iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 24/09/2026

Correct. The way I think of it at the moment is the "blast radius" of checking responsibility. Server-side > Front-end. Touches the database / user information needs proper diligence. UI tweaks less so.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 24/09/2026

We need to figure out what the standard of professional diligence is with using coding agents. It'll land somewhere between "read every line" and prompting "find bugs, fix. try hard", but where?

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 24/09/2026

Weird, that's the interface for reverting an automatic correction! You don't need to press an autocorrect suggestion anymore, it just does it. I guess c/v and l/o are near each other on the keyboard, so might be an easy slip of the fingers on mobile.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 24/09/2026

Looking at the screenshot did you not type the one with the typo and it autocorrected? On my phone the little undo arrow is to revert to the thing that you typed, not suggest a correction. E.g on purpose typo in my screenshot.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 23/09/2026

Mind that the galleries and national museum are free, so you can go in for a quick wander and see if anything catches your eye!

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Reposted by Jamie McHale

Glasgow JavaScript Meetup @glasgowjs.org · 15/09/2026

And now Vidhya talking about CSS logical properties.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 15/09/2026

Hosting this tonight - glad to be back from the summer break. Thanks to Waracle for supporting our next season of talks!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 11/09/2026

Went through to Tectonic night summit in Glasgow yesterday. Really nice to see lots of folks I know. Catching up about work, projects and telling folks about my research into opportunities with @standingwire.com

Main hall of tectonic with guests in purple light

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 10/09/2026

I'm keen to understand if the information I'm providing for felling and woodland creation sites would also be useful for people assessing land opportunities? I also have an indicative value for conifer woodlands that could be of use?

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 10/09/2026

I've improved the data on the felling index, so in addition to details from the register, we include restocking information from the PDF, and add in local info such as SSSIs, Plant Health Notices and Soil Type. The @standingwire.com account will post update graphics for every application change

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 10/09/2026

I’ll be heading through to this tonight - if you are going then give me a shout!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 30/08/2026

Just about a year ago H was pacing the car park of the maternity unit listening to the Waterboys, waiting for Rory to arrive. Yesterday eve we went out to see them live in Glasgow. Been a bit of a year, but lovely to bookend it with this! Looking forward to celebrating the wee guy today!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 29/08/2026

Just had to use the new ScotRail app for the first time. It doesn’t have the functionality or the usability of the old one. Why did they release this?!?

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 28/08/2026

I did not find an alternative. I stopped using the Toggl Raycast integration which was a shame. I actually plan and track via Sunsama now with a toggl integration. It’s just frustrating when I have to step outside or fix the workflow.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 26/08/2026

They once bought me a curry in a dodgy part of San Francisco. 🥘

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 24/08/2026

John Lewis Cafe has a great view!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 22/08/2026

Many advantages that also fortunately coincide with things I like to do!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 22/08/2026

This is exactly why we bought ours. Partner needs the car for her commute, I have the bike for nursery runs and shopping.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 21/08/2026

Yeah, it was the heaviest load I’d had on it. I was mostly worried about roots and rocks. Still, great to be out on it. Opens up a bunch of possibilities!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 20/08/2026

Posted a few photos and the route of a cycle-camping trip from Edinburgh to Pillars of Hercules campsite in Fife. Went out on our new cargo e-bike, first camping trip for our eldest. It was fun and tiring! www.jamiemchale.com/journal/pill...

jamiemchale.com

Pillars of Hercules

Personal website of Jamie McHale - freelance web developer, host of Scottish JavaScript meetups, keen runner, reader and photographer

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 20/08/2026

Reading I like 'em thick, and thought of this thread. open.substack.com/pub/experime...

The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, when people will stop looking at anything made by humans and only look at things made by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet? Do the models need another million tokens? Are we still looking for the right prompts? Or could it be that we are attempting to mass-produce something that cannot be mass-produced?

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 17/08/2026

For STC, not yet. I do have a Patreon account. Think I’m going to move to Stripe for supporters. Been working on the jobs board instead recently

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 13/08/2026

Just posted a link to this into the #jobs channel 🙌

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

The view on Blackford Hill this evening for the eclipse

View through eclipse glasses showing a small orange dot of the sun

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

And sure I guess you didn’t mention sources directly, others in the thread did. But doing the reading, discussion of veracity implies you value checking things.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

You were replying to me! I don’t think you owe me anything but why bother unless you wanted to spend a bit of time?

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

Also kinda weird that one of your arguments is to check the sources directly and you didn't bother to look at my website to validate your claim about writing style!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

well thanks for determining the state of my critical faculties!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

I have a website that you can read my writing for the past ten year or so if you want to confirm. I'm pretty sure this has always been my style. And yes, I just read but I like to find out things as I'm reading. I think the "brain melt" takes are pretty extreme! No ack that LLMs can be useful.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

You mean now? No. I usually get output that either pushes back on a point I make and/or gives me some sources to look over with a short summary at the top.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

Why can I use my uniqueness of perception to critically use LLM output?

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

One of the first I listed!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

Yes, a little. I usually direct my LLMs to give me opposing viewpoints. Accuracy can be thought of as a reasonable opinion a human might hold in these cases, right?

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

I've been working on the @scottishtechnology.club Jobs board. Importing from some local employers automatically now. Approved a bunch of (backdated) jobs this morning: www.scottishtechnology.club/jobs

scottishtechnology.club

Jobs - Scottish Technology Club

Tech jobs across Scotland — engineering, data, product and design roles, updated weekly on the Scottish Technology Club jobs board.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

faith? - I'm not claiming to be the best and the brightest, but I read a fair amount, have academic qualifications, and use AI for work. So on both the "does this make sense to me" and "how does AI act in a subject area I'm an expert in" I think my assessment has a reasonable grounding

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

Sure, it gave references and sounded pretty plausible for the discussion. I guess there is a risk of hallucination, but the time invested/learning risk tradeoff seems reasonable to me (and will likely only get better as the tools improve).

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

Do you think that my appreciation of the book was helped or hindered by these queries to AI?

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

Dialogues between Settembrini and Naphta (I wanted to check my understanding, and expected comprehension of readers at the time); So which of these is "brain melting" use of AI? I think these are all reasonable queries, which it seemed to handle pretty well.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

But this is roughly what I do. e.g. currently reading Mann's Magic Mountain. I asked AI about: TB treatment (previously read a book about TB, wanted a reminder) and it gave me a breakdown with sources; Untranslated French section in the middle (wanted confirmation I understood correctly);

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

Do you check every reference for everything you read? What about translations, or original thoughts? Lots of different ways that you have to "waste time" with non-AI media too!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

Imho if you can get a tool to give you accurate answers a high percentage of the time, and that tool is one that you can use quickly to give you background, references or links on the things you are reading on then you should be fairly comfortable as a general reader.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

Well, you can test it out yourself? There are also benchmarks and studies that try to measure the rate of hallucination. Humans are fallible too!

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

So if LLMs were improved so their results were comparable to human authors then you'd be in favour of using them as a learning aid?

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 12/08/2026

But you can get a summary from AI that includes sources? So you can get references to check out, or even books to dig a bit deeper. I'm still confused as to why people are against LLMs as a tool for this.

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Jamie McHale @jamiemchale.com · 11/08/2026

You remember that this is a conversation about AI augmenting book reading? I have a book I want to check my understanding or get a few snippets more about a topic then LLMs are good for it.

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