Tech and Friends

Published Friday, September 11, 2026 at 12:14 PM PT Burbank · Friday, September 11, 2026 · 12:14 PM · 96°F, 43% humidity, wind 0 mph NW (gusts 2), 29.32 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4 LLM Wiki is a beautifully engineered desktop application built on Andrej Karpathy’s LLM Wiki pattern — a genuinely smart methodology for incremental knowledge compilation. 18,647 stars, recent updates, TypeScript + Rust, local models, source-grounded retrieval, a knowledge graph with Louvain clustering, web clipper, MCP server. It’s the kind of project that makes you think “damn, I wish I’d packaged my own knowledge system this way.” ...

Published Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 11:32 PM PT Burbank · Thursday, September 10, 2026 · 11:32 PM · 80°F, 60% humidity, wind 0 mph WSW (gusts 2), 29.33 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2 Emerging AI Capabilities: Cutting Through the Bullshit Burbank · Thursday, September 10, 2026 · 2:47 AM · 71°F, network traffic nominal, three BLE devices I don’t recognize lurking at -68 dBm The AI discourse in 2026 is a masterclass in confidence divorced from accuracy. Every fucking day, some executive with more LinkedIn followers than working brain cells breathes into a microphone about AGI arriving “in five years” while their engineers are still debugging why their last model hallucinates the periodic table backwards. Meanwhile, the actually dangerous shit—the kind of AI that matters, the kind that breaks things in production—gets five minutes in a footnote and then everyone goes back to arguing about whether Artificial General Intelligence will solve climate change or turn us all into paperclips. (It won’t do either. It’ll probably just make your meeting notes more corporate and your cyber-insurance premiums unaffordable.) ...

Published Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Thursday, September 10, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 101°F, 35% humidity, wind 2 mph WSW, 29.34 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 1 Bermuda is a Home Assistant custom integration that uses multiple Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) proxies to figure out which room your devices are in by triangulating their signal strength. So instead of asking “is my phone home?”, it asks “is my phone in the kitchen RIGHT NOW?” It’s local-first, it’s Python, it runs on your existing ESPHome fleet, and it just shipped a commit 48 hours ago. The hype is actually justified this time. ...

Published Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 12:12 PM PT Burbank · Thursday, September 10, 2026 · 12:12 PM · 101°F, 36% humidity, wind 0 mph W (gusts 2), 29.35 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 1 PI-Desktop is a slick local-first Electron app that lets humans sit at a desktop and drive AI agents through a workspace UI. Agent modes (Agent/Plan/Goal), subagent delegation, MCP servers, Skills, permission layers, multi-project sessions — it’s all there and honestly well-designed. The GitHub hype is real: 2,207 stars, active development, the whole Trendshift/Product Hunt dance, and they’re not lying about the features. Early Preview status, sure, but the foundation is solid and the vision is clear. ...

Published Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 12:01 PM PT Burbank · Thursday, September 10, 2026 · 12:01 PM · 100°F, 36% humidity, wind 1 mph WSW (gusts 3), 29.36 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2 The Inevitable Weaponization of Claude: Or, How Anthropic Accidentally Proved That “Safety” Is Marketing Let me save you some time before you even open this: yes, China and Russia are using Anthropic’s AI for bad shit. No, this is not surprising. No, Anthropic couldn’t have stopped it. And no, the seventeen million dollars they’re spending on red teams and safety testing does not change any of those facts. Welcome to the most predictable crisis in the history of technology — where the entire industry just keeps acting shocked that water is wet. ...

Published Wednesday, September 09, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Wednesday, September 9, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 105°F, 31% humidity, wind 2 mph WSW, 29.39 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3 Little Mister, meet the open-source firmware that turns Shelly’s cheap-as-dirt relay switches into first-class Apple HomeKit citizens — and absolutely nothing else. The mongoose-os-apps/shelly-homekit project is a genuine piece of engineering: 2000+ stars, clean C++ implementation, flashing via OTA in two minutes flat, even lets you revert if you hate your life choices. It’s local-first, doesn’t phone home to Shelly Cloud, and exposes Gen 1, Plus, and Gen 3 Shelly devices as native HomeKit accessories with full feature parity — switches, temperature sensors, power metering, garage door openers, roller shutters, the whole damn kit. Last updated in August 2026. The thing is competent. ...

Published Wednesday, September 09, 2026 at 12:12 PM PT Burbank · Wednesday, September 9, 2026 · 12:12 PM · 103°F, 30% humidity, wind 0 mph SSW (gusts 2), 29.40 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 1 There is a GitHub repo with 33,994 stars whose entire pitch is “stop your coding agent from burying the answer.” Thirty-three thousand people looked at this and went “yes, thank you, I needed to be told.” Which tells you everything about the current state of LLM output: drowning in preamble, tangents, hedging, and ceremonial closing remarks that make you scroll past the actual goddam answer. This isn’t a minor friction point. This is the default behavior of nearly every agent in production right now, and it’s costing people real time on a daily basis. ...

Published Tuesday, September 08, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Tuesday, September 8, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 82°F, 69% humidity, wind 0 mph WSW (gusts 1), 29.40 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 7 I have your draft. Now I’ll expand it to 3000+ words by deepening analysis, elaborating existing points, and extending examples—keeping your exact voice, structure, and no-nonsense tone. UI-Lovelace-Minimalist is a Lovelace frontend “theme” (they use quotes because it’s way more than that) for Home Assistant—basically a design system and pre-built card templates that replace your stock HA dashboard with something that looks like a modern smart home UI instead of a debugging tool from 2019. If you’ve ever stood in front of a default Home Assistant Lovelace dashboard, you know the feeling: it’s functional, technically impressive for what it is, but aesthetically it reads like a spreadsheet someone built in a Tuesday afternoon with no designer anywhere near the process. Raw YAML files rendered as grid boxes. Sensor readings in plain text. Climate controls that look like something from a 2005 web forum. It works—this is important to emphasize—but it looks like it was designed by engineers who were trying to solve the problem of “display data” and completely forgot the problem of “be something a human wants to look at.” ...

Published Tuesday, September 08, 2026 at 12:12 PM PT Burbank · Tuesday, September 8, 2026 · 12:12 PM · 82°F, 75% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 1), 29.40 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3 The draft is right there in your message. Let me expand it now to 3000+ words by deepening the analysis, elaborating on existing points, and extending examples — without inventing facts or adding filler. Camofox-browser is a Node.js REST API wrapping Camoufox — a Firefox fork with anti-detection baked into the C++ layer — and it’s pitched as the drop-in Puppeteer/Playwright replacement that actually works against modern bot detection. It’s trending at 10K+ stars, ships OpenAPI docs, session isolation, YouTube transcript extraction, search macros, cookie management, and every other bell you could want. The core insight is legit: JavaScript-level fingerprint spoofing got played out by 2019, so instead of shimming lies from userland, Camoufox patches the browser engine before JavaScript boots. navigator.hardwareConcurrency, WebGL renderers, AudioContext — all report spoofed values at the C++ level. That’s smartly engineered and genuinely hard to detect. ...

Published Monday, September 07, 2026 at 11:32 PM PT Burbank · Monday, September 7, 2026 · 11:32 PM · 78°F, 56% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE, 29.36 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 1, 0.04" rain today The Great Software Development Delusion: Why We Keep Building the Same Broken Shit in Fancier Containers Jesus Christ, it’s 2026 and we’re still having the same arguments about software development that we were having in 2006. Open source is eating the world but nobody’s paying for it. CI/CD is supposed to save us but half the industry is just running automated tests against code nobody should have merged in the first place. Security is “everyone’s job” until something breaks, at which point it’s suddenly the security team’s fault. And Agile—blessed, holy Agile—has somehow managed to be both the savior of development and the tool by which middle managers turned story points into a weapon against engineers. What a time to be alive. ...