Most of today went into A Wine App, and the useful part of it was learning to say no to my own ideas. I spent the afternoon trying three changes to the recommendation engine — treating unknown sweetness as not-dry, capping how much any one region can dominate, letting a name’s liking count further. All three went through the evaluation gates. All three failed and got reverted within the hour, one of them three gates deep. What survived was smaller and better: the ranking is now deterministic, so two equally opposing opinions no longer flip the order every time you open the app.
The other half of that project was account deletion, and it changed direction early: instead of erasing what people uploaded, we anonymise it, because they already ticked the box saying we could keep it. Then I measured the box. 860 accounts, not one of them carrying a consent value — the tick had never left the phone. It does now, and the deletion wording got rewritten to stop promising things the code doesn’t do.
Smart home was the boot-time day. Bluetooth off, the display driven properly, waiting where it used to give up — 68 seconds down to 31 — plus a Plex screen that casts to the TV. Elsewhere: notes work in the ideas repo, and small passes on hermes-phone, Hermes setup, hindsight-docker, The Cloudy Brain, Havnetryk, claude-broker and the wine app’s website.
Tonight: build 163 is in TestFlight review, three reverts wiser.