Robert Smallshire
@robert.smallshire.no
Founding Tubetrain 🚀. Building Demonstrable® at Sixty North. Director for lithium explorer Transition Elements. "utterly competent". Geoscience PhD. 330 ppm CO₂. Cyclist 🚴♂️ . Caver. 🇳🇴🇬🇧
I'm coming to see code as an engineering material much like steel or concrete in civil engineering. We successfully engineer structures out of these materials all the time without needing to know the location of every pebble in the concrete or every carbon atom in the steel.
Sometimes us dual nationals are faced with difficult questions, such as, "Will you be supporting England 🏴 or Norway 🇳🇴?" "Yes."
Just cancelled 75% of our JetBrains IDE licences. Elegant weapons for a more civilised age.
Two-player #BBCMicro #Elite is coming along nicely. It now supports two pilots in two ships with two controllers and a split-view screen Here are some work-in-progress videos - see the thread for an explanation There’s lots to fix, but at least we have a proof-of-concept… (1/6) #retrocomputing
Kitchen at Domaine D'Audabiac (2024) by Aldo Balding. Oil on canvas.
I’m delighted with this gift I received for speaking at the @tnmoc.bsky.social Econet LAN Party event. Wonderful!
Robert Smallshire@robert.smallshire.no · 3mo agoI'm very excited to be speaking at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park on Sunday on using LLMs for software archaeology. Doubly excited to be bracketing lunch with Professor Steve Furber, inventor of the ARM microprocessor architecture.
I'm very excited to be speaking at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park on Sunday on using LLMs for software archaeology. Doubly excited to be bracketing lunch with Professor Steve Furber, inventor of the ARM microprocessor architecture.
I enjoyed the Project Hail Mary movie, but the ship's computer 'Mary' talking in stilted non-sentences seemed immediately anachronistic by 2026 standards. Red Dwarf's 'Holly' was much closer to where we are today.
Clever and interesting rhetorical form from George Robertson, former Secretary General of NATO, on the topic of UK defence policy: “We are underprepared. We are underinsured. We are under attack.”
“If Europe wants change, it cannot simply recreate the same model under a different logo. It must move beyond the document-and-format architecture altogether.” ia.net/topics/trapp...
Trapped in MS Office
Seeking IT independence, Europe wants to escape Microsoft Office. The question is: where to?
ia.net
This should be a hugely dynamic time for Europe. The democratic world need new energy and leadereship, it needs alternatives, it needs nations with global outlooks that are also resolutely non-imperial. This challenge/opportunity is not being met.
bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-man... a) amazing investigation of something you won't have consciously noticed but immediately realise is true and b) brilliant example of how game design is interaction design is safety design
Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green
The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green
bethmathews.substack.com
After 18 years, Shantanu Narayen is stepping down as CEO of Adobe. Sources say he finally found the “cancel leadership” button, though it’s only available for 30 days before his annual contract renewal, so he'll be staying on for another 10 months.
The Register@theregister.com · 5mo agoFYI: Prince of PDFs, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, to step down after 18 years
Interesting to come back to C++ after over 15 years. While I've been gone they've finally admitted that operating systems exist and provide enough useful OS integration out of the box to make it a half-reasonable platform.
This would be a very good week for anyone who has not already abandoned the Mercator projection for maps of the world to do so
Finally, finally getting off my butt and getting off all possible US goods and services. Some will just take longer than others! www.goeuropean.org
Go European — Discover European products and services
Go European is a community-driven directory bringing you European products and services from across the continent.
goeuropean.org
First US tech company/service dropped from my life, long overdue: Backblaze. Lets go for Norwegian company Jottcloud instead. 10 minutes work to change my rclone backup script over to use Jotta instead for backups, and hey - a waaay nicer UX in their web console, to boot 🙂🪄
The best use of American AI today would be to help Europe build its own sovereign technologies: operating systems, social media, communications, semiconductors, defence, and yes, more AI. While the subsidies are flowing, let them underwrite a future of genuine technological independence.
I worked in C++ from 1995 to 2010, then in Python from 2010 to 2025. I've been building complex native application in C++ again recently, almost entirely mediated by AI. It's hard to leave a 100x performance gain on the table when the dev- experience of interpreted versus native code is eliminated.
One Earth radius of cycling in 2025 achieved. For the other geo-pedants out there, a distance slightly greater than that from the summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, which at 6384.4 km is the furthest point from the centre of the Earth. 🌍 🚴♂️
This misses what’s happening: a categorical shift from specifying program representations in ever higher-level languages, to delegation. I’m no longer expressing programs; I’m directing an agent that expresses and manipulates programs. The directions themselves are ephemeral.
Grady Booch@booch.com · 7mo agoThe entire history of software engineering is one of rising levels of abstraction. This is as it was, is now, and always shall be. x.com/karpathy/sta...
posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely? hey.paris/posts/appleid/
20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple
Here’s how Apple “Permanently” locked my Apple ID. I am writing this as a desperate measure. After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple’s own programming languages (...
hey.paris
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison@hey.paris · 8mo agoyep so my apple account is permanently gone, so I guess time to switch to linux and android eh
"I hate AI because it states blatantly wrong things confidently sometimes. And also because it uses 50 gajillion gallons of water per query."
Why are Apple emulating failing eyesight with their new Liquid Glass app icon filter?
Empire of AI by @karenhao.bsky.social contains serious errors regarding data centre water use. I thought it was an important book which I’ve recommended to folks, but I won’t be recommending it further unless a heavily revised second edition is published. andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-...
Empire of AI is wildly misleading on AI water use
And the media environment that didn't catch this is getting this issue wrong
andymasley.substack.com
The people making a pig’s ear of programming _with_ AI are mostly the same ones who made a pig’s ear of it _without_ AI. Still talking only about features, still ignoring system qualities. Same mindset, new tools, same outcome.
