Notes on software, history, data, and whatever https://colinsblog.net From a recent New York times article Yanacek peered at the A.I.’s suggested fix, pondered for a moment, then hit “enter” to approve it. The A.I. took about eight minutes to figure things out, he told me. “By the time I’d opened my laptop, it’s ready.” One customer recently told... Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:25:00 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2026-03-12-parkinsons-law/ https://colinsblog.net/2026-03-12-parkinsons-law/ The war against Iran is the most poorly planned, least legal and most chaotic large military operation perhaps ever done by the U.S. The President hasn’t offered consistent reasons or objectives either, so we can’t even argue with him. Was the war necessary? Was it necessary in the minuscule time... Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:58:00 -0600 https://colinsblog.net/2026-03-02-what-are-we-doing/ https://colinsblog.net/2026-03-02-what-are-we-doing/ Notes on unintuitive results from using C's log10() - What if you want to know the number of digits needed to represent an integer variable in base 10? You may want to know before printing if it will fit within a printed field. Furthermore, you’d like it to be done pretty efficiently. Why not simply convert to a string... Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:48:00 -0600 https://colinsblog.net/2026-02-25-floating-point-hazards/ https://colinsblog.net/2026-02-25-floating-point-hazards/ From Plain English straight to assembly - The other day I tried out a Z80 emulator Z80 Pack, and had the idea to make some software for the Z80, which I’ve never done. In the 80s I only ever programmed the 6502 CPU a little, and the 8088 a bit more. I was always interested in the... Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:55:00 -0600 https://colinsblog.net/2026-02-10-coding-agent-as-compiler/ https://colinsblog.net/2026-02-10-coding-agent-as-compiler/ Sometimes I like to saute sliced sweet potatos with some kale for lunch when working from home. Add a little vinegar and seasoning, maybe a bit of cheese and you’re done. This meal turns out great using typical orange sweet potatos, but fails badly using purple sweet potatos – they’re... Sun, 07 Dec 2025 13:25:00 -0600 https://colinsblog.net/2025-12-07-purple-sweet-potato-fries/ https://colinsblog.net/2025-12-07-purple-sweet-potato-fries/ Much like our modern food and environment have made it hard to eat healthily without effort, and our modern transportation and farming and automated manufacturing have made exercise an optional activity, extreme wealth and power make difficult thinking an optional activity for the super rich. The billionaires can’t help it;... Tue, 04 Nov 2025 21:55:00 -0600 https://colinsblog.net/2025-11-04-intellectual_couch_potato_syndrome/ https://colinsblog.net/2025-11-04-intellectual_couch_potato_syndrome/ The economics of the software business has been really good for developers since the 1980s at least. By developers I mean anyone in the business of making software, not just individual engineers – developers in the Apple App Store sense. Before the 1980s software was mostly a consulting style of... Wed, 08 Oct 2025 22:17:00 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2025-10-08-software-economic-revolution/ https://colinsblog.net/2025-10-08-software-economic-revolution/ I think this is a sub-genre of its own - Here are a few of the best (most disturbing) short stories I’ve read, ordered from newest to oldest. They’re squarely science fiction (maybe the Quickening is a slight exception here,) which only adds to the horror. You don’t have to believe in the supernatural – there’s an explanation, however unlikely.... Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:35:00 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2025-09-22-science-fictional-horror/ https://colinsblog.net/2025-09-22-science-fictional-horror/ Like the surprising effectiveness of AI coding assistance itself, AI excels at types of coding tasks you might not expect - For fun, I’ve been trying out Claude Code on a variety of my personal projects, not expecting much. I am curious to find how hard is too hard for Claude. A fairly straightforward board game proved too much. And then, debugging broken features and adding new language features to a... Sat, 26 Jul 2025 14:35:00 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2025-07-26-AI-assisted-PL/ https://colinsblog.net/2025-07-26-AI-assisted-PL/ AI code assistants will cause great harm to business in the next ten years or so. Why? Because nobody will understand how their software works, what it’s doing exactly, if it’s actually secure, or in what ways it may fail to scale and so many more particulars. To some approximation... Tue, 03 Jun 2025 14:35:00 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2025-06-03-ai-or-understanding/ https://colinsblog.net/2025-06-03-ai-or-understanding/ I’ve tried out most of the AI LLM products at this point. For the most part I haven’t found a use for them beyond short term entertainment. Recent releases of Claude and Gemini have gotten good enough to perform some busy-work coding for me, but anything complicated needs too much... Thu, 15 May 2025 22:05:00 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2025-05-15-AI-as-editor/ https://colinsblog.net/2025-05-15-AI-as-editor/ This pizza uses almost none of the standard pizza toppings and it tastes great. Make it in a wood-fired pizza oven if you can, or use the highest temp available in your oven. Use convection if you have it. Ingredients Toppings 1 small ripe apple, thinly sliced (it should be... Thu, 02 Jan 2025 21:58:00 -0600 https://colinsblog.net/2025-01-02-apple-pizza-recipe/ https://colinsblog.net/2025-01-02-apple-pizza-recipe/ With the still only partial return to offices, I expect lots of people are running into an unpleseant side of modern computing. Frequent software updates, logins and operating system patches will interrupt your work or at best, restart your computer between work sessions, potentially leaving you some wreckage with your... Wed, 26 Jun 2024 21:53:10 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2024-06-26-lower-bound-of-useful-usage/ https://colinsblog.net/2024-06-26-lower-bound-of-useful-usage/ What follows are a few sort of random observations on topics I’ve pondered while evaluating new languages and thinking about building my own language projects. They aren’t radical design choices or anything groundbreaking but they lend a language its feel for better or worse. Mainstream PL not quite big ideas... Mon, 17 Jun 2024 23:05:05 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2024-06-17-little-big-ideas/ https://colinsblog.net/2024-06-17-little-big-ideas/ “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence” Laurence J. Peter The Peter Principle: Why things Always Go Wrong That’s the hypothesis anyway. More on the Peter Principle. Recently I learned about the study Promotions and the Peter Principle which supports the hypothesis with empirical... Sun, 05 May 2024 03:15:01 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2024-05-05-software-peter-principle/ https://colinsblog.net/2024-05-05-software-peter-principle/ Adding custom metadata is easy and documented when saving an entire table, but adding to batched output is different. - Saving custom metadata – “schema metadata” or “file metadata” – to Parquet could be really useful. You can put versions of an application’s data format, release notes or many other things right into the data files. The documentation is somewhat lacking on how to accomplish it with PyArrow – but... Thu, 11 Apr 2024 09:30:05 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2024-04-11-save-parquet-with-custom-metadata/ https://colinsblog.net/2024-04-11-save-parquet-with-custom-metadata/ Not all tools can read nested logical Map or List type data (often made by Spark.) Here are some tips to make the data more accessible by more tools. - The Parquet columnar data format typically has columns of simple types: int32, int64, string and a few others. However, columns can have logical types of “List”, “Map” as well, and their members may be more “List” or “Map” structures or primitive types. Not all tools that read Parquet can handle... Mon, 26 Feb 2024 19:58:03 -0600 https://colinsblog.net/2024-02-26-make-complex-parquet-more-accessible/ https://colinsblog.net/2024-02-26-make-complex-parquet-more-accessible/ I spent the afternoon learning about Mojo. Here are my notes. - Mojo aims to be a super-set of Python by supporting the Python syntax and adding in new keywords for more performant and safe code. Mojo is a compiler that produces extremely high-performance executable binary files. It offers interop with existing Python libraries and a limited set of Python types Mojo... Fri, 03 Nov 2023 21:10:00 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2023-11-03-notes-on-mojo/ https://colinsblog.net/2023-11-03-notes-on-mojo/ There’s still a lot of old “extended” ASCII out there and you may need to deal with it. One source can be the old-fashioned “fixed-width” data formats, but it may be found in any old files like spreadsheets in Windows. Whatever the case you can’t just wish it away, sadly.... Sat, 21 Oct 2023 20:15:01 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2023-10-21-nonstandard-string-encodings-rust/ https://colinsblog.net/2023-10-21-nonstandard-string-encodings-rust/ Notes on RustConf 2023 Talks I Attended - We saw a wide range of talks, from Rust success stories to language improvement projects, to team dynamics / Rust org growing pains. I didn’t (couldn’t) attend all talks so I may have missed some really interesting stuff. This is just what I took away from what I went to.... Sat, 16 Sep 2023 18:38:24 -0500 https://colinsblog.net/2023-09-16-rustconf2023/ https://colinsblog.net/2023-09-16-rustconf2023/