Writings

Extending llm-wiki with event-driven doc management

2026-05-21

After trying a set of LLM-based and 'claw' personal doc management approaches, I've settled on a pragmatic and practical setup for ingesting…

Ralph-looping a math paper to (attempt to) win a pub argument

2026-05-15

A while back a friend and I played a variant of Texas hold'em. In short: four players, cooperative, no betting. Each street (pre-flop, flop…

If only I had more time, my agent would publish a smaller PR.

2026-05-10

"I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter." Blaise Pascal (background on the quote) One thing…

Single failed payment immediately removed legacy Spotify plan, requests to upgrade

2026-04-06

I've had Spotify Premium continuously for 10 years. My earliest playlist is from 2016, my latest from this week. For the past year+ in the…

Granular personal notes access for limiting OpenClaw blast-radius

2026-02-23

I want an always-on agent that can read a subset of my notes and manage tasks. I don't want it anywhere near the rest of my vault or…

Pragmatic Notes on Running Dangerous AI Coding Agents in Cloud VMs

2026-01-21

Running coding agents with free reign is very powerful for a certain class of tasks, especially ones that require little human supervision…

ChatGPT Atlas doesn't have time for me: fails at well-scoped repetition

2026-01-05

In short: Atlas performs individual browsing steps correctly, but it breaks down when asked to repeat the same well-scoped action across…

Telemetry Redaction with Presidio: A Showcase

2026-01-04

I've been working on telemetry redaction using Microsoft Presidio, and recently contributed a sample to the Presidio repository. This post…

Masking PII in Logs and Traces: Manual vs Automated

2025-12-11

I’ve recently been experimenting with PII masking in observability pipelines using Presidio. When comparing the approaches, three automated…

Building personalized focus apps in minutes.

2025-10-12

Coding with AI agents creates this peculiar problem: you get these short 10-30 second waits while the model thinks, and it's just long…

Tracking AI Assistant Contributions Using Git Trailers and Git Hooks

2025-07-28

It can be challenging to pinpoint the 'concrete' impact AI assistants have on daily development work. For example, during a workshop I was…

Dynamically Routing Traces to Customer-Specific App Insights

2025-07-07

When building a SaaS offering publishing platform that helps customers publish azure marketplace offers, we faced an interesting…

Learnings from ingesting millions of technical pages for RAG on Azure.

2024-05-06

Learnings from ingesting millions of technical pages for RAG on Azure. Context overview This document outlines insights of an engagement…

Showcase: Azure AI Hybrid Search unexpected results gotcha

2024-04-30

Showcase: Azure AI Hybrid Search unexpected results gotcha This document describes a gotcha in Azure AI Search hybrid queries where…

Encoding hidden prompt in LLMs as potential attack vector.

2024-01-15

The recent publication on LLM "sleeper agents" prompted me to re-explore influencing LLMs to pursue alternative objectives. In this case…

What does a statement like “AI will take my job” look like in practice?

2023-11-21

What does a statement like “AI will take my job” look like in practice? On two different occasions and coincidentally, I have been…

GPT-4 CLI with persistence in 10 lines of code.

2023-11-03

A short one: I needed a GPT-4 CLI interface (that's a RAS Syndrome), but most options seemed quite cluttered, and I like code-golf. Here an…

Voice record daily thoughts, redact with GPT4, and save to Apple Notes using Shortcuts.

2023-11-02

The why Recording my daily thoughts and notes is a challenge I return to every few months, and so far, I hadn't figured out a system which…

Evaluating RAG/LLMs in highly technical settings using synthetic QA generation

2023-10-26

In short: The RAG pattern for LLMs can be evaluated using QA pairs. Creating a "golden" dataset is expensive, but an auto-generated "silver…

On automating unit tests with LLMs.

2023-10-19

Dear colleagues, I have a confession to make: I have been delegating some of my unit tests to my Jr. engineer, Gary-Pete Truman. First off…

78% MNIST accuracy using GZIP in under 10 lines of code.

2023-09-20

GZIP Addendum after hitting the HN frontpage: MNIST is a straightforward dataset, and higher accuracies are possible with various methods…

From Concept to practice: Learnings from LLMs for Enterprise Production – Part 0

2023-08-18

Disclaimer: I am an employee at Microsoft ISE. However, the views and opinions are of my own. We have recently engaged in an architecture…

One approach to achieving self-governing AI today

2023-02-06

Note: I will not discuss the alignment issue or responsible AI / ethics. A self-governing AI is capable of solving any challenge in the…

What defines great software: solving my problem in under 5 minutes with Tailscale

2022-05-04

TL;DR: I had been avoiding properly setting up remote networking to my homeserver. Tailscale solved my problem in under 5 minutes. Today, at…