Alasdair Allan

Musk has used "Vox populi, Vox Dei" to justify reinstating Trump on #Twiiter. But the quote is from a letter from Alcuin to the Emporer Charlemagne urging him to resist such ideas, "Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit." Which translates as "And do not listen to those who keep saying, 'The voice of the people is the voice of God', because the tumult of the crowd is always close to madness."

I built a programming language you're not supposed to read, https://veralang.dev. Vera is designed for machines to write. No variable names — typed De Bruijn indices instead. No style choices. Every function contract verified by Z3 SMT solver. Compiler errors are fix instructions for the model, not diagnostics for you. Pure by default, all effects explicitly declared and tracked. Point a model at it. #AI #LLM #OpenSource #Agent
https://negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/28/a-language-designed-for-machines-to-write/

On this day in 1971, the U.K. successful reached orbit using the Black Arrow launch vehicle lifting the Prospero satellite to orbit from Woomera, Australia. The U.K. remains the only country to reach orbit after already cancelling their launch programme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow

The #Vera v0.0.101 release makes LLM calls first-class algebraic effects. An agent calling another model declares in the signature. Type-checked, contract-verified, impossible to call from pure functions. Postconditions constrain model output at runtime. Empty string? Contract violation, not silent garbage. Compose to fetch content, then reason. Every side effect declared. As far as I know, no other language can do this! https://veralang.dev #AI #LLM #Programming

I expanded the #Vera benchmark to six models across three providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Moonshot). Kimi K2.5 got every Vera problem right while only managing 86% in Python and 91% in TypeScript. Across the flagship models, Vera and Python are level at 93%.

Yet there is no Vera in any training data, no examples on GitHub or Stack Overflow. Every token generated from a single spec document in the prompt. Language design doing a lot of heavy lifting.

https://veralang.dev

#AI #LLM #Programming

"Technology does not solve problems," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. The best technology becomes invisible precisely because it's fundamental, it dissolves the old interaction model entirely. The worst adds friction while demanding attention. You shouldn’t have to market your startup as “doing X with Y,” because just “doing X” should be enough. https://negroniventurestudios.com/2025/12/03/technology-does-not-solve-problems/

First signal for the end of what I’ve always called “the platform problem” for #AI. It’s not about the platform anymore, it’s about actions. It’s about AI acting, not chatting. https://venturebeat.com/technology/openais-acquisition-of-openclaw-signals-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the

"We need a new Turing Test," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. The real test for artificial general intelligence isn't fooling humans, it's demonstrating flexible real-world competence that our token-prediction architectures fundamentally can't deliver. https://negroniventurestudios.com/2025/11/30/we-need-a-new-turing-test/

Oh! Now I'm interested, https://ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-time-2-design-reveal. I far preferred the design of the Pebble Time to the original #Pebble. Always considered the death of Pebble as a real waste of potential. #PebbleTime2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcPzmDePH3E

"The web just got a second audience," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. Google shipped WebMCP in Chrome. Cloudflare shipped Markdown for Agents. Both quiet announcements. Neither made the front page. The web just forked its audience, and the infrastructure is already being rebuilt to serve both halves. #AI #MCP #WebMCP https://negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/18/the-web-just-got-a-second-audience/

"Don’t build platforms, solve problems," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. It turns out that #AI will commoditize the mediocre and automated, but amplify the value of the obsessive and hand-crafted. https://negroniventurestudios.com/2025/10/29/dont-build-platforms-solve-problems/

"The valley and the monomyth," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. Every pitch deck is a Hero's Journey. Silicon Valley's greatest export isn't technology, nit's storytelling. The facts don't change the world. The stories do. https://negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/09/the-valley-and-the-monomyth/

Anyone else getting nostalgia for the Nokia 3650? https://www.theverge.com/news/793136/google-japan-open-source-concept-dial-keyboard-rotary-phone

In Amsterdam for this year’s #thethingsconference. It’s fascinating to see how things have evolved in the LPWAN space over the last few years. It’s a very different conference than their first which one I keynoted in 2018. https://aallan.medium.com/teaching-a-new-dog-old-tricks-965a578e753b

"The new programmers? ," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. What does a programming language built for #AI look like? No syntax, no variable names, and no text, just components composed under formal contracts. Less like coding, more like hardware design. https://negroniventurestudios.com/2026/01/12/the-new-programmers/

That's been a productive morning! https://github.com/aallan/vera/pull/415

"The Ghost in the Statistical Machine," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. We anthropomorphise #AI agents, give them names, identities, "souls." But if we anthropomorphise them enough, do they start acting more like us? And if they do, at what point does the distinction between acting conscious and being conscious become meaningless? At what point does it matter? #Moltbook #OpenClaw https://negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/06/the-ghost-in-the-statistical-machine/

Someone watched the Mac vs PC ads back in the day. @claudeai@threads.net have gone on the offensive with adverts against ads, and they just buried OpenAI without even mentioning them. https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/873686/anthropic-claude-ai-ad-free-super-bowl-advert-chatgpt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBSam25u8O4

Resurfacing something I wrote for Hackster.io last year, "Dividing the Stack into Thirds," talking about the ongoing trade wars the splintering of our global approach to technology. https://www.hackster.io/news/dividing-the-stack-into-thirds-648e4fee1ca3