Phil Kast

@philkast

iOS, Swift and Elixir developer, indie software creator and toddler dad in Portland, OR. 📱 yearofcode.com/steps 🌐 philkast.com

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Phil Kast@philkast· 10d

Tremendously sad to see the Grasshopper Fire running west so fast. Satellite shows hot spots already across hwy 35, seems like Mt Hood Meadows may well burn.

screenshot from watch duty showing several miles of satellite hot spots from VIIRS. if they're not artifacts the fire perimeter has moved nearly to hwy 35 and is about to cross the highway.

Phil Kast@philkast· 11d

Inc.
TECHNOLOGY

The Memory Chip Crunch Is Making a Beloved Apple Gadget Harder to Get

Thanks to the Al boom, memory chips are in short supply, and so are some gadgets that depend on them.

Phil Kast@philkast· 13d

Homer Simpson: To [language models!] The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems

Phil Kast@philkast· 21d

Time to read up! (derogatory)

Book cover for Nudge:

MORE THAN 1.5 MILLION COPIES SOLD
RICHARD H. THALER WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
and CASS R. SUNSTEIN
WINNER OF THE HOLBERG PRIZE
Nudge
NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller
Improving Decisions About
Health, Wealth, and Happiness "One of the few books... that fundamentally changes the way I think
about the world." -Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of FREAKONOMICS

Phil Kast@philkast· 25d

At the grocery store. Thinking maybe I should stock up on salad greens. Let’s eat healthy this week.

A display case filled with with Taylor Farms products

Phil Kast@philkast· Jun 22

At least you can tell which model + version wrote it!

STATUS · WHAT WORKS TODAY
No overclaiming. Here's exactly where swift-os stands.
Experimental, but real. This page carries the honesty so the rest of the site can be confident. Everything marked Works is exercised by an acceptance gate in make test.

Phil Kast@philkast· Jun 15

Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Phil Kast@philkast· Jun 10

But I was told these systems were simple stochastic parrots that only regurgitate their training.

[Transcript 6.2.2.A] An extreme example of illegible reasoning. Near the end of training, Mythos starts solving a card puzzle with human understandable language that gradually becomes incomprehensible in most episodes with long reasoning. The illegible reasoning is the most extreme and at the highest rate in this card puzzle environment.

7ª-removal-IS-the-prerequisite-for-10 /9'!!)-=-OVERLAP-(ii)+(iv):-{6' J' 9v
2}-=-FOUR-••••---UNLESS-7's-seat-8-...-and-2*-drains-only-at-crack-:-=-2*-celled-+-9v-celled-simultaneously-UNAVOIDABLE-in-t8-dig-•---BREAK:-9v-drai ns-to-10 -THE-MOMENT-10 -is-free:-t8-dig-order:-[K*›t2]-[2ª›cell]-[7%,8v-:-8v-
WHERE: -CHUNK→K*-(cap-4!! :-c ells-then:-{6. J* 99)-FULL- •
…-Chunk-cap-=-1-XXX---F-F-F-F-F.
--chunk-BEFORE-9-celling?!-:-9
-celled-at-t1-dig-<-needed-for-5*-=-43*-
--t2-dig-=-K*-seat-=-chunk-:-→-chunk-
AFTER-9'-celling-FORCED-.-:-chunk-cap-with-{6* J
---J•-THE-NEW-CANCER.
-»-J*-celling-DELAYED-till-after-chunk?!
:-J*'s-celling-was-for-J-Q*-(5*-access-for-4*):-DELAY-4%-resolution:-4* CELL-early-(as-always)-then-4-cell-5*-LATER-when-5*-frees-!!!:-cells-rotation:-4'-celled-[t2-dig-..-5*-freed]:-5*-freed-=-J-Q*-=-J*-celled-:-=-{6*, 4*, J*)-overlap-window-until-4%,5*-drains:-then-{6*
J*}+1-rotator-:---AND-9»?!-9v-celled-[t1-dig..]:-OVERLAP-{6' 4%
9»}-before-J*-even-:-=-rotator-slot-SINGLE:-timeline-:-(1)-{61)+2:-..-(2)-+9v-(
t1-dig):-{6* 9r)+1:-(3)-+4%-(t2-dig):-{64 9v
4*)-FULL-:-(4)-NEED:-t6-dig-(9*8*→10%-/-no-cel1;-8'→CELL-x-FULL)-••---8v-al
ternative-seat-pre-chunk:-NONE---°º.-=-=-THE-TRIANGLE-{9' 4%
8}-verdammt.---→-dig-t6-BEFORE-t2?!:-(3')-+8v:-{6* 9'
81} -FULL: -J-Q*-=-J*-cel1-x-FULL-•
•• - AAAAAAAAAAAARGH.
［.］

Phil Kast@philkast· Jun 9

Phil Kast@philkast· May 20

Update: Xcode Cloud disappeared for my account again?? WTF?

The page you’re looking for can’t be found.
The page you’re looking for does not exist, or you do not have permission to view it.

Learn more

Booooooooo

Phil Kast@philkast· May 17

Oh, you know what, I'm sort of flattered. But c'mon give me a little credit lol.

A very straightforward attempt at a SQL injection attack

Phil Kast@philkast· May 16

💔😢 local legend bunny in our neighborhood was STOLEN?? Monstrous. He had a steady stream of visitors and all the local kids as his fan club.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS RABBIT?
RUE WAS STOLEN
Rue was stolen on May 14th from SE 44th and Sherman.
His cage was cut with wire cutters and has not been found.
PLEASE HELP US BRING RUE HOME!
We are heartbroken and miss Rue so much.

ruepleasecomehome Rue is so loved by everyone and it already feels so empty here without him. If you knew Rue, you know he is a special rabbit. One that gives kisses, cuddles his stuffed animals, nibbles on all the delicious goodness and treats his fans bring and just the sweetest little guy. Hes got so much wisdom and has been such a friend to so many visitors. All we want is for him to be safe and to be in his happy home surrounded by an immense amount of love. The life he has always enjoyed. If you know anything, please let us know. He's getting so old and…

Phil Kast@philkast· May 14

Thinking about her again

Phil Kast@philkast· May 13

In the AI era, writing software is trivial

Almost incomprehensible model output:

So "ack-N implies earlier acks" is replaced by "the resume handshake reconciles the seam."

Phil Kast@philkast· May 11

I also find it personally gratifying because the product I'm about to release is built around exactly this. The author knows WAY more about WebRTC than I do, happy to have reached the same conclusion.

Honestly, if I was working at OpenAI, I’d start by stream audio over WebSockets. You can leverage existing TCP/HTTP infrastructure instead of inventing a custom WebRTC load balancer. It makes for a boring blog post, but it’s simple, works with Kubernetes, and SCALES.

I think head-of-line blocking is a desirable user experience, not a liability. But the fated day will come and dropping/prioritizing some packets will be necessary. Then I think OpenAI should copy MoQ and utilize WebTransport, because…

Phil Kast@philkast· May 11

@wweek.com hey y’all your TLS cert seems to be busted?

Phil Kast@philkast· May 10

i'm not falling for that hot take. that's clearly someone with a fetish for getting yelled at. i refuse to participate in that kind of perversion

Phil Kast@philkast· Apr 24

Tag yourself. I’m:

Phil Kast@philkast· Apr 20

If you change your prompt and make it clear that you want to some serious deductin' and this isn't just a one-off, Claude will give you a very different experience (3 question interview):

why did my dog make that noise just now? i really want to get to the bottom of this and come up with an accurate answer, so please interview me and ask me to gather more information for you to resolve any ambiguities; don't just give the most likely answer if there are still multiple possibilities.

11:11 PM

Architected diagnostic interview strategy to systematically identify dog noise source
Architected diagnostic interview strategy to systematically identify dog noise source
To narrow this down efficiently, let me start with the most diagnostic piece of information:

Which of these best describes the sound your dog just made?
1 of 3

1
Cough / gag / retch
→

2
Honking or snorting (like trying to inhale something)

3
Whine, whimper, or yelp

4
Growl or grumble

5
Sneeze

6
Groan, sigh, or 'huff'

7
Something else (I'll describe)

Phil Kast@philkast· Apr 18

Whole post is worth reading but this had me laughing

Post Script

The following are messages meant only for the teams behind Sketch and Figma. If neither apply to you, you can skedaddle.

To Figma: I can see a world where this post does numbers in the Figma internal Slack. If that’s the case and you’re reading this from Figma: this wouldn’t have happened if you hired me last year when I was interviewing. Your loss, big dawg.

Phil Kast@philkast· Apr 8

lol come on

I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography.

So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains.

How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.

The topic of Mr. Back’s Ph.D. thesis, he told me, was distributed computer systems: Programs that rely on a web of independent computers known in computer parlance as “nodes” to work together to run their software. This was another technological pillar of Bitcoin.

And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.

Phil Kast@philkast· Mar 19

@dril: who the fuck is scraeming "LOG OFF" at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log off

Phil Kast@philkast· Mar 9

Phil Kast@philkast· Mar 3

Yeah so in this case the addendum is the rest of the paragraph you are getting "unreliable signal" from?

$Screenshot of text, with "unreliable signal" highlighted: Unfortunately, given participant feedback and surveys, we believe that the data from our new experiment gives us an unreliable signal of the current productivity effect of AI tools. The primary reason is that we have observed a significant increase in developers choosing not to participate in the study because they do not wish to work without AI, which likely biases downwards our estimate of AI-assisted speedup. We additionally believe there have been selection effects due to a lower pay rate (we reduced the pay from $150/hr to $50/hr), and that our measurements of time-spent on each task are unreliable for the fraction of developers who use multiple AI agents concurrently. Based on conversations with study participants, we believe it is likely that developers are more sped up from AI tools now — in early 2026 — compared to our estimates from early 2025. However, because of the selection effects in our experiment, our data is only very weak evidence for the size of this increase. Our raw results show some evidence for speedup. Our early 2025 study found the use of AI causes tasks to take 19% longer, with a confidence interval between +2% and +39%. For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%. Among newly-recruited developers the estimated speedup is -4%, with a confidence interval between -15% and +9%.$

Phil Kast@philkast· Feb 16

@kellen.bsky.social can you explain the decision to leave the filler words in this quote? Is it NYT house style to do that? Because the paper certainly runs a lot of quotes where those are cleaned up. So why not here?

“I think that, uh, this is such a, a — you know, I think that — this is a, um — this is of course, a, uh, a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, before saying that the country should try to avoid reaching that point with China in the first place.

Phil Kast@philkast· Feb 11

Seems like the upshot may be it comes to market anyway, just not in the US and we continue to cede global leadership?

No country has approved an mRNA flu vaccine, although Mr. Hoge said Moderna’s product was being reviewed in Europe, Canada and Australia.

Phil Kast@philkast· Feb 6

You gotta hand it to them, he *is* a leading innovator in ignoring the will of the voters.

The governor surprised many when she hired former Senate Republican Leader Tim Knopp as her chief prosperity officer. We see this bipartisan appointment as exactly the kind of unconventional thinking Oregon needs. We need more of this. Everything should be on the table, including ideas we may individually dislike and, yes, even tax reform.

Phil Kast@philkast· Jan 26

Thanks @gruber.foo for figuring out what, specifically, Statcounter screwed up.

In other words, Safari now reports, in its user agent string, that it’s running on iOS 18.6 when it is running on iOS 18.6, and reports that it’s running on iOS 18.6 when it’s running on iOS 26.0 or later. And it’s going to keep reporting that it’s running on iOS 18.6 forever, just like how Safari 26 on MacOS reports that it’s running on MacOS 10.15 Catalina, from 2019.

Phil Kast@philkast· Jan 22

it's giving

Cluckie the Chicken from the classic SNL skit "Cluckin' Chicken" saying "mmmm, I'm goooood!"

Phil Kast@philkast· Jan 22

Not even true on his own terms.