Longer than a blog; shorter than a book
Yesterday I was reminded of a common failing in machine learning algorithms that again suggests they aren t really thinking or understanding. Possibly it points to the lack of a world model. Here s a nice little photo I caught of a bird in its environment: Do you see the bird? Do you know what it is? [ ]
AI limitations I ve noticed lately: * Gemini can t render the math for a Taylor series on an iPad * Github Copilot, with any of the models it supports, can t run my tests because VSCode can t handle JUnit 3 * Gemini doesn t know if it s running in AI Studio or on an iPhone so it gives [ ]
Lately I ve heard developers claim that it s now OK to avoid specifying the character set when creating an InputStreamReader or String, or otherwise converting bytes into characters because Java now (JDK 18 and later) uses UTF-8 as its default character encoding regardless of platform. Except we do still need to do it, for two independent [ ]
I ve released version 1.4.0 of XOM, my open source library for processing XML with Java. It s available from the usual places including Maven Central (xom:xom:1.4.0) and https://xom.nu/. This is the first release coded with LLM assistance. Most importantly, this release fixes a bug in URI normalization that incorrectly resolved /.. paths when computing base URIs [ ]
Often in a code review I ll point out that public signatures are being changed, and we can t do that in a minor release. Then the author will reply that it s OK because it s an internal only API, or an impl API, or both so it s OK. No one is depending on it. And then this [ ]
I’ve released version 1.0.1 of the proper nouns library. This is a new free-as-in-speech Java library that I wrote — Well I sort of wrote it. Truthfully GitHub copilot and whatever LLM model is sitting behind it wrote quite a bit of it. But anyway proper nouns is a library I wrote to scratch an [ ]
I ve heard from way too many projects that they can t sign their applications and binaries. This isn t true. What it really means is that it s a hassle for them to do so, or costs them a few bucks. In 2025 this is not OK. Code signing, developer attestation, and reproducible builds are mandatory. Open source [ ]
More than 15 years ago, I wrote You Can t Trust the Cloud and promptly got called in for an uncomfortable conversation with my manager ™ because someone thought the thesis was incompatible with Google s business plans. This was so even though the piece had nothing to do with Google, Google had at the time negligible public [ ]
I have found something Gemini is relatively good for. I asked it, step by step, to explain to me how to setup a Python program to run as a command line tool, and it did it. It took a little prompting to get it to explain wrapper scripts and virtual environments. Its initial answer didn t [ ]
Properly written Java software uses checked exceptions to indicate environmental problems external to the program such as an I/O error and uses runtime exceptions to indicate problems inside the program itself, in other words bugs. Every time a run-time exception is thrown there s a bug somewhere. Sometimes the bug is inside the method that throws [ ]