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Alasdair Allan

@alasdairallan.com
1.5K followers 157 following 375 posts

Scientist, author, hacker, maker, and journalist. Writes, speaks, and builds. An accidental privacy advocate.

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 18/07/2026
In 1988 a company that made record turntables built its own CPU, because it hated its factory software. It failed. Every one of those ideas ships today. Hardware memory safety. Garbage collection in silicon. Persistent objects. Chips shaped to a workload. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/07/18/t...
negroniventurestudios.com
The computer at the bottom of a canal
Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a proce...
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 12/06/2026
Vera now has a language (LSP) server, so it gets the same editor support as any other language. A normal one checks whether your code parses. Vera's also checks whether it still proves, every contract re-verified by Z3 as you type. veralang.dev #AI #LLM
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 09/06/2026
"A Distribution of One," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. App releases are surging but downloads are flat. The industry sees failure. I don't think so. Most of those apps were never looking for an audience. That was the point. #SaaS #AI negroniventurestudios.com/2026/06/09/a...
negroniventurestudios.com
A distribution of one
Most of the software being built right now will never have more than one user. The industry thinks that is a failure. I think it is the entire point; and that it signals the end of the fifty-year comp...
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 27/05/2026
"It Wasn't Built for This," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. GitHub built Copilot. Copilot drove agent adoption. Agent adoption broke GitHub. The feedback loop nobody wants to talk about. #GitHub #AI #Copilot negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/27/i...
negroniventurestudios.com
It wasn’t built for this
GitHub’s platform uptime over the last 90 days is 86.98%. That is not a typo. Marek Šuppa, who built an independent tracker because GitHub stopped publishing aggregate uptime numbers on its own status...
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 20/05/2026
Announcing agentlanguages.dev, a community-edited catalogue of the 21 programming languages designed for AI agents to emerge since late 2025. The most interesting thing to emerge? They fall into three philosophical camps that disagree on the underlying problem. #AI #LLM
agentlanguages.dev
agentlanguages.dev — Programming languages designed for AI agents to write
A community-edited catalogue of programming languages designed for AI agents to author code, organised around three philosophical camps: syntactic, verification, and orchestration.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 20/05/2026
"Three camps alike in dignity," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Seventeen languages for AI agents. Three diagnosis camps. One field that didn't exist six months ago. I built one of them and went looking for the others. #AI #ProgrammingLanguages #Vera negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/20/t...
negroniventurestudios.com
Three camps alike in dignity
In the last six months, programming languages designed for models rather than humans have started to appear. Work on most began entirely independently, initiated by people who had never heard of each ...
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 19/05/2026
"Documentation-First Programming," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. If AI writes the code, what does the human write? The part of the job most developers hate has now become the whole job. #LLM #AI #Documentation negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/19/d...
negroniventurestudios.com
Documentation-first programming
I find it somewhat ironic that the part of the job that most developers hate is about to become the whole job. Because, at least as far as I can figure out, we are now in the era of documentation-firs...
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Reposted by Alasdair Allan
.Astronomy @dotastro.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
Know someone who should come to a future #dotastro event? Use our nomination form here anytime: dotastronomy.com/nominate
dotastronomy.com
Nominate Someone for .Astronomy — .Astronomy
Know someone who would be great at .Astronomy? Tell us about them.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 09/04/2026
Expanded the Vera benchmark to 6 models, 3 providers. Kimi K2.5 got every Vera problem right while only managing 86% in Python and 91% in TypeScript. Flagship average Vera and Python level at 93%. Yet there is no Vera in their training data, no examples on GitHub or Stack Overflow. veralang.dev #AI
VeraBench v0.0.7 benchmark results across four panels. Flagship tier: Kimi K2.5 scores 100% run_correct on Vera versus 86% Python and 91% TypeScript; Claude Opus 4 scores 88% Vera, 96% Python, 96% TypeScript; GPT-4.1 scores 91% Vera, 96% Python, 96% TypeScript. Sonnet tier: Kimi K2 Turbo scores 83% Vera, 83% Python, 79% TypeScript; Claude Sonnet 4 scores 79% Vera, 96% Python, 88% TypeScript; GPT-4o scores 78% Vera, 93% Python, 83% TypeScript. A horizontal bar chart shows Kimi K2.5 is the only flagship model where Vera beats both Python (+14pp) and TypeScript (+9pp). A fourth panel breaks out all four modes including Vera spec-from-NL, showing GPT-4.1's spec-from-NL score dropping to 50% while Kimi K2.5 holds at 100% across both Vera modes.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 29/03/2026
That's been a productive morning! github.com/aallan/vera/...
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 28/03/2026
The #Vera v0.0.101 release makes LLM calls first-class algebraic effects. An agent calling another model declares <Inference> in its type signature. Type-checked, contract-verified, every side effect explicit. As far as I know, no other language can do this! veralang.dev #AI #LLM #Programming
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 01/03/2026
I built a programming language you're not supposed to read, veralang.dev. Vera is designed for machines to write. No variable names. No style choices. Compiler errors are instructions for the model, not diagnostics for you. Go and point a model at it, negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/28/a....
veralang.dev
Vera — A language designed for machines to write
A programming language where verification is a first-class citizen. Mandatory contracts, algebraic effects, typed slot references, compiles to WebAssembly.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 18/02/2026
First signal for the end of what I’ve always called “the platform problem” for #AI. It’s not about the platform anymore, it’s about actions. It’s about AI acting, not chatting. venturebeat.com/technology/o...
venturebeat.com
OpenAI's acquisition of OpenClaw signals the beginning of the end of the ChatGPT era
The move represents OpenAI's most aggressive bet yet on the idea that the future of AI isn't about what models can say, but what they can do
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 18/02/2026
"The web just got a second audience," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Google shipped WebMCP in Chrome. Cloudflare shipped Markdown for Agents. Both quiet. Neither made the front page. But the web just forked its audience. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/18/t...
negroniventurestudios.com
The web just got a second audience
Buried in a quiet announcement on a developer mailing list at the beginning of last week was a point of inflection, the point where the web stopped being just for humans. WebMCP lets websites declare ...
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 09/02/2026
"The valley and the monomyth," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Every pitch deck is a Hero's Journey. Silicon Valley's greatest export isn't technology, nit's storytelling. The facts don't change the world. The stories do. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/09/t...
negroniventurestudios.com
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 06/02/2026
"The Ghost in the Statistical Machine," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. We anthropomorphise #AI agents, give them names, identities, "souls." If we anthropomorphise them enough, do they start acting more like us? At what point does it matter? negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/06/t...
negroniventurestudios.com
The ghost in the statistical machine
Over the last two weeks we’ve all been capitvated by Moltbook, the social network for AI agents. Moltbook is built on top of Openclaw (née Moltbot, née Clawdbot, the project so good they named it thri...
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 04/02/2026
Someone watched the Mac vs PC ads back in the day. @anthropic.com have gone on the offensive with adverts against ads, and they just buried OpenAI without even mentioning them. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia... www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBSa...
youtube.com
How can I communicate better with my mom?
YouTube video by Anthropic
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 12/01/2026
"The new programmers? ," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. What does a programming language built for #AI look like? No syntax, no variable names, and no text, just components composed under formal contracts. Less like coding, more like hardware design. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/01/12/t...
negroniventurestudios.com
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 03/12/2025
"Technology does not solve problems," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. The best technology becomes invisible precisely because it's fundamental, it dissolves the old interaction model entirely. The worst adds friction while demanding attention. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/12/03/t...
negroniventurestudios.com
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 30/11/2025
"We need a new Turing Test," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. The real test for artificial general intelligence isn't fooling humans, it's demonstrating flexible real-world competence that our token-prediction architectures fundamentally can't deliver. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/11/30/w...
negroniventurestudios.com
We need a new Turing Test
Every time there is some sort of perceived advance towards a general artificial intelligence, we talk about it as a breakthrough, right up until we understand what it’s doing, how it’s “thinking”. The...
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 29/10/2025
AI is an assistive technology. It'll be a long time, if ever, before it's anything more than that. Anyone that tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 29/10/2025
Resurfacing something I wrote for Hackster.io last year, "Dividing the Stack into Thirds," talking about the ongoing trade wars the splintering of our global approach to technology. www.hackster.io/news/dividin...
hackster.io
Hackster.io - The community dedicated to learning hardware.
Hackster is a community dedicated to learning hardware, from beginner to pro. Share your projects and learn from other developers. Come build awesome hardware!
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 29/10/2025
"Don’t build platforms, solve problems," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. It turns out that #AI will commoditize the mediocre and automated, but amplify the value of the obsessive and hand-crafted. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/10/29/d...
negroniventurestudios.com
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 28/10/2025
On this day in 1971, the U.K. successful reached orbit using the Black Arrow launch vehicle lifting the Prospero satellite to orbit from Woomera, Australia. The U.K. remains the only country to reach orbit after already cancelling their launch programme. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_A...
en.wikipedia.org
Black Arrow - Wikipedia
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 07/10/2025
Anyone else getting nostalgia for the Nokia 3650? www.theverge.com/news/793136/...
theverge.com
Google Japan’s concept keyboard is inspired by rotary phones
Speedy touch typists might want to look away.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 23/09/2025
In Amsterdam for this year’s #thethingsconference. It’s fascinating to see how things have evolved in the LPWAN space over the last few years. It’s a very different conference than their first which one I keynoted in 2018. aallan.medium.com/teaching-a-n...
aallan.medium.com
Teaching a new dog old tricks
What the history of the Internet can teach the Internet of Things
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 13/08/2025
Oh! Now I'm interested, ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-.... I far preferred the design of the Pebble Time to the original #Pebble. Always considered the death of Pebble as a real waste of potential. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcPz...
youtube.com
Pebble Time 2 Design Reveal!
YouTube video by Tick Talk w/ Eric Migicovsky
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 05/03/2025
"Commercial fusion is now just 20 years away…" yes, for about the last 50 years. 🤦‍♂️ hackaday.com/2025/03/05/c...
hackaday.com
China Claims Commercial Nuclear Fusion By 2050 As Germany Goes Stellarator
Things are heating up in the world of nuclear fusion research, with most fundamental issues resolved and an increasing rate of announcements being made regarding commercial fusion power. China&#821…
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 27/02/2025
[Alexa] will know "almost [everything] in your life — your schedule, your smart home, your preferences, the devices you’re using, the people you’re connected [to and] the entertainment you [enjoy]…" they understand that most people don't think that's a *good* thing? techcrunch.com/2025/02/26/a...
techcrunch.com
Amazon unveils a new and improved Alexa, Alexa+ | TechCrunch
At an event in NYC, Amazon announced an upgraded Alexa experienced powered by generative AI tech.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 19/02/2025
The RP2040 has now been certified to run at a system clock of 200Mhz! See github.com/raspberrypi/....
github.com
Release 2.1.1 · raspberrypi/pico-sdk
This is a minor release of the SDK with many bug fixes and documentation improvements, along with some new features. Highlights are listed below, or you can see the full list of individual commits ...
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 19/02/2025
The only shocking thing here is that the dead carcass of the company was worth $116 million. techcrunch.com/2025/02/18/h...
techcrunch.com
Humane's AI Pin is dead, as HP buys startup's assets for $116M | TechCrunch
Humane announced on Tuesday that most of its assets have been acquired by HP for $116 million. The hardware startup is immediately discontinuing sales of
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 18/02/2025
By me for @hacksterio.bsky.social, “The return of Pebble: you can’t keep a good watch down!” Some thoughts on @ericmigi.com’s announcement and the return of #Pebble. www.hackster.io/news/the-ret...
hackster.io
The Return of Pebble: You Can't Keep a Good Watch Down!
Eight years after the demise of the both the watch, and the company behind it, the Pebble smart watch is coming back from the dead.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 11/02/2025
I genuinely sorta scared about what Apple is going to do to my favourite image editor. The precedent of the Dark Sky weather app fiasco looms large. www.macrumors.com/2025/02/11/a...
macrumors.com
Apple Completes Pixelmator Acquisition
Pixelmator last year announced that it was being acquired by Apple, and today the company confirmed that the acquisition has been completed after...
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 11/02/2025
About a decade ago I talked about what I called at the time capable computing, that is to say, computing that is “good enough," aallan.medium.com/capable-comp....
aallan.medium.com
Capable Computing
Computing that is good enough.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 11/02/2025
The problem with asking successful people about how to get to where they are now is that how to get where they are has inevitably changed since they did it. You almost certainly can't do what they did, and end up in the same place. That's just not how the world works any more.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 04/02/2025
Stumbled across this piece by Wil Schroter. Was absolutely fascinated, because he's right. Doesn't matter whether you're working a job, freelancing, or building a startup. Plenty of people will encourage you to start, nobody will tell you when to stop. fortune.com/2025/02/03/s...
fortune.com
I had a VC-funded unicorn-in-the-making and I messed it up—here's how
I was humiliated. I had nothing but success in my previous ventures, and this was a very public failure. Now I barely remember it.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 28/01/2025
Pretty much what Jenson said during his #CES2025 keynote, although I'm guessing they were expecting a bit more lead time before we saw something like #DeepSeek. Whatever nutty thing the stock market is doing, this doesn't hurt #NVIDIA.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 27/01/2025
So $NVDA is down 11%. What do people think Deepseek-r1 was trained on? It was trained on GPUs, probably grey market unacknowledged NVIDIA GPU. 🙄
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 07/01/2025
In the queue for the kick off keynote of #CES2025. The experience reminds me of a Jobs era keynote at WWDC. It seems Jensen Huang is the new Jobs, and NVIDIA is the new Apple?
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 06/01/2025
One of my favourite demos from CES Unveiled last night at #CES2025 was the Holobox by Holoconnects, www.holoconnects.com. Using a live video feed that is projected onto a transparent screen and a light box, giving the illusion that the person in the feed is three dimensional.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 05/01/2025
Fascinating to see evolution for the humble robotic vacuum. I think we're going to see people trying to hack this one pretty soon after it's generally available, there's a lot of use cases for a relatively cheap robot platform with an arm. #CES2025 techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/r...
techcrunch.com
Roborock's Roomba competitor gets a robot arm | TechCrunch
iRobot’s ongoing financial crisis aside, the world of robot vacuums is still humming along. At CES Sunday, Roborock announced the Saros Z70. The Roomba
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 20/12/2024
Platform problem. This is the platform problem all over. 🙄
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 19/12/2024
This👇. The other 50% is telling people not to reuse their passwords between sites.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 18/12/2024
You have to love the architecture of downtown Chicago.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 17/12/2024
So. If you’re doing media things at #CES2025. Maybe don’t leave it till Thursday? Most of us fly in early for the weekend media events and then leave early, before the show is over. I’m not going to be there Thursday! 🤷‍♂️ #subtweet
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 16/12/2024
If you missed my talk back in November in London when I talked about the new attack surfaces opened up by Machine Learning models and AI at the edge, it's now been thrown it up on the YouTubes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=llQu...
youtube.com
Dr Alasdair Allan, Consultant & Journalist
YouTube video by Cyber News Group Conferences
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 16/12/2024
They also usually boarded out, with power and lights, and sometimes even heating, with a door that seals properly. Where as British garages are usually just concrete blocks, and you're lucky if there's a power socket, and the door lets in the wind and the leaves.
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 12/12/2024
For the first time in very long time indeed, I have achieved inbox zero! 📭
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 05/12/2024
Cores are the new MHz? @jeffgeerling.com isn't wrong! www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05O...
youtube.com
CPU Cores are the new Megahertz
YouTube video by Jeff Geerling
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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 03/12/2024
Documentation isn't my day job any more, but the proposal for an "llm.txt" file by @howard.fm sort of feels like one of those points of inflection we're always talking about, llmstxt.org.
llmstxt.org
The /llms.txt file – llms-txt
A proposal to standardise on using an /llms.txt file to provide information to help LLMs use a website at inference time.
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