Tech

There’s something appropriately meta about using an AI coding assistant to build an AI-powered news aggregator. QuantumExecBrief monitors quantum computing industry news, filters for business relevance, and generates weekly executive briefings using Claude. The whole thing was built with Claude Code as my primary development partner. The story here isn’t the subject matter, that could be anything. Here’s what I learned about the workflow. The Project in Brief QuantumExecBrief does a few things:...

Last week my academic citations crossed 1000. It’s a number I’ve been watching approach for a while - a quiet milestone that means more to me than I expected. For someone who has moved from pure research into IT, it’s a reminder that scientific work has a long tail. Why Citations Matter Citations are science’s way of saying “this work was useful.” Each one represents another researcher who found something in your work worth building upon....

The Christmas break gave me something I rarely get during the year: time to learn without urgency. Two threads of exploration converged in interesting ways - one practical, one theoretical, both about AI’s role in how we work. Hands-On: Claude Code I spent part of the break experimenting with Claude Code, finally putting it through its paces on a problem that had defeated me for years: refactoring my Emacs configuration. Seven minutes of AI-assisted work accomplished what months of Sunday afternoons couldn’t....

Intro If you run Emacs as a daemon (and you should), you know the drill: you update your config, install a new package, or tweak some settings, and now you need to restart. The typical approach is to kill the daemon from the terminal and start it again manually. It works, but it’s clunky. There’s a better way. A simple Emacs function that saves your work, restarts the daemon cleanly, and gets you back up and running without leaving Emacs....

Intro I recently wrote about gptel - the Emacs package for interacting with LLMs via APIs. It’s brilliant, but every query costs money and requires an internet connection. For quick tasks like code explanations, refactoring suggestions, or drafting text, those API calls add up. Enter Ollama and Ellama. Ollama lets you run LLMs locally on your machine, and Ellama provides a clean Emacs interface to interact with them. No API keys, no costs, no internet required....

I use Emacs and Org mode extensively for managing notes, documents, and related assets. One recurring friction point in my workflow has been accessing Org attachments outside of Emacs, particularly when I need to copy files into other tools such as PowerPoint, Word, or other document systems. Org mode’s attachment system (org-attach) is excellent at managing and organising files, but its interaction model is primarily Emacs-centric (via Dired). Sometimes, however, the fastest path is to open the attachment directory directly in the operating system’s file explorer....

In large enterprises, responsible AI lives or dies in the gap between strategy decks and what actually ships. The WEF “Advancing Responsible AI Innovation” playbook gives a useful language for that gap - but it only becomes real when it’s translated into operating habits across product, risk, and technology teams. Here I want to spend some time thinking about how the nine plays in the framework can be used as a practical scaffold for enterprise AI programmes, rather than a poster on the wall....

I’ve been seeing lots about how AI, and the ever-growing use of LLMs, is creating slop that is killing the internet - making us angry and breaking our brains. I wrote about how this might impact scientific publications in 2023, but I think we should revisit this topic in light of a quote that shifts how I think about content today. In her video, My 17 Minute AI Workflow To Stand Out At Work, Vicky Zhao makes the point that, “in 2025, it will take you longer to read something and comprehend it than the amount of time it took to create it”....

I started using emacs in 2020 after reading a long-lost article about using org-mode as a blogging platform. It hit at the right time as I was looking for a tool that enabled auto-generated, centralised, todo lists - something that was surprisingly difficult to do at the time.1 I have written quite a bit in the last five year, including a peer reviewed journal article and use Emacs every day in my corporate job, both during my science days but also since my move to IT....

I am a big fan of building tools for your workflows. Here is another quick example. To create these blog posts I need to create a markdown file with some front matter. An example of this is below - indeed this is the front matter for this post. --- author: Timothy Johnson title: Emacs - Quick Blog Function date: 2025-05-27 draft: False featured_image: "" tags: ["Emacs", "personal", "tech"] --- Each time I write a blog I need to do this, I hate duplication of work!...