This is my blog. Sometimes in these posts I’ll talk about research or art projects I’m involved with, sometimes I’ll just ramble about other stuff which is keeping me up at night. If you’re interested in a certain topic, click on a tag to see just the posts with that tag:
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If anything here sparks your interest (or your ire!) then get in touch via email or discuss on HN.
- COMP4020/8020: Rapid Prototyping for the Web19 Dec 25
These are draft learning outcomes---subject to change as the course develops....
- Extempore's aliiiiive on aarch6417 Dec 25
If you're on the extempore mailing list you'll have seen the chatter over the last year or so about how development has (sortof) stalled due to the "core team" (@digego and @me, but calling it a "core team" makes it sound more grown-up) having other committments these days and not so much time to hack on it....
- Fixing slow Zed agent startup times17 Dec 25
I've been using Claude Code via ACP (Agent Control Protocol) in Zed, and while the integration is brilliant, starting a new Claude session took noticeably longer in Zed than running claude directly in the terminal; ~30s vs about 5s. And it was particularly frustrating because there's no /clear slash command via ACP---the only way to clear the context, which I d all the time is to re-start the agent, which (because of the delay) breaks my flow....
- Interactive neon perceptron visualisation11 Dec 25
I'm about to design and build a modern interpretation of Rosenblatt's Perceptron. It's called the Neon Perceptron becausever wire will be a flexible LED that'll light up with it's "activation". I'm doing the software, my colleague Brendan Traw is designing some custom PCBs and other hardware, and we're working on the overall design together....
- LLMs Unplugged: teaching language models with pen, paper, and dice10 Dec 25
The LLMs Unplugged site is at llmsunplugged.anu.edu.au. All materials are CC BY-NC-SA licensed for educational use. The code's on GitHub if you want to dig into the implementation details or contribute....
- Blog archaeology3 Dec 25
After the recent switch to VitePress, I became curious about how many of the previous iterations I still had access to. I've been an obsessive git packrat for years, and I figured that there'd be some secrets in the git repo. So I went spelunking in the history....
- Switching from Jekyll to VitePress2 Dec 25
This site has run on Jekyll since 2014 (or even before, I think; but some secrets are lost to time). Ten years is a good run for any technology choice, but I've finally made the switch to VitePress. The source is open, so you can check it out for yourself....
- 11ty and Vite for modern static websites24 Nov 25
I've been using 11ty for static site generation for a while now (not this site---that's Jekyll---but for other stuff) and it's great. But for a recent project I needed proper asset bundling, hot module replacement (HMR), and access to the npm ecosystem without building my own pipeline. Enter Vite....
- Seeing AI tasks through a TAM lens12 Nov 25
When it comes to AI adoption research, we keep asking "do you use ChatGPT?" when we should be adding "for which specific tasks?"...
- Tracking APS AI Transparency Statements11 Nov 25
New Cybernetic Studio project announcement: the APS AI Transparency Tracker (GitHub link)....
- Cybernetic Studio Launch @ SXSW Sydney8 Oct 25
I'm launching the Cybernetic Studio next week (Oct 15) at SXSW Sydney. If you're attending, come to Chippendale on Wednesday afternoon (search for Cybernetic Studio Launch in the SXSW app for details) and see what we've been building....
- The great 2025 email yak-shave: O365 + mbsync + mu + neomutt + msmtp12 Sept 25
For years I was a happy user of mu4e in Emacs. But then a few years ago my employer turned off password-based IMAP auth and broke my (Office 365-based) work email, so I had to make alternative email arrangements....
- Running Claude Code within Zed23 July 25
After several months using Zed's built-in Agent panel I've switched to Claude Code. The main reason is cost. I'm still using the same models---still primarily Sonnet (and occasionally Opus) 4---but using them via the Agent panel incurs per-token billing via the Anthropic API. I was racking up a lot of costs (around 100USD/week) even with a bit of restraint, although still using it fairly heavily during all work days....
- Agentic AI: LLMs with stones17 July 25
There's a truth to that proverb, even if you feel (as I do) the temptation to "well akshually..." make several very valid points about how words can be hurtful. For most of the Large Language Model (LLM) era---since the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022---we've been in turns amazed, disgusted and now kindof "meh" about the way that LLMs can take the words we give them and produce more words in response....
- Automated RPi Web Kiosk Setup in 202516 July 25
As part of a recent art installation I've needed to set up lots (well, dozens) of Raspberry 5s to run as fullscreen Chromium "kiosks" with a pre-set URL (network connected, but with no keyboard/mouse)....
- DIYChatGPT Short Course for ANU Undergraduates7 July 25
If you're an ANU undergraduate student you can enrol in an upcoming (next week!) upcoming 3hr course I've created called DIY ChatGPT: LLMs as Information Processing Machines. It's running for the first time next Thursday 17 July 10am--1pm (although it will run again later in the semester)....
- Agentic Elixir superpowers: Zed + Tidewave + AshAI6 June 25
For a few years now whenever I need to build any sort of networked interactive experience, I reach for Elixir (with Phoenix LiveView and Ash). It's an extremely productive combination, especially when you want to do more complex client/server information flows than the standard request/response UX. I've also (for the last year or two) ditched Emacs for Zed. Again, if you take the time to master these tools I think they're excellent....
- DeepSeek and Shallow Moats: Implications for Higher Education18 Feb 25
mean for the research and development of LLMs? Higher education should avoid putting all its eggs in one GenAI basket, writes Ben Swift -->...
- LLM Parlour Games for Overeducated Wankers7 Nov 24
Note: this stuff is the workshop content for an alumni workshop in November 2024 hosted by the Cybernetic Studio at the ANU School of Cybernetics....
- Format Markdown on save in Zed using Prettier20 Sept 24
One thing I've particularly enjoyed since switching to Zed is format-on-save, which is turned on by default in most programming modes. However, it's not turned on by default for Markdown files....