Earthquakes: For a while, it felt like I could read everything on the Internet that I cared about, that I could follow every interesting blog, keep up with every interesting idea. It feels like that changed at some point since 2020. My guess is this is related to the cultural tremors rippling through the …

Cordwifto Part 2: A screenshot of a web page running in an in-app browser, talking to an in-app webserver, inside an Apache Cordova application running on the iOS simulator. The in-app browser is displaying a site built by Hugo running in-process by way of a Swift wrapper. I kind of can’t believe I just plugged …

Cordwifto: I embedded Hugo in a Go library in a Swift library in a Cordova plugin in a Cordova app to see if it would work. Looks like it does. That’s Hugo logging to a <textarea> and generating a static HTML page on the iPhone simulator. Had this idea that it would be neat to be able to make an …

why is the US government wasting its time with a tiktok ban when there are REAL problems with chinese apps????

My first sunrise of the year this morning at Mueller Lake Park… planning to see one every month 🌅

Someone told me this yesterday and I did not believe them. Funny in an X (formerly Twitter) sort of way.

Holy shit this list of features is enormous. https://bun.sh/blog/bun-v1.2 S3, Postgres, CSS imports, HTML imports, inline C, JSONC package.json, color conversions, ORMless object mappings. Amazing!

The most inscrutable icons in my dock are in the IDE and LLM sections

Opening a project that has been only in zed inside other editors and it looks SO wrong. Not just Zed’s own font, but theme too, I guess. My eyes glaze over and I don’t want to read the code. Feels like one experience I had reading an ancient Python codebase that wrapped a C library. …

Wishlist: good web UI for flipping through diffs. I’d like to be able to export a few commits to a set of diffs, which I can then show on a webpage in sequence. Especially useful for explaining how to build something, or showing LLM changes and how I had to modify them, etc

I wish I could give o1 access to a regular Git repo and have it commit its changes in a branch, with my instructions in the commit message. Surely someone else has had this idea? Where can I buy this.

Charming captcha (is such a thing possible?) from LibraryThing

htmz is a neat hack

Finally able to give the Project Blue gift that I’ve been sitting on since February. Happy birthday Noah!

Ice crystals in the morning

Been a Gandi customer since at least 2009, maybe before. As of today, I’m fully migrated off. End of an era.

I think the funniest thing to me about the Apple privacy lawsuit which was just settled is the notion that guys wearing these things at this restaurant have tastes that could not possibly be predicted by a computer that wasn’t cheating. [two Siri users] said their discussions about Air Jordan …

AI chatbot feature request: a button to summarize the current state of the conversation and any code or other artifacts into a single short message to send to a new chat conversation, to drop baggage of undesirable iterations and reduce token consumption rate.

Cool stats from the past couple of years

New Years Day brunch, mini baked potatoes and caviar

Every time I go on a bike ride or get in a pool it amazes me that the company from California has produced two biometric authentication technologies: one that is unusable when wet, and another that is unusable in direct sunlight.

it’s nuts how my entire generation got its feelings hurt so bad by intentional listicle ragebait that the cultural connotations are (still!) above the fold on Wikipedia for avocado toast

Baked-in-advance Christmas Day quiches (Christmas Eve whisky for scale) btw, quiche is mega easy and the best way to elevate it is to make your own crust. I bastardize Martha by combining the ingredients and smooshing them into the bottom of the pan. Dreadful, I know. Tastes good though

noms de guerre: Definitions nom de guerre noun pseudonym (historically) a fictitious name used in war nom de ‘guerre noun a fictitious name adopted by an actor or model (historically) a fictitious name adopted by the subject of daguerreotype photography nom Daguerre proper name Louis

if i understand correctly, a.m. stands for after midnight and p.m. stands for pre midnight

“Signing in just got easier!”, the website threatened

The ecstasy of triumph / The agony of defeat

Bluesky has such a nice web experience (“even” on mobile), responding instantly and scrolling beautifully; I groan whenever I load a Mastodon or Twitter webpage. I do not have a Bluesky-shaped hole in my soul, but damned if the nice web experience doesn’t make me want to try it …

For readability: Defenders of short lines in source code have won the day when it comes to defaults from automatic formatters, but when I look at the results I don’t understand why. The last 6 lines here are the same as the first 14, and it looks much more readable to me. For readability we recommend against …

Are there any positive effects of a system full of demons which you can ward off with an incantation beginning with THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” ? If yes, what are they?

I am made to understand that it is stylistically incorrect to underline hyperlinks, but, with apologies to my typographical betters, it is hypertextually incorrect to do otherwise. An underlined link is rarely a detriment; its absence often is.

Which side does the rendering again?: So-called “server-side rendering” is actually “server-side serializing, network streaming, and then client-side rendering”, in contrast to “client-side rendering” which is actually “server-side serializing, network streaming, manipulation by JavaScript, and …

In the cloud, you must pay the piper, who, one must always remember, charges more than you’d expect for egress

Last night at Lazarus

Finally, the web is taking cues from the best UX in the world (PBX phone trees) (to be clear you have to type “1” or “2” in the little box and then click the button with your mouse)

I miss Twitter bots. Wish fediverse hosting was easier… not sure I care to be manually approved for botsin.space 🙄 or for that matter to register a new account on any hosted server for every silly bot idea I can think of. It should be as easy as RSS.

I cannot abide the hideous portmanteau “transpile”, sewn together as it is from two words which would perfectly convey the intent in every single case, created intentionally as a distinction without a difference.

There’s nothing important left unsaid because it’s too hard to write online. Nothing wrong with it being even easier, but for decades it’s been the moral equivalent of single-cent bid/ask spreads.

Nominitive determinism, OpenAI edition: Enjoying the alternatives to human intelligence brought to us by the Alt Man

The reason it’s hard to draw a line in the sand to determine the line for “true” artificial intelligence is not because it’s hard to recognize intelligence, but because it is hard to know ourselves. “What will it feel like when …?” sounds easy but is …

I wish my podcast player did automatic text transcription - even a bad LLM would be okay, and even paying a cloud LLM per request would be ok. I also wish it let me mark a timestamp as important so I could go back and find it later.

shiftwidth=3: Like everyone, I have my own code formatting opinions. Whenever the urge to share them gets too great, I try to keep in mind the senior architect from many jobs ago who believed that the best tab width was 3. I suspect that some state education agencies still run scripts indented to three spaces.

Made a mezcal old fashioned (mezcal, orange bitters, Agave syrup) again, but added a pinch of salt for the first time tonight. Deliciousness metric improved ~30%.

Stuff like this makes me want to make my own game. Something cool about not sending a link but physically carrying around or handing someone a thing you made. Perhaps not a game ruthlessly optimized for fun, but a game-like experience designed to be enjoyed in a few moments.

Recently reminded of the Trent Reznor Prize For Tricky Embedding, for which nominations continue into the 2020s.

Accepting comments via access.log: I am somewhat dissatisfied with the comments server on my main website, and have been hunting for alternatives. The most cursed thing I’ve seen so far is this: I implemented static HTML comments on my website by tail’ing the /var/logs/nginx/access.log with a perl script. No CGI, no …

I learned in the reflector.show episodes about the Young Thug trial that a televangelist in the 80s said that “music is the new pornography”, and for a second I understood why one might call one’s band “The New Pornographers”, but no, it actually makes as much sense as …

The secret `brew install` algorithm: How to install programs with homebrew: Type brew search PROGRAM and wait for it to show results Realize this is taking a while Search for the program on the web Visit the GitHub release page for it Click the download button Extract archive to your $PATH Run the program

I see how one might believe that “the purpose of a system is what it does”, and I see how one might believe that the “spirit of the law” is a coherent concept that everyone understands, but I have to say I don’t see how one could believe both at once.

TIL that “lorem ipsum” is the corruption of pain itself. Lorem ipsum is typically a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin. …

Coordinated Lunar Time: In April, the White House released a memo on a standard for lunar time (PDF). I hope it is not too late to save the country from a terrible mistake: abbreviating this standard as “LTC”. “LTC” is a jumbled initialism for Coordinated Lunar Time, patterned after …

Quoting, Raymond Chen: Via The Old New Thing A colleague told a story of how he once broke the entire Office division’s ability to check in code because he accidentally checked in a syntax error to the script that is used to verify that your proposed change has satisfied all the pre-submit requirements such as passing …

Food tracking: Perhaps a weird way to put it, but it’s accurate to say that I’ve been enjoying tracking my food intake for the past 6 months. I’ve been tracking exercise for longer, and I started tracking food too when I realized I was mentally reaching for my phone after meals to record the data …

If you see something strange, say something strange

Just beat my move goal while sitting at a restaurant eating spicy food

Something else I noticed after updating to Sonoma: although I’ve tried many times in the past to extinguish it, the text replacement omw has once again returned, almost like a cicada. Jeff Johnson

Realized since having a baby why YouTube face is so annoying: it’s an exaggerated face we make for babies. It’s like the baby talk of facial expressions. YouTube face in non-baby contexts is like listening to an obsequious couple in the next booth baby-talking to each other.

Let’s Kerberos Cool thought experiment Whenever I think about Kerberos I think about the frequent time I spent at Barnes and Noble in high school, sitting on the floor of the computer books section, reading everything I could about Unix, trying hard to understand Kerberos and many other things

I’m not trying to make everyone mad, but I gotta say, an Alpine Linux that used systemd for everything would solve a lot of problems for me.

Claws: sharpened Chitin: waxed Splines: reticulated Glands: excreting 👹

Patterns

My favorite math scratchpad app Soulver is available on iPhone again - way nicer than a spreadsheet for simple algebra, especially on a phone

I really wish they would like, put a murderous dictator in charge of HDMI (and all) versioning. if you do not stamp the version number on the cables in a way that can be read after it’s been in my garage for 50 years, you get dropped in the piranha tank

Quoting Ryan Tomayko on how many levels of headers you really need in your documents: Remember that Feynman covered all of physics – heavenly bodies through QED – with only two levels of document hierarchy (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 1970).

Operating system feature wish: userspace programmable files: I frequently find myself wishing for the ability to really treat the filesystem as an API. Imagine a file that: returns the current date/time in a certain format when it is read transparently download binaries from github and assemble them into .deb/.rpm/.apk packages … maybe more I am …

UGC privatization could improve AI models: An off the cuff idea: AI training on public data is driving privatization of user-generated content (eg Reddit API). This could push users with a real need for the information who today rely on public google search to build private archives. For instance, keeping a copy of the most insightful …

Browsers need better account primitives: Michał Sapka notes that PhpBB is a good way to create a small community. I’d like this to be true, but I think this makes the barrier to entry too high for normie participation. I think part of the reason Reddit has been so successful is that website account creation is such a chore. If every …

I am seeing more and more bad hyphenation recently, this is just so sad :(

Copiloting LLMs building GUIs: Hypothesis: LLMs will enable developers like me to build apps that require a serviceable but not world class graphical UI. This could unlock a deluge of applications built from or inspired by existing open-source command-line apps that don’t have a GUI complement, especially mobile apps. One …

Homelab aesthetic quotes from computers are bad: And I think that’s how I became the person I am today: I want computer networks to operate in as straightforward and tangible a fashion as they did in 2009. And I want a lot of cabling. … Pihole forms part of a split-horizon DNS arrangement on the top-level domain I use, which is such a …

A router-enforced EULA for IoT devices: A recent shower thought: consumer routers could enforce good IoT manufacturer behavior by placing devices on a secure, contained network by default, and allowing full access only if a device is receiving security updates. The default network would be slower and heavily limited in endpoints it could …

Ironic to use social sanctions (“climate incinerating”, etc) against cryptocurrency people. The whole point of proof-of-* systems is that social sanctions don’t work. An attack that the targets are inoculated against by definition.

Qubes + Whonix is one of the best ways to make sure you don’t leak your identity on Tor but I keep getting nerd sniped. Should I use split SSH?; I don’t use GPG for anything but maybe I could…; Oh neat, automatic VM creation with Salt; …

Musing on AI tools: Regarding AI prose suggestions like this, it seems to me that there’s a big divide between documents intended for others and notes intended for personal use. Clearly you wouldn’t want short sentences like “I’m on it” to translate to 2 paragraphs in inkdrop.app (my notes …

Blue skies, Sierra Ferrel, chickenshit bingo. Thanks Luck.

This would have been my dream laptop until my 2019 onset of RSI :( I miss working out of coffee shops www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/pocke…

TIL: Narrow banking: Fascinating history that feels very relevant today: there was recently a bank startup called TNB that tried to offer “narrow banking” which would have offered deposit accounts and plops the result directly in the Fed, passing interest to customers (nearly 2% in 2018, although obviously …

PLS DO NOT TAKE

Imagine browsers offering synced window.localStorage, with an in-browser UI for whether you’re logged in to a site. It would be like iCloud for the web - syncing data via your browser sync password, obviating the need to create a new account for every application that wants to store data, as …

Circa 2000 or so, my family went on vacation to South Carolina to visit my grandparents. Here I am pictured with the most important member of my family (StarCraft) which I brought on the plane and insisted my grandfather install on the PC he used for work.

Experimenting with a micro.blog account. Goals: keep posts on my own domain… … but also be able to easily write from my phone write short and medium posts (long ones on main blog) keep a foot in the door at Twitter by cross posting

Test post, pls ignore