I bought a lamp from the UK, and it came with this plug… … which turns out to be a normal EU plug inside an adapter. Which is nice, but I’ve never seen this solution before. This adapter looks sturdy, but still so… janky. Is this normal?

@manton.org has already shipped a @socialspec.org plugin for @micro.blog! 🤯

Previous posts in this series introduced Frml, then explained how it checks simplar scalar code, handles contracts between functions, and deals with loops. This post shows how Frml handles arrays. What We’re Doing A minimal array program is: fn main() -> Int { let a: Array<Int> = [2, 3, 5]; assert a[2] == 5; return length(a); } The array type checker subclasses the loop type checker and adds visitors for the array syntax. Everything scalar and every while loop is checked exactly as before; the…

Inspired by a post I found today on dev.to and to hit my daily 10-idea list, here are 10 things every coder has blamed, or at least I have—Pair them with these 20+ signs you’re a real coder: #1. Lack of documentation: We all complained about poor or non-existent documentation, but who wants to write it in the first place? #2. Unclear requirements: “That’s what the use case/Jira ticket/user story said” or “It wasn’t clear from the use case…“ That excuse never fails. #3. Unreadable code: “This…

WARNINGBipolar disorder is a serious mental health condition. This article is not meant to mock or laugh at this disorder, but merely use its name and some of its symptoms to convey a message. Never self diagnose, or use AI tools to diagnose yourself, and instead get a medical help if you suspect you are having any mental health conditions. Earlier this month I have received an invoice from Anthropic which ends at -0011, meaning it’s my eleventh month of paying Anthropic to use Claude. A year…

Not too long ago, Apple accessory company Elevation Lab released a product designed to silence the noises made by AirTags when they are out of range. That is a reasonable idea for an AirTag installed in something someone might steal. It is also a dangerous product in the hands of someone who might want to stalk or harass another person, a distressingly well-documented use of AirTags. Elevation Lab, today: We have removed the product and will use our patent on it to prevent anyone else from…

“The Topic” being, of course, the Mathocalypse, except sometimes with AI alignment and even quantum computing and complexity theory and other stuff thrown in. With Ryan Peterman: Notably, near the end of the above podcast, you can watch my live reaction to the news that an Anthropic model found algorithms for the 3SUM and the All-Pairs-Shortest-Path problems beating records that stood for generations—news that hadn’t yet reached me when I woke up and logged in. (If you don’t feel like watching,…

I’ve been thinking about this thread a lot, specifically this bit: As far as I can tell the answer is something like LLMs are smart but not wise; they don’t induce that many of those “Aha!” moments that seem to be best mined through other means (or often, just doing nothing and pondering stuff on walks) These days, most of my “coding” work happens by me steering agents, and these agents are generally very good at making progress once I’ve framed the problem. But (as I’ve written about in the…

Photo apps today are broken. I keep asking myself the same question: why aren't there better photo apps? Your camera roll is a lot of interesting stuff you've seen over the years. That's why I think everyone should curate their photo library, similar to how we curate Instagram. For me, part of it is personal: I just really like the aesthetics of the Instagram grid. That layout is beautiful and kind of unique. So why isn't there more pressure to do that? The Story you tell yourself You tell…

Ben Nadel demonstrates a buggy spread operator in Adobe ColdFusion 2025, update 13. This only happens when spreading the result of a scoped method call....

Many people say that AI is just another tool. But this is not quite true. Unlike any other tools, it doesn't just solve or automate some narrow problem, it constantly learns and adapts which allows it to compete with our cognitive abilities.

Apple is selling the recently announced HomeView, an iPad mini glued to a speaker that serves as a hub for the home, with a chaotic commercial in which a family runs over for breakfast. I can’t remember any other company commercial that causes anxiety and contempt for the product.

A long-rumored Apple HomeView is finally revealed and I’m a bit disappointed. Image © AppleFirst, and foremost, it won’t be available in the EU until Apple and the European Commission clarify AI-related policies. So, even if I wanted, I couldn’t buy it. But I’m sure soon or later, this will be resolved. Would I buy it then? For $299 it should offer something, that a cheap Android tablet running Home Assistant dashboard can’t. And honestly, I don’t know what it could be for me. (Given that my…

Inspired by Dave's I wish you the best in the Offline and the associated Hacker News submission. Where are the people announcing their recent arrival to or increased adoption of "social media, AI usage, or in more extreme cases the Internet entirely"? Who among those people not only thrive in the Offline, but could coexist well with me both online and offline? If you haven't found them yet, who could those people be for you, and how could you find them sooner than later? Why would I want to…

All I can say is, this was quite a refreshing surprise to me, where everything is going tinier and more glued and sealed up today. True, I’ve not yet had to ever replace a battery on one of my Kindles, and they’ve been running for years. What has appeared to be a dead battery sometimes, just required a trick to kickstart it and get it charging again. But a battery is often what gives in first, so just knowing could be easier to open up and replace, does give some peace of mind. See…

NetFoundry’s VP Product Marketing Jack Poller has been writing a series of posts on the NetFoundry blog about microsegementation, and I’ve been doing supplementary “back of the envelope” to illustrate what he’s talking about. Jack’s latest piece is on network segmentation vs. cryptographic segmentation, and it made for a perfect four-panel comic, pictured above. Here’s the article. Network segmentation decides trust based on where a connection comes from (that is, its IP address). The problem…

I am usually chill. The world moves through me without much trouble.That said, in my head, I notice about a hundred subtly "incorrect" or subtly broken things in the world. I am secretly the biggest nitpicker, and this is a view into that part of my mind.The liftMy apartment's lift has capacitive buttons. Capacitive buttons don't have a tactile feel, but the implications are beyond the dissatisfaction of calling the lift. Old people struggle to figure out how hard to press, and the feedback is…

The next major release of @hypertexting.com is now available in the App Store. I'm excited about this one!

If you’re reading this on your phone, you probably won’t notice much of a difference, except maybe for the accent color. On a computer, though, quite a lot has changed since your last visit. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, please check it out! A few months ago I completely redesigned this website, but I was never fully happy with the result. It felt too left-aligned, too wide, too empty, and not really me. So I redesigned it once again. This time I think it’s here to stay for a while,…

Photo from yesterday, because I didn't get anything I liked today. I finally published the blog post I have had in my drafts folder for weeks now, about how I imported my shared albums from iCloud into Immich, without creating 30,000 duplicates.

I keep seeing news stories like this, trying to debunk the idea that Ukraine’s drone strikes against Yandex did not cause a massive outage of apparent bots on social media. So far all the pieces like this I’ve seen hinge on trying to say that the Cloudflare graph is for search bots, not social media bots. And then they bring out a bunch of experts in the space (who track the data science more closely than I do, I have no doubt), who said “We don’t see it.” But the simple fact is on Twitter now,…

Now that I already wrote about Backblaze for another reason, I’ll also finally take a moment for a different rant related to their software. This screenshot is almost a year old, because I couldn’t quite figure out how to do this post – it can’t really be visualized. (In the time I procrastinated on this post, there’s been a different shitstorm that I luckily don’t need to care about personally.) As already indicated in my last post, Backblaze very much has a “hide the details” approach to…

(This is an updated version of an older post - the introduction remains the same, the technical details are different) Linux draws a distinction between code running in kernel (kernel space) and applications running in userland (user space). This is enforced at the hardware level - in x86-speak1, kernel space code runs in ring 0 and user space code runs in ring 32. If you’re running in ring 3 and you attempt to touch memory that’s only accessible in ring 0, the hardware will raise a fault. No…

The second Group Facilitation Method Swap will be on Saturday, November 21 in Olympia, Washington. These are free events, registration for Olympia is currently open, and you’re invited. Facilitation Group Method Swap About the eventThe first Group Facilitation Method Swap was last month in Tacoma and we had a blast. One participant offered up her venue in Olympia so that’s where we’re headed next. If you’re interested in group facilitation, or want to get some practice with different ways of…

The other day, a colleague scolded me for being a hypocrite when I mentioned that his Claude Code subscription directly supports fascists in USA. He wasn’t wrong. The first thing he asked was: which laptop do you have? Which OS are you running? Apple? That is responsible for forced child labour in the East to mine precious metals and assimilate their mass-produced laptops? And you talk of fascists? Ha! I did want to mention that the laptop is nearly seven years old but didn’t get the chance.…

Introducing @hypertexting.dev - the new home of the HyperTexting CLI and developer documentation. #MakeHypertext

This feels like Pixar’s Luxo or the classic half-dome iMac crossed over into the WALL-E universe, and looks like it is going to be cloned to oblivion. The $299 price is… interesting considering the tech inside it (parts of what it can do are highly non-trivial, and very much the kind of AI Apple likes doing). I feel somewhat vindicated that Apple seems to have built a Siri for Families of sorts, but at the same time I have to wonder what flavour of it (and when) will be available in Europe, and…

I can't quite recall when I first used this slash command... perhaps early summer this year, or maybe even before that. Regardless, it was a formalization of something I'd been doing in LLM•space for a while now, and I just gave it both a term — "shadow micro-blogging" — and a formal string, "/sh.mb" to denote it in the prompt. And here's the thing: I almost always used it at the end of the prompt, not at the start; there's an intentionality in this positioning that is meaningful. Unlike slash…

Interop is an effort to increase the interoperability of key features of the web platform across browsers. Run by a team of representatives from companies that make substantial contributions to browser rendering engines—including Apple, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla—Interop focuses on features that are high-priority for web developers and end users. Each year they select a list of features to focus on for that year. This effort has led to a significant amount of features getting cross…

I just had an interesting journey getting help with a failed Quad Lock product. The company made things right in the end—they sent me a warranty replacement for free even though technically I think it was past the warranty period—but there were some annoying bumps along the way. Before I tell the whole story I first want to share the most important thing I learned. The official website for Quad Lock is https://quadlockcase.com/. There’s another website, quadlockcases . com (note “cases” instead…