I had trouble getting a Ralph loop going, so I've written some notes in the hope they'll help other people get started faster.

Do you know if anyone has looked at what kinds of task lists are better handled by Ralph versus giving the LLM the list and asking it to implement everything in one session/prompt? In other words, how do you recognize when Ralph is the right approach?

I ask because I've tinkered with some Ralph loops and found I can achieve similar results by handing Claude (Opus 4.6, 1M context) a PLAN.md file with a long checklist of tasks and telling it to sequentially complete them.

I don't seem to have the problems that Ralph solves. But like any tool, it would be good to have a mental model for when to reach for Ralph in the future should a need arise.

Some thoughts on the novel: its strengths and weaknesses, why it's so different from other first contact novels. I'd love to hear people's views of the novel.

Like the other poster wrote, interesting mystery/plot, poor characterization shared with all of his work I have read - one thing that sticks out was the overly long bit about the man’s fascination with his female partner’s breasts in zero gravity could be taken as weird.

Clarke was widely believed to be gay/bisexual when it was illegal in the UK. Perhaps he was overcompensating?

New trains for Amtrak in the US. Better than before, but still a long way behind the best in Europe and Asia. The manufacturing process seems crazily manual.

A blog post about what it was, how it worked, and the controversy surrounding it. It's a key piece of the modern AI story, but also a cautionary tale.

Some thoughts on why AI-assisted learning of APIs doesn't really work and why it's better to hand code stuff if you're learning. Love to hear what people think.

An opinionated blog post on using both Replit and Cursor to build the same app. Which one wins? Would love to hear people's thoughts.

A blog post about sirens. What they are, how they work, and where to go if you want to hear them.

Weather forecasting sites are unnecessarily hard to use. The NWS data is free and easy to access, so I built an app with AI that gives me what I want. If I can do this so easily, what other markets will be disrupted?

I've gathered some data on how the price of single malt Scotch whiskey varies with age (some 50 year olds retail over $30,000). I've dug into the dynamics of the industry to find out why!

Here's what I found out trying out small language models (SLMs) on my local machine: they're good, but you need a powerful machine to run them properly.