This has been one of my biggest annoyances working with Python and pip when dealing with projects where that are not meant to be installed as a package, how do you handle dependencies? Think projects like application backends, python scripts, REST APIs etc If you’ve ever struggled with this, you’re going to love this: a…
Category: Development
How to stay in the coding flow using LLMs
We all know that moving to LLMs and agents has caused the feeling of losing touch with parts, or maybe even all, of a code base. This isn’t just something that is problematic for managing and handling the translation from business logic to implementation it is a problem because it feels exhausting. I’ve had coding…
The Pregnancy and Health Apps Still Leaking Data in 2026
When Yeeun Jo, a student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) contacted me in 2025 to ask about data tracking in app advertisements related to women’s health and pregnancy I was a bit skeptical. I think I first told her along the lines that while such data collection was broad it was rarely so…
The Unbearable Cheapness of Open Weight Models
Today I was setting up Hermes to see how it does with web research. I chose DeepSeek V4 because I know it is cheap, but seeing it’s pricing next to Anthropic and OpenAI ‘frontier’ models is crazy. Nearly a 50x price increase based on tokens alone, let alone how much pondering any of their models…
Scan any iOS or Android App for SDKs and API Calls for Free with AppGoblin, no login
AppGoblin lets any user, from anywhere, request to scan any mobile app for the SDKs, trackers and API calls the app makes. How it works? Want to scan a lot of apps? AppGoblin has a 100% free android app that lets you select apps from your device. This lets you select groups or multiple apps…
PSA/Reminder: AI apps access your clipboard
Clipboard contents: sudo bash -c ‘rm -rf .local/share/waydroid/data/media/*’ I was reminded today that the Cursor app I’ve installed likely has access to my clipboard. After an SSH debugging session fixing a full disk I opened Cursor and without haven’t even touched this file in week it auto suggested the above function name and command.
AI Companies are raising crazy amounts of money so why not use their free tiers?
Cash in on the investor frenzy: a quick PSA that LLMs have free tiers While some people (my friends included) are out there paying $200 a month to OpenAI and Anthropic, I’d just like to share that if you need to save some money now is the time to cash in on the high valuations…
How creepy is the personalization in ChatGPT?
I’ve been pretty cavalier with using AI. I think once I got used to not fully trusting it’s truthfulness, and instead using it like a teacher that I question and verify. But this past month I’ve been getting more uncomfortable with the answers. Especially ones that I can see are digging up little nuggets of…
Self hosting 10TB in S3 on a framework laptop + disks
About 5 months ago I made the decision to start self hosting my own S3. I was working on AppGoblin’s SDK tracking of the top 100k Android and iOS apps so was wanting a lot of space, but for cheap. I got really lucky with getting a second hand Framework laptop. The laptop was missing…
Contabo Defaults Encourage Using SSH Passwords
I recently started helping a less technical friend and had my first chance to see/use Contabo VPS. I’ve been really surprised at their default security practices so far. Contabo’s default VPS creation seems to be root user and password? If you go to “Advanced” the default is to create a user called “admin” (good!) and…