What I've been reading

• Poisoning Well, Heydon Pickering

• Planning isn’t progress, Sam Marullo

• The Water is a Mirror, Jennifer Pahlka

• The Rise of the Gurus, Sam Freedman

• Django 5.2 release notes. Composite primary keys an interesting addition.

• AI ambivalence, Nolan Lawson

• 31 March – 4 April 2025 Walknotes. A great walk notes particularly the entry for Monday

  Awake before the alarm. Outside a bird calls as rhythmic and insistent as a phone. We’re back in the civil twilight; the clocks changed yesterday, automatically and without fanfare. I knew it was coming but I’d forgotten when. The wall clock, cooker and the microwave gave it away. Small betrayals.

• Middle-Aged Man Trading Cards Go Viral in Rural Japan Town, Ynes Sarah Filleul

• Import AI 407: DeepMind sees AGI by 2030; MouseGPT; and ByteDance’s inference cluster, Jack Clark

• The Pull: Racing Versus Adventure Running, Hannah Green

• Elliptical Python Programming, Susam Pal

• Wikipedia entry for Pedestrianism

• The Strange, Unsettling Story of British Steel, Ed Conway

• CaMeL offers a promising new direction for mitigating prompt injection attacks, Simon Willison

• Research heresies, Will Myddelton

• A History of History, Victoria James

• Opposite is not a winning strategy, Jennifer Pahlka

• Inside the 2025 Cross Government Software Engineering Conference, Katherine Bhambra

• Jack Scott – Cocodona 250 ultramarathon. Jack Scott whose 2024 winter spine broke records targets Cocodona 250. Fascinating hearing how he's preparing and makes the race even more exciting as Courtney Dauwalter is also racing. Kicks off on 5th May!

• Tired of fortnightly sprints? We’re trying something different, Kelly Lee

• You don’t have to do fortnightly sprints, Steve Messer

• Stop Writing __init__ Methods, Glyph

• AI assisted search-based research actually works now, Simon Willison

• Working Through the Fear of Being Seen, Ashley Willis

• I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice and received the GPLv3 license, mendhak

• 14 Advanced Python Features, Edward Li

• What's new in pip 25.1 - Dependency groups! Richard Si

• The Age of Forever Wars, Lawrence Freedman