Blog on Francis Irving

Vibe coding personal apps in mid-2026

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are a few mobile apps that I’ve wanted for a while, and that are relatively speaking just for me.

Toucan Music showing artwork

Places - When people recommend restaurants or cafes to me, I’ve for a long time put them in a Google Maps list. It’s annoying in various ways, for example the page zooms out when you select the list. And I don’t like keeping my data locked into a free service.

On the frustration of agreeing with everyone about AI

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Conversations about AI are febrile and have been for a while now. Everyone has different views.

It’s frustrating for me because not only do I empathise with all of you, in some ways I have every major position in my mind.

I find myself impossible, messed up. Niller-nally, retwixt, fragmented.

I agree with the accelerationists

I briefly used an open source agentic programming tool with 1000 tokens/second of a top Chinese model. It was like a drug pumped straight into my veins. I worked on artificial life 27 years ago - we were trying to do the same at CyberLife, just much earlier. Creation can be beautiful, and helpful, warm and purposeful. There’s diseases to cure, climate models to optimise, software to make perfect for each person.

Instalamb, my browser plugin to control Instagram

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 14:20:03 +0000

Lots of dancers, civic society organisations, artists, musicians, clowns are only on Instagram. Unfortunately, my mind finds the platform distracting and overwhelming - for my own accessibilty I need to tame it.

I prototyped a web browser plugin for this in my week making something every day, and it’s now pretty stable. Try it out!

Plugin store links: Firefox Instagram Plugin, Chrome Instagram Plugin

It has a bunch of features for you to take control of Instagram, but the critical one is stopping AI recommendations, so you can just view the accounts you’re following without being pulled into something you didn’t want to spend time on.

My mind sampling results

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 10:49:12 +0000

One of the projects in my week long hackathon was to make a system to sample my own mind with a random alarm.

This was crudely based on Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling - there are lots of papers about that method, for an introduction see this overview BBC article or my own post about a book on the topic. Hurlburt has for a few years now released videos of the method in progress, which are long and excellent - I’ve watched a lot of the first batch sampling Lena.

Announcing "Mindful Media Club"

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 10:06:44 +0000

I’m starting a meetup / online commnunity to share tips on skillful use of social media.

Things like browser plugins that let you customise YouTube, tips on settings, social practices like how to form a healthy active WhatsApp group for a particular purpose. And so on.

Wherever you are, there’s a Discord. The aim is to make an online guide with all the tips in, depending how it goes.

A week making something each day

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:01:25 +0000

As a challenge, last week I made five things, one each day. Each had to be finished in some sense, and preferably published. This is what I made and what I learnt!

Monday - Godot game

My goal was to learn Godot enough to write some kind of video game and publish it, all in one day. Incredibly this was fairly straightforward. Things I learnt:

This video tutorial and the text one in the main docs are both great starting places.
Physics engines are really good and easy to use compared to when I last coded games with them which was in 2002.
Open source game engines are genuinely very mature
It’s satisfying making something that just runs locally and is very visual

Itch.io is extremely generous with letting you just make a page for your game. It’s pretty liberating - no servers or DNS to think about like with a website, and no complicated signing mechanism like an iOS app. Although, I’m not confident the Windows build I made worked, only the Mac one…

Netatmo smart thermostat! How much gas I saved last winter, and how to automate it to turn off when out (not using IFTTT)

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 23:43:54 +0000

This post has two sections, one about gas prices and energy savings, the other about Android automation and the Netatmo API.

1. What a smart thermostat is like and how much money I saved

Last year, with gas prices going up, I decided to get smart radiator valves. I’d thought the saving from these would be by only heating rooms when I’m in them. I was lazy about going round and adjusting the manual radiator valves several times a day!

The little differences between Android and iOS in 2023

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 22:04:53 +0000

These days I alternate mobile operating system. Partly because as an app-making professional I strongly feel I need to understand both, and partly because it slightly irritates people who are die-hard fans of one or the other.

I don’t particularly love either - a plague on both their houses. I’d rather we all used a fully open operating system, or there was a lot more competition and a standard application platform. Still, they work, and both have lots of delights.

What is high-quality about the data that trained generative AI?

Sun, 07 May 2023 18:03:00 +0000

Our brains have 100 trillion connections. Large language models have up to half a trillion, a trillion at most. Yet GPT-4 knows hundreds of times more than any one person does.

Geoffrey Hinton, deep learning pioneer

The recent surge in interest in generative AI was sparked by neural networks trained on high quality public, human culture.

Their use of this culture is extremely focussed - they only saw good quality inputs, and only saw each input once (see the paper One Epoch Is All You Need for why). If you show them lots of bad quality stuff, they’re not adaptive enough to tell and ignore it.

This kind of rosy yellow glow in my head

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 13:24:40 +0000

A book review of “Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic” by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel (2007)

A couple of years ago I realised I didn’t have a visual imagination.

This was ultimately quite inspiring - it’s led me to ask maybe a hundred people about their own inner lives. The answers so varied, I’m left in wonder at this hidden world that we barely talk about.

My favourite source about this is “The pheneomena of inner experience” (a paper by Heavy, Hurlburt 2008). It uses a method (Descriptive Experience Sampling, or DES) to randomly beep a bunch of volunteers in their every day lives, and get them to then capture their current mental phenomena.

Art I enjoyed in 2022 - top eight

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 12:09:26 +0000

To my surprise this list is television heavy - I didn’t find any incredible new board games, and I was disappointed in most video games. It’s somewhat in order - my favourite is roughly last.

Thanks everyone who recommended these to me - you know who you are! I’m not going to link to where to watch things - for TV and films I use JustWatch to find a suitable source.

On intuition's relationship to rationality via language

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 09:49:33 +0000

A three year old draft blog post I just found. Feels worth publishing - the improvements in AI since then if anything make it clearer, and all the “right now” caveats justified.

It’s better to start by thinking of us as pattern matching devices first.

Not simple ones - such as modern deep learning AI that essentially does layered functions to measure correlation. Complex ones, that model causality in a sophisticated way we don’t remotely understand yet.

Blind-sided

Sun, 16 May 2021 06:38:34 +0000

It was a rushing, a burning, an all-things-are-change, a compulsion.

I was torn up for three days or was it two weeks, except the long moments when I just forgot. Intertially, suddenly remembering, half weeping, half positively reconstructing my own construction of who I am and why.

Everyone I talked to I would grill - wait, what do the sheep look like when you try to go to sleep by counting them? And when you read a book, how good quality are the faces of the people you imagine?

Pressure cooked split black urad dhal

Sun, 20 Oct 2019 16:34:50 +0000

This is a recipe from Phil the Dhal, a friend who has been experimenting with pressure cooking Indian food. I’m posting it here so it doesn’t get lost. Ask if you want this just to be the first of a series!

First pressure cook of split urad dhal was a success.

Needs some understanding and refinement of what you can put in with the dhal in the pressure cooker. i.e. salt and turmeric are uncontroversial, but stuff like chilli powder or garlic and ginger paste or chopped chillies I don’t fully understand.

Brainstorming a better YouTube recommendation algorithm

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 16:54:15 +0000

This year, the public narrative around Facebook has switched - the company feels on the defensive in lots of ways. I think it deserves to be - with billions of users, it is long past time for them to spend their energy on reducing harm, rather than on more growth.

There’s a bit less talk about YouTube (owned by Google), and the problems with its recommendation algorithm.

The problems

Here are an article and a video which show the span of problems - from causing political radicalisation in every direction, to creating vast farms of weird, abusive videos targetted at children:

A cycle home along the river

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 11:56:26 +0000

A tasty early morning breakfast with friends in town, and time to cycle home. A sunny day, so take the route along the river!

Crossing the road by the docks. The sky impeccable. Delicious light of being away from the tropics, strong and clear, but not overly harsh.

The dome of one of the three graces is just visible, and at the right hand edge the tower which has sucked car pollution out of the tunnel under the river for over 100 years.

On using a variety of information services

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 16:20:27 +0000

In the last couple of weeks I’ve:

Deactivated my Facebook account.
Logged out of Twitter on my desktop.
Stopped using Google Contacts, Calendar and Photos

I’m not really sure why, but there it is, I have. I think over the last five years in excitement at the good user experience and high user adoption, I forgot why I was negative about such centralised, out of control services in the first place.

A thousand times an ant colony of fifty times a cat

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 14:19:30 +0000

Culture is important.

Particularly, it’s important for technology which is about how we as humans talk to one another.

Telephones, computers, mobile phones, internet… They’re all about how our particular species of primate communicates. And now they’re becoming one powerful industry newly reformed.

We’re each a neural network, thrown abruptly into a chaotic world, which by sheer force and pain and amazement has cohered into the awareness that we are.

A fugue on authoritarian high modernism

Sun, 29 Oct 2017 09:05:03 +0000

He listened.

The speaker started with a natural forest.

A gorgeous, maddening, complex, survived-of-the-fittest, multi-species, layered, organic feedback pathways, mycella-ridden delightful speckled sunlight happy, violent/eating/parasiting/singing insects/birds/people, robust kind of a forest.

They followed with a timber forest.

A straight-laced, single specied, splatted down, polygonally-bounded-tree-age-contoured, money spinning, automation hugging, zen simple, database-like, timber-producing, silent, vulnerable all-lined-up-in-rows kind of a forest.

The for loop iterated.

The peace to know what you don't know

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 20:53:23 +0000

I avoided statistics at school like a rash - filled myself up with super powered double A-levels in Maths And Mechanics instead. I’m not sure why, as it turns out statistics is vital to the good functioning of our world in 2017.

We have plenty of computers and plenty of data, and plenty of willingness to make evidence based decisions. Alas it is easy to fool yourself into thinking you know something you don’t. For your confirmation bias to convince yourself you’ve found evidence, so you don’t feel guilty when you report up your management chain.

Email review #1: FastMail

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 18:44:13 +0000

I’m personally still frustrated with the email services I know about. I’m going to start by reviewing what I use now, which is FastMail.

This is for my personal email, which I use for identity on many web services, for notifications and for writing letters to people. I’m working for myself at the moment too, so I use it for business in that context.

As background, be aware that I don’t think the email protocols (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) cut it any more. So I’m not splitting my email up by rating apps separately from service. I think the two are integrated together. This is because the user experience is better - setup is simpler, and unfortunately basic features like search, spam and filtering have to have a proprietary interface as the standards aren’t good enough. I’d love better protocols to be adopted on a wide scale, but realistically they’re not yet.

Textures and colours, India

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 17:36:51 +0000

A short walk around Vote Leave's software VICS

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 18:13:35 +0000

The campaign which won last year’s referendum for the UK to leave the European Union immediately dissolved, and in the process kindly open sourced some of its innovative canvassing software VICS - blog post, github repository.

This afternoon, prompted by a chat with Incubator of Change (a Liverpool based think tank working on new ideas for how to develop policies), I took a quick look at the code. Rather than lose what I learnt, I’m just throwing it up in this blog post.

Hindu holy mountain #2: Arunachala

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 23:08:28 +0000

In the late 1890s - the story goes - an ordinary boy in southern India heard an uncle mention the name of this holy mountain.

Arunchala!

Just this, just the name, started pulling him to it. The mountain is meant to be, literally, an incarnation of the deity Shiva.

Then, a while later, for no apparent reason, the boy had a sudden spiritual awakening on the nature of death. In final frustration during some pointless grammar exercises, he left home, headed for the mountain. He stayed there for the rest of his life.

Rant on the failure of news media

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 06:51:21 +0000

Last night I watched Charlie Brooker’s news recap of the year. As I watched, the humour leavened things and left me entertained. But in my sleep, my mind has realised it had made me pretty angry. So a brief change in tone for this blog - a rant!

Charlie - both you personally, and you as a representative of the media - stop whining about the news bubble! You collectively all made the news bubble. Take some responsibility for it!

Notes on a meditation

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 01:14:03 +0000

I went on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation course in the Goenka school, at Bodhgaya in Bihar province in north India.

It was a complex event - my emotions and thoughts about it have often changed dramatically in a day.

This blog post is more in note form than a cohesive, final account.

1. Silence

For 9 of the 12 days on site we were silent. Not just no spoken words - also no eye contact, no gestures, no communication with others.

Hindu holy mountain #1: Pavagadh

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 08:34:20 +0000

He took my hand. “Follow me. Move fast. Don’t stop.”

I’d spent the early morning looking round the tranquil mosques of ancient Champaner at the bottom of the holy hill.

(This is a good guide to them, plus I left a comment on buses which might be useful. It’s in Gujarat, west India, a little north of Bombay.)

Now it was time to get to the top. Pavagadh. During the Diwali national holiday.

First, do no harm

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 07:59:41 +0000

A two year old draft blog post I just found, which is too good not to publish. Age leavens its earnest attempts to be ahead of trend.

New computer technology used to be my relaxation, my hope.

As the world has changed, that comfort has gone.

We grew up in a digital village. Now we’re in its seedy metropolis.

A decade or so ago, I used my energy for emotionally hard problems to try and help with international development or democracy or climate change.

In praise of temple elephants

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 09:41:29 +0000

They all seem to be called Lakshmi.

The first one I met at the Virupaksha Temple in Hampi.

You pay a small coin for a blessing, which he takes with his trunk and passes on to his minder.

Then he touches your bowed head like this woman in Pondicherry.

That one was at the Sri Manakula Vinayagar Temple. An amazingly clean temple, worth visiting to see what Hinduism would be like in a clean India - something I hadn’t imagined possible, but it works!

Scouring pad

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 07:29:27 +0000

I wrote this post two weeks ago before going on a meditation retreat. It felt too negative at the time; it isn’t in that it reflects my mood then.

India is like a scouring pad.

The dirt the dust.

Litter cast uncaringly - except in Pondicherry, as if to show it is deliberate everywhere else.

The highest ambition of the government cleanup campaign is to end public human shitting. By 2019, in this space faring nation.

Houses like trees

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 08:28:03 +0000

Zenrainman’s house is like a tree.

Grown out of the earth of its own basement on the edge of Bangalore, pressed into bricks.

Nurtured entirely by water and light from its own roof.

It breeds, symbiotically, large primates to maintain it.

Treating their sewage.

To water a rooftop rice paddy ready to grow enough to feed them.

The spaces are full of art and light.

Changing money

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 14:47:02 +0000

Oh India!

There’s always another surprise, toughening your way through the day.

This week Modi, the Hindu nationalist PM, announced to the nation that the two largest bank notes were now worthless pieces of paper.

This clamp down on black markets and electoral bribes has a complex set of rules which let you trade in the old notes in limited ways, and heavily restricts use of ATMs.

As a result, for the last few days banks have turned into queues like these ones in Hyderabad.

Communal pets

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 23:07:32 +0000

India is unusual in having two shared public “pets”.

Dogs are the ones that I’ve seen before in other countries, prowling every street and temple. These puppies with their sore-furred mum are in Pushkar.

Unusually, people feed them. The other day while waiting for a safari at a tiger reserve, I saw a woman feed a whole packet of sweet biscuits to a cute dog with lovely fur. Apparently the last chapati of a batch is reserved for a dog.

Zero marginal cost

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 08:42:00 +0000

The next page I found in the notebook (after the last one) is my own view of the problem of information goods having zero marginal cost, so not functioning within capitalism. Paul Mason describes this in Postcapitalism.

Walking through the diagram…

“Zero marginal cost newtech” is the starting point. A “marginal cost” is a business term for the extra amount it costs to make one more of something. For digital goods, such as MP3s or converted PDFs, this is essentially nothing. This leads to the possibility of cheaper and cheaper, more and more freemium business models, driving the value of the information good in and of itself to nothing. The arrows lead out to four options at this point.

Sea. Sunlight. Calm. Trees. Laughter.

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 23:05:34 +0000

I found another oldish notebook. It’s about the edge of chaos.

The more lightly shaded left hand edge is absence, null, non existence. The dark shaded right hand side is total chaos, randomness. The sharp line down the middle is the edge of chaos - where things are balanced, interest lies, life grows.

There are four examples.

1. “Too few forum members” vs “Too many forum members”. If you start a new community, and nobody joins, it’s pointless emptiness. If it goes wild, and too many join, it ends up like a newspaper comments thread. There’s a pure balance, where the community is interesting and viable. (Reddit tries to avoid this dilemma by dividing itself in a cellular way making lots of subreddits)

On finding political axes using maths

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 00:18:06 +0000

Drifting in the sea of political beliefs, left and right don’t seem to have any meaning any more.

It’s possible to make up new axes. Alas, these aren’t grounded in real views of the population, instead they’re distorted by the politics of their creators.

Luckily, there is a way of finding actual axes by experiment, using opinion polls and maths.

Back in 2005, my friends Chris and Tom persuaded a youthful YouGov to add a complete set of political position questions to their demographically weighted UK poll.

History of libraries

Thu, 26 Nov 2015 20:48:11 +0000

Thanks to the excellent Thinking Liverpool [1], a lunchtime talk about the history of libraries caught my eye.

I mention the history of public libraries worryingly often. I make an analogy between libraries in the age of the printing pres and the modern need for equivalently novel public institutions in the age of the networked computer. Time to find out more.

It was in the Victoria Gallery, just across the road from work. Great!

Don't play the game, mutate the board

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 00:55:21 +0000

I found some notes I’d written at the start of this notebook, a few months old.

I used to campaign in Cambridge for more Fairtrade coffee and chocolate. That was a “closed” tactic, as opposed to an “open” tactic like open source software or open data.

It worked - even the best selling chocolate bar Dairy Milk is Fairtrade now. The tactic slightly shifted the board of global economics.

Sync/Backup workshop at Redecentralize Conference

Sat, 07 Nov 2015 20:56:32 +0000

The fabulous Redecentralize Conference was organised by Ira and a bunch of other volunteers. Its subject - how do we make the net resilient, private and fun again?

It was an unconference, so I decided to do a session on a personal itch I’ve had for the last few years - file synchronisation and backup.

I don’t have a nice way to manage my files - documents, music, photos, email. Syncing them across devices and keeping them backed up seems strangely harder than it did in the 1990s. At least, if you don’t just go all in and trust Google or Dropbox with them.

Making our information society safe and fair

Sun, 30 Aug 2015 03:23:23 +0000

The topic of how to make our information society safe and fair regularly comes up in conversations.

I think we need some quite big, radical things. They’ll need new public service Internet organisations to implement.

This is my high level view list.

1. Access to culture

“People have too much knowledge already: it was much easier to manage them twenty years ago; the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage.” (one MP’s response to the Public Libraries Act 1850)

Those brief moments when winning seems possible

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 19:59:38 +0000

This mad dash bad mixen fun up down world.

Forces smash hither and fither, 7 billion of us strange qualia, doing, being human.

Web culture, open source culture… sucked out of academia, hacking, sharing, making, funning, building. Just late enough for usability to be just there just cheap enough.

Smashed with.

Political culture… burnt out, tired, so so so good best world has ever been, so so so broken, media corporate capitalist socialist thought tangle.

"I find politics inaccessible": User testing voter advice apps

Sat, 25 Apr 2015 19:21:17 +0000

How is she going to vote? My friend (let’s call her F) just doesn’t know.

This isn’t unusual - about 20% of voters are like her (see Q3).

She needs to work it out fast. She doesn’t like polling stations, so has a postal vote. She has to decide this weekend - or she’ll get busy with work, and not remember to post the ballot in time.

mySociety helpfully list 16 voter advice apps, so I decided this was a chance to test them out!

Why I'm collecting every MP candidate's CV

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 18:11:14 +0000

My side project for the last month is to try and collect the Curriculum Vitae of everyone standing for Parliament.

It’s called Democracy Club CVs.

I’ve been working every spare hour - mainly around midnight and on Sundays. Partly it is technically interesting, partly the other Democracy Club volunteers are fun to hang out with…

It’s also just enjoyable, with leaflets from ex-whips, professional musicians and raving loony leaders (that last one is standing against Boris).

But that doesn’t really explain … why am I doing it?

The advert wars

Tue, 24 Feb 2015 22:47:09 +0000

One of the pitched battles in this century’s cyber war is about advert blocking and injecting.

It’s in full flow.

You can tell - journalist friends complaining that ad blockers have killed Joystiq, a 10 year old gaming magazine; web friends complaining that an ad blocker charges advertisers to not block some ads.

I’ve got some perspective.

Back in 1996, I helped make one of the earliest web advert blockers, WebMask.

Why did we do it?

Which web development tools are commodities?

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 17:55:46 +0000

We’re really bad at thinking about innovation.

To improve my own sense, I’ve been gradually absorbing Simon Wardley’s Value Chain Mapping since first seeing him talk about it a few years ago.

The picture to the right is an example of one of his maps. Each blob is a technology need.

As you go from left to right in the map, the technologies go from custom built, through product to commodities. (You can read more in an introduction by Simon, also see my post about the product/market space).

Promising to make software safer

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 01:47:18 +0000

1. Virtual bugs

I first really knew that all software was fundamentally insecure back in 2001.

I was working for an artificial life games company. We made virtual pets - amazing ones with a simulated brain, biochemistry and genetics.

I’d just built a new networked version called Creatures Docking Station. It let the cute, furry, egg-laying Norns travel through portals, crossing the Internet directly between player’s computers.

Long, cold cyberwar

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 22:34:10 +0000

Let’s keep this post simple.

We’re near the start of a long cold, cyber war. Many things make this clear - from Stuxnet to Snowden, from the Sony hacks to Chinese DNS poisoning.

This is a hard time to be in information technology.

Just in raw, technical security terms this is tough - rebuilding every layer of computing infrastructure so that it is safe.

And that’s the easy problem.

I blinked and missed 6 exciting things in the last 20 years of space

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 00:00:07 +0000

I blinked.

A long, slow, twenty year blink.

And meanwhile, space exploration went… Phoooom!

From a distance it looks bad. We haven’t sent humans to the moon for over forty years. There’s no grand, visible, memorable showpiece - apart from space shuttles exploding and being decomissioned.

And yet, when I recently got interested again, I found a flurry of things had happened. Many I had seen in passing, but not really looked at. All together, they add up to something amazing.

An email to Nicholas

Mon, 26 May 2014 14:28:07 +0000

Dear Nicholas,

Thank you for your previous two letters. I’m sorry I was so slow getting back to you after the first one, that you had to write another.

I didn’t know Canon meant essentially the same things as Round. I’m sure I must have been told, but I never got what it meant or cared. I only really appreciated rounds at all in actually singing them with people at Kentwell (the Tudor recreation thing I do).

Properly funding Democracy Club

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 22:32:06 +0000

Politics is broken.

At the last election, a few people made an amazing organisation to try and fix it.

Democracy Club is a non-party-political group of volunteers. At the next election, we want to hold candidates to account, and stimulate public engagement.

We do this by emailing people small, easily achievable tasks. These small tasks will add up to hugely useful resources. (Democracy Club about page) 7000 volunteers (in every constituency!) found out who the candidates are, what they thought about local and national issues, and monitored their election leaflets. (I wrote up what they did on the OKFN blog.)