Michael K Pate
August 14, 2026
I've spent some time implementing all 3 of these. ================================================================================ Comparing Persistent Memory Systems for AI Agents: OB1, agentmemory, and brainoutside ================================================================================ AI agents lose their context when a session ends. If you want an agent to remember project decisions, personal preferences, or family schedules across runs, you need persistent storage outside the model's context window. Three distinct approaches have emerged for solving this: 1. OB1 (Open Brain): A centralized, Postgres-backed service for cross-app personal life management. 2. agentmemory: A local SQLite engine tailored for low-latency coding workflows. 3. brainoutside: A git-backed Markdown repository designed around human curation and personal voice. Here is how their architectures, ingestion pipelines, and retrieval models compare in practice. -------------------------------...
August 11, 2026
Adding watermark stripping to Humanizer I use the Humanizer skill pretty regularly. It's a portable agent skill that strips signs of AI-generated writing out of text, checking 33 patterns. Em dashes, the rule of three, "vibrant tapestry," the usual stuff. It works well for what it does. What it didn't do was handle watermarks. The EU AI Act starts being enforceable this month, and one of the requirements is that AI outputs have to be detectable as machine-produced. Which means the labs are going to start watermarking their output. I wanted to know whether the tool I use to make AI writing sound human could also handle the hidden signals that mark it as machine-produced in the first place. I forked Humanizer to my own repo and started reading up on how text watermarking actually works. Two sources, one conclusion I put two documents in the repo to work from. One was a blog post by Sean Goedecke arguing that text watermarks will always be trivial to remove . The other...
August 05, 2026
A few days ago I installed a Claude Code skill called llm-council . It's a nice adaptation of an Andrej Karpathy idea: instead of asking one AI a question and taking its word for it, you run the question past five advisors, have them peer-review each other anonymously, and let a chairman synthesize a verdict. It worked. I liked it. And then I noticed the thing that bothered me. Five advisors, one brain The skill spawns its five advisors as Claude sub-agents. Same model, same weights, same session. The only thing that varies between them is the prompt — one is told to play the Contrarian, another the Expansionist, and so on. Which means the disagreement is manufactured. The Contrarian objects because I told it to object, not because it sees something the others missed. And more importantly: whatever that model can't see, none of the five can see. You get one opinion wearing five costumes, and the peer-review round is a model grading four other outputs of itself. Karpat...
July 18, 2026
I spent some time the other day looking for writing skills on Github. The one I found first was Creative Writing Skills , which is actually far more. First off, I had Claude read through it. Claude created a folder named " untitled-story ", which you can download here if you are interested. You can use it with Claude Cowork(which is what I will do here and what Jimmy recommends). But if you prefer a different agent, just point it at the folder and turn it loose. One (optional) addition I made today was adding a folder full of Jason Hamilton 's genre guides - in this example, the alpha male romance. You can also add some of your own work into the draft folder but in this case, I was starting at the very beginning. Since I didn't have a story ready, I had Claude generate 10 Log Lines. I chose this one and added it to the folder. < Snowbound Sovereign — Fleeing a corrupt sheriff, a small-town waitress crashes her car outside a mou...
November 24, 2014
So in getting the Nexus 6 , I also wanted to change away from Verizon. Not because the services was terrible - it actually worked pretty well - but it was kind of expensive and CDMA and just not what I was looking for these days. After doing some research, I decided I really wanted to go with the $30 plan (100 min/unlimited text+data) from T-Mobile. I had heard good things about it - even from the Verge's Nilay Patel , who you would think would be somewhat picky. But I still hesitated ordering from Wal-mart.com . So Thursday afternoon after the phone arrived, I made a trip out to the store. I wasn't even sure exactly what I was looking for but in the Electronics section there was a whole display of various cell-phone related items - including some rectangular boxes that sounded like they were exactly what I wanted. The only immediate problem is that they are locked in so I hard to turn to the counter for assistance. There was one Associate behind the counter - waiting on som...
December 13, 2011
So my Blogger Profile is now my Google+ Profile which used to be my Google Profile but isn't anymore sortof kinda. It seems simple enough.
October 18, 2011
I haven't posted here in a while but I wanted to see how Dynamic Views worked. Pretty Slick so far. The new backend is nice as well. The old one worked pretty well for a long time but was really looking dated.
February 02, 2010
I just got an e-mail from Blogger about the upcoming change to ftp access . So I did some switching around and this blog is now back at the original location. And maybe I will increase the post frequency here to less than 5 years between posts. Let us hope.
August 02, 2005
I would love to find a way to combine the security of Strongspace with the ease of use of FolderShare . It just seems like such a natural to me.
July 10, 2005
This morning, I read this post. News Hounds (motto: We watch FOX so you don't have to) reports on the latest Fox News fear-mongering. - Ed Bott I decided to make a comment. I would recommend that you read it, only hours later it has yet to appear. Despite the fact that Ed has posted several things since then. In my comment, I linked to this post. Do any of the wingnuts on the right seriously believe that if a terrorist can kill and injure people in London, England, that it can’t happen in Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., or any of a hundred of our cities? Even I don’t think they’re that dumb. It’s clear that they aren’t so stupid. It is plainly obvious that they do not care. - Oliver Willis So to repeat as best as I can remember what I said earlier: Why is it "fear-mongering" when a terrorism expert makes a general statement but perfectly acceptable for a leftist like Oliver Willis to make the same point in a rambling, foundation-less attack on George W. Bush? I am...
May 19, 2005
For now, I'm not going to go deeper into the rift between myself and Adam Curry, only to acknowledge that now he's saying more things that are untrue in press interviews, punishing me for thinking he was ever a friend. My generosity with him is, in an ironic and unfair way, a gift that keeps on giving. - Dave Winer As someone who is proud to have a Winer Number of One, I always follow with fascination Dave's interactions with other people. It is sort of like watching a train wreck in extremely slow-motion.
April 30, 2005
I had an idea for a new domain name a few weeks ago and decided to move my blogger blog over into it. Thus, the blog formerly known as The World of Michael K. Pate has now become incre.dulo.us. Hopefully disruptions will be kept to a minimum.
April 03, 2005
For Textpattern users, the forum seems to be coming apart at the seems . And no one is sure how to fix it. For WordPress users, frustrated by "off-topicitis" and a lack of manners , the forum helpers are leaving . Perhaps it is time for everyone to return to Movable Type. Their forum is so helpful in allowing everyone to navigate the legalistic exacting minefield that MT has become. Then again, maybe not.
March 29, 2005
I got an account tonight and I have a bunch of invites to give away. Feel free to leave a comment or drop me an e-mail if you would like one. So far, I am not too impressed. The blog has less templating capability than Microsoft Spaces. If they want to make this popular, that needs to be high on their list.
March 09, 2005
I have plenty of storage and bandwidth available these days and because of that, I can't quite bring myself to get a paid account on Flickr. It is kind of a shame to miss out on what they have to offer. Perhaps someday they will offer a less expensive way for us to participate while hosting our own photos. Until then, this set of Photoblog Scripts and Programs look extremely interesting.
March 06, 2005
I have a new template in the works and I should be releasing it very soon. Until then, you dudes need to chill just a bit.
January 18, 2005
A few weeks Michael Heilemann wrote about his search for a gallery solution . And in my wanderings, I have found he is right: there seems to be no perfect solution. If I was dying to do things in MT, I would be looking to study Doug Bowman's tutorial, but since I am not, I won't do much more than admire it. PhotoStack has been my first choice. I think it is largely there feature-wise, it just needs some work done to make it easier to style. The best Flash gallery I have seen lately is SimpleViewer while the best flashy but non-Flash solution is Couloir (check out Photo fades and then some for more information.)
I think the answer might lie in a combination of the last three if I had time to get it done.
January 10, 2005
I got a summons for jury duty recently. That is something I have been patiently awaiting for 20 years now. I have always wanted to do that...except that January is a busy time for us in the Library and this week especially would not be a good time for me to be away. Monday was even worse. But there was no way out of it (even being a county employee does not help) so away I went.
I arrived at the Courthouse a few minutes early and found a parking space (behind the County building rather than next to the Courthouse). I went to the Main entrance, dropped all my things in the bowl at the metal detector, and stepped through. Then I had to explain to the security guard that my Lexar Jumpdrive Secure was not a weapon of some sort.
Past that, I spent a few minutes wandering through three floors looking for a sign of where we were supposed to go. It turns out, of course, that we were to gather in the basement. Then it was sit and wait. Fortunately, I had added eReader to my new Treo 650 a...
January 07, 2005
One of my weblogs is getting bombarded by spam pointing to sites at GeoCities.com. I don't think this is going to work out very well (I would expect Yahoo! to be removing the relevant pages forthwith), but I don't think I am have to be too concerned about adding GeoCities to my blacklist. It hasn't been much of a blogging haven since they turned off FTP.
January 03, 2005
One of my Christmas gifts this year was an MP3 on Channel . And, being the techno-guy that I am, I wanted to use it to listen to podcasts . My problem was that most of them lasted longer than my average drive. It makes them mighty hard to listen to them in one session. After doing a little research, I found the solution: Mp3splt
After a little experimentation, I found this command works best for me.
mp3splt.exe -f -a -t 3.0 filename.mp3
Now it is simply a question of finding enough stuff to listen to.