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…

When learning something, if the subject material is unfamiliar then it is more difficult to learn, because you need to keep it in memory. And human memory is limited. That’s why Chunking is a good strategy. Some other strategies to deal with this are - Get the information out of your memory, by writing it down somewhere - paper, your notes, whatever Familiarity with the material matters. So try chunking. Read this first in Inside the Box.

Just now, Mrs Heathen was heading out to pick something up at a specific local Ace Hardware. Here in Raleigh, one company — Westlake — has bought up several Ace Hardware stores, and we weren’t sure which it was. I put “Westlake Ace Hardware” into Apple Maps, and got a fire hose of results that were 99% utterly useless — even with quotes, the results absolutely ignored my specific search string and just gave me back everything in Raleigh that included “Ace Hardware” in the name. This is…

Tor and Onion addresses are one of those things that I feel like I have known about since forever. Still, I never really understood how the Tor Project worked, both organisationally and technically. It is thanks to Avoiding the Internet Achilles’ heel: locking the web open with Onion Services at the Internet Archive Europe that I met some of the main maintainers of Tor software and I had a deeper understanding. I casually chatted with Silvio and Gus after the presentation, and I discovered that…

When I started remodeling my office things got a bit out of hand. Since I did not fancy setting up my workstation I simply connected the iPad to one of the Pro Display XDRs, pulled out the travel keyboard and trackpad and used it for a week as primary computing device. So far, so good — I already wrote about my experience using the iPad for software development last year when we got a major revamp of iPadOS. Not much has changed (except that my desk looked like a dumpster during the time of the…

Introducing @socialspec.org: APIs for social engagement on the World Wide Web (of websites). Built on open standards.

I brought my Linux laptop along on this trip because I’m “trying to do my own thing” when it comes to my computing space. The System76 Darter Pro is a nice laptop and the keyboard is amazing. Unfortunately, I have to keep tinkering with the Wi-Fi network connection to do something as simple as writing this blog post. Apparently, Debian 13 Trixie with Sway WM has a challenge when it comes to guest networks that tend to bounce users between hotspot nodes. The lesson has been learned. One of the…

Read about it in Inside the Box, but of course I’ve known of this idea from before. Like, when I wrote somewhere that, unimaginable is usually imaginable, truly unimaginable things are impossible to imagine. I read about a similar idea in Abundance, where they talked about who gets funded for new research - it’s not truly new research, it’s familiar research. Though the story was different there. This basically means throwing a rope to the reader (for example) when you’re doing truly unique…

Speaking of sci-fi authors, Automattic is hosting Neal Stephenson for a livestream about his new book soon, please tune in! Neal was a big influence on WordPress! I got hip to him from Tantek. In the source code of billions of pages you’ll see this: <link rel="profile" href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> GMPG is the Global Media Protocols Group, “an experiment in Metamemetics.” Inspired, of course, by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group that owned the virtual real estate in Snow Crash’s metaverse.…

I’m a little surprised by this bit of news, and sad that my beloved orange model is gone.

On the merit of making use of an old CSS maintainability and performance optimization technique.

TL;DR Claude Code sessions on the web can subscribe to their PRs and get GitHub activity pushed in. I wanted the same in my local sessions. I’ve ended up with a Claude Code channel plugin that forwards each watched repo’s webhooks to my machine with gh webhook forward and pushes reviews, comments, CI results, merge conflicts and force pushes into the session that subscribed. I went through three designs. The one I run now is a small local daemon with a thin shim per session. It keeps each…

The demoscene (a slightly niche, 1980’s/90’s subculture revolving around artistic computer programs) is something I’m more interested in than I have any logical reason to be. It’s also something I randomly encountered while looking through ASCII art tutorials. Since then I’ve collected a lot of links to sites and forums related to it. But then I wondered, if I was starting from scratch, with only the word “demoscene” to go on, what would I find? Part 1: Traditional search engines So I naively…

On putting your name where nobody will ever lookInside a mechanical watch, on a small bridge of steel that holds the balance wheel, a watchmaker engraves a name. Sometimes it is the house. Sometimes, in the older tradition, it is a person, followed by the word fecit - he made it. The engraving sits under the dial, behind the case, in the dark, under a component that must be removed to be seen. The owner of the watch will almost certainly never look at it. The owner of the watch is not the…

Now that my port of CamelForth-80 to the Sega SG-1000 is sort of working, it’s time to get it working better. There’s a lot of undone odds and ends and little bugs that I need to take care of before I can try running it on real hardware, so this week’s (abbreviated) effort was mostly along those lines. VDP Delay The Sega SG-1000 is designed around the Texas Instruments TMS9918A video display processor. A lot of great machines use chips in this family, including the ColecoVision, the original…

HomeView is unavailable in the EU as of 2026-10-13, the date of the press release:Apple HomeView is not available for sale in the European Union, as Siri AI is currently unavailable in iOS in the EU. Apple is working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward.It’s great having a government that cares about my wallet. /sI also disabled the new Siri on my Mac today. It’s still rough and useless, at least over here.

HomeView, that's the new Siri-in-a-Speaker-with-a-Screen device, which was announced by Apple today. No new app stores for this device. Also: updated HomePod mini and updated Apple TV 4K. All with Siri AI. Oh, and Apple Home Collection, which are accessories developed with two third-parties, LG and Schneider. ~ Links: Apple Announces HomeView Smart Display, by Dan Moren, Six Colors Home, by Apple

Apple introduced a few new things this morning centered around home use. Updated products are mostly predictable updates with slight price hikes after the existing ones over the summer. The star of the show is the new $299 HomeView, the long-rumored stationary home gadget: Apple today introduced Apple HomeView, designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it. With a stunning 7-inch Liquid Retina display, HomeView brings entertainment, connection, and smart home management…

James Shore posits that each person-month spent writing code results in 10 days of maintenance in the first year, then 5 days every year after that. Naïvely interpreted, this is a threshold-based model for induced maintenance, and its interesting because it’s so simple. If it could be shown to be true, that’d be useful. The argument Shore is making about the effects of robot-generated code does not depend on the specific numbers, so Shore’s numbers come from a hypothetical wisdom-of-the-crowds…

Using AI has started to become my daily routine. I am still very careful with AI's reply as I am worried about hallucination. I never see AI as a threat but as a partner. Imagine AI as Jarvis from Ironman. When I first use AI, I treat it like a chat bot. Then I started to copy AI prompt from the internet. Earlier this year, I started to let it perform data analysis. That's where I begin to have issues with AI's output. AI can be very convincing even though it is wrong. When your prompt is not…

CSS Grid Lanes supports stretch alignment along the stacking axis, allowing items to fill any remaining space left between other items, and avoid a jagged end edge. See Aligning items within their lanes to learn more.

Discrobble now shows which Discogs folder each album is in, and you can move it to another folder from the album page. This release also collects everything shipped since 1.3.6: any of your collection fields on the album page, help for releases with missing artist credits, and a pull-to-refresh that always finishes. What's new Turn on "Show collection folder" in Settings > Display, and the album page shows the album's Discogs folder at the top of its collection details. Tap it to pick another…

I finally got around to importing my whole historical Twitter archive (just my own original tweets, not replies or retweets) into this WordPress site as a proper Custom Post Type: https://chriscoyier.net/tweets I haven’t added it to the navigation or anything else on the site yet. Not sure what I want to do there. Just feels good having my own data. I used this and hacked it up a bit to fit my needs, and so I didn’t have to leave it as a permanently installed plugin. It’s coming at a weird…

Contents # I have a Patreon! Video Audio The full essay I have a Patreon! # I’ve been writing since the 1900s (technically the late 90s, but still) on the web, about the web, and, over the past twenty years or so, about software development and publishing. I’ve been here a while and am not going away. But I’d like to write more, make more videos and podcasts, and specifically look at the problems we have who are now outsiders in our own industries, whether that’s in software development or in…

AI is great as a maintenance worker. I'm also noticing that it got better at search as well, but not because of the models getting better or some trickster prompts, no, but because the whole internet has turned to complete shit.We spent decades poisoning our infosphere with SEO and "content marketing posts", putting the useful stuff behind the closed walls of Facebook and Instagram, so it's now easier and more convenient to let a computer dig through the mess, and it's crazy to think now that…

During a bit of football banter about League 1 over the weekend, Ken said to me “I bet you’ve never been to any of those places either. All a bit far north” – it turned out I had visited 18/24 of the places in the League. That prompted an idea for a geography quiz, could I make a quiz that combined pinning the locations of cities on a map with some general knowledge questions about those cities? I started out with this prompt: I want to make a geography quiz about cities in the world. For each…

The vibePretty worn out, honestly. I have wanted to keep things moving, but I have been tired enough that it is hard to ignore. Getting away from the desk for a while helped.Highlights🤝 I found Buildside at the start of the month, and I have spent more time there as I get used to being a solo builder. I am still figuring out how to get my apps in front of people, so it helps to see how other builders talk about their work and what they are trying. I have met people working on their own projects…

Learn how to use the sentinel built-in from Python 3.15 for placeholder values. Python 3.15 introduced the new sentinel built-in. The sentinel built-in can be used to create placeholder values: NOTHING = sentinel("NOTHING") A placeholder created by sentinel is the more idiomatic way to provide default arguments or return values where None wouldn't be usable. 15 days of Python 3.15 To celebrate the release of Python 3.15, over the next 15 business days I'll be writing about a new 3.15 feature…