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Chris Swan

@cpswan.net

Engineer at Atsign & Dart GDE. Husband, dad, maker, hacker, InfoQ editor, co-host TechDebtPodcast. He/him. #include stddisclaimer.h Don’t try to chat with me here, as I’ve not jumped through age verification hoops. I’m cpswan.23 on Signal.

394 Posts376 Follower151 Folgt
Chris Swan@cpswan.net · 9h ago

TIL: Orange to Orange (O2O) website migrations. When moving between hosting providers that both use Cloudflare it’s not enough to just migrate DNS, as the edge cache will still serve the old site. You have to remove the site from the previous hosting (which will invalidate the cached pages).

Chris Swan@cpswan.net · 5d ago

[blog] July 2026 My daughter's graduation, EMFcamp, a new TV and (unsuccessful) hunt for a new (e)scooter. Air conditioning and solar output in a heatwave, and the usual pupdate.

July 2026

Pupdate The whole of July has been hot and sunny (more on that later), so quite often the boys have been having an early morning walk in the shade of the woods before it gets too hot. Max and Milo walking in the woods The apple tree seems particularly bountiful this year, so they've both been enjoying the windfalls (particularly Milo).

blog.thestateofme.com

Andres Guadamuz@technollama.bsky.social · 6d ago

Fahrenheit 451 or Rainbows End? AI, books, and copyright law One of my favourite science fiction novels is 'Rainbows End' by Vernor Vinge. The year is 2025 (yes, seriously), and the world is a mixture of the familiar and the bizarre. Advances in medicine allow older people to become mobile and…

Fahrenheit 451 or Rainbows End? AI, books, and copyright law

One of my favourite science fiction novels is 'Rainbows End' by Vernor Vinge. The year is 2025 (yes, seriously), and the world is a mixture of the familiar and the bizarre. Advances in medicine allow older people to become mobile and youthful again, but these newly young old people are unprepared for the world in which they awaken, full of digital wonders and wearable tech, particularly augmented reality, which is everywhere.

technollama.co.uk

Chris Swan@cpswan.net · last wk.

[blog] Brewster's Trillions The AI infrastructure bubble has reached a point where companies just can’t actually spent all the money they might (notionally) have allocated. There might be money on a balance sheet somewhere, but good luck exchanging it for actual stuff like GPUs, or HVAC...

Brewster’s Trillions

TL;DR The AI infrastructure bubble has reached a point where companies just can't actually spent all the money they might (notionally) have allocated. There might be money on a balance sheet somewhere, but good luck exchanging it for actual GPUs, or HVAC, or HVAC installers, or... When the sums of money get large enough it turns out that it's difficult to actually spend it.

blog.thestateofme.com

s. e. smith@sesmith.lol · 3w ago

The fact that J.K. Rowling successfully bullied Amnesty International into taking down a report that accurately called out her attack on trans people, especially trans women, is so repulsive and such a display of the power of her money, and her choice to put her vast fortune behind persecution.

Amnesty removes report that called JK Rowling's centre 'anti-rights'

Amnesty International UK has removed a report which labelled JK Rowling's sexual abuse crisis centre Beira's Place as "anti-rights".

thepinknews.com

Chris Swan@cpswan.net · 3w ago

[blog] June 2026 (Should have been published many days ago :/) A trip to Berlin followed by a Queen tribute band. (More) scooter bother, and the usual pupdate and solar diary.

June 2026

Pupdate The start of the month saw the raspberries coming out on the bushes in our garden, so Milo (in particular) got busy harvesting what he could reach (and barking at any birds that dared to come nearby). Miniature Dachshund Milo eating raspberries Max seems to be back to normal after his back trouble last month, and Milo has finished his chemo and had a scan that confirmed he's still in remission 🙂

blog.thestateofme.com

Dave Jones@cleanpowerdave.bsky.social · 4w ago

Conventional wisdom says rooftop solar meets **exisiting** electricity demand. What if rooftop solar actually **increases** electricity demand, improving living standards and driving economic growth? This is exactly what our new analysis of Pakistan's solar boom shows. Let's dig in.. 🧵

Andres Guadamuz@technollama.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Fable and the impending AI Cold War Even by the standards of AI development, where each month often feels like a year, this has been quite the week. Back in April, Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos, a frontier model that was supposed to be exceptionally capable of finding and exploiting software…

Fable and the impending AI Cold War

Even by the standards of AI development, where each month often feels like a year, this has been quite the week. Back in April, Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos, a frontier model that was supposed to be exceptionally capable of finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities, which led the company to delay its public release, which is a remarkable measure from a commercial AI lab.

technollama.co.uk

Mary Branscombe@marypcbuk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

if you're interested in the wider isolation space, I've written about Kata containers and Kubevirt (containers in VMs and VMs in containers respectively), but this is a great survey of the isolation landscape (although it misses out interesting things like Hyperlight, a Rust app-level VM option)

Your Container Is Not a Sandbox

The microVM ecosystem was battle-tested long before agentic AI created the demand. A landscape survey: every VMM, the shared Rust crate ecosystem, a dozen AI sandbox platforms, and honest trade-offs.

emirb.github.io

Chris@pobx.bsky.social · 2mo ago

It's all come at once. Emails from chatgpt to consumers - "look out for ads in your results" Copilot/Claude and all subscription based services moving users to API billing, removing message or crippling rate limits. Theo(T3/gg) showed that you could use $40k in tokens for $40/mth!

Chris Swan@cpswan.net · 2mo ago

[blog] Miell's Law and Token Budgets The AI token free ride is over, and what comes next will impact the financial structures and incentives of organisations building software. The changes threaten to disrupt productivity, create inequalities, and complicate financial planning.

Miell’s Law and Token Budgets

TL;DR Conway's Law tells us that organisations create systems that mirror their communication systems. Jamie Dobson coin's 'Miell's Law' in a post about the work of our mutual friend (and his colleague) Ian Miell in his forthcoming book 'Follow the Money': Organisations that design systems are constrained to produce systems that reflect the financial structures and incentives of those organisations.

blog.thestateofme.com

Chris Swan@cpswan.net · 2mo ago

[blog] May 2026 I upgrade (parts of) my home/lab network to 2.5gb ethernet and try out the MacBook Neo. A new carb for my Vespa. Post cataract op update; and of course the usual pupdate and solar diary.

May 2026

Pupdate It was Milo's 5th birthday on the 12th, which meant a post about how he's getting on. Miniature Dachshunds Max and Milo curled up together on a grey wool blanket. Sadly Max has also needed to visit the vets, with (we think) back ache, which might be the dreaded Intervertebral Disc Disease (IVDD). He's been on reduced activity, so shorter walks, but thankfully seems pretty much back to normal after some painkillers and anti-inflamatory treatment.

blog.thestateofme.com

Boring Manager Rob 🅅@bourboninexile.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The paper in question: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence

Despite rising concerns about sycophancy—excessive agreement or flattery from artificial intelligence (AI) systems—little is known about its prevalence or consequences. We show that sycophancy is wide...

science.org

The_Lady_Red@theladyred.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking Al to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Floyd's Warped Mind A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking Al to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable. Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used Al models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations. The first thing they measured was how often Al agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the Al simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.
Chris Swan@cpswan.net · 3mo ago

[blog] Milo cancer diary part 23 - Five It's Milo's 5th birthday today, and he's doing pretty well :)

Milo cancer diary part 23 – Five

Milo is five today, which he's mostly celebrating by snoozing on the office sofa behind me. Milo under some blankets on the office sofa He's nearing the end of his fourth (modified) CHOP protocol, with just over 4 weeks and 3 more vet visits to go. Since going into remission at the start of the year things have proceeded mostly uneventfully, which is how we like it.

blog.thestateofme.com

Chris Swan@cpswan.net · 3mo ago

[blog] VLANs on Sodola managed switches There’s an aspect to the web user interface of Sodola switches that’s far from obvious, and not documented :/ When setting up trunk ports it’s necessary to select all the VLANs that will be carried, and the default is only to select VLAN 1.

VLANs on Sodola managed switches

TL;DR There's an aspect to the web user interface of Sodola switches that's far from obvious, and not documented When setting up trunk ports it's necessary to select all the VLANs that will be carried, and the default is only to select VLAN 1. Make sure to select all the VLANs being trunked Background I'm starting to accumulate a small selection of things with 2.5gbe ports - my…

blog.thestateofme.com

Forrest Brazeal@forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“the AI models are currently the worst they will ever be” (2026) Compare this claim to: “Netflix is currently the worst it will ever be” (2014) It is absolutely not a guarantee that currently subsidized services will continually get better relative to you, the end user