November 5, 2025

Author

Pierce Freeman
November 05, 2025

I always forget the feeling of walking around at 4pm and anticipating sunset. It’s almost like time is just an illusion. A few random things in case you missed them:

  • Golden City FC is moving to Kezar Stadium, for those of us that can’t justify a Caltrain down to San Jose on a weeknight.

  • San Francisco turnout was pretty high yesterday: Prop 50 passed. I have no other updates because that was literally the only question on the ballot.

  • I finally bit the bullet and redesigned my website, I guess black and white is the new black.

Now on to the nerdy stuff.

A deep dive on OpenAI Atlas [link]

Richard and I broke down the latest in agentic browsers. OpenAI Atlas has made the biggest splash but there are a whole host of browsers trying to compete for the same mantle: Perplexity, Brave, Opera, even Microsoft all have their own answers for the agentic control. We thought it was worth doing a deep dive on what exactly makes them different from Chromium since they’re all just built on top of it.

We talked through how the computer use models are actually working behind the scenes (spoiler: most are actually only using dom parsing). We also go into our experiences in using the different browsers, the UX problems they’ll need to solve, and try to place our bets on the winner. Don’t count Google out quite yet.

Automating our home video imports [link]

There were too many of these tapes to not have some meaningful automation. I iteratively built up a few utilities with the basic conceit that we need to physically change over the tapes when done. The rest of our pipeline should be fully handled by a supervisor. This program handles consistent filesystem structure, error detection, transcoding, clipping, labeling, and notification upon the completion of each tape.

I admit I might have gone a little overboard with my latest workspace setup. It has an old Sony Handicam & Sony DCR connected through miniDV with a long daisy-chain of converters to hook up to USB-C. I built a little utility to manage the imports and alert me when they're done. The pipeline:

- Manually put in the Hi8 and MiniDV tapes
- Control software rewinds them until the beginning then starts playing
- Stream miniDV footage to a raw capture .dv file on my NAS
- Encode the output files into mkv videos for Jellyfin
- Chunk the tape for individual scenes with TransNetV2
- Predict the contents and individuals in each scene with Gemini Pro 2.5

I spell out the whole setup including some technical details on the protocols that are actually written to these little cassettes.

The safest way to run any coding agent is within virtualization. Boot up a container with a limited scope, a git branched workspace of what you're working on, and all the tools it will need to get the job done. I'm willing to wadger a large sum that almost no one does that. --dangerously-skip-permissions is well named but most people just shrug and let it run.

I’m still a bit surprised that the vast majority of coding agents are run locally, versus being cloud encapsulated. It’s a good datapoint that convenience trumps basically all else in developer experience. When things are running locally they have access to the same environment that you do, you can interrupt them contextually, see their diff updates in your IDE, etc. But there are two sides of every coin. The same thing that make them powerful also make them dangerous: they’re running in the same root directory as your development keys, they can run bash arbitrarily, etc.

Codex seems to be taking local sandboxing the most seriously. I had fun breaking down the techniques that they’re using to try and balance the power and danger. All of which was made a lot easier by their open source client repo. Shout out to OSS.

Until next time. May the tensors be good to you.

Pierce