Out of band thinking
I just recently moved into a new flat. It's a great flat overall, but what's not so great is the heating/cooling system. It is a "smart" system, and I don't get a thermostat on the wall, rather a buggy app. The app is for Android 4, so I can't even install it on my phone. The flat generously comes with an Android tablet that has the app installed, which "works" but crashes half the time, is very…
This is a more coherent version of my earlier thought dump . Everyone keeps saying AI won't kill software engineering, just the boring parts. "The craft survives". But I'm not entirely convinced we know what the craft actually is. Code is how you think, not just the product I think code is a medium of thought for the software engineer. Before when we were are forced to write it by hand you hit…
A few weeks ago I wrote about The Plumber With A Skeleton Key , where I argued that giving fully autonomous AI agents unrestricted access to your machine is roughly as sensible as handing a random stranger on the street the keys to your house, your car, and your identity. This post dives into the how that goes a little further than a docker-compose.yml snippet. I built ParanoidClaw , my own…
I feel like I'm watching the death of the craft that I've admired and wanted to master since I was young. A week ago I forked the popular project "OpenClaw" to add a sandboxing backend using bwrap for my autonomous AI agent container hardening project. The fork is already 3000 commits behind. How is that rate of change sustainable? How does anyone understand what's going on in that codebase? I'm…
The Slopinator 9000 The Slopinator 9000 is satire. The README says so, twice. The caution banner says so. The publishing steps are no-ops. I named the GitHub project and account "slopinator-9000". I genuinely did not think I needed to be more obvious about it. The premise is a direct joke about "velocity culture", the attitude in tech where shipping anything, fast, is intrinsically virtuous…
If you hire a plumber to fix a leak in your basement, would you give them a skeleton key to every room in your house and the combination to the safe in your bedroom? Obviously not right? Yet, this is exactly how we are deploying the current generation of "autonomous" AI agents. We give them shell access, API keys, a browser, then act surprised when they're tricked into burning the house down. As…
I archived my decade old Windows install I've been moving from machine to machine since my school years, and installed PopOS on my main machine now (previously had Linux on a removable SSD). I'd like to share below what I learned about signing from the pain of setting up "Secure Boot" as I still wanted to dual boot Windows for games with draconian anti-cheats. What is Secure Boot? Secure boot is a…
Launched with the promise of enhancing transparency and efficiency in the 2024 Presidential Elections, SIREKAP aimed to leverage Optical Character and Mark Recognition (OCR / OMR) technology to accurately and easily count ballots for a live quick count. However, its implementation has been marred by controversy, raising questions about the system’s reliability, security, and overall effectiveness.…
Recently, I’ve been reading and trying to implement geofencing on Android. So far it has been quite successful, I have implemented a working project that has a geofence around my school and alerts to user to login and logout on entering or exiting the school grounds. This app was intended as a solution to student registration during study leave in my school, as during exams students can come and…
In this problem we use the A* pathfinding algorithm to traverse a maze. Here is the problem statement: Input Format The first line contains 2 space separated integers which is the position of the PacMan. The second line contains 2 space separated integers which is the position of the food. The third line of the input contains 2 space separated integers. Indicating the size of the rows and columns…