Sayid 0.8 is out! It’s the third release since I brought Sayid back from the dead a couple of weeks ago, and it has a clear theme: making the tool easy to pick up. The revival releases were mostly about the engine - bounding the recording, consolidating the API, getting the data out. This one is about the experience. If you’ve ever bounced off Sayid because you couldn’t figure out what to press, or what it was trying to tell you, 0.8 is for you. It started with a bug report Shortly after the…
This week I had the pleasure of attending Software Should Work (2026), henceforth SSW. This was my first time attending a conference and it was really fun so I thought I would write about it. Firstly, a huge thank you to the organizer, Isaac Van Doren, for making it happen. I'll be going through the days and their talks and anything interesting that happened outside of talks. I won't be trying to summarize the talks but what I took away from them and will be handing out made out demerit points…
Today I sent this email to orders@firstmfg.com, the customer support email address for First Manufacturing Co., which sells motorcycle riding gear, most notably vests and jackets: Today I received marketing spam from info@leathernewyork.com. The email address to which the spam was sent, [elided], which is also the address from which I am writing to you, is a unique, privacy-protecting email address which was only ever given to First Manufacturing Company, specifically when I placed orders…
Projectile 3.2 is out!1 That’s the third Projectile release this month, and by now you probably see the pattern - a whole lot of nothing for a couple of years, then everything at once. Where 3.0 was the big cleanup and 3.1 the pile of long-standing feature requests, 3.2 is a focused release with one clear theme: search and replace. Plus one bonus feature I’ve wanted for ages, but more on that below. Replace, but with a preview projectile-replace has always been one of those commands that…
The answer is in economics, not talent. The biggest hurdle for an Indian company trying to develop frontier model is that right from the get go, it has to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI free plans + all Chinese open weight models. Chinese models mostly flourished due to the demand from their domestic market which OpenAI/Anthropic couldn’t meet as they’re unavailable in China. This unmet demand created space for innovation. China knows this story well, but here in India, we like unfettered,…
On why most of your hard problems were already solved by a fish, a mammal, and soon, an open-source solution The fish and the mammal who took the same examPut a dolphin next to a shark. Same torpedo body, same dorsal fin, same general business of being the thing other animals do not want to be downstream of. You would assume close cousins. You would be off by about 300 million years and an entire mountain of priorities. The shark is a fish. The dolphin is a mammal that got bored of land, walked…
WordPress 7.0.2 went out today with two important security updates. One is a type of pre-authorization RCE we (fortunately!) have only seen a few times in WordPress’ 23-year history; the last, I believe, in the PHPMailer class five years ago. Major kudos to Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber for finding the batch REST API RCE, to TF1T, dtro, and haongo on the facilitated SQL injection! Thanks to responsible disclosure, the WordPress.org Security team was able to coordinate with hosts and CDNs to…
Why do those humans on Avatar get so impressed by that tree? I'm sure they could connect to the Metaverse and talk to AI slop of dead people just fine at home too. (2026/07/17 22:57)
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on UnsplashMost writers choose a niche by looking outward.They study what’s popular. Possibly, compare audience sizes. They search for gaps within established categories: productivity, personal finance, business, creativity, the eternally nebulous “self-improvement.”And then they squeeze themselves into whichever box appears most promising // profitable.It’s the current best practice x best advice you’ll hear from every authorial charlatan flogging a course. But 9 times out…
Editorio is a free native macOS markdown and code editor. My favourite feature is the speed at which this thing opens. Lightning fast.
The anonymous blogger Gwern recently completed a thirteen thousand word post called Human-like Neural Nets by Catapulting, in which he offers a theory about why LLMs don’t possess truly flexible human-like intelligence, and how we might train LLMs that do. Theories like this are entirely unremarkable: every crank researcher on the internet has a theory about how to crack AI. But Gwern is remarkable. Outside of OpenAI itself, Gwern is the earliest person to anticipate the potential of large…
Thursday and Friday are my remote work days; which came from the pandemic days to reduce the number of employees in the office. Originally my remote work days were Tuesday and Friday, but that was recently changed. I don't know why my job still lets me have the two remote days to work, but I do appreciate it very much! Honestly, I could work remote 100% of the time these days since there's nothing on-prem that would need my attention anymore, but the company wants there to be a presence of…
I asked Claude to make a video about how it created this video game level. This (frankly mindblowing) video goes into the math and process around creating a solve using real telemetry and a physics model that hits all our story beats with realistic video game motion.In our movie Reality Games, there’s an eight minute sequence near the climax where we fly into the internet, which becomes a fully 3D motion graphics world. It tells the story about how a social movement is engineered. The goal was…
I'm doing something new with the structure of my site. Or, something old, really. While I've got a blog folder to hold general posts, the r est of the site is made up of arbitrary folders and files scattered to the four winds. I can throw stuff anywhere. It's liberating. The approach did cause a complication. Aggregating content from across the site into a single list is more complicated than processing a single directory of files. I fixed that today during a few hours of live streaming. I was…
Due to my compulsive need to self-host whatever I possibly can1, I decided to set up a self-hosted PDS. All that's on it so far is my Bluesky profile data, but it was a surprisingly painless process. Why bother? Well, I get to own my identity (DID) and my data. The relay and AppView remain Bluesky's, but the authoritative copy of my account is mine. I already syndicate from my site to Bluesky and controlling the PDS is the last part of this infrastructure I can reasonably control. I've been…
White Boat at Nyhavn – Copenhagen, Denmark – Fujifilm GFX100RF – Copenhagen Negative People often ask me why I think Fujifilm Recipes have become so popular. The answer seems obvious: they produce beautiful pictures. That’s certainly part of it, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. After years of creating hundreds of Recipes and talking with photographers from around the world, I’ve come to believe that what we’re really drawn to isn’t just the look, it’s how Film Simulations and Recipes…
Matheus Moreira (blog) built lone lisp directly on Linux system calls. In this interview, he shares his knowledge of C and the Linux Kernel. How did you get into computing originally? What was your path before discovering Lisp etc.? I’ve always liked computers, but what truly got me into programming was video games. When I was a kid, I used to play games from a series called Mega Man Battle Network, and I ended up getting inspired by those games. They’re ultimately responsible for my learning…
Linus Torvalds: I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today. There are other…
Dear Reader,Please enjoy this conversation I had on the Design Systems House!I share a lot of new ideas I've had about reading as a system, and I get to look like a cool computer man as well!Best,Bram
Hello, loves! Writing a note to ask for ideas, I got an idea. Let’s see what happens with it. Result: I think it turns out nicely. I was thinking about this morning’s creation of a little object that made things simpler and was easy to test. And I was looking at RoomView, and a long story test for something that doesn’t seem that tricky. And on Hill’s slack, I though I’d start a convo and get some advice, and I wrote: A RoomView has a method illuminate that illuminates every cell that it…
By Shanna Trenholm, from the DOORS thread. (Read Shanna’s lovely newsletter!)Howdy, everyone. Thanks for the feedback on Savor of the Month. (Continue to chime in here.) I’m going to limit participation to Supporters for now, but will continue to monitor and perhaps experiment. If you haven’t already, do check out the July installment, devoted to theme of DOORS. Enjoy others’ contributions, make your own, leave reactions, etc., here!This isn’t actually in the thread, but I really love this…
This document contains some thoughts about the storage and comparison of URLs, common operations crucial to the correct function of security software like Microsoft SmartScreen. Importantly, URLs are also displayed on security surfaces to enable the user to make a decision based on their contents. Eight years ago, I wrote the Guidelines for URL Display. Background The Web allows linking and retrieval of various resources via an address known as a URL. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is an…
My friend and former GitHub coworker Jason Rudolph died in May 2026. With the consent of his family, I’m writing about some of my memories of Jason. Platform I first properly (and in meatspace) met Jason when I joined GitHub’s “Platform” team. That team was a few (unreasonably excellent) engineers who maintained and improved GitHub’s API. As almost all features ended up touching the API in some way, the role could have easily become a gatekeeping one. Instead, Jason turned it into primarily an…
I am generally not someone who cares much for easter eggs (unless they come with interesting stories), but John Gruber’s one-liner made me pause: Joanna Stern explains why this emoji is correct today: 📅. (This one too: 📆) I thought this was some trickery, but the answer is simple: I did not realize inexplicably there are two distinct calendar emoji: one for calendar, and one for a tear-off calendar. The way I learned about it was to use a tool I made a few years ago called text.makeup: I…
Hello! I’ve been working on a Django site recently, and I decided to use SQLite as the database. When I was getting started with using SQLite as database for a website I read a bunch of blog posts about how it is totally fine to use SQLite in production for a small site and I think it is totally fine, but what I did not fully appreciate is that SQLite is still a database, databases are complicated, and I do not know a lot about operating databases. So here are a couple of small things I’ve been…
It’s hard not to have tragic copywriting as a programmer. As we stepped into this indie scene, it was (and is) all too common to ship something like this: The Button Label Test - A Live Audit What will happen when you tap? Humanize copy The button text reads like a launch code sequence 😅. This names the result ✨! 9:41 Cancel New Event JUL 17 Design review Today, 2:00–2:30 PM CalendarWork Alert10 minutes before The action stays the same. Only the words get clearer. Initiate Add Sequence Even…
There was a time when a two or three year-old, refurbished flagship smartphone was a good purchase. But times are changing.
Instagram is a photo sharing app that was released through the Apple App Store in October, 2010 and reached one million users in just three months. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for one billion dollars. Mike and his partner, Kevin Systrom, are both graduates of Stanford University. Mike speaks with Jessica Harris about how he launched Instagram, from scratch. Listen to the interview
