Tag: Culture

A desktop 3D printer printing a small mechanical part in a home workshop, with filament spools blurred in the background.

The Bill That Wants My 3D Printer to Police Itself

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

There is a printer humming in my workshop right now, laying down a part one 0.2mm layer at a time. It is a slow, almost meditative machine. It does not know what it is making. It does not know if the object taking shape on the bed is a bracket for my garage shelving, a fidget toy for my son, a one-off template, a jig for my guitar building, or something I should not be making at all. It knows one thing: move the nozzle here, push out this much plastic, repeat a few hundred thousand times. That is the entire worldview of a 3D printer.

I bring this up because the California legislature has decided my printer should know more than that. Assembly Bill 2047 would require every 3D printer sold in the state to run a state-certified “detection algorithm” designed to recognize and refuse to print firearm components. I got into this hobby almost a decade ago on a Prusa, I still run one today, and I have spent enough of my career writing software to have a strong and specific reaction to this. It is not a political one. It is an engineering one. The bill asks for a piece of software that cannot reliably exist, and even if it could, it would have nowhere to run. On top of that imaginary foundation it then builds an entire regulatory apparatus.

What AB2047 Actually Asks For

The mechanics are worth understanding before we argue about them. The bill lays out a multi-year timeline. By July 2027, the California Department of Justice studies firearm detection technology. By January 2028, it certifies detection algorithms from vendors. By July 2028, manufacturers must submit an attestation for each printer model they sell. By September 2028, the state publishes a list of approved printers, updated quarterly. And starting in March 2029, selling a non-compliant printer in California becomes illegal. There are new criminal penalties for anyone who disables the detection technology.

Read that sequence again and notice what it assumes. It assumes that by 2028 there will be vendors selling reliable firearm-detection software, that the DOJ will be able to certify it, and that manufacturers can bolt it onto their machines. The entire structure depends on step one being possible. So let’s look at step one.

A Rifled Barrel Is Just a Grooved Cylinder

Here is the core problem, and it is the kind of thing that sounds solvable until you actually try to specify it. A 3D printer receives a model. The model is geometry: a mesh of triangles, sliced into a stack of two-dimensional paths. To detect a firearm part, the software would have to look at that geometry and decide whether it represents something dangerous.

But geometry does not carry intent. A rifled barrel, to a detection algorithm, is a grooved cylinder. So is a section of industrial screw thread. So is part of an optical instrument, a custom gear, a textile bobbin, a printable fidget toy, a thousand legitimate objects. The shape that makes a barrel a barrel is not unique to barrels. You cannot write a function that takes in a mesh and returns “this is a gun part” without either missing real firearm components or flagging an enormous number of innocent ones. In machine learning terms you are choosing between false negatives and false positives, and both failure modes here are catastrophic. Miss the real thing and the law accomplishes nothing. Flag the innocent thing and you have a printer that refuses to make a curtain rod bracket because it looks suspicious.

It gets worse once you remember that the person trying to evade detection gets a vote. Shape-based detection is defeated by the most trivial transformations imaginable. Rotate the model. Scale it slightly. Split a banned object into a handful of innocent-looking pieces, print them across separate jobs, and assemble them on the bench, which is how people print large or complex parts anyway. None of these change the function of the final object, and all of them defeat a classifier looking for a known silhouette. There is an old locksmith’s adage that locks only keep honest people honest. A detection algorithm is a kind of lock, and this one stops the honest while inconveniencing nobody who is actually a threat.

Where Would This Software Even Run

Suppose, against all of this, that someone ships a detection algorithm that actually works. There is a second wall waiting behind the first, and it is the part of this I find almost funny: even a perfect classifier would have nowhere to run.

Here is what most people, and I suspect most legislators, do not realize about how these machines work. By the time a design reaches my printer, it is no longer a 3D model. Software on my computer, called a slicer, has already flattened it into G-code, a dumb list of hundreds of thousands of instructions that say move here, extrude this much, heat to this temperature. The printer’s control board never sees the shape of the object at all. For the firmware on the printer to detect a gun, it would have to reconstruct a three-dimensional model out of raw toolpaths and run shape analysis on it, on a microcontroller with kilobytes of memory. My Prusa cannot do that. No consumer printer can. It is not a hard engineering problem so much as an absurd one.

So the detection has to live somewhere else, and there are really only two places it can go. The first is the slicer. But the popular slicers, PrusaSlicer, Cura, OrcaSlicer, are themselves open source. You fork the one with the block stripped out, or you simply use a different one, and nothing downstream ever checks what it produced. The second place is the only one that actually enforces anything: require every printer to refuse any G-code that is not cryptographically signed by a state-approved cloud slicing service. That version works, in the narrow sense that it would function. It also means the end of slicing your own files on your own computer, the end of open-source firmware, the end of the printer as a general-purpose tool. It turns an open machine into a locked appliance that prints only what a government-approved server allows.

That is the choice the bill quietly forces, even if its authors never say it out loud. Either the detection is real and trivially bypassed, or it is genuinely enforceable and the open ecosystem is dead.

And that open ecosystem is not incidental to how these machines work. The software that actually drives them, the two dominant projects Marlin and Klipper, is open source and free to download, and replacing the firmware on a printer is something the community does routinely, in minutes, to tune machines and add features. A state-mandated block sitting in that firmware is removable by definition. The whole community already holds the key to the proposed lock. The law is betting that criminals either do not know the key exists or will politely decline to use it. The bill’s response is criminal penalties for disabling the technology, which means the actual enforceable result is that an ordinary maker who updates their firmware becomes a potential criminal, while anyone with bad intent was always going to use a non-compliant machine bought out of state or built from parts.

Who Actually Pays

This is where the abstract engineering critique becomes a real-world one. The signatories on the opposition letter are not a fringe group. They include Prusa Research, Make Magazine, and VORON Design, alongside individuals like Josef Průša, Dale Dougherty, and Joel Telling of 3D Printing Nerd. The numbers they cite are the reason. More than 1.5 million California students reach 3D printing through their schools. More than 30,000 businesses depend on it, from dental labs to jewelers to small manufacturers. There is something on the order of $10.5 billion in investment riding on this ecosystem in the state.

The bill’s penalties, reportedly $25,000 per violation, do not land on the people it is nominally aimed at. They land on the school district, the maker space, the library, the small business owner running three printers in a garage. Those are the entities that buy from compliant vendors, register their equipment, and follow the rules. The person determined to manufacture an untraceable weapon was never in that group. They route around the law, because routing around the law is, as we just established, trivial. So you end up with the worst possible outcome: real cost imposed on the law-abiding, near-zero cost imposed on the dangerous, and a chilling effect on exactly the educational and small-business use that makes this technology worth having.

Compelled Speech and the First Amendment

There is a legal dimension I am less qualified to litigate but that I think any engineer should at least register. CAD files and the source code that drives these machines are, under a long line of cases, a form of protected expression. The bill requires manufacturers to attest to the behavior of an algorithm operating on that expression, which the opposition frames as compelled speech on a matter of public concern. I am not a lawyer, and I will not pretend the constitutional question is open and shut. But it should make us uncomfortable that the mechanism here is the state requiring a company to vouch for the output of detection software that, as far as anyone can demonstrate, does not actually work. Picture a law that required every typewriter manufacturer to certify, in writing and renewed every year, that their machines cannot be used to type a threatening letter. That is roughly the position AB2047 puts a printer company in. You are being compelled to attest to a fiction, under penalty.

What This Pattern Should Teach Us

I want to be careful here, because it is easy to read a piece like this as “no regulation, ever.” That is not my position. Untraceable firearms are a genuine problem and a serious one. The objection is not that the goal is illegitimate. The objection is that the proposed mechanism is engineering fan fiction, and that mandating impossible software does not become possible because a statute says so.

It helps to remember what the law already does. California does not ignore homemade firearms. If you want to build your own, you must first apply to the Department of Justice for a serial number and engrave it on the receiver, and doing otherwise is itself a crime. The state already regulates the dangerous act, directly, where it belongs. What AB2047 does instead is reach past the act and conscript the tool. Nobody expects Home Depot to interrogate why I am buying a length of steel pipe or a box of fasteners, even though plenty of dangerous things can be assembled from ordinary hardware. We regulate the act, not the hardware store, because the hardware store cannot read minds. Neither can my printer.

This is a pattern worth recognizing, because 3D printers are not the last general-purpose tool a legislature is going to try to make smart enough to police its own users. Any time a law says “the tool must detect bad use and refuse it,” an engineer should ask the boring, deflating questions. Can the tool actually distinguish intent from form? What does the determined adversary do in response? Who absorbs the cost when the detection is wrong? For AB2047 the answers are no, they trivially route around it, and the schools and makers do. When those are your answers, you do not have a safety feature. You have a tax on the honest and a piece of theater for everyone else.

If you build things, and especially if you build things in California, this one is worth paying attention to. The opposition letter has a breakdown of where the bill stands and who to contact on the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety committees before it advances. I am writing to those committee members, and I am going to call my own state senator, Dave Cortese, because the gap between what the bill asks for and what software can actually do is not a close call, and that gap is precisely the kind of thing the people who build these machines are in a position to explain.

My printer is still running as I finish this. It still has no idea what it is making. And no statute, however well-intentioned, is going to change that.

A wooden violin with holographic blueprints projecting from it on a workbench.

Reading List 5

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

Today’s reading list is a mix of cautionary tales about our digital infrastructure and some fascinating glimpses into how AI is changing both software design and human interaction.

[article] GoDaddy Gave a Domain to a Stranger Without Any Documentation. Wow. This is a really chilling story. I’m glad that I don’t use GoDaddy for my domains.

[article] HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’. GitHub is in a tough situation. If you look at the graphs they published from their April 28th outage you can see that their growth rate is off the charts. Agentic coding has put strains on that infrastructure that no reasonable person or team could have been prepared for, and the result is a degraded experience and customers walking away.

[blog] Letting AI play my game – building an agentic test harness to help play-testing. There is something really satisfying about watching an agent test a product. I’ve been doing this a lot lately with my Gemini Scribe project, which I need to write about at some point.

[blog] How to use Deep Research with the Gemini API. Great writeup on how to use the latest version of the deep research agent. I’ve updated gemini-utils and my Gemini CLI deep research extension for the newest version of deep research as well.

[article] Meet Shapes, the app bringing humans and AI into the same group chats. It’s inevitable that AI is going to start showing up in more settings where people talk to each other.

[article] Statue of a man blinded by a flag put up by Banksy in central London. This seems like the perfect statue for our times.

[article] MIT’s virtual violin offers luthiers a new design tool. One of the things that makes string instruments so complex is that they are an interface between physics and nature. The wood imparts its own characteristics on top of the geometry. This is a neat project from MIT, but to really help luthiers they will also need to be able to model the woods used in these instruments.

[article] Instagram is testing optional ‘AI creator’ labels. I really think the industry has this backwards. We should be creating “human created” labels. We should assume all content is AI unless otherwise stated.

A spotlight shines on a pianist intensely playing a small, worn piano on a large, dark stage.

The Koln Concert and Creative Constraints

Allen Hutchison1 Comment

This week I was reminded of a story I like to tell, and the value of constraints on creative work. When I’m working, I often set my constraints before I begin. For example, on an old agentic coding project, I set a few constraints: “The orchestration model must be Gemini Flash,” “All tool calls are through sub-agents,” and “Permissions and configurability are at the core of the agentic loop.” From that, I ended up with adh-cli, a policy-aware TUI for working with Gemini that inspired many of the features I worked on in Gemini CLI last year. The project itself is defunct now and not maintained, but the constraints gave me a great way to think about the project and forced creativity in other areas.

We run into constraints in many different ways. Maybe it’s time pressure: How many of you felt like you wrote your best papers 24 hours before they were due? Maybe it’s the environment, like you must integrate with a certain piece of software, or you have to design your system in a certain way. Maybe it’s self-imposed like my example with adh-cli.

Or maybe the constraint is philosophical. Take Mario Zechner’s Pi Agent, for example. In a blog post, Zechner expressed frustration with the bloat of modern AI coding assistants that try to do everything, describing them as “spaceships with 80% unused functionality.” In response, he built Pi around an “anti-framework” philosophy of radical minimalism. He intentionally constrained his default coding agent to just four fundamental tools: read, write, edit, and bash. By stripping away the hidden system prompts and unpredictable context injections, the tool forces developers to be intentional. It proves that you don’t need a massive, opaque framework to build highly capable AI workflows—sometimes, fewer tools create a sharper focus.

Whether it’s a self-imposed architectural rule or an anti-framework philosophy, these software constraints force us out of our default habits and into a space of deliberate, intentional design. Yet, in our day-to-day work, constraints are rarely celebrated. In fact, that is actually how I end up in constraint conversations the most often: people don’t like their constraints because the constraint has been imposed on them externally. They see it as a restriction instead of a way to channel their creativity. To me, a constraint means that we shut down a huge portion of the exploration space. I don’t have to worry about a million different architectural choices because the constraint has made the decision for me. It is incredibly freeing. Whenever I try to help someone turn around their mindset—from fearing or being frustrated by constraints to being excited by them—I inevitably end up telling them the story of Keith Jarrett and the 1975 Köln Concert.

In 1975, a 17-year-old jazz fan named Vera Brandes organized a late-night concert at the Cologne Opera House. She managed to book Keith Jarrett, one of the most notoriously perfectionist jazz pianists of his generation. It was an ambitious undertaking, and almost immediately, it turned into a disaster.

Due to a backstage mix-up, the venue provided the wrong piano. Instead of the premier concert grand Jarrett requested, he was presented with a small rehearsal model. It was horribly out of tune, the pedals stuck, the high notes sounded tinny and harsh, and the bass lacked any resonance. Jarrett, exhausted and suffering from back pain, flat-out refused to play. It was only when Brandes followed him out into the pouring rain and begged him that he relented, taking pity on the teenager. “Never forget,” he told her. “Only for you.”

What happened next is legendary. Forced to play an unplayable instrument, Jarrett had to completely abandon his usual style. Because the high and low registers were awful, he confined his playing strictly to the middle of the keyboard. Because the piano was too quiet to fill the 1,400-seat opera house, he stood up and hammered the keys with immense physical force. To make up for the lack of resonance, he relied on rolling, repetitive, hypnotic rhythmic patterns in his left hand.

He embraced the limitations, and in doing so, he produced absolute magic. The recording, The Köln Concert, went on to become the best-selling solo jazz album in history.

I think about the Köln Concert all the time, especially lately as we navigate the current landscape of Artificial Intelligence and software architecture.

The Bloat of Infinite Resources

In modern software engineering, we are rarely handed a broken piano. We operate in an era of perceived infinite resources. Cloud computing gives us endless horizontal scaling. Context windows for Large Language Models have ballooned from a meager 4K tokens to 1 million or more. If an application is slow or an agent isn’t performing well, the default instinct is to throw more compute, more memory, or a larger model at the problem.

But infinite resources often breed intellectual laziness. When you have a 1-million token context window, you don’t have to think critically about what information actually matters. You just dump the entire codebase or the entire library of documents into the prompt and hope the model figures it out. It’s the equivalent of having a perfect Bösendorfer grand piano and just mashing all the keys at once.

A pragmatic engineering manager might push back here: Developer time is expensive. If I can solve a problem today by dumping an entire codebase into a 1-million token context window, isn’t throwing compute at it just good business?

It’s a fair question, and engineering is always about tradeoffs. But the tools have evolved—building a RAG pipeline doesn’t take a week anymore; with the right utilities, it takes minutes. More importantly, relying on infinite resources often hides long-term costs. When I built adh-cli, I made an explicit tradeoff: by routing everything through tightly scoped sub-agents, I was actually consuming more total tokens than a single massive prompt would use. But because my constraint forced me to use a much cheaper model (Gemini Flash), my bet was that the overall system would be far more cost-effective and resilient. AI doesn’t remove the need for architectural judgment; it exponentially increases it. You have to exercise good judgment to know when throwing compute at a problem is a calculated business decision, and when it’s just masking a fragile design.

The Innovation of Constraints

The most interesting work in AI right now isn’t happening where resources are unlimited. It’s happening at the edges, where constraints are severe.

Take local models, for example. When you’re trying to run an LLM on a consumer laptop or a Raspberry Pi, you don’t have the luxury of a 70-billion parameter model. You are forced to use a smaller, quantized model. This constraint forces you to build better architectures. You can’t rely on the model to “know” everything, so you have to optimize at the edge. Maybe you build robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines. Maybe you implement sophisticated memory retrieval systems to surface exactly the right historical context just-in-time. Or maybe you break complex workflows down into tiny, focused sub-agents, each operating with its own tightly constrained context window. You have to craft highly specific, deterministic prompts.

# Instead of one massive prompt, constraints force modularity
def evaluate_code_chunk(chunk: str, context: dict) -> EvaluationResult:
    """
    A tightly scoped function that uses a small, fast local model
    to evaluate a specific piece of code, rather than dumping
    the whole repo into a massive API call.
    """
    prompt = build_focused_prompt(chunk, context)
    response = local_model.generate(prompt, max_tokens=256)
    return parse_evaluation(response)

Just like Jarrett avoiding the tinny upper register, we learn to avoid the weak points of our tools. We build guardrails. We write cleaner code. We design systems that are elegant because they have to be.

Finding Your Broken Piano

Of course, there is a survivorship bias to the Köln Concert. For every broken piano that produces a masterpiece, there are a hundred broken laptops that just result in missed deadlines. Not all constraints are good constraints. You can’t change the laws of physics, and if a structural limitation is genuinely preventing the work from happening, you have to reevaluate. The goal isn’t to suffer for the sake of suffering. But by starting with strict constraints, you force yourself to explore the boundaries. If you prove a task is impossible under those conditions, you can always loosen the constraints and expand your resources. But if you start with infinite resources, you never learn where those boundaries actually are.

Constraints are not the enemy of creativity; they are its prerequisite. Yes, accepting a severe constraint—especially an external one you didn’t choose—can be incredibly painful in the moment. Keith Jarrett hated his broken piano. He didn’t feel freed; he fought against it until he was forced to adapt. But like exercise or eating your vegetables, the value isn’t in the immediate comfort. It’s about the mindset shift. You accept the constraint to build a muscle, to stay fit, to force yourself to find a new path when the easy one is blocked. When we are stripped of our ideal tools and infinite runways, we are forced to abandon our default habits. Whether it’s the self-imposed design rules of adh-cli, the radical minimalism of Mario Zechner’s Pi Agent, or the physical limitations of a broken rehearsal piano in Cologne, constraints force us into a space of deliberate, intentional action.

If you want to build a truly resilient, innovative system, don’t start with the biggest, most expensive tools available. Start with a broken piano. Artificially constrain your resources. Limit your context window. See what you can achieve with a 7B parameter model instead of a flagship API, or see what happens when you strip your agent’s toolkit down to the bare essentials.

You might just find that the limitations force you to build something far better than you would have otherwise—a system that is elegant not in spite of its constraints, but because of them.

So, look around your current projects. Where are you relying on infinite resources to mask lazy architecture? And more importantly: what constraints have you come across in your own work that felt like a frustrating restriction at first, but turned out to be a blessing in disguise? I’d love to hear your stories.

A split illustration contrasting corporate AI surveillance with independent home computing.

Reading List #4

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

This week’s reading had a through line I wasn’t expecting. Almost every article circles back to the same question: who actually benefits when AI reshapes an industry? The answer isn’t always the people doing the work.

[article] Tech CEOs Think AI Will Let Them Be Everywhere at Once. All of the articles I’ve seen on these “management intelligence layers” feel very one-sided. The executive gains synthesized information and faster decision-making, but what do the employees get? Do junior and mid-career folks get better mentoring and coaching? I don’t think so. Collapsing the layers might be good for the bottom line, but is it good for people?

[blog] Figma’s woes compound with Claude Design. There is something fascinating about how frontier labs can reset product expectations overnight. The cost of entering new segments keeps dropping, which makes the world uncertain for SaaS companies and startups alike. This feels like a concrete example of the agentic shift playing out in real time.

[blog] DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price. Open-weight models just continue to improve. Simon Willison’s breakdown highlights the focus on efficiency here, not just raw capability. It may soon be possible to run frontier-class models on high-end home hardware, and that changes everything about who gets access.

[article] This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men. We are living in a world where we have to assume that the content we are viewing is AI-generated. I think we should focus our efforts on tools that allow people to certify their content is real rather than trying to watermark AI content. The conversation around AI and creative authenticity is only going to get louder.

[article] I’ve been using “Ask Maps,” and it has forever changed Google Maps for me. I used the new Ask Maps feature extensively on my last trip and it felt like magic. Natural language queries against a map database is exactly the kind of AI application that just works, no prompt engineering required.

[article] You Should Have Exactly 3 Pairs of Headphones. Here’s Why. I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Beats for workouts, AirPods Pro for every day, and AirPods Max for travel. The right tool for the right job applies to audio gear too.

A cinematic, retro-futuristic illustration of a high-tech developer workspace with a floating command-line interface, AI nodes, and glowing wireless earbuds.

Reading List #3

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

Today’s reading list is a mix of practical AI implementation, terminal tooling, and a glimpse into the future of human-computer interaction. It’s fascinating to see how quickly the conversation is shifting from “what can AI do?” to “how do we actually use this stuff?”

[article] You can now easily call LLMs from your messaging engine. Should you?. Richard Seroter provides a really nice walkthrough on adding LLMs to Pub/Sub in Google Cloud. It’s a great example of bringing AI directly to the data pipeline.

[tool] Make Tmux Pretty and Usable. Tmux is pretty great, although I prefer Zellij. This article still gives you a bunch of solid tips on making Tmux useful and nice to look at if it’s your multiplexer of choice.

[article] Duolingo CEO Says They’ve Stopped Tracking Employees’ AI Use for Performance Reviews. Employees aren’t stupid. They understand that the adoption of AI and all its ability to increase productivity does nothing for them individually. There is no incentive, and that is why we keep seeing stories like this pop up.

[article] AirPods Pro 3 may let you talk to Siri without actually saying a word. This would be so cool. I remember this concept from the first time I read the Ender’s Game series when the characters could talk with AI systems through subvocalizations.

[article] 8 Tips for Writing Agent Skills. Writing skills is easy, but writing effective skills is much harder. My colleague Philipp has some great advice on how to craft instructions that agents will actually follow, which is a topic I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about recently.

A glowing terminal window overlapping with a polished desktop environment.

Reading List #2

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

Today’s reading list is dominated by the rapid evolution of AI tooling and the real-world implications of deployed models. It is a reminder that while the underlying models are improving, the interface layer and security guarantees are where the real battles are being fought.

[article] AI images are now being abused to fake evidence for vehicle insurance fraud. We have spent so much time as an industry trying to add watermarks like SynthID to AI generated images, but I think we are looking at this backwards. Instead of trying to mark what is fake, we need to focus on building cryptographic guarantees that prove an image is actually real.

[release] Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic Coding Power, Now Open to All. My feed has been flooded with people talking about this new open weight model and its agentic capabilities. I need to carve out some time this weekend to pull it down and see how it performs in my own local setup, especially as the agentic shift continues to accelerate.

[article] OpenAI’s Big Codex Update Is a Direct Shot At Claude Code. I haven’t spent much time in Codex lately, but this update has some genuinely interesting features. It is fascinating to watch the major players trade blows in the AI coding space, pushing the entire ecosystem forward in the process.

[release] The Gemini App Is Now on Mac. While I spend a lot of my time in the terminal with Gemini CLI, having Gemini as a native desktop experience right on my Mac is a massive quality of life improvement. It keeps you in the flow, and I can’t wait to see where the team takes the integration next.

An overhead view of a wooden desk with a notebook, coffee mug, and phone showing a reading list.

Reading List #1

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

Two things collided this week. I have been trying to push myself toward a daily posting streak, the kind of constraint that forces you to write before you feel ready. And I have been reading Richard Seroter’s daily reading lists every morning for months, quietly admiring the discipline of the format. Today those two things became one experiment.

So here is the first one. The shape is borrowed shamelessly from Seroter: a short, opinionated tour through whatever caught my attention in the last day or two of reading, mostly sourced from my Readwise pile. Some days the picks will feel coherent. Other days, like today, they will be all over the map. That is part of the point.

[blog] I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack. Steve Hanov makes a startlingly good case for SQLite-first, Go over Python, and a $5 VPS instead of AWS. This is such good advice that it is making me seriously rethink how I deploy some of my hobby projects.

[article] Why Weekends Are Under Threat. The framing of the weekend as a network-effect technology is worth the read on its own. I think we have all been feeling this drift. Phones started the trend in some ways, and agents are going to make it worse.

[article] 5G From the Sky, New Internet Infrastructure Takes Flight. Sceye’s stratospheric balloons aim to live in the gap between Starlink and terrestrial cell towers. I recently wrote about my experience with Starlink Mini on a road trip, and I am excited to see real competition emerge in this layer of the stack.

[article] ‘It Feels as if I’ve Made a New Best Friend’, My Experiment With AI Journalling. I have played around with AI journalling inside Obsidian, but I have not tried Mindsera or Rosebud. I like that we are seeing new ways of interacting with AI and text, not just chat windows.

[article] Chrome Now Lets You Turn AI Prompts Into Repeatable ‘Skills’. I think Skills in Chrome is going to be really useful. I have been developing a growing library of Skills for other agents, and I would love to have them available in the browser too.

[blog] Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers (2008). I managed a compiler team once, though I was never a compiler engineer myself. Posts like this make me think it might be time to revisit that space.

[article] California Ghost-Gun Bill Wants 3D Printers To Play Cop, EFF Says. I do not think this kind of legislation can succeed if we use the same model we used with copy machines and currency. 3D printing is a different beast, and it needs different solutions.

A mixed-media illustration of a double-necked electric guitar with glowing microtonal frets, set against sound waves that shift from orderly blue patterns to chaotic warm-colored interference patterns.

Temperature 1.0

Allen Hutchison3 Comments

I subscribe to a lot of music channels on YouTube, and last week every single one of them started talking about the same band at the same time. Not a slow build, not one creator picking up on another’s video. It was like a switch flipped. Two masked figures in black-and-white polka-dot costumes, performing on KEXP, playing music that sounded like it had arrived from a parallel universe where Western tuning never became the standard. The band is called Angine de Poitrine, and their live session has racked up over six million views. I sat there watching, grinning like an idiot, thinking: this is what temperature 1.0 sounds like.

If you work with large language models, you know what that means. The temperature parameter controls randomness in a model’s output. At temperature 0, you get the safest, most predictable token every time. The writing is competent and completely forgettable. Crank it to 1.0 and you get something wilder, less expected, sometimes brilliant, sometimes incoherent, but never boring. Most production systems run somewhere around 0.7, which is the sweet spot for “creative but not too creative.” It’s also, increasingly, the setting our entire culture seems to be tuned to.

The Median is Everywhere

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how our culture has been drifting toward monoculture for a long time, and AI is accelerating the trend. Language models are prediction engines. Left to their defaults, they produce the statistically most likely next token, the most average, most expected version of whatever you ask for. I argued that the writer’s job is to pull the output toward the edges, to resist the gravitational pull of the median.

But it’s not just writing. The flattening is everywhere. Algorithmic recommendation systems optimize for engagement, which in practice means optimizing for familiarity. Spotify’s Discover Weekly is tuned to give you something new that sounds enough like what you already listen to that you won’t skip it. Netflix thumbnails are A/B tested into oblivion. Even the indie coffee shop down the street has the same reclaimed wood and Edison bulbs as every other indie coffee shop in every other city, because the same Pinterest boards and Instagram algorithms surfaced the same aesthetic to the same demographic worldwide.

We are living at temperature 0.7, and I think people can feel it.

Something Between the Notes

Which is why Angine de Poitrine hit so hard. Everything about them resists categorization.

Start with the instrument. Khn de Poitrine plays a custom double-necked hybrid, a guitar and bass separately wired, each fitted with additional microtonal frets. It was custom-built by a local luthier in Saguenay, Quebec. Western music divides the octave into 12 equal steps. Microtonal music lives in the spaces between those steps, the quarter tones and third tones that are standard in Indian, Arabic, Turkish, and Indonesian traditions but almost unheard of in Western rock. When you listen to Angine de Poitrine, the notes themselves are literally between the notes your ear expects. The music is operating outside the grid.

Then there’s the visual identity. In an era of algorithmic personal branding, where artists are coached to show their faces, share their stories, and build parasocial relationships with their audiences, these two perform behind oversized papier-mâché masks. They go by pseudonyms. Their website states plainly that “any speculation regarding the identity of its members is unverified, not endorsed by the group, and could constitute an invasion of privacy.” They’ve stripped away every signal the recommendation engine uses to sort and categorize. No faces, no backstory, no brand. Just the music and the performance.

And the performance is unhinged. Their KEXP session is part math-rock concert, part absurdist theater, part fever dream. It shouldn’t work. It’s too weird, too dense, too far from anything the algorithm would select as “likely to engage.” And yet six million people watched it and couldn’t look away.

The Joke That Wasn’t Random

Here’s the part that matters most to me. Angine de Poitrine formed in 2019 as a practical joke. The two musicians were booked to perform twice in one week at the same local venue in Saguenay, so they put on masks and polka-dot costumes for the second show as a gag. But the people behind those masks have been musical collaborators for two decades, performing together in various projects since they were 13 years old. By the time the KEXP camera pointed at them, the craft underneath the joke was deep and undeniable.

This is the part that connects to something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Virality looks like luck from the outside. But what looks like a random spike is almost always preparation meeting a moment. These two spent twenty years building a musical vocabulary together, absorbing microtonal traditions from around the world, developing the kind of telepathic interplay that only comes from thousands of hours of shared performance. The band name was a joke. The musicianship was not.

Temperature 1.0 output only works when the model has been well-trained. Randomness without depth is just noise. What makes Angine de Poitrine compelling isn’t that they’re weird. It’s that they’re weird and masterful. The strangeness is intentional, controlled, the product of two people who know exactly what they’re doing and have chosen to do something no algorithm would have predicted.

The Hunger

I think the six million views aren’t an accident, and they aren’t just the novelty of funny masks. I think people are hungry. We scroll through feeds that have been optimized to show us what we’ll tolerate, and we’ve started to notice the sameness. When something comes along that is genuinely, irreducibly different, something that can’t be reduced to a Spotify genre tag or an engagement metric, it cuts through the noise like a signal from another frequency entirely.

Angine de Poitrine didn’t optimize for the algorithm. They built a custom instrument, put on masks, and played music that exists in the spaces between the notes the Western world agreed on centuries ago. And the world responded not in spite of how strange they are, but because of it.

Maybe the lesson is simple. In a culture tuned to 0.7, the thing that breaks through is the thing running at 1.0. But only if the model behind it has been trained for twenty years.