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When AI Becomes Your Advocate
A grieving family in the US faced a $195,000 hospital bill. Unable to make sense of it, they turned to an AI chatbot called Claude (built by Anthropic) for help. The AI highlighted duplicate charges, inconsistent medical codes, and services that shouldn’t have been billed together. With those findings, the family negotiated the bill down…
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Surely It’s Been Indexed Already… Right?
You can chase every trick in the book, or spend five minutes on the obvious. Ten minutes. That’s how long it took to generate a single report. Ten. I was told it has always been that slow, and users have been advised to select smaller ranges. I wasn’t satisfied by that. The report existed on…
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Working with AI: A Human-Centered Approach to Code Collaboration
My coding pace slowed down; AI’s never does, and is getting faster. The trick is keeping it from “helping” too much – with good docs, clear prompts, and lots of patience. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with agentic coding AI—tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT that can read my code, suggest changes, and edit multiple files…
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AI as Your Pair Programmer: Sometimes Junior, Sometimes Peer, Sometimes Mentor
Or: Convincing Myself Our AI Overlords Aren’t Replacing Us (Yet) Introduction After 20 years in software development, I’ve seen the landscape shift – from debugging with print statements to navigating version control debates, and leaning on Stack Overflow like a trusted colleague. Now, a new kind of collaborator has joined the team: AI. What I’ve…
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Historical Timezones and Computing
The bug wasn’t in the code. It was buried in history. Every developer has a favorite edge case. Mine involves a birthday, a “bug”, and a timezone that no longer exists. Years ago, my colleague B and I supported a patient registration system for a healthcare group. One day, a tech-support case landed on our…
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Npgsql 8.0, Entity Framework Core and JSON POCOs
Npgsql 8.0 introduced NativeAOT and trimming support (hooray!), which necessitated explicit opt-ins to some dynamic coding practices that are incompatible with NativeAOT/trimming. One of these is JSON POCO mapping which I use quite heavily in some of my projects (boo! hiss!) As mentioned, though, it is opt-in via NpgsqlDataSourceBuilder introduced in Npgsql 7.0 or the…
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Using DevilBox for WordPress Development on WSL2 on Windows
Or: pretending I’m still a *nix wizard. It’s been a while since I moved from MacOS back to Windows, and it’s also been a while since I worked on any WordPress sites. I like Sage. Unfortunately, both Lando and Laragon are not supported scenarios, and so I went back to the Devilbox, which I used…
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LibreELEC 10, Raspberry Pi and Crashing
So, I recently switched my HTPC Raspberry Pi 3 from RetroPie, on which I only use Kodi anyway, to LibreELEC 10. Immediately started experiencing crashing just browsing, especially when viewing TV shows. I’m using it in conjunction with a Jellyfin server, so I thought it might have been caused by the Jellyfin addon for Kodi.…
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Working with Ancient Network Equipment (or: Getting Around Old SSL and TLS Versions)
The Problem At work, I recently had to dig out an old NETGEAR SRX5308 ProSAFE Quad WAN Gigabit SSL VPN Firewall (that’s a mouthful) for a very specific scenario (try shotgunning four LTE modems). Problem was, no modern browser can access the web management page due to the ancient SSLv3 standard without changes to the…
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Ubiquiti Device Discovery Tool Outdated As Hell
…and how to “fix” it Ubiquiti’s Discovery Tool hasn’t seen an update since 2017 — and if you try running it on a modern system, you’ll probably get this very helpful error: A Java Exception has occurred. That’s it. No stack trace, no details, just failure. Installing an ancient Java version system-wide isn’t exactly great…