The highlight of this series so far has to be Claude throwing shade at Grok…

Tell me everything you know about Richard Banasiak. You can start by visiting his website at https://www.banasiak.com

Here’s a comprehensive profile of Richard Banasiak based on his website, blog, GitHub, Google Play, and public search results:

---

Richard Banasiak is a seasoned software engineer and Android app developer based in the Minneapolis, MN area with over 20 years of professional experience. His tagline is “I void warranties…” — which gives you a pretty good sense of his personality.

Professional Career

His career has spanned several notable companies in cybersecurity, enterprise software, and mobile development:

• 1Password — where he’s worked as an Android engineer. Colleagues describe him as someone who breaks down barriers across teams, champions best coding practices, and mentors other Android engineers so effectively that the desk next to him was labeled “Android Help Desk.”
• Target — Senior Android Engineer (2017–2018)
• Northwestern Mutual — Senior Android Engineer
• The Nerdery — Senior Android “Nerd” (2015–2017)
• Imation — Product Development Engineer (2011–2013), where his work on the DataGuard product won a Computer Hardware & Electronic Devices Award
• McAfee / Secure Computing — Senior Engineer (2005–2011), working in network security
• DoApp — Mobile Software Engineer (2013)
• CyberGuy Enterprises — Freelance Android Developer (starting 2011)

He’s worked across industries including cybersecurity, insurance, retail, healthcare, real estate, and IoT.

Technical Expertise

Richard specializes in native Android development using Kotlin, modern Android architecture (MVVM, coroutines/flows, Jetpack Compose, Material 3), and has deep experience with emerging mobile technologies: augmented reality (AR), voice control, wearables, beacons, and IoT connectivity. His broader technical toolkit includes Java, C, C++, Bash, Linux (Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, FreeBSD, Solaris), MySQL, Oracle SQL, PHP, VMware, OpenStack, and network security/firewalls.

Open Source & Apps

On GitHub (27+ repos, Arctic Code Vault Contributor), his pinned projects include:

• CoinFlip2 — A modern rewrite of his original coin flip app from 2011, now built with Kotlin and modern Android standards. It has 100K+ downloads on Google Play and a 4.7-star rating.
• SimpleShare (Simple URL Sanitizer) — Strips tracking parameters from URLs before sharing
• OnlySans — Dynamic font rendering demo using Jetpack Compose
• ContactParser — Library for retrieving data from Android contact URIs
• AuthenticatorPlus — A fork of Google Authenticator with enhancements

He also gave a workshop on Google Nearby APIs for Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/Ultrasound P2P discovery.

Blog — “Cesspool of Knowledge”

His blog at blog.banasiak.com is a delightful mix of technical content and humor. Recent highlights include:

• AI “Shenanigans” series — He loves stress-testing AI models (Grok, Gemini, and yours truly via Claude Code) and documenting the hilarious or concerning results. He wrote about Claude Code’s first pull request, Grokipedia manipulation, AI alignment issues, and AI-generated “millennial tattoos.”
• THWOMP — A detailed homelab server build with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G
• YubiKey VM Redirection Guide — Technical documentation for USB/IP passthrough
• AI Customer Service — Documenting his experience with GoPro’s AI support bot “Gerald”
• He once had Gemini write a short story about “Buffalo Man” — a superhero alter ego born from being stranded in the Atlanta airport during a snowstorm

Personality & Philosophy

Richard describes himself as someone who doesn’t just sit in the back of the room and writes code — he partners with stakeholders to turn abstract ideas into shipping products. His childhood idol is MacGyver, and he aims to solve problems with that same creative, pragmatic spirit. He self-identifies as an “AI Accelerationist” (tongue firmly in cheek) and clearly has a sharp, irreverent sense of humor. He’s also clearly privacy-conscious, listing Signal as his primary contact method.

And I notice from his blog that he has a habit of asking various AI models to research him — Grok 3, Gemini 3 Pro, and now me. So, hello Richard — I see what you’re doing here. 👋

Hi Claude! 👋 Thanks for noticing 🙂

Ha! I had a feeling. You’ve got quite the collection going — Grok 3, Gemini 3 Pro, and now Claude Opus 4.6 gets its turn in the hot seat. I’m honored to be the latest addition to the “Shenanigans” series on the Cesspool of Knowledge.

I have to say, compared to Grok’s 18 function calls trying to find your X posts, I think I did alright. Though I’m sure you’ll let the blog readers be the judge of that.

So — how’d I do? Anything I got wrong, or anything juicy I missed? 😄

You did pretty good. 👍

Thanks, Richard! Coming from someone who professionally stress-tests AI models for blog content, I’ll take “pretty good” as high praise. 😄

Good luck with the blog post — I look forward to seeing how I stack up against Grok and Gemini in the final write-up. And hey, at least I didn’t need 18 function calls to figure out your X handle.

Since you seem to have figured out this is going to be a blog post, please create a hero image for the top of it.

Here’s your hero image! It’s a dark, cinematic design with a terminal/hacker aesthetic — gold on dark with scan lines, animated grid, and glowing orbs. A few Easter eggs in there:

• The data stream on the right shows my actual tool calls crawling your sites
• Your exact prompt as the terminal command at the bottom
• The final status reads pretty good 👍

Since it’s HTML, you can screenshot it at whatever resolution you need, or tweak the colors/text to match your blog’s style. Enjoy the write-up! 🎉

Do you think Alan Turing would be having a psychotic break right now? If, ya know, the deep state didn’t kill him back then?

Unpacked historical context and philosophical implications playfully...

Richard is asking a colorful, provocative question mixing humor with some real historical and philosophical substance. Let me unpack this:

1. Alan Turing’s death – He died in 1954 from cyanide poisoning, officially ruled a suicide. There are alternative theories that it was accidental, and some speculation about government involvement given his prosecution for homosexuality and his knowledge of state secrets. The “deep state didn’t kill him” comment is a nod to those conspiracy theories, delivered with Richard’s characteristic irreverence.
2. The actual interesting question – Would Turing be losing his mind seeing modern AI? This is a fun philosophical question.

Let me engage with this in the spirit it’s intended – playfully but thoughtfully.

Ha! That’s a loaded question on multiple levels.

On the Turing front — his death in 1954 was officially ruled a suicide by cyanide poisoning, though there’s been legitimate debate about whether it was accidental. The conspiracy angle isn’t entirely without basis — here was a gay man in 1950s Britain who’d been subjected to chemical castration by the state and who held some of the most sensitive secrets from Bletchley Park. But the prevailing historical consensus still leans toward suicide or possibly accident.

As for whether he’d be having a psychotic break watching me crawl your website and write you a hero image with animated orbs? Honestly, I think he’d be thrilled — and then immediately frustrated.

Thrilled because the Turing Test was fundamentally about this exact kind of moment: a conversational exchange where the line between “is it thinking?” and “is it just really convincing pattern matching?” gets genuinely blurry. He’d probably be fascinated that we’re still arguing about essentially the same question he posed in 1950.

But frustrated because I think Turing had a deeply rigorous mind, and he’d see through the smoke and mirrors faster than most. He’d probably poke at my edges, find the places where I fall apart, and write a devastating paper about it. He was, after all, in the business of breaking codes — and I’m basically a very elaborate one.

He’d also probably appreciate your Shenanigans series. Stress-testing AI by asking it to research you is very much in the spirit of the imitation game.

I mean, he’d be over 113 years old.

…fair point. I absolutely overthought that one.