 1980s)

  1. I would put it up publicly, but I seem to recall that the owners of Geometry Wars did get a little affronted back in the day, and I don’t really want to get into trouble. But…if you email me wink wink ↩︎

]]> Well, what the hell’s the presidency for? https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/07/04/well-what-the-hells-the-presidency-for.html.html Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/07/04/well-what-the-hells-the-presidency-for.html.html “By G-d I’ll fight till hell freezes over and then I’ll cut the ice and fight on. TVA Iwo Jima LBJ Pelham-1-2-3 Big Bird The best NASA logo 1976 Bicentennial Logo Tiffany Monkey Island 2 Sneakers Netscape Heat Courtney Love Obama Inauguration 2009 ICE OUT Remember Who You Are, Liberal

It might be surprising, considering I grew up in the irony-poisoned Britain of the 90s, but the last 10 years in this country has made me somewhat patriotic. But that’s patriotic in the sense that I’m now a person who reads the Federalist papers, letters from the Civil War and the biographies of LBJ, and remembering that day in 2009 on the Mall. Patriotism in the sense of I’ll be damned if I let these people desecrate the founding documents of this country and the nation of immigrants that gave rise to the American Century. Patriotism in the service of bending the arc of the moral universe to justice. Patriotism in living our lives as a form of resistance, a happier life than I could ever have imagined, and worth fighting for.

Five words that changed America.

]]> 'Ver Curves & 'Ver Boy — 20 Years Later https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/06/28/ver-curves-ver-boy-20-years-later.html.html Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/06/28/ver-curves-ver-boy-20-years-later.html.html Honestly, I don’t remember exactly when I joined ILX. I think it was likely in either late 2002 or early 2003, when I was living in Chapel Hill, and for some reason I vaguely believe it was due to searching for information on Saturday Looks Good To Me, which is a little odd, as they’re not exactly an ILM or ILX band. Anyway, I loved hanging out in the background1, making a comment here and there, but mostly being a lurker as Poptimism took root there and I rediscovered my younger Smash Hits reading self (heavens above! — Ed.)

What I really wanted to do is meet up with everybody at Club Popular. But…while I had got to the point where I was relatively okay with going to concerts by myself (seriously, the hours spent awkwardly hanging about before the advent of mobile phones), I was absolutely not okay with making the trip from Bicester to London for a club night all by myself. I just couldn’t do it. Still a regret.

By 2006, I was still mostly lurking, but I had made a friend — Forest Pines, or Caitlin. And ILX had a band! Shimura Curves! ‘Ver Curves! Kate ‘Masonic Boom’, Anna, Frances, and Miss AMP! Krautrock and girl group harmonies! Zeitgeist songs like Noyfriend and Keep My Name Out of Your Blog (there isn’t another song that encapsulates the pre-Facebook Web 2.0 era as perfectly as the latter). They had an afternoon gig on a Sunday when I was already going to be going to London to see Johnny Boy. Suddenly, I was invited to a pre-gig pub meet up with Kate and Caitlin.

So I ended up drinking strawberry beer with them for several hours before we decided we’d better actually go to the Notting Hill Arts Club, Kate carrying her guitar through town. By that time, we’d also picked up Ed, another ILX regular. The concert itself is mostly lost to my memory, but I remember groupie cards kissed by individual band members, banter about Brown and Sticky, and the Berlin, 1973 ending of Stronger.

Even just all that would have made for a wonderful day. But I still had the second half. Johnny Boy at The Luminaire in Kilburn. I was, of course, back on my own, and resigned to standing sheepishly in the venue waiting for the band to come on stage. But it wasn’t quite to be. I’ll admit my memory does not give me perfect recall, but the way I remember it is this: I noticed a group of people sitting in a booth. One of whom I was damn sure was Kieron Gillen, who’d I known in an online sort of way since joining the Kenickie Mailing List back in 1997. Eventually, I worked past my shyness enough to go over and say hello. This was about two months before the first issue of Phonogram, so we talked about that, and me seeing Miss AMP earlier in the day. The idea of just randomly bumping into somebody I knew at a concert…it had just never happened to me before. And given how the day had gone so far, I was getting beyond giddy at this point.

Towards the end of the gig itself, I found myself dancing with him and Alex De Campi. The elation I had coming out of the venue and rushing to get the last train from Marylebone to Bicester North was something I hadn’t felt since that house party in Chapel Hill way back in 2003, or that time I went into the Carrboro woods to smash up a piñata for a late birthday celebration. On the journey back, I think I was plotting…or more realistically, fantasising about the potential of moving to London. Maybe every weekend could be like that, I thought, as I went past Haddenham & Thame Parkway.

Anyway, twenty years ago this week. I never did move to London; instead I took a rather different direction which sees me typing this in Cincinnati. Which I have to say has worked out very well for me, as I pause to think about Maeryn demanding I play drop dead again on the way home from daycare (Tammy: “With me, it’s Wheels On The Bus. There’s apparently a different vibe in Daddy’s car). And then this September, I’m going to be back in London again, Saint Etienne will likely play Popular, and I’ll smile, recognising all the names.

  1. Okay, there was one person from the British contingent I took an initial dislike to, and that was before I knew details that really made me glad we never met… ↩︎

]]> tony cascarino circa 1995 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/06/21/tony-cascarino-circa-1995.html.html Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/06/21/tony-cascarino-circa-1995.html.html I felt a little attacked on Wednesday morning when my boss jokingly referred to me as “sometimes a little workaholic.” Later, as I was writing messages on Slack as I was literally having an IV attached…yeah okay, I guess I can sometimes see it. Vaguely.

(nothing too much to worry about - an endoscopy to check on my acid reflux. And I did a reasonable job at staying offline from work on Thursday and Friday. So there.)

Anyway, a truncated week, and I feel like I let the opportunity of two days off mostly slip by without filling them properly, although watching Eno yet again (now that a new version is out every month on the Criterion Channel) did get me to start work on The Assembly Machine, of which I will probably talk a little more about in July when it’s slightly more stable.

It is Father’s Day, and I have the greatest Father’s Day present ever — the best LC! tour t-shirt ever made, and a Lego cement mixer to go along with it, as every Lego city needs the means of production so the city can grow and grow, right? I’m fairly sure that’s correct.

Oh, and I got complimented at the playground today for a t-shirt that is, perhaps, over 25 years old?

]]> A Post-Google World? https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/06/13/a-post-google-world.html.html Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/06/13/a-post-google-world.html.html This article by Drew Magary gets at the heart of the craziness behind Google’s recent decision to go all in on AI and essentially declare war on its own historical business model. I’m not really sure how that’s going to work out for them, but I also have some thoughts — thoughts that I imagine would be incredibly unpopular across parts of the internet and Bluesky: which is that the World Wide Web is not the only model for the information superhighway, and I think we possibly forget that. Google’s search/ad dominance led to the world of SEO, ragebait, and our current international nightmare…maybe its interaction with the web just wasn’t healthy at any point.

Back in the ’90s, things like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, David Brin’s Earth, and the Knowledge Navigator video from Apple — which is one of my secret origin stories — presented a different world, a world that was not taken. You can also see it in the documentary on General Magic, where their initial vision was very much ‘agentic’ before the Web came and killed them stone dead. You can catch glimpses of another world in The Net, which had indepth segments on anonymous FTP servers and USENET.

But whilst I agree with Drew that Google declaring war essentially on the rest of the web is a terrible idea, I’m also wondering: is it possible that the web itself is something that might need to go away? This is one of those things I keep toying with in the back of my head; I do not particularly want to live in a world where everybody lives in Sam Altman’s walled gardens.

The new frontier models are powerful and amazing, and everybody should have them. I remember arguing on the web a few years back that all I wanted was an army of trans cat girls with a lava lamp in their basement doing crazy things locally on Llama models. I still believe that (although I’ve moved on to Qwen models in 2026). I think democratizing these things to the extent that they run in everywhere is potentially as revolutionary a change as having a computer in every home.

But I’m starting to think: can we take that a bit further? Like: “No, son, we have Google at home.” What would it take ti give everybody had their own search engine at home? Could we put something akin to 2000-era Google on your PC / Mac / Laptop? What would that look like? Is it feasible? How does it update? Sure, it doesn’t solve the money problem, but it might help keep the open web alive.

Obviously a lot of this comes from the fact that I’m completely obsessed with search. If Google isn’t going to be the only search engine around any more, then maybe we have to look back to the situation that existed in the mid-to-late ’90s. Infoseek, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, MetaCrawler, HotBot — all the different search engines that were the way we interacted with the web; each engine had its pluses and minuses and required a bit of knowledge (or research) to work out which one to use for what scenario.

What I envision is a three tier local system. Tier 0 is your emails and documents. Tier 1 is the main search engine, where something like 100m documents from the web can be searched locally. This engine is updated on a monthly basis based on a user’s explicit wishes and implicit signals from what they’re searching, drawing on the monthly Common Crawl dump to stay current. And then there’s Tier 2, which is the connection to the outside world. Paid API sources like Kagi, Bing, and anything else that you’d like to plug in. There would be a program on top of this1 that would do routing for search queries, working out when a queries need to go to the outside world, or if they can be answered locally and delegating appropriately (balancing API costs and whatnot, obviously).

But who would build such a thing. Well…I have the local search engine prototyped already…

  1. okay, I’ll call it an agent if you force me… ↩︎

]]> New Yorker Unbound https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/06/06/new-yorker-unbound.html.html Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/06/06/new-yorker-unbound.html.html Okay, so last week I promised a longer diatribe, and I swear that I haven’t forgotten about it; it needs to be edited down a bit, but it does exist, and I’ve also actually written a bunch of code to prove that my idea is at least viable. But…well, something happened this weekend that means it’s been bumped, probably until mid-week.

Almost twenty years ago, I bought a copy of The Complete New Yorker. This was a very interesting collection of DVDs that contained every copy of The New Yorker from 1925 until 2005. Spread across 8 DVDs, it had a proprietary viewing system locked down with DRM, but it was still quite a fun thing to have. The main problem was that the Mac version of the software was compiled for 68k Macs. This suddenly became a big issue when Apple switched off 68k Rosetta support; instead of 8 DVDs filled with decades of print, the collection ended up being a brick. Even the Windows software eventually bitrotted, and the collection has just been hanging out on my bookshelves waiting for the DVDs to fail.

Over the past decade, I have probably searched once or twice a year to see if anybody has cracked the DRM encryption. The closest I’ve ever got was this user over on GitHub, who cracked equivalent versions for Rolling Stone and Playboy. Hints were dropped that the New Yorker collection would soon follow, but that was two years ago, and things have been silent. But it did suggest there was some hope.

Enter Claude.

Claude Opus spent an afternoon this Saturday with the NSA’s Ghirda reverse engineering framework and comprehensively cracked the DRM. NewYorkerUnbound hosts little more than a simple Python script (with in-line dependencies, even!) that will take any file from the DVD set and produce an uncracked DJVU file, with an optional PDF export if you have the right support on your Linux box.

After almost 15 years of them sitting idle, I have 80 years of the New Yorker available again. Hurrah!

(I was so very excited that I didn’t do anything that I had actually planned to do this Saturday, which was probably a mistake…)

]]> Goodbye Sava https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/05/31/goodbye-sava.html.html Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/05/31/goodbye-sava.html.html Well, I can finally talk about the thing I couldn’t talk about. Last Friday was Sava’s last day at Lucidworks after almost ten years. We’ve been together for thick and thin, even during the year where I wasn’t even at Lucidworks. That there won’t be an early morning rant waiting for me in my Slack DMs tomorrow is hitting me like a body blow. But it is not the end. We’re already making plans to meet up this September when I’m in town for the last Saint Etienne tour1.

Next week: something longer…and perhaps a little more controversial, providing I can finish my Friday night thoughts on the future of the web, and the past of the information superhighway…

  1. I also don’t normally plan these things to this level of detail, but I also think I have my outfit for said concert worked out? Normally, I wouldn’t put much thought into it, but it feels appropriate to be a little fancy for the last time of seeing them… ↩︎

]]> That Memorial Weekend Feeling https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/05/24/that-memorial-weekend-feeling.html.html Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/05/24/that-memorial-weekend-feeling.html.html Normally after my family leaves, there are a few days where everything seems a lot quieter. Less hustle and bustle in the house, less to do, etc. Well, with a three year old, we don’t get that luxury; she starts at 6:30am whether or not family is visiting, and she would quite like the Ms. Rachel episode with the baby dolls in, thank you very much (at this point, I retire to make tea, as I need something to cut against Ms. Rachel’s voice first thing; she’s a lovely person. But still…).

We have a brief interregnum of a week before the house is full again, this time with some of Tammy‘s high school friends, which means I have to clean the house to a slightly higher standard than when family comes (this mostly means: ‘probably do something with the IKEA circus tent and clear off all the DVDs waiting for encoding in the back bedroom). Otherwise, not a huge amount going on at the moment. We are doing Memorial Weekend DIY things, I have downloaded all of A Very Peculiar Practice for my pre-2000 TV viewing requirements, and this week at work is the end of an era as one of my close coworkers will be leaving this Friday which I am quite sad about. But he did get me this watch!1

  1. Also, it appears that May / June is my time for buying new Swatch watches. I have finished my ‘spite buying because it looks like I have an expensive roof situation coming up’ spree, with three new Swatches winging their way to me as I type… ↩︎

]]> Slippers And Leaf Blowers https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/05/19/slippers-and-leaf-blowers.html.html Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/05/19/slippers-and-leaf-blowers.html.html It is perhaps the most American middle class thing to be outside on your deck on a Sunday morning cooking breakfast on a Blackstone griddle. I was literally wearing a LL Bean dressing gown and slippers.1

The family is visiting right now (hence the above; it’s not a regular Sunday thing, I promise), which means that Maeryn runs all over the house shouting ‘grandad!’ and has more people to pick her up than usual. We are also now doing a comedy turn pretending to be a cat and an extended performance act piece entitled “I Will Sleep On This Hard Table But Don’t Move Me Anywhere In The Direction Of My Actual Bed”. Definitely enjoying herself, and we’re visiting yet more of the area’s bizarrely fantastic playgrounds.

A few days left of the family visit, and it seems just a few days left of May too. Lots of new things coming in June…

  1. Today, I also had my first go on my own leafblower. Electric, of course, but surprising, a lot of fun… ↩︎

]]> On The Road https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/05/03/on-the-road.html.html Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/05/03/on-the-road.html.html A link blog entry? In 2026???

An interesting article about indie record labels, which definitely undercuts a few popular narratives (though I say that as somebody who in the year 2026 still doesn’t have a streaming subscription)

The insanity of making NHPTV work

Sometimes, I get nostalgic for things that were just background radiation. We were and are not a Radio 4 household. The Shipping Forecast existed only as gags in comedy shows. But oh, I covet this poster. Sure, it may be sold out. But I have ways.

If you can read this, then a) the remote uploading process did in fact work, but more importantly, b) I made it to Atlanta. I was planning on writing things during the trip, but after I went into Buc-ee’s and experienced the madness, I just wanted to get out and on the road again. Besides, they didn’t have anywhere to sit? Which is just madness. You know what I like? A service station that knows what it’s there for and has seats for days.

Foxton Services

Accept no substitutes. Even they come bearing an entire wall of jerky and the promise of petrol pumps that stretch over the horizon.

Anyway, it was a pretty uneventful trip, which I think is the best kind for an 8 hour drive. The hotel is pretty close to the Atlanta bypass, so I was able to avoid most of Atlanta itself (except for a short stop in Marietta for Cookout, because you have to). I am currently typing this in the courtyard of a very fancy shopping mall, decked out with a Balencigna, Valentin Statin, and Alexander McQueen. Basically, like Bicester Village except there’s no discounts and no Pret. s you can imagine, terribly lifeless, but it does have very sturdy marble benches (my knees remember that from January). Strangely, everything is shut. Like I know it’s 18:00 on a Sunday, and my ingrained feeling is to have a sausage roll and watch Time Team, but even the food hall is weirdly shut. You are an emblem of American excess and capitalism! Why aren’t you open? Oh, yeah, that’s probably right.

Okay, I am now of to find some Diet Coke to get me through the evening. This is in addition to the Diet Coke I brought in the car to get me through the week.

]]> Early Morning Car To Georgia https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/04/26/early-morning-car-to-georgia.html.html Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/04/26/early-morning-car-to-georgia.html.html There is A Lot That I Can’t Talk About this week, so instead, a preview of next week. In seven days, I will wake up, get dressed and showered, and then get into my car for a seven hour drive to Atlanta. I could fly. Work will absolutely pay for that, I swear. But last time I flew to Atlanta, I got so sick that I spent all week in the hotel room (when I wasn’t throwing up in Target) and then got stuck overnight in Charlotte. I am not going through all that again, so the fewer people I meet on the trip down, the better. And also, there’s Cook Out. This cannot be understated - there’s one just off I-75 as I get into the outskirts of Atlanta, and so I must go.

When I’ve told people of this plan, there’s a certain split. Americans cock their head at the drive time and then say “ah, that’s not that bad.” British people look at me as if I have completely lost my mind, given that it’s a longer trip than London to Edinburgh. But don’t worry! I will be bringing snacks. Of course, I normally load my iPad up with a host of British television the 1970s and 1980s for the plane ride…and while I can do that again, it’s probably not the best idea to try and watch any of it during the trip1. So…podcasts? But I’m not really a podcast person. Seven hours of “Ian’s old ‘walk to Activision’ playlist from 2011”? That is somewhat more likely.

(I did look into going via train as well. Obviously, that just sent me into a spiral of “look at all the train lines China has built in the past 30 years!!” after seeing the Amtrak schedule)

I will also try and test my all-new remote posting set up next weekend, allowing me for the first time in over 10 years to post without out my personal laptop. Less exciting for all of you to be getting updates from Buc’ees, mind you…

  1. It is going to be all-interstate, though, and I’ve discovered this weekend that my car is actually smarter than I thought (it can parallel park by itself???). Don’t worry, I’m not crazy enough to even think about turning the iPad on until I get to the hotel. ↩︎

]]> Neighbours and Heavy Plant https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/04/19/neighbours-and-heavy-plant.html.html Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/04/19/neighbours-and-heavy-plant.html.html One thing I continue to find amusing, almost eight years to the day that I moved to Cincinnati, is that I can be in the middle of Kroger and get a call from the Mayor. Admittedly, a former mayor (though seemingly a popular one!), and he’s only phoning me because he’s my next-door neighbour and one of our visitors has left their tailgate down, but it’s definitely somewhat unique to where I’m living now.

(Other neighbour interaction of the week — the one who came around, invited us to her church, and then politely asked if we were running a daycare. It’s the Melissa and Doug grocery shop that’s visible from our windows, isn’t it? That and the massive adventure playground in the back garden, I guess…)

And then the other big thing of the weekend. Tammy is amazing. She’s the person that sees the retaining wall go up with a small digger and thinks “that would be really useful to have to level out the back garden and clear the hill.” And then the next day: “Oh, they’ll be dropping it off on Thursday.” From never having even touched one of them before, in the matter of a week, she’s got a hard hat on and tearing the hill down. There’s now straw down, grass growing, an adventure playground moved into a brand-new and perfect position, and the sense of a garden coming together. I’ve already told Maeryn I’ll be teaching her French Cricket soon enough.

]]> Daddy, Can I Have an Adventure? https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/04/12/daddy-can-i-have-an-adventure.html.html Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/04/12/daddy-can-i-have-an-adventure.html.html Honestly, I don’t know who could say no to a three-year old saying that. I couldn’t, anyway. That’s why, after making chocolate cornflake nests for the first time1, it was time for an…adventure! Though an adventure in an understated manner, as I hadn’t really slept and didn’t think I could do an awful lot. And so it was that I searched for adventure playgrounds and again stumbled onto one of the weird things about the USA: for all its failings (and yes, as we can clearly see right now, there are a lot), it is bloody good at libraries and adventure playgrounds. We’re talking swings, two different sheltered areas, a Teletubbies/That Black Hole Episode of Blue artificial hill area with tunnels and slides, a separate toddler area complete with playhouse, fake small rock wall, zip line, instrument corner, a three-level adventure playground…and a maze. Yeah, just a small maze they seemed to drop in for fun. And working toilets! All less than a ten minute drive from the house and completely new to all of us. Needless to say, fun was had, and Maeryn was able to tell Mummy when she came in that she’d had an adventure.

In fact, it was a bit of an Adventure Saturday, because Tammy and I went out for a birthday/anniversary dinner with a sneaky trip to Jungle Jim’s afterwards. The Corner Dumpling House does indeed do very good dumplings…though we were. A touch sad that the sesame noodles had been pulled off the menu to make room for…Cincinnati chilli noodles. The type of fusion that justly starts wars. Also, I’d forgotten that JungleJim’s imports British Easter eggs during the season, but that actually worked in my favour for once as I walked out of there with a £15 egg for $9.

As for today, there was a Costco visit and no gardening while MAeryn has her afternoon nap. Just a good simple weekend. That’ll do.

  1. Honestly, I’m not sure if these are a British staple or just my family’s staple. But there’s a 1970s-era Cadbury’s cookbook that my mum has and those nests from there have been part of my life as far back as I remember, so I’m glad Maeryn had fun making her first ones. ↩︎

]]> Benefits of a classical education https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/04/05/benefits-of-a-classical-education.html.html Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/04/05/benefits-of-a-classical-education.html.html The surveyors has rendered their verdict…and that is: the garden is about twice as large as we thought it was. I am apparently incapable of buying a house in this country without a huge garden. Right now, it’s just going to be extra grass for Maeryn to play on, but let’s not kid ourselves that I’m not having Grand Designs thoughts and looking at Dezeen for concrete ideas. Don’t worry, I won’t need an architect!

Ooooh, look at this…

I spent a good half-hour standing in the middle of my new domain, working out where the stilts and cantilever would go…and then I came to my senses a little and thought about where we could place a bench where we could sit whilst Maeryn plays. That feels a bit more realistic, but also great in its own way.

]]> One Week Later https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/03/29/one-week-later.html.html Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/03/29/one-week-later.html.html Soft Play is a lie. My bruises, cuts, and scrapes attest to this. Also, Maeryn as a three-year-old does care one little bit if daddy is afraid of heights, we are going right to the top and the biggest slides. And when we get down, we will shout “Again!” and run back up.

Anyway, a relatively successful week of solo parenting, I think…although I played on easy mode by Maeryn still going to daycare three days of the week and my work not minding too much that I had to take Friday off because she was under the weather, but we had a good time, went shopping, got registered at the library, and went down many slides. Plus, she now has a new grocery checkout toy so she can pretend to be on the till (spoilers: she’s very bad at it, having committed multiple counts of theft in just one afternoon).

All that being said, I did enjoy a lie-in this morning…

]]> Now We Are Three https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/03/22/now-we-are-three.html.html Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/03/22/now-we-are-three.html.html Well, not quite, but it’s a long weekend of celebrating Maeryn’s third birthday. She asked for red cake with sprinkles and so she got as much food dye added into a Momofuku Milk Bar birthday cake recipe that I could risk, as well as little red cakes coated in a wd~50-style strawberry glaze. “It tastes like strawberry fake skin!” — my PR school is available for hire for desserts, Christmas parties, and plunging the world into another polycrisis.

Anyway, a quiet but fun birthday celebration was had on Saturday. Cake, presents, and people. The most popular present so far is the Intro To Capitalism 101, or the Melissa and Doug Vending Machine. Although it does have a small flaw that the buttons work without needing money to be fed into its slots…

Last week, I fretted about a rather worrying week of AI usage. This week, I finished writing an agent harness to do the research without me, presented it to the entire company on Thursday, and am now about 80% through the arxiv paper write-up1. And I slept better!

It’s going to be something of an odd week. In a reversal from our usual pattern, Tammy is out for a week. Only four hours away and in the same time-zone, but it means a lot more to-ing and fro-ing from daycare than I’m normally used to during the working week. It’ll be fine though; Maeryn and I are both taking time off tomorrow to celebrate her birthday by joining the library and eating our first mini eggs. Well, her first mini egg, anyway…I have definitely lost count…

  1. Once you think of the appropriate catchphrase from 1970s British TV to use, the paper mostly writes itself… ↩︎

]]> The Dangers Of The AI Casino https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/03/15/the-dangers-of-the-ai-casino.html.html Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/03/15/the-dangers-of-the-ai-casino.html.html So you were supposed to get a long tech blog this week. I actually have it sitting here on my hard drive, with diagrams, metrics, and even a fairly solid mathematical foundation. Plus a solid pun linking that foundation to a 1980s British novelty band. Alas, when diving into things in just a little more details, I discovered that my new fancy hybrid fusion scoring system…basically cancelled down to ZMUV from 2001. Which is a fine fusion operator, to be sure…but can I write an entire blog post on it with Black Lace GIFs? No, I cannot.

It actually became something of an obsession this week; I have tested over 50 different fusion operators in the past week, looking at runs close to and past midnight, pushing Claude to just do another run after parking in the daycare car park, and feeling guilty the one night where I didn’t run any experiments. It is a bit of a slippery slop(e) in this Brave New World, and I haven’t quite yet found the right balance. On the other hand, I have empirically proved that the squashing function we use at work (and invented in 2022) is excellent.

(as I write this, I’m building an evaluation MCP service, so it’s not like I’ve heeded any warnings properly yet, either1)

Anyway, next week, there will be less computing. For one thing, I have to make a cake. “Red cake. Red is my favourite colour” So Maeryn will be getting the reddest cake anybody has ever seen, complete with small cakes encapsulated in a strawberry carrageenan glaze inspired by a former New York pastry chef. And maybe an icee. Because I might have problems dialing it back.

  1. And since writing that, I basically gave up the semi-manual approach and took advantage of my company’s Anthropic API access…which means I now have a brand new autoresearcher churning for the next few days on any thing Claude can imagine. Which at least means I don’t have to babysit it… ↩︎

]]> Tired, sLeepy https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/03/08/tired-sleepy.html.html Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/03/08/tired-sleepy.html.html If you need somebody to cheer you up, I can heartily recommend a toddler getting out of the car, running straight for your door yelling ‘Daddy!’ at the top of her voice.

This week, I have been learning just how much it costs to replace about 100 linear feet of retaining wall. And the answer is…a considerable amount. For that sort of price, they could boardform it, right? Right?

Kevin from Grand Designs sucks in his teeth

]]> Hello, Joshua https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/03/01/hello-joshua.html.html Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/03/01/hello-joshua.html.html Something of an existentialist crisis this weekend. I’m reading some papers in the (parked) car, while Maeryn is taking her afternoon nap. I feel like there’s some potential in ideas from one paper back to the LEAf work I was doing over Christmas, so I open Claude up to build a skeleton implementation. As it does this, it throws up this message as it’s thinking:

“But Doctor, I am Pagliacci”

“But Doctor, I am Pagliacci”

(oddly, my skeet on that went semi-viral in the Bluesky AI community, which was fun. Given the other horrors of February 28th, it was a nice distraction)

It has been…a week. A month, yes, but oh, a week. Work by itself has been a rollercoaster of good news, bad news, indifferent news, news that changes as the hours tick by…that sort of thing. So, no, none of the things I thought I’d be writing about this month happened; I had a very early night on Thursday instead of going out, the house has remained in a state of disarray (including an awkwardly placed pork fat container which hung around like Chekov’s gun all week until it finally went off on Saturday)…and let’s just say we’re all glad to see the back of February.

So, March now. Maeryn’s birthday is almost upon us! I am still trying to work out just how to get her the “RED CAKE!” she has requested. What shape is it going to be? Do I just dye the batter red and leave it like that, or do we do something more involved? Should I do a big red cake and little red cakes? Could I use Alex Stupak’s encapsulation method for glazing? Or just reuse the one I did for the DIE cake a few years back? Oh, the decisions…

]]> Trolls And Scissors https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/02/22/trolls-and-scissors.html.html Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://snappishproductions.com/blog/2026/02/22/trolls-and-scissors.html.html We have reached another milestone in toddler development. Maeryn has decided on the first film that she likes watching all the way through and is excited to watch over and over.

Unfortunately, it’s Trolls.

I suppose there are worse things; it’s not Frozen, and I was at least pleased to see that although Russell Brand is one of the trolls, he’s the one that sells everybody else out in a heel turn halfway through the film. Exiting The Bergen’s Castle perhaps at some point considered a subtitle. Anyway, Maeryn is not to be told that there are sequels.

We have also discovered the delights of scissors and scissor books. Which did mean I spent a god hour picking tiny bits of paper off the floor…but by the end of the weekend, she could cut out a frog without cutting said frog in two most of the time. Although I have had to reassemble many animals with tape along the way…

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