Wednesday, 4th March 2026
Something is afoot in the land of Qwen
I’m behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba’s Qwen team over the past few weeks. I’m hoping that the 3.5 family doesn’t turn out to be Qwen’s swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departures in the past 24 hours.
[... 705 words]Anti-patterns: things to avoid
There are some behaviors that are anti-patterns in our weird new world of agentic engineering.
Inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators
This anti-pattern is common and deeply frustrating.
Don't file pull requests with code you haven't reviewed yourself. [... 331 words]
The NICAR data journalism conference provides a copy of the schedule as CORS-enabled JSON, so I vibe coded my own mobile-friendly schedule app to help me keep track of the sessions I want to attend.
On the second floor of 141 Wooster Street in New York's SoHo district there is a 3,600 square foot room filled with earth - 280,000 pounds of it, first installed in 1977 and maintained there ever since.