Links

Finally a week with more than two links! Beatrice de Graaf is a Professor at Utrecht University. Her talk at Stanford on The Quest for a Third Rome describes using text mining techniques to analyse Putin’s speeches since 1999. The paper, written with her student Neils Drost, is open access: Putin and the Third Rome:: Imperial-Eschatological Motives as a Usable Past “In this corpus, we ask how Putin used the combination of history and Russian Orthodox theological, biblical tropes as a usable past, to create his powerbase, to understand how he built up to defending and legitimizing the invasion in Ukraine” A similar area was covered by Teitelbaum in his book War for Eternity about the influence of Alexsandr Dugin and mysticism on both Putin and Steve Bannon in the US. Does Putin believe it? Maybe. Is he using mysticism and religion for his own ends? For sure. ...

Some AI development resources this week… How to Build an AI Code Agent Thorsten Ball has published how to build your own AI code agent. He creates a toy example in Rust that’s <400 lines but still includes tool use. Geoffrey Huntley does the same. It’s worth reading both Claude Code Best Practices Anthropic has released a detailed guide on Claude Code best practices. Of note: Claude can (and should!) use the architect/plan then code model that Aider makes explicit. Telling Claude to read code/docs, then plan, then code, then commit gives better results than just telling it to write code Ask Claude to review things (e.g. the CLAUDE.md hint files) and suggest improvements. Repeat. (As an aside, the Anthropic workbench can improve general prompts) Telling Claude to ’think’, ’think harder’ etc results in more thinking tokens being used Clear context frequently (/clear) - usable context window is smaller than the advertised max The model of asking Claude to review and improve its work (or human starting points) repeatedly was not obvious to me ...

Two links this week… AI Logos Are All Buttholes In what might be the most important visual design analysis of 2025, Velvet Shark has compiled a gallery of AI company logos that look like buttholes. From Claude’s spiral to Midjourney’s abstract void, it seems AI branding has converged on a rather unfortunate design pattern. If It’s Crypto, It’s Not Money Laundering Money laundering is legal now, as long as it’s crypto. JP Koning summaries the Trump administration’s latest legal changes: If it’s crypto, it’s not money laundering. ...

I’m trying not to be perfectionist about this blogging thing, and concentrate on getting stuff out so in that spirit so this week there’s just a few links, all on AI. First up - how to use AI. I see so many people type some random question into ChatGPT/Claude, get a mediocre answer back and move on. But how to get good results from these systems is not at all obvious. For a complex example, see my post on Experimenting with Deep Research or an even more extensive example of using one model to generate a prompt for another ...

Trying something new, with a weekly-ish list of links 1) OAPs are radicalised too When Grandpa Turns Extremist: Digital Immigrants, Radicalisation and the German Reich Citizens Movement the radicalisation of middle-aged and elderly people remains largely overlooked despite their active involvement in nearly all extremist movements. This Insight advocates for a more nuanced understanding of extremism and ageing, emphasising the need for radicalisation prevention strategies geared towards those born as Digital Immigrants, such as Baby Boomers and Generation X. These generations did not grow up in a digitised world, and their education largely did not include critical media studies. Among others, this factor makes them prone to misinformation consumption online. [This article looks..] at the example of the German Reich Citizens Movement, which has a very specific age structure and is characterised by the relatively late radicalisation of its adherents. The movement, which predates the digital age, now primarily relies on the internet for communication, spreading its ideology, and mobilising action against the state and governmental authorities ...