What I’m doing now
(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one, too.)
Updated January 24th, 2026, from my cabin-in-the-woods home in New Zealand, where it’s mid-summer.
hiking with my boy
Hiking and camping with my boy (because it’s summer in New Zealand now), so mostly offline — no phone or computer.
Last month we hiked the Routeburn Track. Yesterday we finished the Paparoa Track. Soon we do the Abel Tasman Track.
GrapheneOS
Switched my (Google Pixel 10) phone to GrapheneOS, which is badass and easier than I expected.
66 books that reference me
More added now. New page on the site: sive.rs/ref
impressed with z.ai GLM 4.7
I ask LLMs all kinds of curious questions. I had $20/month subscriptions to Claude.ai and ChatGPT but occasionally try others.
Z.ai’s new GLM 4.7 is so good that it made me cancel my Claude.ai and ChatGPT subscriptions.
Now I just use OpenRouter.ai - a portal that lets you direct your prompt to any AI - (though I usually use the llm tool on the command line) so I can ask my questions of a variety of AIs, including GLM 4.7 but also Kimi K2, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, and others. Feels better to not be bound to one.
recorded a videobook of “Useful Not True”
The very day I wrote the last word of “Useful Not True”, I went into my recording booth, and recorded the entire audiobook in one take, in 110 minutes.
But last month I listened to it again and realized I could do better. So I went back into the booth and turned on the camera as well, recording the audiobook while making a video at the same time.
Now making subtitles, after aligning my transcript with the audio, which meant learning the Montreal Forced Aligner and the Sub Station Alpha subtitle format.
done with podcasts
I’ve been on over 250 podcasts, and spent hundreds of hours editing the transcripts to make them as accurate as can be, so no one has to listen to 500+ hours of me talking. You or a computer can read, search, or query the transcripts. But this has all taken so much time that I’m going to stop doing podcasts for a while and turn my attention back to writing.
boy starting high school year 2
My son is about to start his second year of high school, and is so wonderfully insightful, philosophical, talkative, and creative. We talk talk talk like 20-30 hours a week.
programming
I’m enjoying a re-think and re-structure of all of my past code, doing even more inside of PostgreSQL. I’m in that phase where I do it until I fall asleep at night, then bounce of bed at 5am to get right back to it. Doing Go for my first time.
I wrote a Mustache template parser in PostgreSQL, so now I can save my HTML templates in PostgreSQL, and call a single function with the minimum variable - like an HTTP cookie - and it will return the HTTP headers and HTML body, ready to return to the browser. It’s very simple and very exciting.
public code
Finally sharing my main code, which you can see at:
Migrating it in from an old non-Git directory, so it will appear piece by piece.