A programmer & lifelong learner — writing about tech, culture, and life.
I'm Ben — I live in Canberra, Australia, and spend my days building products with AI. This is where I write about what I’m working on, plus culture, life, and whatever hobbies I'm into at the moment. Thanks for stopping by.
Recent
- The Father We Carry: From Family to Public Life
From the promise of flat management in China to family letters, classroom punishment and pressure to marry, an essay on how early experiences of authority shape public life.
- AI Model Provider Research: Quality, Price, Privacy, and Latency
The same model can cost ten times more on one platform than another, yet three 2026 audit papers found that price predicts nothing about whether you're getting the real model. This note checks pricing pages, privacy policies, data-center disclosures, and the papers themselves across eight providers, then orders the elimination by how reversible a mistake is.
- Liskov Substitution: A Matching Signature Does Not Mean It Can Be Swapped In
Refund channels can share method signatures while behaving differently for their callers. Reversals, settlement receipts and state history show how four contract checks work, and what types, capability interfaces and contract tests can protect.
- The Open-Closed Principle: Which Changes Should the Design Accommodate?
Adding a refund channel leaves existing implementations alone, while adding a reversal operation reaches across them. Comparing interfaces and union types shows what the open-closed principle can protect, and when an abstraction earns its place.
- Single Responsibility: A Responsibility Is Not a Task, It Is Someone Who Will Ask
Single responsibility is usually taught as "a class should do one thing", a sentence that cannot be used to judge any code. In 2014 Martin said it plainly: this principle is about people. Split the four groups of requirements living inside one refund service, and what you get is another way of stating cohesion and coupling.