Compunet: Britain’s Forgotten Pre-Internet Community Long before Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, there was Compunet. In 1982, in a small flat in Islington, London, two teenagers set up a computer bulletin board system on a network called Prestel. Within a few years, it had become one of the world’s first genuine online communities—thousands of people meeting in cyberspace, exchanging messages, playing games, and falling in love, all before the internet existed in public consciousness. ...

The Demoscene: Where Art Met Assembly The demoscene wasn’t about games. It wasn’t about productivity software or killer apps. It was about taking a computer that wasn’t designed for art, stripping away the operating system, and hand-crafting something beautiful in 512 bytes of RAM. This was the demoscene, and it was the most vital creative community in computing. What Was the Demoscene? A “demo” is a real-time audiovisual production written from scratch—no pre-rendered video, no external assets, just code and mathematics creating sound and graphics in real time on modest hardware. Think of it as a 4-minute music video that weighs 64 kilobytes and runs on a Commodore 64. ...

I’m sitting at a desk with two machines. One is a 1981 ZX Spectrum, 16KB of RAM, sitting on a desk in my garage. The other is a 2026 MacBook running Claude Code. Between them lie 45 years of computing history. And here’s the thing that struck me recently: I’m still doing the same thing. On the Spectrum, I’m typing: 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 INPUT A$ 30 IF A$ = "YES" THEN GOTO 50 40 GOTO 10 50 PRINT "YOU SAID YES" On Claude Code, I’m typing: ...

Anthropic’s Claude Code has been making waves as one of the most capable AI coding assistants available, but a significant internal leak has exposed the underlying technology behind the platform for the second time in just over a year. The incident raised fresh concerns about how the company handles sensitive internal information and operational security. What Happened An internal debugging file was mistakenly included in a routine software update and published to a public package registry used by developers. This file referenced a compressed archive stored on Anthropic’s cloud infrastructure. ...

On Adversity, Awakening, and Rediscovering Who You Are Most of us don’t find our life’s purpose in a single moment of calm reflection. We find it in the wreckage. We find it in the sleepless nights, the boxes we didn’t pack, the home we no longer live in. We find it when we are forced - absolutely forced - to stop, strip everything back, and ask: who am I without all of this? ...

For most of human history, intelligence has been scarce. Not intelligence in the biological sense - people have always been clever - but usable intelligence. The kind that helps you design a system, debug a problem, write code, plan a strategy, analyse data, or turn a vague idea into something real. That kind of intelligence has always been expensive. You hired it, studied for years to acquire it, or waited for an expert to have time for you. Companies paid consultants, specialists, analysts, engineers, and researchers because complex thinking historically required humans who spent decades learning their craft. ...

I genuinely think a lot of people still underestimate how fast the AI developer tooling ecosystem is evolving. A good example of that is the new Code Review feature in Claude Code, which Anthropic just released in research preview. Docs: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/code-review At first glance it sounds like another “AI reviews your code” feature. We’ve had plenty of those. But when you look closer, this one is actually quite different. Most automated code review tools are basically static analysis with a large language model wrapped around them. They skim the diff, leave a few comments, maybe point out a style issue or a possible bug. ...

I keep running into the same problem with Claude Code Pro ($20/month): I burn through the usage limits faster than I expect. The obvious solution is upgrading to the $200/month plan, but that feels excessive for how I actually use it. So I started exploring alternatives. What I’ve realised is that the best approach isn’t replacing Claude Code entirely - it’s building a hybrid AI developer stack where different models handle different types of work. ...

Every now and then a piece of technology appears that quietly changes the rules. Not in a loud marketing way. Not with a huge product launch. Just a project sitting on GitHub that makes you stop, stare at the screen for a second, and think: “Wait… this changes everything.” That was my reaction when I saw OpenClaw. Software That Can Actually Do Things Most of the time when we talk to AI, we are talking to a chatbot. It answers questions, writes text, maybe generates some code. Useful, sure - but still mostly passive. ...

In turbulent periods of life, a few clear principles can make complex decisions feel more manageable. Below is a distilled list of lessons and guiding rules that can be reused whenever things get messy. Legal and financial grounding Involve experts, stay in the loop. Use trusted professionals for complex legal and financial work, but stay copied into key communications and make sure you understand the main decisions being taken. Make money flows unambiguous. For big transactions - mortgage redemptions, refunds, pension moves - insist on clear written figures, timing, and an explanation of how any surplus or contingency will be handled. ...