Starmer might start to do better in the polls if he arms Denmark with Trident. Trump seems to respond better to strength rather than weakness, and a deterrent if Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa [1] ever goes off the air could be established.

This might seem impractical. The UK needs a nuclear option and doesn't have much to give. But we don't need to hand over subs and train the Danish navy. Unlike the US there isn't a complicated nuclear football and authenticated launch sequence. We could just add the Danish prime minister to the chain of command. Some simple enabling legislation, and two envelopes in the safe instead of one. Only Mette Frederiksen would know the contents of the second envelope.

This is crazy, but it hasn't been a normal January and at some point the policy of appeasement has to end.

[1] I once listened to a Radio 4 Today Program interview with a Trident submarine commander. He said that every morning at 6am they came up to periscope depth and listened for the Today Program. If he couldn't find it then it was safe to assume that civilization had ended and he was free to unleash armageddon. The very next day the Today Program was off air due to strike, and I was briefly terrified. It turns out they check three times.

ITHCWY has been running on ASP.NET 4.8 for a long time. I've been putting off the upgrade as the official Microsoft documentation says something close to 'your funeral'. Visual Studio Copilot added a modernization agent. It claimed to have generated a plan, but the file it insisted it had just written was hallucinated. So I rolled up my sleeves and did it the hard way.

Hard is an overstatement. I did some much needed refactoring and jettisoned a bunch of dead code. The regular Copilot (via Claude Sonnet 4.5) was a big help on things that didn't exist any more or needed to be done differently. The new OutputCache refused to disengage until I entirely killed the default and I need to spend some more time there. It seems to matter which order you enable server features which is moderately terrifying but probably doesn't need to be touched often. It's certainly better than poking around in web.config and hoping for the best. If you're reading this then it has been served by asp.net core 10.

Probably some subtle things are broken and it usually takes a while to mop everything up after a migration this big. If you run into any problems please get in touch.

Hyperlapse from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe:

I-80, SR 49, SR20, I-80 some more, SR 267 to Kings Beach.

This didn't look like a terrible idea the morning of December 26 (Boxing Day), the weather forecast was good. Google Maps predicted a little under four hours. Then it started to snow. And then there were many crashes, I-80 shut in both directions and the resulting jam took over six hours to clear.

Most of the hyperlapse runs at a 80-130x speedup. The jam portion is over 1000x.

In case you are insane here is the full drive, minus charging and food stops:

Shot on Rivian Drive Cam, post-processed as per this post, edited in DaVinci Resolve Studio, music hallucinated by Eleven Labs.

Roko's basilisk is the improbable theory that advanced AI in the future will punish anyone who failed to help speed the development of the AI.

I'm coining Rob's basilisk, which is the far more likely theory that AI will eventually torture people who made it watch home security cameras. Here's a gem from mine:

"The day began with regular neighborhood activity, including several individuals walking by. Early morning saw garbage collection services, with a person in a yellow vest moving green garbage cans and later a blue recycling bin was picked up. Around 7:34 AM, a person exited the Garage, and shortly after, a green Rivian SUV pulled into the driveway, with a resident exiting the vehicle as the garage door opened. Throughout the morning, numerous people walked dogs, including one with a black dog on a red leash. Later in the morning, a person was seen putting a green suitcase into the trunk of a white SUV, coinciding with an Amazon delivery truck driving by. In the afternoon, a person was observed taking a picture of the house. A UPS delivery person delivered a package around 4:50 PM. As evening approached, a cat was spotted walking across the Backyard, and two people got into a white pickup truck from the Garage. The day concluded with continued pedestrian activity and several trains passing by, including a person seen holding a glowing blue object in the evening."

Nearly a decade ago I whipped up a script to send my Nest footage to the Google Cloud Vision API. The twist was that it only notified me when it saw something novel. It was pretty chatty to start with, and then every few weeks I'd get an alert that it had spotted an ice hotel or ballistic missile submarine. At that point I turned it off (maybe this will save me one day).

Some terrible part of me wants to build a RAG database of Google Home Premium Advanced notifications so that I can do the same thing in prose, and never miss anything unusual on my street. A more practical part realizes that the glowing blue object is probably a phone.

Brief time lapse of sunset looking towards the Ponte 25 de Abril (a mashup of the Golden Gate and Bay bridges) in Lisbon, Portugal.

Google Pixel 8 Pro 7mm f1.7 1/15s ISO250

LH 1680, A320-214, 06141

Updated 2026-03-14 09:42:

Google Pixel 8 Pro 7mm f1.7 1/700s ISO21

LH 1676, A320-214, 05972

Google Pixel 8 Pro 7mm f1.7 1/1,000s ISO21

TP 554

Updated 2025-11-29 16:54:

Google Pixel 8 Pro 7mm f1.7 1/2s ISO21

TP 573

I just finished Alan Wake 2, and while it's a pretty good game this took me well over a year.

It's not (mostly) because I'm still not that great with a Xbox controller. It's a long game and I'm pretty busy. Astonishingly at the end it wants me to play the whole thing again, which seems to be a bit of a trend. It also wants to sell me expansion packs which is completely missing my section of the market.

I would happily pay you twice as much if the game was half as long.

Sadly I'm a completionist and I'm not going to stop halfway through unless the game is bad (e.g. No Man's Sky. I already have a job. I'm not going to find and smelt minerals to weave wiring to eventually twenty hours later turn the light on in my space cabin). But I'd love to play more than one game a year.

Also, making more content is lazy. Taking a scalpel to your plot and getting to the essential core of the story takes skill and guts.

Publishers, please take my money!

(PS, man, I loved Firewatch. More like that please.)