2026/10 on Mikael Ståldal's technical blog

What is AI?

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 18:00:00 +0100

Definition

By Artificial Intelligence (AI), I specifically mean systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs).

How we should understand AI

There are many views on this. Some say it is just a statistical model and fundamentally just a computer program, though a very complicated one. Others say it has intelligence comparable to a human, and perhaps even has a consciousness.

I think both these extremes get it wrong. On the one hand, you cannot reduce today’s LLM-powered AI systems to just a statistical model and a regular computer program and believe that helps you understand it. On the other hand, I see no reason to believe that today’s AI systems have human-like intelligence, let alone consciousness.

MySuite

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:00:00 +0200

As I have written before, you can build efficient and easy to host web apps with Go and SQLite.

I have now developed a suite of personal productivity apps with Go, SQLite and TypeScript+Preact for the web UI.

Calendar: MyCal
Mail: MyMail
Notes: MyNotes

And a simple app to save links with Go, SQLite and htmx:

MyLinks

I call the whole suite MySuite, which also contains a password manager MyPass made in Rust.

Each of those five has its own native Android app (made in Kotlin).

From XTerm to Alacritty

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0200

I have written before how to support tabs and scrollback in XTerm with tmux.

Now it seems like Wayland is replacing X11 as the default window system in Linux desktops. And XTerm, as the name implies, only supports X11. So I wanted to replace XTerm with another terminal with native Wayland support.

After trying a few options, I decided to go with Alacritty. As a bonus, you also get clickable hyperlinks (OSC 8).

Here is how I configured it to work with tmux: