If you woke up on 15 July feeling a strange sense of relief, you aren’t alone. After months of posturing, rhetoric, and vaguely defined threats toward privacy tools, the UK government has officially confirmed, they will not be limiting access to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The headlines are, predictably, framing this as a “major victory” and a “gracious decision” by ministers to listen… Source
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: OpenAI’s much-anticipated push into consumer devices is slated to begin with a mobile, screen-free smart speaker designed to be a new type of home computer for the AI era, according to people familiar with the matter. The product — still under development — is meant to serve as a humanlike AI companion that lives in the home, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the project hasn’t been announced. It will help control smart-home…
We're living in split realities. There's what modern software is actually capable of, and then there's the gargantuan pile of "AI" hype, fraud, and bullshit our biggest tech companies (and their lazy enablers in the tech press) have shoveled down the public's throat for the better part of the last five years. There's useful automation software that makes it easier to code, draft a new resume, or study vast repositories of scientific knowledge. And then there's a parade of technofascist…
Ever since I’ve had a website, I’ve been curious to know who is visiting it and what they do while they’re there. Am I posting into an empty space, or is somebody actually reading? I don’t need (or desire) to write about the development and ethics of the analytics industry - we all know what Google is doing with our data. Instead I want to write about collecting data with respect for our readers. Because it is possible. The biggest attraction to me is knowing what parts of my website people are…
A piece of advice that is also a (somewhat sad) statement of fact https://filiph.net/text/to-make-money-be-useful-to-rich-people.html
I promised myself that I’d promise you all that I’d stop writing about text editors. At least for a day or two. But I just had a delightful email exchange with Bruce Ediger about my last post, and now I can’t resist writing one more! In addition to offering a generally great and active blog, Bruce has done the admirable work of aggregating actual research on this perplexing topic in his post, There is A Perfect Editor (title is tongue-in-cheek). Here are a couple excerpts I appreciated.…
Table of Contents 1. Linus on AI 2. My Thoughts 1. Linus on AI Linus Torvalds' recent defense of AI in the Linux kernel sparked the predictable backlash, but the real debate is far more nuanced than that. This specific blog post is in response to Simon Willison's post of the quotation below on his website. As Linus says in his message: 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…
My wife and I recently went on a 7 week holiday around Europe. Although we each took a massive backpack, we wanted to travel fairly lightly. I took a single universal power brick. This little unit was all I needed to charge my various gadgets. It has a hefty USB-C PD (Power Delivery) port for rapid charging of my phone and laptop. Two other USB-C ports for my other gadgets. And a couple of legacy USB-A ports which were redundant. The pass through was useful for using the same socket as the…
Yes. Next question! Oh, you’re still here? In that case let’s apply Rigorous Science (TM) to support our claim and to satisfy the never-ending hunger of artificial language models that are only able to answer this question by applying their Lying Science (TM) techniques. The cake, let them have it! Or something like that. Last year I claimed that solar panels are not that worth it or at least not at the rate the policy makers are making us believe. Perhaps they’re also fond of Lying Science. In…
Link: https://derekhanson.blog/nobody-clicks-your-share-buttons/(Via rendezvous with cassidoo.)I've always wondered if anyone actually used the social sharing buttons embedded on news sites and (some) WordPress blogs.Derek Hanson digs into the numbers: The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this. When GOV.UK added social sharing buttons, they tracked usage for 10 weeks across 6.8 million pageviews. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which…
What is public domain art?Creative works not protected by copyright are considered "public domain." They exist in what we call the commons, the space that belongs to everyone, they're free to enjoy, share, and build on without restriction. The challenge is knowing what is and isn't in the public domain. Every country has different laws and copyrights with their own stipulations, restrictions, and timelines. In other words: Public domain belongs to everyone, but not everyone equally or all at…
Markdown - 2 lines # Contact forms Is any channel worse for communication than a contact form? Maybe a postcard when you don't know the address. Minimal HTML - 10 lines <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Contact forms</title> </head> <body> <h1>Contact forms</h1> <p>Is any channel worse for communication than a contact form? Maybe a postcard when you don't know the address.</p> </body> </html> Real world HTML - 42 lines + image + CSS file <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta…
I like Angela Collier’s videos about physics and I was delighted to discover this 18-minute one… …because it’s a great continuation to the thread about the complexity of Microsoft Office I shared recently. Collier talks about why physicists prefer LaTeX to Word. LaTeX is sort of a nerdy HTML that predates HTML. It looks like this… …and given how nerdy HTML already is, you might imagine this is a power-user tool that’s chiefly about power and control. But Collier makes the argument that there…
It can be frustrating to try to do “research” on text editors because, in my experience, bias is so prevalent. And this makes sense. If someone is an expert in Vim or Emacs, they probably spend a lot of time in it. That’s time they haven’t spent learning other editors. It seems plausible, then, that the more experienced someone is in a specialized editor, the less able they are to give a fully informed opinion of how it compares to some other editor. Especially given just how much time those…
Inspired by Becky‘s post How I Collect Blog Statistics, Respectfully,1 I thought I’d share what I do.2 tl;dr: I collect virtually nothing and I use even less. Let me take you on a journey through the different kinds of analytics tools I’ve used: 1996 —1999: Hit counters! My original websites used a hit counter that I wrote in Perl based on a sample from Matt’s Script Archive. Because I was edgy and dark, I made it look like this: I made the flaming digits using a stock effect in Corel…
Over the years I've built quite a lot of stuff for Bear Blog. Themes, add-ons, plugins, fun little widgets, and more. I've always had the same approach: make it "complete and perfect" before publishing. Investing a lot of time, tweaking and testing, then hitting the publish button. Now I feel like trying something new to challenge that OCD way of doing things. Instead of "perfecting" things, whatever that means, I'll just put it out there and build it up piece by piece. I've had an idea for a…
i ironically read this article by antonio on my rss readerand im pretty conflicted on this one!on one hand, i agree that blog customization is fun and i like doing it(i hope my blog has a semi unique style lol)and obv having the recipt that someone read my stuff in the apache log makes me happyand reading it in the rss feed not sending a recipt IS a feature, not a bug, i just dowish that more people would like reach out then i guessbut on the other hand, i see reading an article off an rss…
My recipe for not hating myself consists of three elements: 1. Keep changing -- and by changing, I mean improving, and by improving, I don't mean "be more productive." I mean be a better person today than I was yesterday. Better means more patient, more kind, more loving. Not richer. 2. Practice gratitude. If I'm constantly looking for things to be thankful for, I don't have time for self-pity, and self-pity destroys. 3. Punch Nazis. I want to go into Nazi punching in a little more detail.…
Replied to Using the Xteink X4, a minimalist e-reader by an author (Schemascape) I now find myself seeking out modern DRM-free e-books from more enlightened publishers. Here are some sources: For (mostly old) public domain works: Standard Ebooks Global Grey Ebooks Project Gutenberg For contemporary e-books without DRM: StoryBundle Humble Bundle (Books) Bookshop.org and eBooks.com when filtered to DRM-free e-books (e.g. from Tor Publishing) I read a blog post on Schemascape titled Using the…
Hello, loves! OK, let’s do the thing we love: find something to improve, and improve it. Shall we start where we left off? Result: Not as joyful as some days. We pared down the RoomView by removing its references to layout, dungeon, and dungeon view, passing them as parameters when they were needed. Pretty much what the received wisdom would suggest and I’ve done it many times and don’t recall ever regretting it. There is a place for encapsulating a bunch of objects that need to be processed…
We are currently looking to get a new washing machine. Looking online at the usual big stores and every single one has an awful AWFUL website experience. These are large companies who are typically owned by a large conglomerate who should, somewhere in the depths of their organisations, have people who know how to build websites well, and certainly they’ll know how to code things so they work well on a mobile device. Right? RIGHT? Wrong. The worst, so far, is Curry’s. I’d clicked through to…
Seven years ago I wrote a post about regular expressions to match diagnosis codes. I wanted to revisit that post looking at speed and error rates. Regular expressions usually do not exactly match what you’re looking for and nothing else. They have error false positives and false negatives. But they also have advantages, and context determines whether the advantages make the error rates tolerable. The post mentioned above gave the following regular expression for ICD-10 diagnosis codes.…
“.. hard to overstate how critical $ORCL is to the entire AI narrative. No big company has levered itself (figuratively and financially) more .. the stock's horrendous trading performance underscores heightened anxiety about how it can profitably build all the infrastructure ..” - Vital Knowledge[image or embed]— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) July 16, 2026 at 7:59 AM Picking up our Paramount/Warners thread. Ed Zitron has an epic length post on the pivotal role and precarious…
Good morning, programs. I'm currently at a conference (Day of Data), but thankfully one just down the road. I'll be back tonight, and thought I'd take a break between sessions to share some links. I'll be presenting later today one of my favorite talks, "A Beginner's Guide to Wrangling Asynchronicity in JavaScript". I love the talk, but given I'm up against eight other talks at the same time and I'm not talking AI... well it may be a small personal affair. We shall see. Building a Blog with…
My wife and I have been looking for an app to track things like habits, hobbies, and when we last did certain chores. To be honest there are probably hundreds of different habit trackers on the App Store. Next to todo list apps they are supposed to be the easiest apps to create so it is not really that surprising there are so many options. But we must have tried dozens of different apps but none of them quite fit what we were looking for. Of course now we have AI, so this sort of thing should…
A few months ago, I wrote about finding joy in programming in the age of AI. In the personal discussions I’ve had with fellow developers — both before and after that article — one thing keeps striking me. Most people don’t argue. They just say: yes, that’s exactly how it feels. But a question kept coming up in those conversations: why does it feel this way? Not in the philosophical sense — I c...
Yael Grauer on being told to "ask Claude" when seeking trusted advice:→ String Literal
When I began my journey on the IndieWeb months ago, I made a promise to myself that I would delete my accounts on corporate social media platform siloes by the end of the year. For over a decade, there have been substantial arguments made about why people should delete these accounts, and the performance of people making the announcement they're deleting their Facebook account has become a meme itself. And as I began undertaking this task in earnest, I realized how much work and complexity…
I came across this article by Panayotis, for whom “AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more”. It’s not the first article on that topic I have read1, and I feel particularly targeted, since I use AI-generated cover images for most of my articles, this one included. I’m totally fine with that. I think it’s a usage of AI which is fun and even creative. I think it’s more original and personal than looking for and using an image I would not have created myself. For that matter, I…
A return to form and function Image: Apple. In 2009, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Bertrand Serlet walked onstage and presented an audacious claim: “Zero New Features,” the slide read. Serlet, Apple’s then-senior vice president of software engineering, was introducing OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, a release Apple claimed would emphasize small “refinements” and major updates to internal technologies. But to the public, it really was “Zero New Features” — a quote forever cemented in…
