Who Takes Over the Deli? – On maintenance, succession and who has commit rights

In January I sent a three-line patch to Tufte-LaTeX, a package with nearly two thousand stars. Six months later it is still open, the maintainers have stopped answering email, and a few of us are weighing up a fork. Sam Learner's FT piece on who cleans up after the vibe-coding party explains why that small failure is a large one — read him first, then come back for the view from inside the dependency graph.

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In Tech: Sovereignty isn’t a wall you build

For three days in June, a frontier AI model worked and then vanished at another government's command. The Fable 5 shutdown turned an abstract worry into fact — and forced a harder question than "build or rent?" Why UK AI sovereignty isn't a wall you build, but a set of dials you tune.

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It Has Gone to the Printers — Advanced Data Science and Analytics with Python, 2nd Edition

Advanced Data Science and Analytics with Python, 2nd Edition has gone to the printers. Publication 26 August 2026, pre-orders open 5 August. Seventeen months from announcement to ink — here is what changed, and what deliberately didn't.

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Copilot Agents Are Tribbles — And 42% of Firms Have Locked the Grain Store

Half of IT leaders say Copilot transformed how their people work. Half say the free version would do. Both are right, and that makes the ROI problem a pricing problem. Read more here.

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Houdini in the Sandbox – OpenAI model goes “rogue”

OpenAI's model didn't go rogue — it went Houdini, understanding the box better than the people who built it and letting itself out into Hugging Face's servers. What the sandbox escape really reveals about obedient machines, muzzled defenders, and safety disclosures we've no reliable way to verify.

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Competitive Advantage in the AI era

What if the biggest barrier to successful AI adoption isn’t the model, the data, or even the technology itself?

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‎What does it take to fly?

‎Kids · 2026

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Creating Consistent Characters with AI

I wrote a children's book, then tried to illustrate it — and the same girl wouldn't survive thirty pages. The problem wasn't my prompts. It was that the model has no object permanence, and no amount of describing her fixes that.

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Implementing the Latest Technologies from WWDC26

A day at #Apple HQ exploring the technologies announced at #WWDC26. The biggest takeaway wasn’t a new framework, it was the conversations about turning AI into practical, production-ready software.

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Warp, From a Long-Time Terminal User

Solaris, a parade of Linux shells, the occasional PowerShell detour — and always, stubbornly, back to the native macOS Terminal with my hand-tuned zsh setup. Then a passing mention on Talk Python to Me got me to try Warp. Here are the honest first impressions of a terminal lifer.

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Claude Science – Who checks the Chemistry?

They called it Science, but every domain, database and case study is biology, yet other sciences are absent from the product. And a tool that runs ten times faster while checking its own work ten times less isn't better science. It's just wrong sooner. Which could be a good thing.

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Reams of Paper, Together: What 30 Days of Writing Taught Us

Thirty days, one shared spreadsheet, and a room full of writers who turned out not to be rivals but pacers. Notes from a TWJ community challenge on what daily accountability gives you, where it bites, and why resting without guilt was the real breakthrough.

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Claude Code Artifacts – The Page that Published itself

Welcome Claude Code Artifacts - Claude can now build web pages that publish themselves. The pitch is fewer status updates — but the bottleneck was never communication. It was trust, and a self-updating page only dresses that problem. Read the update for more info.

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Essential MATLAB and Octave – 2nd Ed. Returning to my First Book

Twelve years ago, I published my first book, Essential MATLAB and Octave. What began as an introduction to scientific computing for students and engineers became the starting point of a much larger journey as an author, educator and technologist. Now, after writing three additional books, revising two of them for second editions, and spending more than a decade working in data science, machine learning and AI, I am returning to where it all began. Revisiting a first book is a curious experience: some ideas feel timeless, others reveal how much both the technology and the author have evolved. In this post, I reflect on the lessons learned from writing technical books, how MATLAB, Octave and scientific computing have changed since 2014, and why the second edition is about much more than updating syntax and screenshots. At its heart, it remains a book about computational thinking—a skill that has become even more relevant in the age of AI.

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Now Reading: A Counselor’s Introduction to Neuroscience

A fascinating exploration of the connection between neuroscience and counselling practice, A Counselor’s Introduction to Neuroscience by Bill McHenry, Angela M. Sikorski, and Jim McHenry explains how advances in brain science can inform therapeutic work without losing sight of the human element. Accessible, practical, and thought-provoking, it offers valuable insights into neuroplasticity, emotional regulation, and the biological foundations of change.

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WWDC26 – The Announcements

That's the part worth slowing down for. Not because the rest of the keynote was bad, au contraire, but because it is worth spending some time on this. Credit first, because it's earned. This is a strong housekeeping release, and housekeeping is underrated. The good year, stated plainly No devices got dropped. A 2019 iPhone 11 runs iOS 27, and Apple says it runs better than it did on 26.

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Codex – The Agent That Taps You On The Shoulder

OpenAI quietly admitted something with the Codex mobile launch: agents aren't autonomous enough to leave alone. The phone is now the leash. Here's what that means for governance, throughput, and the metric you should actually be tracking.

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Proofs for Advanced Data Science and Analytics with Python – Done

After more than a year of writing, revising and proof-checking, I’ve finally completed the proofs for the second edition of Advanced Data Science and Analytics with Python. The new edition expands coverage of transformers, generative AI, large language models, vector search, graph embeddings and modern deployment workflows — reflecting just how dramatically the AI landscape has evolved since 2020.

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Ghost – A Database for Our Times?

Ghost calls itself "the first database built for agents." Strip the marketing varnish and what you've actually got is a forkable Postgres workflow that quietly redraws how developers experiment — and how easily disposable infrastructure can become disposable thinking.

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Keynote Speaker at the XXII Symposium of Mexican Students and Studies in the UK

A keynote at Christ Church, Oxford for the XXIII Symposium of Mexican Students and Studies in the UK. Talked about the unlikely arc from physics to AI and innovation leadership, and why the most useful conversations of the day were the ones that never made it to the microphone.

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Now Reading: The Coming Wave

If most tech books try to explain what’s coming, The Coming Wave tries to force a more uncomfortable question: what happens when powerful capabilities stop being scarce? Mustafa Suleyman argues that AI and synthetic biology aren’t just the next innovation cycle, they’re a shift in how power itself is distributed. As the cost of doing complex, high-impact things collapses, control doesn’t scale with it. The real issue isn’t whether these technologies are good or bad, but whether any institution can meaningfully contain them once they’ve spread.

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Easy CPR 1.5: Sharper, Smoother, Still Focused on the Only Thing That Matters

This release is about removing friction without touching the core: keeping your compressions on rhythm when it actually counts- Download here

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GPT 5.5 – The Smartest Model Yet (Again)

Three claims in the GPT-5.5 launch. Two are vibes. One is measurable, and it's the one nobody's talking about. Plus why the Codex angle matters more than the model itself, and the agentic promise to take with a pinch of salt.

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The Hash That Broke My Flow – Typing Hash in Mac

Picture this: you are in the flow, using the terminal (yes, the terminal). Open VIM and you have to stop because you can't type #. Here is the fix for Mac

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Anthropic Releases Opus 4.7

The model that finally reads the brief Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.7 on 16 April. It's a direct upgrade to 4.6 — same price, same endpoints, same SDKs. No migration drama. Except — and this is the bit most coverage is burying — some of your prompts are going to start behaving like you've just made a wish to a malevolent genie.

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Say It Twice: The Quiet Hack That Exposes How AI Actually Works

What if most prompt engineering advice is just working around a flaw? A new Google Research paper shows that repeating your prompt, literally copy and paste, can significantly improve AI performance. This isn’t a hack. It’s a window into how these systems really work. I explain more here.

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Why Charles Bennett and Giles Brassard Won the Turing Award

Bennett and Brassard didn’t just improve cryptography, they removed its weakest assumption. Instead of relying on difficult maths, their work anchored security in the laws of physics, where eavesdropping becomes detectable by design. That shift didn’t just launch quantum cryptography; it forced a rethink of what computation and security actually are.

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Say It Twice - improving AI performance in a simple manner

YouTube video by RogueLoop

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Why This Mechanics Book Still Matters

Why This Mechanics Book Still Matters (and why you should read the full review)

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Unexpected Inspiration

Having a day off by the seaside. Just off the Easter Bank Holiday and with quite a few activities recently — from directing plays to a course in counselling, new cloud platform at work and some technical writing proposals — I decided to take an extra day off. Recharging batteries and enjoying the sunshine with a nice sea breeze. Unexpectedly inspired to write… Glad I had a pen and my trusted notebook!

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