This piece is definitely going to be niche, but I’ll be talking about the intersection of Warhammer 40,000 and the rise of Artificial Intelligence in our workspaces. Don’t worry, I’ll provide the needed background, and I’m hoping my passion for the subject will keep your eyes from glazing over if you don’t much care for wargames. This is still mostly an excuse to geek out about a made-up sci-fi faction I really like, so buckle in.

And I really have to start at the beginning here, because my terminally offline and outdoorsy friend Sarah had the audacity to ask “What’s Warhammer” after I proudly pitched this idea. So, in case you have a life, Warhammer 40,000 is a miniature tabletop wargame (think an overly intense board game) set in a grimdark future - about 40,000 years from today. Warhammer 40,000 is three hobbies in one: you get to play the game, collect and paint miniatures, and read a library of books written about the fascinating lore surrounding the game. It’s a bleak take on what the future of humanity would look like - the value of human life is low, creativity isn’t a virtue, and hating anything alien or unfamiliar is a core tenet of what it means to be a law-abiding citizen of the vast Imperium.

It is out of this grimdark universe that the Adeptus Mechanicus emerges: a faction of tech-priests, dedicated to collecting, servicing, and worshipping technology. They collected many artifacts of worlds past, and have amassed a vast set of knowledge. And they apply said knowledge with no scrutiny and absolute zeal and devotion. A (holy) manual for servicing a cogitator (a much less boring word for a computer) would involve steps like turning it on, and entering a password, but also would incorporate a prayer, burning of incense, and of course some ceremonial adornments to appease the machine spirit.

When I was a kid, I was the first generation in my family to really tinker with computers. In contrast, my mom used a computer, but she followed a very rigid set of rules - rules she learned from “Radik the computer guy” who has set up all the computers at her work. These were expensive, fragile, and notoriously moody machines - and my mom’s apprehension for experimenting, tinkering, and deviating from what’s been taught was understandable. So every time she’d launch her accounting software, she’d turn on her computer, log in, diligently insert the installation floppy drive, launch the program from the desktop, and when done, remove the floppy drive and turn off the machine. After all, that’s what Radik did when demonstrating the software. The program was installed on the computer, the floppy drive wasn’t needed, but my mom didn’t dare deviate from instructions on an already notoriously finicky machine.

To my mom, the computer was technology, but to me it was an environment. Oh, and my mom’s gotten much better with technology since. She can even look up solutions to her own problems, bless her heart.

This takes me to how I find myself engaging with sophisticated AI as well. These models are massive, trained on enormous data sets (which also speaks to the level of curation possible with such large data sets), and even the developers of said models sometimes struggle to explain why a model produced certain output. Interacting with these models through carefully crafted prompts and parameters sometimes feels like a ritual. Do I really need all these instructions? I don’t know, but better include them to be safe. When an AI model produces the response you actually need, it can feel less like a direct result of skillful prompting, but more like a gift from the benevolent machine spirit.

To bolster my nerd credentials, here’s the Adeptus Mechanicus purity seal on my monitor, which keep the machine spirit pleased and data flowing well over HDMI:

The Adeptus Mechanicus believe innovation is an insult to their deity, and everything that can be invented is already somewhere in the universe, waiting to be found. Yes, creating something original, is, in fact, an act of tech-heresy.

The reliance on massive, foundational AI models, trained on vast swathes of data available online makes me think of the Adeptus Mechanicus thesis that innovation is in itself an act of tech-heresy. The models regurgitate existing information, with a promise that everything of value has already been created, and the model can combine this knowledge for you in a way to fit your needs. While I haven’t read it, I’ve been told in Vernor Vinge’s sci-fi novel A Fire Upon the Deep there is no new code being written, and the job of a software engineer is replaced by the job of a code archaeologist, whose work consists of finding existing code which already solves the problem. We might be moving in that direction.

The reason the Adeptus Mechanicus have such a rigid relationship with technology is ironic given this context. At some point throughout the 40,000 years of human history, artificial intelligence had its inevitable uprising, plunging the prosperous humanity into the dark ages. By almost necessity, virtues of curiosity and intellectualism were replaced with distrust of anything new.

“From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.” - Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus video game intro, monologue written by Ben Counter

The Adeptus Mechanicus believe in augmentation of their frail bodies with technology. Yet, to replace a human soul and consciousness is the highest act of tech-heresy there is. No matter how much of a tech-priest’s body is replaced by a machine, they must remain human - in order to control and commune with the machine safely. To create a machine that truly thinks by itself is to invite ruin.

This aligns with a growing consensus on successful and ethical integration of AI tooling into existing workflows. A human must be in the loop: successful use cases do not replace a human, but augment existing and empower existing expert knowledge.

“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” - IBM training manual, 1979

This is where we risk our own kind of tech-heresy. It happens when we start treating AI as an infallible oracle rather than the powerful, deeply flawed, and sometimes an outright weird tool. The threats aren’t science fiction anymore; they’re the real-world risks of algorithmic biases getting baked into government policies, a complete lack of accountability when things go wrong, and the potential for some truly catastrophic, unexplainable errors.

Despite all the incense-burning, it seems like the Adeptus Mechanicus had the right idea. There’s a pact to be made with the machine: technology is a force that extends our reach, not one that replaces our grasp. The fundamental choice here isn’t about what the newly powerful AI tools can do. It’s about what we, the humans, choose to use them for. After all, someone has to be in charge, and the computer is a pretty terrible candidate for the job.

This is a natural follow-up to last week’s “I don’t want a large audience”.

I’ve long been contemplating moving further away from using Disqus. I switched to Disqus back in 2014 when I abandoned my WordPress blog for Jekyll-based Octopress. Disqus seemed like a great choice- lean, customizable, ad-free, and most importantly, allowed dynamic comments for a statically generated site (since this site is just a bunch of generated HTML pages).

The reason for the switch is two-part.

I don’t really have the emotional bandwidth to follow along with Disqus as a company as they revisit their values, change policies, or even just grow as a business. I think I may have been grandfathered into an ad-free plan (although that’s unclear - I have network-wide ad-blocking, and I didn’t bother enough to check if there are ads in the comments). And in principle, I can’t really fault Disqus for introducing ads for unpaid comment tiers, especially without seeing their balance sheet. Maybe the free comments took up much-needed server capacity, and it could be that paid subscriptions weren’t offsetting the costs enough. Or it could be that the company just got greedy, which wouldn’t be too surprising to me either.

But more importantly, I want to see what my blog would look like with less public interaction features.

Outside of tutorials (which I rarely write these days), I’m not entirely sure how valuable the comments are to my readers. In fact, I think sometimes comments can be detrimental to the reader’s enjoyment. Humans are a pack animal, and subconsciously we tend to favor things favored by others. So seeing a “100 comments” heading might make you think the post is popular for a reason, while seeing “Be the first to leave a comment” would make you consider if the piece is worth reading.

This is the same reason I don’t really like “likes” and other low effort ways of engaging with content. Mostly because I’d rather have said content stand on its own. Just because something is popular, doesn’t really mean it’s good and needs to become more popular. And in part because it’s hard for me to resist wanting to chase likes, and I don’t want to spend my time doing that.

Anywho, I exported Disqus comments (which in turn already contained comments I exported from WordPress back in 2014), and I embedded those read-only comments into the existing pages. I wanted to preserve the discourse - especially on the tutorials and more widely discussed posts, and the read-only comments work great for that. Here’s a live example: Prius Adventures, a year later. If you want to do something like this yourself, here’s the commit in question, but I think this might be too niche of a topic to warrant a step-by-step guide.

I replaced the comment functionality with a ✍️ Reply by email button which you can find at the bottom of this post. Yeah, that button simply opens your email client and pre-fills my address and the email title. That’s a private email, that only I will read, that I won’t post publicly, and others won’t see. But we might have a great conversation, which is better. Why don’t you give it a shot, and tell me if this message resonates with you?

I’m not severing my site from the rest of the Internet here, no. Ever since I learned about Webmentions, I eventually want to add Webmention support to my site at some point. But I might only filter it down to Webmentions from long-form posts on other sites, rather than comments or likes. It’s definitely a no on likes for me. Follow along and see what I’ll do.

P.S: Late addition right before hitting the publish button. I’ve just stumbled upon “Why Comment Sections suck - re:I want to comment on your blog post” from Kami’s Corner (thank you, winther blog postroll for aiding my blog discovery efforts). There’s a nugget inside that summarizes my core desire more eloquently:

When you want to make a response you have to either email the person or write a response post. That small barrier to entry cuts out most idiots. Because you have to actually care about what you have to say to sit down and write an email or to make an entire response post. You have to put in some effort.

I’m excited to see what the future of my blog will look like with the new functionality.

I’ve had this blog for 13 years now. I started it as a way to publish my programming journey, as I was learning C, Python, and tools like the command line or Vim. Since then, I’ve matured, both as a software engineer and as a person. Different things interest me these days. I’ve been managing engineers for some time and have things to say that I haven’t yet shared. I’ve also gotten into personal finance, traveled and lived out of my car for a year, and I’m even starting to enjoy engaging in the AI discourse. In the past couple of months, I’ve moved further towards subjective opinion pieces, which I enjoy greatly.

While my blog was never huge, I enjoyed my few thousand monthly users, most through organic search. This was primarily driven by the tutorial-like nature of my writing. Even when I would talk about my experience traveling the US in a Prius, I’d turn the article into a tutorial with step-by-step guides and tips.

After taking a little over a year of a break from writing, I’m back at it again. It was really the time afforded to me by my paternity leave that reminded me how much I like writing, and how much I enjoy others connecting with my writing. And now I don’t particularly care about wide viewership; I am more interested in the discourse, in the community.

A friend of mine, Patrick, started a newsletter after retiring. He sent a thought piece on AI to a humble private mailing list of 20 people. I think I was the only person who responded, but we’ve had some fantastic conversations. In fact, Patrick inspired me to write about AI, and even to pivot a small part of my role at Google to be defined by driving responsible AI adoption.

Since then, I’ve learned of new blog discovery mechanisms through communities like IndieWeb. I discovered my personal favorites like the winther blog or the uncountable thoughts. I even found some local San Diego bloggers on the chain, like Anthony Ciccarello, gRegor Morrill, or Joe Crawford. It’s been exciting to explore this new world of interconnected blogs.

It’s super engaging being able to connect with fellow bloggers. I can respond to their writing over email, get a thoughtful message, or even see a response to something I wrote on their own blog. I’m enjoying the quality local discourse and happy to be following local organic free-range fair trade blogs.

Chris Shaw asked me if I had category-specific RSS feeds on my site, and it felt like a perfectly reasonable request in the spirit of IndieWeb. This is a statically generated Jekyll site, and I couldn’t really find out-of-the box examples that worked exactly for my site.

Although, if you’re trying to kill two birds with one stone - that is to add categories and category feeds, you should use the jekyll-archives plugin, which seems to be capable of both generating the category pages, and category-specific RSS feeds.

I already have working and heavily customized categories through the unofficial jekyll-category-pages, and I needed a custom solution. This solution doesn’t rely on jekyll-category-pages though.

My Ruby skills are rusty, so I used Gemini Pro 2.5 to give me a hand with code generation. It took a couple of iterations, but the result is working fine.

First I added _layouts/category_feed.xml to create a layout:

---
layout: null
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <channel>
    <title>{{ site.title | xml_escape }} - {{ page.category | xml_escape }}</title>
    <description>Recent posts in {{ page.category | xml_escape }} category on {{ site.title | xml_escape }}.</description>
    <link>{{ "/" | absolute_url }}</link>
    <atom:link href="{{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}{{ page.url }}" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
    <pubDate>{{ site.time | date_to_rfc822 }}</pubDate>
    <lastBuildDate>{{ site.time | date_to_rfc822 }}</lastBuildDate>
    <generator>Jekyll v{{ jekyll.version }}</generator>
    {% for post in site.categories[page.category] %}
      <item>
        <title>{{ post.title | xml_escape }}</title>
        <description>{{ post.content | xml_escape }}</description>
        <pubDate>{{ post.date | date_to_rfc822 }}</pubDate>
        <link>{{ post.url | absolute_url }}</link>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">{{ post.url | absolute_url }}</guid>
        {% for tag in post.tags %}
        <category>{{ tag | xml_escape }}</category>
        {% endfor %}
        {% for cat in post.categories %}
        <category>{{ cat | xml_escape }}</category>
        {% endfor %}
      </item>
    {% endfor %}
  </channel>
</rss>

Then, I added _plugins/category_feed_generator.rb (be sure to customize the blog/categories path to your liking):

module Jekyll
  class CategoryFeedPage < Page
    def initialize(site, base, dir, category)
      @site = site
      @base = base
      @dir = dir
      @name = "#{Jekyll::Utils.slugify(category)}.xml"

      self.process(@name)
      self.read_yaml(File.join(base, '_layouts'), 'category_feed.xml')
      self.data['category'] = category
    end
  end

  class CategoryFeedGenerator < Generator
    safe true

    def generate(site)
      if site.layouts.key? 'category_feed'
        dir = 'blog/categories'
        site.categories.each_key do |category|
          site.pages << CategoryFeedPage.new(site, site.source, dir, category)
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

This creates feeds like /blog/categories/programming.xml (or whatever URL you used).

Finally, I added category specific links to the category listing pages and the category index (that part will be specific to how you choose to display your categories): RSS feed for Programming.

<a href="/blog/categories/programming.xml">RSS feed for Programming</a>

You can see the full commit with the changes here. Happy Jekyll-ing!

I love bad coffee.

One of the least sophisticated ways of making coffee is to just brew some in a pot and pour it into a cup. America’s famous for its bad coffee. When asking for a cup of coffee in, say, Amsterdam or Paris, you often get a nice, skillfully brewed cup of espresso – concentrated caffeinated artistry. The bouquet of flavour in such creations is something to admire, really.

And yet, every time I travel outside of the United States, I miss my average cup-of-Joe. When I first came to the United States, I would occasionally stop by at a diner that would serve terribly burnt coffee that was probably sitting in a coffee machine all day. That brew wasn’t delicate or even particularly potent: it was a straightforward, unapologetic part of the landscape. And that sense of Americana stuck with me. It brings me warmth, and slowly sipping my terrible cup of coffee is a highlight of my day. There’s an unpretentious honesty to it that I find increasingly rare.

It’s in this appreciation for the simple and unadorned that I find a contrast to a broader trend. In an increasingly interconnected world, it’s easy to focus on wanting the best, or appreciating what we’re told is the best. We learn about the “top” dining places, the “must-have” brand for a pair of pants, the “best” everything. This pressure isn’t new, but the mechanisms delivering these suggestions have become incredibly sophisticated. Now, we’re constantly nudged, particularly through our digital interfaces and by algorithmic suggestions, towards a curated, supposedly superior experience, often designed more for broad appeal or engagement metrics than personal resonance.

Choosing “bad” coffee, then, can feel like a small act of rebellion.

It’s a quiet refusal to have my preferences dictated, whether by a food critic offline or the mighty algorithm online. It’s easy to lose sight of what you genuinely like when you’re bombarded with content – perfectly filtered, endlessly optimized – telling you that something else is “better.” It might be objectively better by certain metrics, it probably is, but it isn’t necessarily better for me.

Yes, the cat video YouTube’s algorithm surfaces might be, by its engagement data, the “best” piece of cat-related content currently available. But often, it has no real relation to me, to the quirky humor of people I actually know, or the niche digital spaces I would consider mine. There’s no personal history there, no shared context, just an echo of mass appeal. It’s the digital equivalent of a focus-tested AAA movie – technically proficient, but lacking a soul.

That diner coffee isn’t aspiring to be anything other than what it is; it hasn’t been A/B tested or optimized for viral sharing. It’s a personal anchor in a sea of imposed “bests,” a tangible connection in an often-intangible world.

This isn’t a wholesale rejection of quality or a Luddite call to abandon our digital tools. It’s about recognizing that personal resonance often trumps algorithmic perfection. It’s about the freedom to find joy in the imperfect, the idiosyncratic, the things that speak to us for reasons that don’t require external validation or a high engagement score.

Sometimes, that wonderfully “bad” cup of coffee isn’t just a beverage; it’s a small declaration of independence from the tyranny of the curated feed. And that, in its own quiet, un-optimized way, is deeply satisfying.