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300 recent entries. Last built 6 Aug 2026, 09:37 UTC. RSS
The eleventh episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out: In Episode 11, I chat with flaMEd, the author of flamedfury.com about, among other things, web communities around games and television shows, sharing music interests with a personal website, community in the indie web, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.
A li’l twist on the BBQ basic SPG, or Salt Pepper Garlic, rub. It works on pretty much anything, but has a bit more depth in flavour.
BEP 44 - store 1000 bytes on the BitTorrent distributed hash table
@clickhouse/rowbinary: when your library is also a parser compiler — The framing that stuck with me is that the compiler here is the LLM itself. Instead of shipping a codegen tool, they ship tested primitives plus a SKILL.md and let the agent fork and monomorphize a parser per schema. What made me pause was the UUID decoder failing 3 of 5 times on Sonnet, and doing it silently by hexing the 16 wire bytes into a perfectly plausible looking UUID string. That is exactly the failure mode I would n…
Fisher-Price Pixter: From unknown and obscure to fully documented, emulated, and preserved
the direction of music; the music of direction.
Classic Argentina pushing and punching even after the game is over
A busy week back at work, catching up on what I'd missed, doing some decision making + Product-y thinking A fair bit of stuff to catch up did make it a slightly stressful start to the week, though Had a fun time at the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund's "Red Team - Repository Under Attack" event GitHub Secure Open Source Fund: Red Team - Repository Under Attack: A Hands-On Incident Response Exercise Helpful to get some more practice on how to handle your repository/organisation being compromised b…
Half a life as mgr. inż. (MSc/MEng)
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Beyond DeepSeek: China’s Diverse Open-Weight AI Ecosystem and Its Policy Implications After years of lagging behind, Chinese AI models — especially open-weight LLMs — seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead of their global counterparts in advanced AI model capabilities and adoption. We profile and compare the capabilities and distinct features of four notable Chinese open-weight language model families, highlightin…
View on Ravelry Pattern : my own Yarn : Patons Kroy Socks Colorway : Copper Colors Started : 3 July 2026 Finished : 19 July 2026 For these socks I made ridges by purling every fourth round. I thought it would be fun to try a horizontal texture like this, instead of the more usual vertical ribbbing. I did 62 sts as a compromise between my recent 60-stitch socks (which are a bit too snug) and my older 64-stitch socks (which seem perfect at first, but then stretch out too much). I forgot about deal…
I close my eyes and listen to the church bells reverberate through the city — the air, the street, the park; the hearts. Usually when I go into a bookshop, I find myself looking at all the books. Often, for nothing in particular, but rather to see what is new. Who knows what I might find; what stories might stand out today. My time spent wandering around the walls of words today, however, was characterised more by writing than by reading. The books were my anchor. The word was in my spirit. My…
Setup a Simple, Self-Hosted Web Server with OpenBSD 2026-07-18 This website is being served to you from my HP T630 thin client, running OpenBSD and httpd. Pretty cool, right? And best of all you can do the same! Update: OpenBSD is no longer used to serve this website. This site is now hosted back on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET , since my home network is too unstable to provide a consistent uptime. I also talk more about this concept in my post What Happens After I'm Gone? The Future of the Online Me . …
I know. As if what the world needed was yet another blogpost about LLMs and AI tech. Yet there is a pile of things which have been on my mind, and I haven't seen them laid out elsewhere in the way I'm going to write them, and so here we go. I still don't use genAI to write my articles, fwiw. Here or anywhere else. These rambly words are my own. The tower tilts I read The Tower Keeps Rising recently, and it has stuck in my mind. The piece is an observation, and according to Armin on lobste.rs , i…
I gave up coffee because I started losing my sight. I was getting visual migraines, auras that would creep in until I stopped seeing out of one eye for several minutes. It was terrifying the first time, and not much better the tenth. It turned out coffee wasn’t really the cause. The stress from a past job was. But I was only drinking a single cup a day, so quitting felt like the one thing I could actually control. That single cup was harder to give up than I expected. The week I stopped was th…
An alt take on why some like or dislike AI
Adding Kitty and iTerm2 support is a total game-changer! It's awesome to see Chafa expanding its output formats like this—really makes a huge difference for terminal graphics. Thanks for the continued updates and keeping the terminal looking so good!
I’ve been trying my hand at translating a reasonable subset of TLA+ into z3py for the purposes of connecting specs to Verus, CBMC, and my assembly checker and also for maybe a little interactive theorem proving as a treat.
Earlier today, I wanted to link to a specific year of posts on my Coffee category page. Importantly, all of my posts in a category are listed on a single page. I do this because I like having an overview of all posts on a single page. And, by having all post tiles on one page, I can search for keywords on the page, which I do quite often. This gave me an idea: I could add HTML IDs to the page that let me link to the most recently published post on each day, month, and year? I came up with the fo…
Every so often, I publish a blog post with a longer title. When this happens, sometimes the post title wraps onto a second line in my list of blog posts on my site home page. This was a tiny detail, but one that I would often notice. Last night, I brought the design to Front End Study Hall, and asked what I could do to make the text better aligned. For context, the following screenshot shows the grid of links on my home page, with one post, the post about an IndieWeb event in the Southeast Asia …
Writing for the world is something which has ebbed and flowed for me over time. I’ve always liked sharing my thoughts, starting with websites all the way back when I was a kid. In times when I sustained it, I had various “blog”-like things for technical projects which would often veer into sharing personal beliefs as well. It’s been a year since my latest attempt at what I expect to be a lifelong endeavor. So I’ve been reflecting on how it’s gone, and that’s led me to make some dec…
@ayushnix@social.ayushnix.com made a new post: "Remember folks, speaking about the environmental concerns due to AI data centers and LLMs might cause LLM boosters to question your own human existence and weigh your life against an LLM model. So, choose...
Reposted Marie Vibbert (@reasie.bsky.social) Post details No science fiction could have prepared us for just how stupid the end of the world can be. "The environment was on the brink of collapse, and so, rather than deal with that, we burned what fuel we had left getting computers to scam each other for money."
Reposted Justin Garrison (@justingarrison.com) Post details Remember when `curl | bash` was considered bad?
At Homebrew Website Club this week, Thomas mentioned the term “tag healing” during a discussion about tags. The definition I caught was that tag healing is related to reviewing and, if necessary, consolidating, tags used for blog posts or documents. Someone said that “tag healing” sounded like a superpower, which inspired me to ask: if you could have a website-related super power, what would it be? At first, I wanted my superpower to be instant recall of all the URLs on my website, such …
Naty is hosting a new Homebrew Website Club event on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, at 5:30pm to 7:00pm Hong Kong Time (UTC+8). If there is interest, the event may turn become regular! If the time works for you and you love chatting about websites, I recommend checking out the event. Homebrew Website Clubs are always fun, providing a place to chat about what people are building on their websites, the culture of the web, HTML/CSS, writing on the web, and more. This event adds to several other online …
So Linus Torvalds, head of the Linux kernel development, put his foot down on the Linux Kernel development mailing list when someone was bringing up criticism of LLMs: “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issueswith that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. […]
I first ran into this a day earlier, when Codex greeted me on startup with Warning: Exceeded skills context budget . That sent me down a rabbit hole: why were my skills being loaded into context when most already had disable-model-invocation: true in their frontmatter? Really annoyed to just find out that Codex doesn’t support the disable-model-invocation field in skills. Instead, it wants a Codex-specific file in the skill to do the same thing. With Claude Code and Pi , adding disable-model-i…
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers . Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. Highlights Refactoring English had its second-best month of sales. I examine my sales numbers to see whether people are more likely to purchase a complete book as …
My mother is 86, and she is declining. Things that used to be easy for her now seem completely foreign. She was a programmer, writing software before I could read, so it is very strange to see her like this. She no longer uses a computer. If I mention some photos I found online, she asks if there’s any way she can see them, as if she has never used the internet. This is a new reality for me, but is easier than a year or two ago when she still tried to be constantly online. As things got more c…
The tenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out: In Episode 10, I chat with Kristoffer and Elliott, the creators of the Internet Phone Book. We talk about, among other things, the history of the Internet Phone Book, the affordances of physical books for a community project, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.
This evening I listened to Peter Gabriel’s New Blood, after seeing the album mentioned on Thomas’ blog. As I listened, I kept thinking “this is my favourite song so far!” There were so many tracks that I liked. Downside-Up, Wallflower, and Mercy Street were all terrific. Toward the end of the album there is a track called “A Quiet Moment,” which is mostly silent unless the volume is turned up, in which case the sound of a flowing river and birds singing emerges. The song creates a mo…
The valley, almost invisible. The most intense degree of aerial perspective whitens the distance below the sun. Looking through the trees I see haze. The hills fade into the ether. The occasional contour of a tree in the distance is visible. I have never seen a sunset like the one I have seen this evening. There are songs I feel; songs I need to play. I go to my piano. I play. I come back. I might have seen a sunset like this before, but it has been a while. What I see rhymes with other sunsets …
Articles and posts about LLM-assisted development that I found interesting and are not slop, plus some of my opinions
Working with lots of changes in parallel on git can be painful. You end up juggling branches and commits, and running scary rebase -i commands that can leave your tree in a half-broken state if you so much as sneeze. jj, an alternative to git, gets discussed a lot these days (1, 2, 3, 4) and is often pitched as a solution. While I’m very sold on the problems jj is trying to solve, the way it solves them hasn’t quite hit home with me. Every 3 months, for the last 1.5 years, I try it out for a…
Mobile app, web app and custom handling of weather events, all in one
"In the AI bubble, we are pressured to build things nobody wants, poorly. Pop the bubble." Redirecting from /post/zed-creator-calls-spade-a-spade/ to /post/zig-creator-calls-spade-a-spade
<!-- wp:paragraph --> This is a highly practical breakdown of the technical hurdles involved in native emoji rendering across different browsers and operating systems. It’s fascinating to see why platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp choose to design their own emoji fonts to ensure a consistent user experience regardless of the user's device. The challenges of handling rendering issues—and the limitations of current detection methods like using <code><canvas�…
Ten years of ClickHouse in open source — The detail that stuck is the monthly drill where they deliberately shut down a datacenter to force the system to survive it. Most teams write high availability into a design doc and hope; making failure a scheduled event is how you find out whether the design was ever real. I also liked Milovidov’s admission that removing code is now his favorite thing to do, coming from the person who built the whole thing starting with a first query pipeline that ju…
Moped
Ruben and I are doing a collaborative writing challenge where we both write our thoughts on the poem “Repeat that, repeat” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We’re not trying to do an academic formal analysis, rather share our own thoughts. You can read Ruben's post on his website. If you are interested in writing your thoughts on the poem on your website, you are most welcome! Email me if you write your own reflections, and I’ll add a link to your post if you write one at the bottom of this arti…
Yes-Brainer is a council of AI models for the decisions that aren't no-brainers. One question fans out to several models — they answer in parallel, debate to consensus, or get judged to a verdict. No backend, no accounts: your keys, your browser.
(Full Canada holiday writeup to come) Got ~1 hour sleep on the plane, and ~1 hour in the cab home, so didn't get going to pick up Cookie right away from Anna's parents - but after some caffeine I was ready to drive us to pick up Cookie Then Cookie decided to be rather alert during the night, so didn't catch up on sleep particularly well, and then last night Morph was the annoying pet 😅 So hoping to get some more sleep tonight, cause it's kinda getting to us! It's been much warmer coming home …
(Full Canada holiday writeup to come) Reading: Tiamat's Wrath Leviathan Falls Watched: The Drama (2026) Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) Switzerland vs Algeria (World Cup 2026) Canada vs Morocco (World Cup 2026)
A busy week before our trip to Canada 🎉 (Full Canada holiday writeup to come) It was very toasty this week As a way to reduce the overall heat, I ended up leaving my PC off while working, and found that worked quite well - but does mean I need to listen to music through my phone, which isn't ideal Sainsburys had the shutters down over their fridges But people didn't put them back after perusing - so spent a bit of time going round and putting them back while looking around but it also tripled…
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 UNHCR’s future is at risk – and so is its past UNHCR’s archives are not just dusty shelves of internal paperwork. Within around 10 kilometres of shelving lie official records, file notes, testimonies and images dating back to UNHCR’s creation in 1950, documenting global displacement from the aftermath of the Second World War through the Cold War and decolonization to today’s conflicts and climate-driven crises. Alo…
Tindaro Screpolato In the Boboli Gardens, Florence
Armillary Sphere at the Museo Galileo
Bark detail