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@matthewsinclair.com

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I build stuff with bits. matthewsinclair.com quantumfaxmachine.com geodica.com whatnext.dev masto.ai/@matthewsinclair

A stylised view of a landscape of digital platforms in a purple/blue colour palette, hinting at different layers and levels. SMTP is over forty years old, still wide open, and still effectively owned by a handful of platforms. Just about all tech runs the protocol-to-platform loop but cheap software might be about to run it backwards. Blog #0198: From Protocols to Platforms and Back
A picture of a misere hand in 500: 6♦️A❤️5♠️6 ♠️Q ♠️K ♠️J ♠️J♣️ ❤️K ❤️
A screen grab of a chat with Claude Code where Claude accidentally rhymes, and then rhymes again when it is pointed out that it's previous comment rhymed, claiming it was all an accident.
Claude Code text output showing absolute gibberish.
A photo of the YouTube livestream on my TV of the Artemis II spacecraft on it's way to loop around the Moon. The craft is on the left and an oddly egg-shaped moon on the right.
Two pigeons sitting on a window sill behind iron bars. Hence the title “jail birds”.
Looking up through the centre of an internal spiral staircase in a cream/white interior towards a blue skylight. Blog #0194: The Time Cost of How Is Zero Agentic coding pushes the implementation cost of software towards zero. The value shifts from how to build something towards why and what. But this is just the latest rung on a very old ladder.
More stylised blue lines with white glowing orb spheres over a flowing digital background. Blog #0193: Learning and Dreaming Part 4 of 4. Cross-entropy loss, Adam optimizer, the training loop, and autoregressive sampling. The GPT learns and generates.
Blue, purple, and green stylised swirls on a dark background. Blog #0192: How Tokens Talk to Each Other Self-attention, multi-head projections, and KV caching — the core of the transformer
Matrix-inspired green hieroglyphs on a dark background. Blog #0191: From Letters to Logits Part 2 of 4. Character-level tokenization, linear algebra, softmax, and the complete GPT architecture — all in pure Elixir.
Stylised graph of blue connected nodes and lines on a dark background. Blog #0190: What If Numbers Could Remember? Part 1 of a 4-part series on building a GPT from scratch in Elixir. Autograd, computation graphs, and making numbers remember.
An image of The Highlander from the 80s sci-fi fantasy film of the same name. Blog #0189: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Highlander Rule A simple rule with a pithy name turns out to be surprisingly effective at keeping agentic coding on the rails
A greyscale picture of the head of The David by Michaelangelo. Blog #0188: On Knowing What Code to Throw Away Agentic coding has inverted the job — from knowing what to write, to knowing what to throw away
A picture of a very well-organised workshop tool bench with all of the tools arranged in a set of hanging brackets behind the bench.
The year "2025" rendered in a gold-ish translucent 3D font.
A path in the woods with a fork in the road, one direction has two tracks as if vehicles of some kind have gone down it, the other path is just a single walking trail.
A photo of the grounds of Nottingham Castle, UK with a large lit up hashtag saying #itsinnottingham.
This is a wall installation of 180 CDs from the 90s and 00s (which was about the last time I bought a physical CD).
A stylised image of a vile of magic purple elixir. I am sick and tired of having to justify “Why Elixir?” so I decided to write down all of the reasons why in one spot! #0181: Why Elixir? A Rebuttal to Common Misconceptions Why Elixir is not just a good platform for modern development, but a great one!
An AI-generated example screenshot of an Emacs-like editor editing a Markdown file. Today's #braingasm post explains how to make Emacs appear in macOS Finder’s “Open With” menu for .md files by manually associating file types using duti.
A plain poster on a tiled wall that reads "Less Social Media." We don't have a smartphone problem. We have a software problem. The real threat isn't screen time. It's algorithm time. Discover how we can protect our children—and perhaps democracy itself—from algorithmic manipulation: #0179: Kids and Smartphones https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0179-kids-and-smartphones
Scrabble pieces laid out to say "LEARN FROM FAILURE" on a plan background. 📚 QUANTUM FAX MACHINE: MARCH 2025 READING LIST! 🚀 ⚠️ Irresponsible AI When AI goes wrong - practical tips for avoiding "garbage" output from AI assistants, Apple's "$10B+ Siri AI Disaster," and the provocative question: "Is GenAI Digital Cocaine?" 👉 https://quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/qfm060-irresponsible-ai-reading-list-march-2025
People climbing a grey, rocky mountain looking upwards towards the sky. 📚 QUANTUM FAX MACHINE: MARCH 2025 READING LIST! 🚀 🚀 Engineering Leadership Challenging conventional wisdom with pieces dismantling the '10x engineer' myth, exploring what it really means to be a tech leader in 2025, and examining the identity crisis facing software engineers in an AI-augmented world. 👉 https://quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/qfm059-engineering-leadership-reading-list-march-202
Shot of programmers computer over the top of a keyboard looking at two monitors in a darkened office/desk. 📚 QUANTUM FAX MACHINE: MARCH 2025 READING LIST! 🚀 ⚡ Elixir Deep dive into the evolving Elixir ecosystem with highlights on Women in BEAM, new UI libraries for Phoenix LiveView, and Sean Moriarity's keynote on designing LLM-native systems with Elixir. 👉 https://quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/qfm058-elixir-reading-list-march-2025
Closeup of a women's left eye. 📚 QUANTUM FAX MACHINE: MARCH 2025 READING LIST! 🚀 ## 🤖 Machine Intelligence Exploring the philosophical foundations of AI, economic implications, and practical applications. Featuring discussions on "gradual disempowerment" and Mayo Clinic's innovative approach to combating hallucinations. 👉 https://quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/qfm057-machine-intelligence-reading-list-march-2025
Close-up for a woman's left eye. 📚 QUANTUM FAX MACHINE: MARCH 2025 READING LISTS ARE LIVE! 🚀 Fresh content alert! My March 2025 curated reading lists are now available covering four tech domains: 🤖 Machine Intelligence ⚡ Elixir 🚀 Engineering Leadership ⚠️ Irresponsible AI 👉 https://quantumfaxmachine.com/
This image shows a woman looking at a wall covered in tattered old advertising posters. The post says: I recently read “What If We Made Advertising Illegal?“ (https://simone.org/advertising/). It makes a bold case: advertising is corrosive, manipulative, and ultimately harmful to society. It fuels attention-hijacking, undermines truth, and distorts our shared reality. As with other once-tolerated hazards—lead in paint, indoor smoking—perhaps it’s time we called time on advertising altogether. But what if, rather than banning it outright, we taxed it instead? https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-advertising
A picture of a young boy at the bottom of a very large staircase that goes up and away out of sight. Wondering what's next once you're a software engineer? Check my #podcast on career boundary conditions—4 episodes in, wanting your feedback. More at https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0175-whatnext-podcast-next-steps #whatnext
Holding down the Command Key (⌘) for a few seconds in Finder on macOS shows a list of available hotkeys.
I'm a software engineer ~ what next? S01E01 - Carlton Lane - Boundary Conditions
A human hand reaching up into the sky to grab a cloud.
Using emotional science, gamification, storytelling, and AI, my lumii helps you process any difficult or meaningful moment in just five minutes—finding relief and closure similar to wrapping up a therapy session.
Two folders on a computer disk, one for 2023 and one for 2024.
Screenshot of Speedtest.com download speed test after changing some cables around.
A crow covered in Velcro bands. As in “vel-crow”. #pun #dadjoke
A birthday lunch at The Albany on the Thames in Thames Ditton, Surrey, UK.
Cyclists in The Giro approach a tight corner on stage #2 preceded by a sign that says, worryingly, “PRAY”. 👀
A screenshot from YouTube showing that auto-play is currently set to “off”.
The more I look into things, the stronger my suspicion grows that the ultimate conclusion from all of this deep learning/neural-net/GPT-3/DALL-E stuff isn’t that we end up making sentient machines, it’s rather that we discover that humans aren’t as sentient as we thought we were.
Apple Vision Pro headset with battery page sitting on a table.
A table full of Australian junk food.
Mansfield Parkour Mansfield Parks and Recreation Mansfield Parknado Northanger Abbey Road Persuasion Impossible Bennet and the Beast Emma-geddon