A friend of mine has years and years of concerts logged on Concert Archives. People she knows are on What I’ve Heard, which takes the shows you were at and displays every song you have ever heard a band play live, counts them up, and prints them as a poster. On a phone call she asked how hard it would be to share her history there too. While we talked, I pointed my agents at the question and let them run in the background. ...
My friend Nate Aune built MakerPerks, a curated directory of builder perks: free credits, discounts, and programs for startups, students, open source maintainers, and indie developers. There is a lot of real money sitting in those programs that most builders never claim. He talked about it on Sundai, the AI hacker community we are both part of, and I decided to see if I could build him an MCP server super quick. I may have gone a little overboard. It took a weekend, and the adapter is live at makerperks.mcpaql.com, built with MCP-AQL. Any MCP client can point at it and ask real questions: what can a student claim, what can an open source maintainer claim, how much is it worth, and where do you redeem it. ...
I just finished watching the season five finale of For All Mankind. No spoilers, but the whole show is filled with people in spacecraft stuck, slowly running out of resources of one variety or another. And, shortly after, I happened to catch this video on the World War II buoys anchored out in the English Channel to rescue downed pilots. My brain just decided to staple the two things together and do some napkin math to see if the idea would actually hold up. ...
I don’t need a full CMS. I need a publishing workflow that stays out of my way. The Problem with Traditional CMS WordPress, Ghost, and their cousins all share the same assumption: your content lives in a database, and the CMS controls access to it. That means servers, logins, attack surfaces, and maintenance. For a personal site, that’s overkill. I want to write, review, schedule, and publish. I don’t need user management, plugins, or a PHP runtime. ...
This site exists because someone on Hacker News decided to be unhelpful. What Happened I had an old WordPress site at mickdarling.com that I hadn’t touched in years. It was a placeholder, nothing more. At some point, the ad network got compromised. One of those fake “MacOS Security Center” malware popups that everyone’s seen before. Did the person who found it send me a note? No. They posted it publicly on HN as a gotcha. Not “hey, your site has a problem.” Just a drive-by to try to make me look bad. ...
I like building things. Usually tools that solve problems I keep running into. What I’m Working On Now Dollhouse Research Dollhouse Research is where the rest of this now sits. The through line is building blocks for AI customization: making expertise, process, memory, and tools reusable, open, and easy to combine, instead of something every team rebuilds from scratch in prompts. The research side of it is about whether the claims hold up. It is easy to say an architecture makes agents more reliable. It is harder to run the experiment, register what you expected beforehand, and publish the number you actually got. That is the part I care about, and it is why there is a lab rather than just a product. ...