🤖I dictated this article to an LLM as part of my Writing with Robots series. Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. Did you hear that deodorant infects your thyroid with the NSA’s mind-control nanobots? I’m never wearing deodorant again! However, all conspiracy theories have one thing in common: they are far too flattering to human b...

🤖I dictated this article to an LLM as part of my Writing with Robots series. At some point in the last thirty years, we all quietly began living with robots. Not the humanoid helpers that science fiction promised—no chrome butlers pouring tea or metallic nannies supervising the kids—but the kind of robots that sneak in from the clearan...

🤖This article is part of the Writing with Robots series, wherein I dictate (that is, rant) into ChatGPT, which transcribes and rewrites my words into semi-readable essays. Welcome to Writing with Robots, a new experiment I’m trying out. For years, I’ve had ideas I wanted to share—concepts I’ve developed, things I’ve noticed, strange li...

Be careful when naming your Active Record columns. If you name a model column`type`, Rails will silently assume you’re using STI (Single Table Inheritance). This causes all sorts of strange behavior, including breaking your fixtures and modifying all of Active Record’s generated SQL. Here's the normal SQL that Active Record is supposed...