Paul Hallett

New blog post: Hyper Personal Software 🦛 A manifesto for smaller, personal, free and joy-filled software. paulwrites.software/articles/hyps/

phalt.github.io/TransferWind...

I made the CSS styling for my tools much nicer and easier to write in my markdown-powered site builder. Here's the blog post and some interactive examples: paulwrites.software/articles/too...

"There are problems like this which I see people complaining about daily that are solvable without a lot of time or effort now. As far as I can tell, these problems are problems because people are implicitly carrying around a pre-agentic cost model." danluu.com/ambitious/

日本に行きます！

Saw the new pele.run project by @obsidian.md team and it took me a little over 100 loc to swap it into my custom website publisher: paulwrites.software/articles/pele/ Now all my diagrams look gorgeous, and render easier.

I feel like we lean into LLM coding and go really fast and then we stop and we're like "hmmm but does it actually work properly?" and we discuss for wayyy longer than if we had just written it by hand.

I often write down procedures and steps in markdown files, and then copy/paste each chunk of code when I follow it. I've built a tool to turn these markdown files into runbooks themselves, fully executable, with confirm/dialog/inputs etc all defined using markdown format: github.com/phalt/paulrun

I lament that all the tech news boards are just "LLM this and LLM that" now. I miss seeing cool weird things, new python packages, and immature start up ideas. Did the pre-www folk feel the same that all the message boards was just "www this, www that"?

Did you know PokeAPI now has a dedicated sprite viewer website? Browse all sprites from all the games - including Pokemon, items, badges, and types! pokeapi.github.io/sprites/#/po...

Murder on the Moors sounds like an Agatha Christie novel doesn’t it?

Weird software update

Just got an A/C (heatpump variant that can cool and heat) quote that is 1/3 of the expected cost of replacing the heating in my house. And that's for A/C in all rooms in my house. Why the fuck aren't we all getting this installed?

I dunno man I think a username is way less private than a random string of numbers?

Looks like I’m getting a loan to install air to air heat pumps.

I think we need to plan better for this lol. It's clear skies and sunny yet we're using so much power (I assume for fans and A/C etc) that we've turned all the gas turbines back on. It could also be because we've got zero wind (a factor contributing to the heat).

We're finally here aren't we? The climate crisis.

Ahh World Cup season in England. Time to play “football fan or racist” with all the flag wielders.

He may be a trillionaire but I’ve never seen any evidence of him having a happy loving family, a fulfilling hobby, and a great life. All I see is him be a troll, a loser on the internet, try very hard to be cool, and be a grumpy jaded man. So I think he hasn’t really won anything.

Favourite things about Norwich? I get to watch air traffic like this nearly every week day.

Sometimes kids say things that really freak you out. Us, on my bike to preschool today: My son: Dad, I just saw a big black dog! Me: where? With an owner? My son: no, on its own in the bushes! Pretty sure my son saw the Black Shuk.

Oh boy here I go being obsessed with aircraft and flying again.

Is it weird my preferred shoes for drumming are my running shoes?

My API client project is being used to turn ~14k lines of custom boilerplate into 1.5k lines of fully typed clean API interface code ^___^ This is why I built Clientele! ⚜️ github.com/app-sre/qont...

What ever happened to the whole Fully Automated Luxury Communism movement? Is this whole advent of LLMs the thing they need to like…fully automate everything?

Sometimes I feel like my job is to stop us writing code.

I think I could watch a typhoon jet every day for the rest of my life and not get bored.

Man I love airshows

The British love words like punnet don’t they.

One of my favourite bands of all time is a band none of my friends have heard of. Maybeshewill. Imagine all your favourites bits of rock / post-hardcore / emo / metalcore combined with instrumental melodic bliss. music.apple.com/gb/album/tak...

As a drummer I hate this trend of throwing sticks around in between notes. I get it. It’s a drum corp thing. But it’s so crass and showy. I wanna hear you drum.

A 14c temperature drop feels dangerous to the weather system? Never experienced something like this.

I miss browsing new music on myspace

Oi British people: CLOSE YOUR WINDOWS AND CURTAINS. Fresh air is hot air.

If we asked AI to give people what they wanted, AI would have given them a faster horse.

Water guns in the garden really is like a cold nuclear war isn’t it? Everyone constantly trained against everyone else, first person to put their water gun down gets dowsed by everyone else.

Thoughts and prayers is all we do about this right?

My son is figuring out numbers but doesn’t understand how they work yet so he’ll say stuff like “Dad I’m gonna have nine hundred and sixteen naps today” and I love the absurdity of it.

New blog post: ⚜️ Clientele 2.0 is here and ships with new HTTP Backends, massively improved typing support, and clear dependency improvements. paulwrites.software/articles/cli...

i finally did the talk

Wait a minute so Labour has "stopped the immigrants" (reduced net migration to the UK by 50% compared to last year), which is exactly what all the racist white guys want, but they still call them the wrong party to lead the country? Maybe... that's not the real reason then? Maybe?

HN but for personal blogs? Yes please.

My knee when I run more than 2km: please stop I’m tearing apart! My knee after 90kms of day care cycling the past week: MOORRRREEEE

In fairness though people said the same about email. And now a ton of people pay for that & find it normal to do so. We recommend reading this article about why quality independent software deserves your hard‑earned cash: stephango.com/quality-soft...

General reminder, as Google continues its lurch to search awfulness, that Kagi is legit brilliant. Its own AI features can be turned off. You can customise your datasets and weightings. Also SlopStop allows you to downweight, or filter out entirely, AI slop results. Legit worth the $10 a month.

Is there a little post-hardcore / emo revival happening? Is it mostly late 30’s / early 40’s Dads who dress like it’s still 2008? Am I here for it? The answer to all of these is the same.

LLMs ask you to "sit with" a lot of thoughts don't they? But they say it so fast and flippantly it is clear they never sit with any thoughts themselves much.

The GitHub breach is bad because they probably pulled resources from security to focus on delivering more Copilot features, or loosened the guard rails around security to get more features out faster. The GitHUb breach is not a problem because all that was stolen was 1,000's of Copilot services