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I took an amazing trip to SE Asia last month, including Angkor Wat. I had a hard time finding good reading or other resources to learn from before I went, in part because Amazon is awash in AI garbage. Here’s some books and podcasts I found useful about the Khmer empire in general and Angkor in particular: Ancient Angkor by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques. The closest thing to a coffee-table book to preview what you will see. The practical information is outdated but the pictures and descriptions are good. Empire Podcast #185: The God Kings of Angkor Wat by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. An entertaining and fully detailed account of the Khmer empire. It’s basically an excerpt from Dalrymple’s new book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. Fall of Civilizations Podcast #5: The Khmer Empire by Paul Cooper. Another history, not quite as magically well told as Dalrymple but full of good information. Angkor and the Khmer Civilization by Michael D. Coe. A highly recommended history of the Khmer region. Honestly I found this very dry and too detailed, but I did learn from it. Lonely Planet Pocket Guide: Siem Reap & the Temples of Angkor. We didn’t use this much but it seemed like a useful practical guide. OTOH it dates to 2018 so things have changed. My other advice for visiting Siem Reap and Angkor is: go. It is amazing. Plan for at least two full days of touristing there. Hire a private guide and driver if you can, it is absolutely worth it. (Email me for a recommendation.)
I’ve been doing Dry January this year. One thing I missed was something for apéro hour, a beverage to mark the start of the evening. Something complex and maybe bitter, not like a drink you’d have with lunch. I found some good options. Ghia sodas are my favorite. Ghia is an NA apéritif based on grape juice but with enough bitterness (gentian) and sourness (yuzu) to be interesting. You can buy a bottle and mix it with soda yourself but I like the little cans with extra flavoring. The Ginger and the Sumac & Chili are both great. Another thing I like are low-sugar fancy soda pops. Not diet drinks, they still have a little sugar, but typically 50 calories a can. De La Calle Tepache is my favorite. Fermented pineapple is delicious and they have some fun flavors. Culture Pop is also good. A friend gave me the Zero book, a drinks cookbook from the fancy restaurant Alinea. This book is a little aspirational but the recipes are doable, it’s just a lot of labor. Very fancy high end drink mixing, really beautiful flavor ideas. The only thing I made was their gin substitute (mostly junipers extracted in glycerin) and it was too sweet for me. Need to find the right use for it, a martini definitely ain’t it. An easier homemade drink is this Nonalcoholic Dirty Lemon Tonic. It’s basically a lemonade heavily flavored with salted preserved lemons, then mixed with tonic. I love the complexity and freshness of this drink and enjoy it on its own merits. Finally, non-alcoholic beer has gotten a lot better in the last few years thanks to manufacturing innovations. I’ve been enjoying NA Black Butte Porter, Stella Artois 0.0, Heineken 0.0. They basically all taste just like their alcoholic uncles, no compromise. One thing to note about non-alcoholic substitutes is they are not cheap. They’ve become a big high end business. Expect to pay the same for an NA drink as one with alcohol even though they aren’t taxed nearly as much.
The Trump administration has made aggressive threats against immigrants in the US. It’s not clear what’s coming, my biggest fear is a violent display of fascism. (Don’t call them camps!) But even if it’s a polite legal process it will be chaotic and disruptive to many neighbors. Back in 2018 I donated reactively to the Trump administration’s cruelty to immigrant families. This time I’m trying to get ahead of it. The need for the money is now, no matter what happens it is going to be a bad few years for immigrants in the US. To that end I asked on Metafilter about charities to donate to. I got back a remarkable reply listing 18 charities that all have some California focus. I donated to most of them. I want to highlight two groups in particular. One is RAICES. They work in Texas, not California, but they are well organized and effective. The other is KIND. They have a simple mission. They try to ensure every unaccompanied minor has legal representation in immigration court (something not guaranteed.) The other groups on the list are all also deserving of consideration.
LLMs are good search helpers. Here’s three search tools I use every day. All of these use an AI to synthesize answers but also provide an essential feature: specific web search results for you to verify and further research. I use these for conversational inquiries in addition to more traditional keyword searches. Phind is an excellent free LLM + search engine. The AI writes an answer to your query but is very careful to provide footnotes to a web-search-like list of links on the right. I use this mostly for directed search queries, things like “what’s an inexpensive TV streaming device?” where I might have used keyword search too. The Llama-70b LLM that powers the free version is quite good, sometimes I have general conversations with it or ask it to generate code. Bing CoPilot has a very similar output result to Phind. I find it a little less useful and the search result links are less prominent. But it’s a good second opinion. Bing has been a very good search engine for 10+ years, I’m grateful to Microsoft for continuing to invest in it. CoPilot results are sometimes volunteered on the main Bing page but you often have to click to get to the ChatGPT 4 Turbo enhanced pages. Kagi is what I use as my general search engine, my Google replacement. It mostly gives traditional keyword search results but sometimes it will volunteer a “Quick Answer” where Claude 3 Haiku synthesizes an answer with references. You can also request one. I think Phind and CoPilot do a better job but I appreciate when Kagi intercepts a keyword search I did and just gives me the right answer. Google has tried various versions of LLM-enhancement in search, I think the current version is called AI Overviews. It’s not bad but it’s also not as good as the others. Not mentioned here: ChatGPT or Claude. Those are general purpose LLMs but they don’t really give search results or specific references. In the old days they’d make up URLs if you asked but that’s improving.
8BitDo makes good game controllers. A wide variety of styles from retro to mainstream, with some unusual shapes. And wide compatibility with various systems: PC, Macs, Switch, Android. They’re well built, work right, and quite inexpensive. A far cry from the MadCatz-style junk we used to get. The new hotness is the Ultimate 2C, an Xbox-style wireless controller for the very low price of $30. But it works great, doesn’t feel cheap at all. The fancier mainstream choice is the Ultimate 2.4g at $50 which includes a charging stand and extra reprogrammability. But what’s really interesting to me are the odd layouts, often small or retro. The SN30 Pro is particularly interesting as a portable controller. SNES-styling but a full XBox style modern controller with two analog sticks, easy to throw in a suitcase. There’s a lot of fiddly details for this class of device. Controller type (XInput, DInput, switch, etc), wireless interface (Bluetooth or proprietary), etc. 8BitDo makes good choices and implementations for all that stuff I’ve tested. They seem to work well with Steam. They’re a popular brand so well tested. It helps that PC game controllers have mostly standardized around the Xbox layout and XInput. Steam can patch over any rough spots for older games.
More in programming
This post was previously published through my newsletter on October 19, 2026. From time to time, I will republish newsletter issues on my blog here if I think people (and search engines) might benefit from it. If you want to read everything I’ve written once it is posted, I recommend signing up for the newsletter. For the last 5-6 years or so, I’ve been talking about, teaching and helping teams implement contract testing on a regular basis. To make that more concrete: at the moment, I’m having ongoing conversations with four different potential clients about helping them in some way with their contract testing implementation, and so far, I’ve run my contract testing workshop four times this year. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you when I say that I really like the concept of contract testing as a means of addressing integration testing challenges in distributed software systems. However, no matter if I’m speaking, teaching or implementing contract testing, certain challenges almost always come up at some point, and I want to highlight some of those today. Understanding the concept of contract testing First of all, it often takes people a while to understand the concept of contract testing, especially when they’re used to what I call the ‘traditional’ approach to integration testing: deploying the systems and services in scope to a shared testing environment and then testing them ‘as a whole’. Of course, the more distributed your system and your development process is, and the higher the deployment frequency, the more complex and the slower this integration testing approach is going to be. The premise behind contract testing is to break that integration testing puzzle down into small chunks of individual consumer-provider pairs, and then test the integration between those two in an asynchronous manner. By asynchronous, I mean that there is no need to deploy consumer and provider into a shared environment; both parties perform their part of the process in their own, local development environment. This means you can detect potential integration issues before you deploy, instead of stumbling onto them after you do so. This makes contract testing (or contract-based integration testing, to use its proper name) a significantly different approach to integration testing compared to the more ‘traditional’ approach. In my experience, it usually takes people time to wrap their head around how the process actually works, which steps you should take and in which order, and what you (do not yet) know after each step. It often takes going through several contract testing cycles before people start to ‘get it’. That’s not their fault, that is to be expected, since the contract-based approach to integration testing is, again, quite different from what they’ve been doing for so long. To better cater to this, I redesigned my contract testing workshop a year and a half or so ago. It is now a full-day workshop (half a day is simply too short), and I take much smaller steps and repeat them more often. From what I see, this has led to a better understanding of the concepts with my audience, and that’s the whole point. Contract testing === Pact I’ve talked to quite a few teams that had heard of contract testing somewhere, decided that that was the way out of their integration testing problems, and then immediately started writing contract tests with Pact. Understandable, because Pact is a very useful, very powerful and very popular tool, plus, it’s open source, which makes it easy for teams to get started. Often, they skipped a step in the process. Pact is very much a consumer-driven contract testing tool by nature, and while consumer-driven contract testing is the richest and most powerful of the different approaches to contract testing, it is not necessarily the best fit for every team and every context. It’s a classic example of using the wrong tool for the problem at hand, because they didn’t take enough time looking at the problem and the available solutions. That’s not the problem of Pact, even though it is often framed that way (‘Pact didn’t solve my problems, therefore Pact is not a good tool’). That’s a ‘we didn’t fully understand the problem and the context’ problem. Contract testing removes the need for communication Another challenge that I often see when I talk about or help teams with contract testing is the fact that teams don’t talk to each other. This then leads to integration issues, because team A expects something from team B that team B doesn’t supply. Contract testing is not the solution to these problems. It can’t be - tools alone do not solve problems, let alone communication problems. What contract testing does do is make potential integration issues visible early on in the development process, often earlier than (again) more ‘traditional’ approaches to integration testing. That’s where the value of contract testing can be found. It is not a means to replace communication between teams. In fact, and this is especially true for consumer-driven contract testing, contract testing cannot succeed without good communication between consumer and provider teams. Contract testing replaces all other types of integration testing This one comes up less often than it used to, but sometimes, I still hear people saying that when they will have contract-based integration tests in place, they don’t need other types of integration tests anymore - including E2E tests. That’s simply not true. While contract testing is a great way to find out earlier about the impact of a change in a specific consumer or provider further downstream, in many cases, I wouldn’t rely on these tests alone before moving to production. Because of its asynchronous nature, contract-based integration testing only verifies whether a consumer and a provider speak the same language - can a consumer understand the message returned by a provider in a specific situation? It does not verify that the request or the response message reaches the other party in the first place, for example. In other words, it doesn’t test connectivity between a consumer and a provider. And because integration testing is broken down into individual consumer-provider pairs, you don’t see the entire system working ‘as a whole’. This means you might want to keep a few end-to-end tests in place, even when you’ve got good contract testing coverage across the board. The above is not a complete list of challenges with contract testing, but the ones I mentioned here are those that come up most often.
Have you seen this? If you haven't, you should. I think everyone needs to. Wealth inequality on a scale this extreme is almost impossible to explain. You have to experience it to understand. Go ahead. Try it out. Where is the top of this graph? Good question. Keep
Slop is without a doubt everywhere. Be it in restaurant’s menus, music playlists, or online game storefronts, it is now impossible to escape it. Yet, I’ve never met anyone who was actually looking forward to consuming that. No matter how hard it’s shoved down our throats, the human longing to connect with other people through art still remains. Raymond Kotewicz They will not let you filter A simple solution would be to have slop filters. Automatically label AI-generated trash, and let users hide it if they don’t want to see it. So far, I don’t think any of the major internet platforms has implemented this. The common excuse for why they don’t let you easily filter out slop is that it would be technically too difficult. Let me be clear with everyone here: this is complete bullshit. We’re talking about companies that can hire some of the most talented engineers in the world. I don’t think anyone seriously believes they can’t come up with a way to guess if a file has been generated by AI or not. 90% of the slop out there stands out so much everyone can see how it was made after looking at it for 5 seconds. A more plausible reason for the lack of slop filter is that they are simply testing out the waters. They are checking if users will tolerate it. The question tech executives want answered is: will people buy this garbage? And if the answer to that question is yes, here’s what they will do: they will start generating it themselves. They don’t need the useless meat proxies who think typing ten words and pressing enter makes them creative. They definitely don’t want to verse anyone royalties when they could just be making a one time purchase of tokens. If you think this is not real, just ask Tim Sweeney. I bet he will be more than happy to confirm. Roman Navarro Curation by humans for humans So now that it’s clear that tech companies will not save us from drowning in slop, it’s time to turn back to actual humans instead. The good news is they are a lot of people who are here to help you. There are thousands of people on the internet who will search through mountains of content to find the perfect piece of art they want to share with the world. We don’t explicitly call them curators. They are streamers, bloggers, journalists, DJs, overly enthusiast fans, or simply your friends. Some of those people are seriously amazing. There are DJs out there who will spend thousands of hours digging through crates to craft you the perfect ninety minutes of music. Why do you still need those machine-generated playlists? The alternative to blindly trusting the output of a recommendation algorithm isn’t always to become an expert in every field of art. Sometimes you just have to put the trust you had in a machine back into another person. Back to the real world? The real long term solution would be to stop relying only on the internet for distribution. This is already a thing in the music industry. Every city has a record shop that will sell you a carefully selected set of vinyls. For many musicians, physical sales (and concerts) are a much better source of income than streaming. The same goes for the movie. While text-to-video AI is a thing, the real money isn’t made by generating 30 second TikTok dramas. The real money comes from people paying tickets to see a full-length movie in a theater. Sadly I’m not too optimistic about my own field: video games. Somehow it seems the direction we’ve taken is the opposite. We’re all in on online distributions platforms. We have fully accepted them as our new digital overlords. Next month GTA V is coming out without a disk in the box. Sony already announced that the next Playstation will not support physical media. Physical distribution is not even mentioned in the pitch of the average indie publisher. In Breda, the small Dutch city where I live, we used to have two dedicated video games shop. Higher interests rates, expensive rents, and various policy failures have done their jobs: they are both closed. I don’t think this is a good sign for the survivability of the gaming industry.
Understanding how assigning anthropomorphic traits to agents can improve their effectiveness and interaction.
