Latest content from I Like Kill Nerds
Nobody looks at their WooCommerce search until it starts costing them money. Out of the box, WordPress answers a search by scanning the posts table with a LIKE '%query%' clause. There’s no relevance ranking in that, so results come back ordered by publish date, and the query has no idea what a SKU is. Misspell one letter and you get an empty page. Someone typing into your search box has…
Selling Quad Cortex presets is one of the most manual jobs in music gear. Someone buys a preset from your store. You open Cortex Cloud, search for their username, send a friend request and wait. They accept whenever they next open the app. You come back, find the preset, share it, then go and mark the order as fulfilled. Then the next order lands and you do the whole thing again.
Bruno’s microphone was clipping so hard by about 6:15am that every time he raised his voice it sounded like a blown speaker in a Commodore. It wasn’t a bit hot either, it was properly distorting, the crunchy overdriven mush you get when someone slams a gain knob to the right and walks away from the desk. Nobody fixed it for ages. An hour and 44 minutes in, Kyle was still on air…
Fable 5 came back on the 1st of July with a meter attached. Max plans get it at 50% of weekly limits from the 20th. Pro moved to usage credits with a one-off hundred dollars to soften the landing. The best model any of us had used was available again, and you had to decide whether a task was worth spending it on. Opus 5 landed on Friday at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output.…
Downloading a video from Instagram feels like one of those jobs a computer should manage without turning it into a whole event. I wanted to copy a link, press a button and have the actual file on my Mac. That was it. I didn’t want a new workflow, an account or a monthly plan for the privilege of downloading a file. The desktop apps I’d used for this over the years had stopped being…
I was trying to get into Privileged Mode on my NordicTrack treadmill when it stopped me with a code, then asked for a response before it would let me through. A bit of searching led me into the NordicTrack owner community, where people had already pulled the whole thing apart. They’d worked out how iFit generated the response, shared the calculation and saved everyone else from having to…
Nobody in Canberra has stood up and said “we’re banning VPNs.” They don’t have to. If you’ve watched how this government operates, you already know where this is heading. The under-16 social media ban kicked in back in December. TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, all of them now have to take “reasonable steps” to keep kids off, or cop fines up to $49.5…
Someone has registered isfable5back.com. The whole site is one word, “No,” with a little timer counting how long the best coding model anyone’s used has been switched off. A week now. I check it more than I’d like to admit. If you missed it, the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national on the 12th, at 5:21pm Eastern,…
So you bought a Helix Stadium and now you want to record. Maybe for a church worship set, maybe for your own stuff. Either way, the other audio interface can go back in the cupboard. The Stadium is a full USB-C audio interface. Eight in, eight out, straight into your DAW over one cable. No analog splitting, no second box, no clock sync headaches. I’ve built a Reaper template so you…
On the 10th of June, Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that governments should have the legal power to block dangerous AI deployments. Two days later, on the 12th at 5:21pm Eastern, the US Commerce Department used that exact power on him. It ordered Anthropic to cut off all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, anywhere in the world, citing national security. There was no…
Helix Stadium Native is on the way. Kurt Ballou from Converge mentioned it on the Garza Podcast while walking through how he uses the Stadium, and you can hear it around the 58 minute mark . By the sound of it he’s been using it already, because he talked about shifting tones between his touring floor unit and the Native plugin inside Pro Tools at his studio. The desktop editor matches the…
I started writing TypeScript in 2015, back when admitting that out loud in certain circles got you looks. It was barely past 1.0, the tooling was rough outside Visual Studio, and half the people I respected thought I’d lost the plot. I tried it on a side project, saw the editor catch a whole class of dumb mistakes before I’d even saved the file, and that was it. I was in.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about the dangers of leaning on AI too hard . At the time it felt a bit like shouting at a cloud. The tools were handy, sure, but most people I knew still wrote the bulk of their own code and reached for ChatGPT when they got stuck. That world’s gone. Pichai stood up at Cloud Next this year and said 75% of new code at Google is now AI-generated. Two years…
About six months ago I reviewed the Helix Stadium XL and came away cautiously optimistic. Great hardware, better amps, and a pile of missing features and first-gen bugs. Since then I’ve actually gigged the thing. Christmas shows, Sunday services most weeks, a couple of conference events, somewhere north of 30 shows all up. So this is the honest catch-up, and it starts with the time it nearly…
I’ve been working on a game in Three.js. That choice was mostly practical. Three.js is good for games because I can use the web dev knowledge I already have, but it hides enough of the browser 3D pain that I can stay focused on the game instead of hand-rolling everything around WebGL. The game needed water. I didn’t want the usual shiny demo plane. I wanted something closer to the…
Aurelia 2 has had server-side rendering sitting in that slightly annoying place where the core has the right foundations, but app developers still don’t have a tidy package they can install and use. If you’re building an internal dashboard, you can get away with a pure client-rendered app. Nobody is searching Google for your settings page. But if you’re building a public website,…
I recently ran into a fun little problem with the Helix Stadium XL and Streamlabs Desktop. And by fun, I mean the kind of problem where you spend a stupid amount of time wondering why the thing you can hear perfectly fine in your headphones sounds completely wrong in the recording. The Stadium was connected to my Mac over USB-C. Streamlabs could see it. The audio meters were moving. I hit record,…
GPT-5.5 dropped yesterday under the rumoured codename Spud, and I’ve been hammering on it inside Codex for most of today. I want to say something that probably won’t be popular. It feels a lot like GPT-5.4. That’s not a bad thing exactly, but it’s also not the leap the X timeline had me bracing for. Every leaker for the past month was whispering about big model smell. The…
At 25 I could code until 3am, sleep four hours, and do it again the next night. I had endless energy. I also had no idea what to do with it. I would start projects and abandon them. Chase every shiny new framework. Rewrite working code because I read a blog post that made me feel bad about my architecture. The engine was running hot but the steering was all over the place.
For fifteen years I played guitar in my bedroom. Noodling. Learning the opening riff of songs and never finishing them. Playing the same power chords I learned in 2005. I owned nice gear. I watched YouTube tutorials. I told people I played guitar, which was technically true in the same way someone who owns running shoes is technically a runner. Then I started playing at church and everything…
Remember Web3? The decentralised future where users owned their data and corporations did not control everything? The revolution that was going to disrupt Big Tech and return power to the people? It was speculation. That is all it ever was. The tech industry took gambling on tokens and wrapped it in revolutionary language to make it sound like innovation. The revolution was not coming. The tokens…
Let me save you the suspense. If your job can be done from a laptop and an internet connection, there is no good reason you should be commuting into an office during a fuel shock like this. We already ran the biggest accidental experiment in remote work anyone could have asked for. It worked. The world did not end. Companies did not collapse. Projects still shipped, meetings still happened, and…
We used to build things. Software that did something. Products that solved problems. Tools that people used. Now we build apps to talk about building things. Project management tools for managing projects that produce nothing. Communication platforms for communicating about communication. Productivity apps that consume more time than they save. The industry has become meta. We are so busy building…
You spent years building expertise. Learning the domain. Mastering the tools. Understanding the nuances that only come with experience. This expertise is your value. It is why people pay you. It is why you have a career. It has an expiration date. And that date is approaching faster than you think. This is not pessimism. This is pattern recognition. The half-life of expertise is shortening. The…
The RBA just raised the cash rate to 4.1% . That is two hikes in two months. The big four banks are tipping a third in May to 4.35%, which would be three consecutive rate rises for the first time since March 2023, back when they were trying to wrangle post-COVID inflation. Two rate hikes in the first quarter of 2026 has added $225 a month to the average home loan, or $2,700 a year. That nearly…
You can earn more money. You can rebuild your health. You can make new friends to replace the ones you lost. Most resources that feel scarce can be regenerated if you invest the effort. Attention cannot. You have a finite amount of attention in your lifetime. When you spend it, it is gone. There is no getting it back. There is no earning more. You get what you get and then you die.
The startup mythology has a convenient excuse built in. Most startups fail because the market is tough, the competition is fierce, the timing was wrong. External factors. Bad luck. Forces beyond anyone’s control. This is cope. Most startups fail because the founders are bad at business. The market was fine. The idea was fine. The execution was bad because the people doing the execution did…
There was a moment, somewhere around 2012, when the internet was as good as it was ever going to get. We did not know it at the time. We thought it would keep getting better. Instead it got worse, and we have been coasting on momentum ever since. This is not just nostalgia. The structural incentives that made the early internet good have reversed. What we have now is optimised for different…
The return-to-office push has been justified with a lot of words. Collaboration. Culture. Serendipitous encounters. Innovation. Mentorship. Water cooler conversations. The magic that supposedly happens when bodies occupy the same physical space. It is all bullshit. The office exists because managers do not trust you to work without being watched. That is it. That is the reason. Everything else is…
The guitar world has spent the last few years treating capture tech like a holy war. One camp wants modelling. One camp wants captures. One camp wants to shout AI a few more times and hope that somehow counts as innovation. It is all getting a bit silly. That is why Helix Stadium has my attention right now. Not because Proxy is already out in the wild and flattening everything in its path. It is…
In 2008, the financial crisis destroyed millions of jobs. The unemployment rate doubled. People lost homes, savings, careers. It was the worst economic crisis in generations and it scarred everyone who lived through it. I think we are headed for something worse. Not a financial crisis. An automation crisis. The kind of job displacement that makes 2008 look like a practice run. This is not going to…
I have a ducted air conditioning system made by iZone. It works fine. There’s an app. The app does what apps do. You tap buttons, things happen. It’s perfectly adequate. But I’m a developer, and perfectly adequate is never enough. I wanted to control my AC from the terminal. I wanted to type a command and have my house cool down. I wanted to ask an AI assistant to set up my…
I have written a lot of code. Hundreds of thousands of lines across dozens of projects over twenty years. Some of it was clever. Some of it was elegant. Some of it solved hard problems in interesting ways. The best code I ever wrote was none of that. The best code I ever wrote was the code I deleted. A function that turned out to be unnecessary. A feature that nobody used. An abstraction that…
I catch myself being nostalgic for the early 2000s. The internet felt new. Phones were for calling. Social media had not eaten everything yet. Things seemed simpler. Then I remember that the early 2000s included a financial crisis that destroyed people’s retirements, a war that killed hundreds of thousands, and a job market that locked out an entire generation. The things I am nostalgic for,…
The most successful software I have ever built ran on technology that was embarrassing to admit at the time. PHP when everyone was doing Node. PostgreSQL when everyone was doing MongoDB. Server-rendered HTML when everyone was doing SPAs. Cron jobs when everyone was doing event-driven architecture. I was embarrassed about these choices at meetups. I felt like I had to apologise for not using the…
I used to get bored. Properly bored. The kind of bored where your brain, desperate for stimulation, starts making things up. Connecting random thoughts. Playing with ideas. Inventing problems to solve. This was where my best ideas came from. Not from brainstorming sessions. Not from productivity systems. From staring at walls and letting my mind wander with nothing else to do. I cannot remember…
Someone alive today will be the last professional writer. Not the last person who writes. People will always write. But the last person who makes a living primarily by arranging words on behalf of others. That person exists right now. They might be in their twenties or thirties. They might be starting their career as I type this. And they will be the last. This sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. It…
Go look at job boards. Filter for junior or entry-level developer positions. Notice anything? There are barely any. And the ones that exist have requirements that would have been mid-level a few years ago. Two years of experience for an entry-level role. A portfolio of shipped projects. Knowledge of seventeen different technologies. The junior developer job, as a category, is disappearing. We have…
For decades, we optimised for the wrong things. Memorisation. Credentials. Which university name you could drop. How many facts you could recall in an interview. The education system was built around filling heads with information that would be useful later. Then AI happened and suddenly the information is just there. You do not need to remember it. You need to know how to get it. The new skill is…
I am going to be bleak for a moment. You should probably sit down. AI is going to take a lot of jobs. Not in some distant science fiction future. Soon. Maybe not your specific job in the next twelve months, but within the next decade, the employment landscape is going to look radically different. And I do not think we are ready. This is not doomerism. This is observation. The capabilities are…
Mark Zuckerberg bet his entire company on the metaverse. He renamed Facebook to Meta. He poured tens of billions of dollars into Reality Labs. He did interviews in virtual environments with cartoon avatars that haunted my nightmares. He insisted this was the future of human interaction. Nobody asked for this. Nobody wanted this. The metaverse was not a response to demand. It was one…
Crypto has been around for over fifteen years now. Bitcoin launched in 2009. Ethereum in 2015. We have had a decade and a half of innovation, billions of dollars of investment, countless startups, multiple boom and bust cycles, and a generation of developers working on blockchain technology. Name one problem crypto solved for regular people. Not hypothetical problems. Not problems that might exist…
I’ve been in thousands of meetings over my career. Most of them could have been an email. Some of them could have been a Slack message. A disturbing number of them could have been absolutely nothing at all. The modern workplace has a meeting addiction. Got a problem? Schedule a meeting. Need to make a decision? Meeting. Want to share an update that affects three people? Better book a room…
Every email client on earth has made it trivially easy to commit one of the most devastating acts of workplace communication: the unnecessary reply all. One click. That is all it takes. One click and suddenly forty-seven people who did not need to be involved are involved. One click and an email thread that could have died quietly explodes into a cascade of responses, counter-responses, and people…
Every few years someone publishes a “how I work” post and I read it thinking yeah, that’s nice, but do you actually do all of that or did you just describe the idealised version of yourself? The version that wakes up at 5am, journals, meditates, drinks a green smoothie, and has inbox zero by 9am. I’m not that person. I never have been. Here’s what actually happens. I…
It’s 9am. You’ve just made your coffee. You’re ready to be productive. Then your calendar reminds you that you have standup in five minutes. You sigh, open the video call, and wait for everyone to trickle in over the next seven minutes while Dave figures out why his microphone isn’t working again. Finally, the ritual begins. Sarah goes first. “Yesterday I worked on…
You have a meeting on your calendar. It is thirty minutes long. There are six people invited. The topic is something that could be summarised in two sentences. By the time everyone joins, exchanges pleasantries, gets distracted, and finally discusses the actual subject, you have burned three person-hours of collective time. That meeting should have been an email. But wait. You sent an email. It…
There’s a fantasy floating around tech circles that AI is about to make software developers obsolete. The logic goes something like this: AI can write code now, therefore anyone can build software, therefore we don’t need programmers anymore. It’s a seductive idea if you’ve never actually shipped production software. I’ve been using AI coding assistants daily for well…
Technical interviews do not predict job performance. We have known this for years. Study after study shows that whiteboard coding, algorithm puzzles, and system design interrogations have almost no correlation with how well someone actually does the job. We keep doing them anyway. Why? Because we went through them. We suffered. We ground LeetCode for months. We memorised sorting algorithms we have…
Notion is not a productivity tool. Notion is a tool for feeling productive while accomplishing nothing. It is a creativity sink disguised as a workspace. It is where work goes to become content about work. I have watched people spend more time building their Notion setup than actually doing the tasks the setup was meant to track. I have done it myself. This is not productivity. This is…