Matthew Pennell

Looking forward to actually being able to watch a game in real-time for once - @wshcommanders.bsky.social are playing in Madrid this weekend. #HTTC

Been hacking my bad habits for the last couple of months, here's a reflection on what worked (and what didn't):

matthewpennell.com/blog/purpose...

The answer is "absolutely f***ing useless" - it's annoying you can't plug your OpenAI key into Windsurf.

More vibe coding adventures this weekend; I switched from ChatGPT to Windsurf (using GPT-5) until I ran out of free credits. Not sure how helpful the (entirely free) SWE-1 model is going to be while I add the finishing touches. #ai

First Radiohead, now Interpol/Bloc Party - why can't bands ever choose a ticketing platform that can cope with the traffic their fans generate? They all use these obscure third-party apps that fail at the crucial moment.

Experimented with some vibe coding today (ChatGPT and Windsurf). Kind of nearly almost worked, but I suspect my free accounts ran into a context window issue because it started going in circles eventually. Main learning is to write a much more detailed, step-by-step functional spec up-front. #ai

It's a bit of a niche request, but I'd like it if MacOS apps had an alternative icon, for those situations where you use two apps regularly but are constantly clicking on the wrong one because their icons are too similar. Looking at you, Bear and Vivaldi.

40 years since I got my first Spectrum; that's where I start counting from.

A thread, a super interesting, yet terrifying study, by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue, which shows language models can suffer permanent cognitive damage when trained on low-quality, high-engagement social media posts.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AIResearch

Considering how pivotal they've been in the direction my life has taken, it's slightly surprising to realise that I've only ever owned seven computers. Two 8-bit machines; two in the early 2000s, Pentium III era; two iMacs; and my current (now five-year-old) PC.

Wrote up a brief summary of some of the design choices on my relaunched personal site. Most fall under the category of "stealing from myself":

matthewpennell.com/blog/redesig...

#ux #design #blog

Probably a couple of weeks late to this (slowly clearing my newsletter backlog), but The Oatmeal's take on AI art is spot-on:

theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

Redesigned and restructured my personal website for about the twentieth time - but this time, finally, the underlying platform remains the same.

matthewpennell.com

On about the fourth attempt, I finally have a navigation that actually works at all screen sizes. Forgot this stuff was so hard.

Our Fusion Retro Books 2026 Annuals - 4 in total! Another year - some more XMAS Annuals to read!

Putting down my CRASH! mug on my CRASH! coaster, I pull out a credit card from my ZX Spectrum styled wallet and put down the money for yet another CRASH! annual:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/zza...

#retro #zxspectrum

“Cartography of Generative AI (2024)” shows a sprawling, diagrammatic ecosystem of how generative AI is produced and maintained. The background is light pink with turquoise and yellow highlights. The left side has a turquoise vertical sidebar with labeled sections such as AI imaginaries, Critical expertise, Data sciences, Silicon Valley, and AI harms. The main diagram maps the flow of generative AI development from top to bottom: Top left: A globe icon with arrows represents global energy consumption, linked to servers and calculation power (chips, GPUs, and companies like TSMC). Top center: Rows of red server racks show data centers, connected to big data platforms and pipelines of training data (shown as orange blocks). Top right: Yellow stacks and schematic diagrams depict the supply chain of raw materials (e.g., cobalt, lithium) and scenes of mining. Upper right corner: A vignette labeled digital colonialism shows resource extraction sites and cables crossing oceans. Middle section: Blue isometric office-like spaces labeled AI start-ups and Silicon Valley venture capital, with tiny illustrated workers at desks, computers, and whiteboards. Orange and yellow arrows and blocks represent the movement of datasets, training, and alignment processes. A section labeled human labour shows rows of workers annotating data. Lower section: Gridded platforms in orange and yellow depict data extraction from the internet—social media, images, sound, text—and web scraping from sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr, YouTube. Groups of small figures interact with large wireframe cube models labeled generative AI engines. Other vignettes show AI products (like chatbots), digital gig work, and consumer use. Far right: Layers of stacked chips show advanced chip production and global supply chains. A blue network node diagram illustrates the infrastructure economy behind AI technologies. Boxes at the bottom describe research and governance structures.

Hadn't seen this "Cartography of Generative AI" before. From Estampa, a collective of programmers, filmmakers and researchers working in the fields of audiovisual media and digital environments: cartography-of-generative-ai.net

After two hours fighting with Kubernetes, Docker, NPM and custom deploy scripts, I'm quite nostalgic for the days when deploying a website meant dragging your files from one window to the FTP server window and watching the little progress bar files fly from one folder to the other.

Looking forward to your updated article with Lord of the Rings at the top of the list in a year or two. Or three. Five, maybe?

Wow - just received a late Amazon refund ... from 2019.

Shower even if the rain don't stink,
Stop caring what people think,
Always buy the first round of drinks.

Learn how to shut your trap,
'Til you got a good answer back,
Admiring others, watch your back.

When in doubt, do something kind,
Be prepared to change your mind,
Always leave the past behind.

Put your faith in the one who tries,
Don't gossip and don't tell lies,
When in doubt by a larger size.

Never trust a judgmental man,
Listen to those you are younger than,
Be good just because you can.

Make up after every fight,
Always kiss your girl goodnight,
Don't buy underwear too tight.

Hips and Makers (30th Anniversary Edition)

Every few years I remember how great Kristin Hersh's first solo album, Hips and Makers, was. This time I discovered they released a 30th anniversary edition last year, with 10 additional tracks.

open.spotify.com/album/13JHk7...

Boogie Nights is his best, but my favourite will always be Magnolia.

May be an odd topic to write about after a week's vacation spent doing nothing, but here we are.

matthewpennell.com/blog/to-live...

So that's <counts> 30 items remaining on the to-do list before this redesign is ready to launch, hopefully before October 1st.

I tried Inoreader but couldn't make it stick. What I have found useful, though, is scheduling time to read a couple of email newsletters right before I sit down to work in the morning -- I find it helps to remind me that, yes, I do still care about industry stuff and learning new things.

I've got one - never seen them live, so fingers crossed I make it through the online random queue scrum tomorrow morning.

A multi-monitor setup really comes into its own on race/game weekends. Figma on the main screen, Spotify on one side, and F1 qualifying on the other.

YouTube video by Legendary English Loudermilk Talk like that - vocal fry

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHHt...

While I do like having a gaming PC, I definitely don't enjoy the hellishly complex process of debugging hardware issues on Windows - juggling drivers, updates, installs, BIOS settings, overclocking, undervolting, and watching/reading hundreds of YouTube guides and Reddit threads.