My blog, where I attempt to collect my thoughts and share the occasional interesting topic with others
To answer the titular question up front, while I can't predict the future, Anthropic is still one of the best options for agentic development. However, thanks to the release of Kimi K3 now there is a properly viable alternative - something that isn't just close (like GLM 5.2 ), but rather on the same playing field as Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.6 Terra, and something that even gets close to Fable 5 or GPT…
As I've previously written, I like to get hardware that works and then just stick with it. Often, this also means going with budget friendly options, because I don't think I could ever afford replacements for high end mice, keyboards, headsets and so on. The good news is that while I've experienced untold amounts of bad hardware due to this approach, sometimes you also get reasonably lucky and…
It seems that the media chips in Intel Arc B580 (and similar) GPUs don't handle streaming and recording that well, while the GPU is overloaded - instead of making the game FPS drop and keeping the stream and recording stable and smooth, they focus on giving all of the processing power to the game. The end result is both the video and stream getting increasingly noticeable amounts of dropped…
Last month Zhipu AI released a new model: GLM-5.2: Built for Long-Horizon Tasks Since then, it has climbed most of the open model coding oriented leaderboards and now sits at the top, also closely trailing Anthropic's Opus models: This caught my attention, because personally I enjoy the capabilities of Opus, but don't enjoy its tone . I am currently on their Max 5x plan for about 108 EUR per…
Today I don't have the most information dense post for you, but I'd like to share something that makes me irrationally angry regardless: AI slop. A lot of people have acknowledged that AI writing tends to lean sycophantic and is like something you'd see on LinkedIn, unless you do some work to make it behave differently, and often times it's that way for no good reason - especially when you use…
About a year ago, I wrote an article called "AI, artisans and brainrot" , which was some time before the inflection point late in 2025 that many noticed, where the LLMs got noticeably better at writing code and agentic development truly took off. Things have progressed in quite a few ways since, both in regards to infrastructure and social trends. The article was a bit lengthy, but let me extract…
You might notice that my blog now looks a bit different from how it used to! Let me tell you a bit about the old setup, why and how I got to a new one, and also offer up some basic benchmarks to compare the two with one another. Long story short, I wanted to eliminate as many dependencies as possible, so I'd have to update the thing less often - which led to me making my own static site generator.…
I'm creating a simple developer utility to make managing Claude Code profiles (e.g. running it with DeepSeek, or some OpenRouter models) a little bit easier. Edit: I just did the first release, which you can check out on ccode.kronis.dev , or go directly to the Itch.io page to either download or buy the pre-built binaries or look at the source code. It's a simple utility and it's early on…
Here's a quick tutorial on how to work around an annoying issue on Windows. Suppose that I have Git Bash installed on Windows that I got with my install of Git , and that I like to use to run various shell scripts. The problem there, is that if I also have installed WSL , then I have approximately 0 idea how to run Git Bash from a PowerShell terminal session, for example, if a development tool has…
Recently, the Zed editor had its 1.0 release. While I can't say what it's going to be like in a few years, even now it has largely replaced Visual Studio Code as my editor for non-IDE tasks (though I still keep Notepad++ around for some more persistent tabs, like notes). This won't be a super formal or structured review, but just my first impressions, setup and some thoughts so far. I will…
This post is in Latvian, because the conference and the accompanying slides were also in Latvian. Nesen bija kārtējā LATA konference, nu jau 2026. gada versija: Digitālā burbuļošana. Procesi, datu centri, mākslīgais intelekts. Slaidus viņi vēl nenopublicēja, bet šo to norises laikā piefiksēju. Iedomājos, ka uztaisīšu sava veida kopsavilkumu par to, kas šķita vissaistošākais. Nebūs te tik daudz…
It's been a while since I last looked over the pond, at what the Americans are doing. The problem is that they just keep doing more stuff, to the point where if I were to write about them, it would be a long post and it becomes less and less possible to hide behind sarcasm and not condemn that whole administration. At the same time, in absolute terms I am nobody so that gives me some safety, but…
A while back, I learnt of the practice of buying white label and recertified hard drives: the idea being that large batches of good drives sometimes get returned to OEMs by hyperscalers. They can then be retested and sold either with the branding, or with the branding removed (although can sometimes have small scratches and such). Essentially, if I decide to get a white label drive, then the…
Okay, so I'm a little bit late with this one. A while back, there was a post on LWN about the European Commission calling for evidence on open source. If you want, you can have a look at the EUR-Lex post for yourself: The gist of it is, that Europe has become quite dependent on foreign tech, which means risks both in regards to the supply chain itself, as well as the overall governance - and given…
Near the end of the last year, my father, Pēteris Kronis, passed away. It has been months since and I was thinking about whether I should write about it or not, but in the end decided to put this out there anyway. It was a sad, humbling and human experience. I wanted to write something, to both share in that experience and to also remember him, in writing. What happened I live in his old city…
There is this one old HackerNews post that sometimes people reference, when talking about how engineers view software: It's an observation of how the trend goes: a new product or service comes out an engineer looks at it and says "Anyone could build this for themselves" it proceeds to do really well and becomes popular regardless There's even an XKCD about this and you can look at the Dropbox…
Suppose I have a legacy project, or even just an older project that I worked on previously and now want to carry over the mechanisms that made it work, to a new one. All sorts of custom functionality, wrappers around the underlying library components with custom functionality, like being able to tell when any input field or input element has been touched and a form should be considered dirty…
Here's a short post: I think AIOs or All-In-One coolers are the superior cooling solution, both to air coolers and custom liquid cooling loops for the average user! Recently, I got some new thermal paste, because my CPU temps were still a bit higher than I'd like under full load. While gaming they'd hover around 70 C and under some benchmarks they'd go up to 80 C whereas with Prime95 they'd rise…
In my previous article about my investments on Revolut in 2025 (plot twist: AMD's value just spiked and fell a bit afterwards, that's how those things go), I mentioned that I live a fairly Spartan lifestyle and get the things I need, rather than the ones I might want. A part of this is finding the pieces of hardware that fit my needs without being exorbitantly expensive. For example, my main PC…
I thought I'd make a casual blog post and talk a little bit about the investments I have done in 2025 so far and how they've turned out. I guess sometimes talking about our finances is a bit of a faux pas, but I don't really care about it that much and I think it's an interesting topic. Secondly, I am obviously not a financial advisor and none of what I say is actual financial advice, just my…
At the start of this month, I had an outage where more or less everything I host went down. In part, it was due to failing builds, in part due to bad networking, in part due to broken cloud dependencies, alongside software just being plain finicky. The good news is that I resolved most of the issues, everything was back up and running and eventually I even figured out that you need to setup static…
So, for most of the week, my blog, homepage and some other sites have been down, so let's talk about brittle software! It all started, when I wanted to have a quick look at the font stack on my homepage, since I've forgotten exactly what it was and there's this one lovely site that gave me some inspiration. Unfortunately, when I went to open the site, my browser refused to do that: (you'll notice…
Recently, I went to a software development event in Germany, where, at the conclusion of one of the days, I was hanging out in a hotel room with a friend of mine. Earlier, she had been exploring ways to get full VMs running on her Linux system easily, for doing some development work and experimentation with Docker on them. Another friend had suggested VirtualBox as a starting point. I looked at…
Previously, I explored why having two Intel Arc cards in the same PC is a bit of a mess: Two Intel Arc GPUs in one PC: worse than expected A little bit later, I discovered that Windows 11 fixes some of the issues and that most games and programs, but not all, mostly work: What is ruining dual GPU setups Now that I had an OS that's a little bit more cooperative, I decided to go from my setup with…
Recently, there's been a European Citizens' Initiative called "Stop Destroying Videogames" which by now has hit the milestone of 1'000'000 signatures. You're still encouraged to sign it if you care about its goals and are a EU citizen, since not all of those are likely to be valid signatures, but overall this is a pretty positive trend: If it does indeed get enough valid signatures, it will get…
I like the concept of containers and I like Docker . Despite jails and LXC also having been around for a while, Docker has really nice DX and no wonder that it's pretty widely used nowadays (as well as the other OCI compatible solutions). It's a pretty good way to get rid of some of the environment specific requirements and also have a consistent way of packaging applications, giving and limiting…
Here's a blog post of something positive that I recently experienced: the Windows bootloader is actually kinda cool! I did move from Windows 10 to Windows 11 by installing it on a new 1 TB SSD, which will give me way more space than my old ~240 GB SSD had, in addition to future proofing it a bit more, as well as allowing my dual GPU setup to mostly work (even despite the interesting title of that…
Recently I posted about the woes of trying to run two Intel Arc GPUs in the same system and how I couldn't easily use Windows 10 because it doesn't let me split tasks between them properly, nor use one of the cards for encoding in OBS, because the support for choosing which GPU to use for encoding just isn't there for Intel Arc cards (I'd need an Nvidia card for that, or wait until someone writes…
Software licensing is a bit of a mess. There's many different licenses out there that are meant to protect either the users of the project, the developers, or any corporate interests. Some licenses are proprietary and geared explicitly towards commercial interests, though others are meant to ensure the viability of open source projects, or just free software as a movement in general. Generally,…
There's this one sci-fi short story called What's Expected of Us , that I quite enjoyed. It was published back in 2005 by Nature , though if you want, you can also read an archived copy of it. The premise of the story is quite simple, there's a device called a Predictor: By now you've probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you're reading this. For those who haven't…
Over the years, I've had quite a few different GPUs: GeForce 9800 GT (this one melted to the point where reflow soldering wouldn't help) GeForce GTX 650 Ti (this one ended up being too weak for most games, I gave it away to a friend) Radeon RX 570 (this one ended up not having enough VRAM for modern games) Radeon RX 580 2048SP (this one was pretty good, but a bit unstable, especially in VR) More…
Today, I'd like to complain about Teams, but to do that, we must first mention Skype! Skype, it just works Skype is one of the older communication apps and has been around for a while, it recently turned 20 years old . It's gotten a bunch of updates over the years, some of which were liked more or less than others, but overall a lot of people have been using it to keep in touch. To some degree,…