Weeknotes vol. 8: Active Storage and shipping baby no. 6
By Garrett,

I had two (big) tasks this week (which as per usual I’m writing after the fact):
- Get file uploads integrated into the app with Active Storage
- Bring my beautiful wife to the hospital on Friday to ship baby no. 6
I’ll stick to the nerdy stuff for this post though.
There’s nothing not to love about Rails, as my experience with Active Storage further confirmed. Installation is a breeze.
bin/rails active_storage:install-
bin/rails db:migrate -
class Thought < ApplicationRecord has_one_attached :file end - Make some updates to your form(s)
- Done
And then there’s all the little app specific details, and that’s what took the week.
Phil finished the Web/Mac app design, and so the next few weeks (after the break with baby) will be spent focused on production-ready HTML and CSS, which I’m very excited about. This is where my original love for the internet started and I’m excited to see what’s changed since the last time I was serious about it (probably everything).
Like this? Get email updates or grab the RSS feed like it’s 2008.
More from the blog
-

Bloated: how chat made you fat
The pitch for writing with a language model is that it saves you time: you describe the memo, the model produces it and 90 seconds later you have four pages (okay, maybe forty) instead of a blank document. Someone still has to read those pages though. The model did not remove that work. It just moved it downstream to your colleagues or suppliers, and on the way it produced more than any human would have ever bothered to write.A person writing badly under time pressure tends to write too little. They run out of patience before they run out of points. A model has the opposite failure. It never …
-

Apple’s bicycle without a chain
Steve Jobs described the computer as a bicycle for the mind. Apple Intelligence so far is more like a bicycle with no chain. The frame is gorgeous, and the engineering is extraordinary, but you cannot get far with it.In early 2025, Xe Iaso published a [piece that landed like a brick through a window](https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/squandered-holy-grail/) in the Apple developer community. The argument was simple and damning: Apple had built the holy grail of trusted compute with Private Cloud Compute, a genuinely unprecedented piece of security infrastructure, only to fill it with half-baked not…
-

Weeknotes vol. 17: business, schmizness
Hello and happy casual weeknotes Friday.I stopped writing these [about a year ago](/blog/weeknotes-16/) when I began the transition into consulting (solving fun and challenging problems), and to say a lot has changed since then would be the understatement of the century.In summary: [Iain](/blog/iain/) joined full time, we're helping people solve operational problems and optimize their work across pretty much all aspects of business, and we're having a lot of fun doing it. Iain has his masters in AI for Business, which has pushed me to go down the biggest rabbit hole I've been down since HTML/…
-

The ten trillion dollar gamble
In November 2025, on stage at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live event, the chief financial officer of OpenAI was asked how her company planned to honor roughly $1.4 trillion in compute contracts on $13 billion of revenue. Sarah Friar said she was looking to assemble a network of banks, private equity, and a federal "backstop" or "guarantee." By the following evening, she had posted to LinkedIn explaining that "backstop" had muddied the point, that what she meant was something more like a public-private partnership, and that the United States government has been "incredibly forward-leaning" …
-

Never talk about goblins
Buried in a JSON file that OpenAI [posted to GitHub recently](https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/66b0781502be5de3b1909525c987643b9e5e407d/codex-rs/models-manager/models.json), inside the configuration for its newest coding agent, sits an instruction that reads like a footnote written by someone losing their composure. “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” The line appears [more than once](https://gizmodo.com/never-talk-about-goblins-openais-instructions-to-…
