Introduction

Today’s LLMs have already ingested basically all of the publicly available information they can to build their models. In order to improve further, they’re going to need to seek out additional sources of information. One obvious such source is the countless interactions they have with their users, and while privacy concerns are certainly relevant here, for the purposes of this article I want to focus on another issue: quality signals. How will these LLMs know whether a given exchange led to a solution (defined however the user would define it)? Without this knowledge, there’s no way for LLMs to give more weight to answers that ultimately were fruitful over answers that were useless but the user gave up and ended the session.

Better late than never, as I’m writing this in early February 2026…

First, here are a few links to past years in review:

• My 2017 Year in Review
• My 2018 Year in Review
• My 2019 Year in Review
• My 2020 Year in Review
• My 2021 Year in Review
• My 2022 Year in Review
• My 2023 Year in Review
• My 2024 Year in Review
• My Year in Review Post Checklist

Now on to the various categories…

By a devoted advocate for individual choice

Introduction: Fire Protection, Reimagined 🚒

In a nation that prizes personal responsibility, it’s time to ask whether a single, taxpayer-funded fire department model still serves us best. A market of competing fire protection providers would let every household choose the coverage, response times, and perks that match their unique risk profile and budget. What’s more, it would allow individuals and households to prioritize how they want to spend their money, rather than leaving it up to big government and its known inefficiencies. Let the invisible hand of the market sort out which fire departments offer the best value for their rates, and which properties people find worth protecting with fire extinguishing services.

This article is part of the 2025 Advent of C# Code Calendar, which publishes 2 C# articles every day in December leading up to 25 December.

NOTE: Originally targeted xUnit v2; now updated to xUnit.v3.

Introduction

One of my favorite new features in .NET 10 is C# file-based apps (or file-based C# programs if you prefer). With this feature, we can create individual .cs files and then run them using dotnet run <file.cs>. On Unix OSes you can go even further and mark the files as executable and include a shebang (#!) directive as the first line to tell the OS what to run it with and then you can run the files directly without even calling dotnet run.

Introduction

A command that many shells have had forever and that PowerShell has had for a long time as well is ‘cd -’ which means “change directory to previous folder”. This means you could do something like this:

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> cd c:\dev
c:\dev
> cd c:\temp
c:\temp
> cd -
c:\dev

This is quite handy in many situations. In particular, since I’ve modified my PowerShell Profile to NOT start in my users folder but instead to start in my c:\dev folder (from which I can easily get to any repo I may be working from), I very often find myself using cd - whenever I create a new terminal in the folder I want to be in such as when using VS Code.