I see a lot of posts about people leaving platforms. This one about leaving Reddit, this one about leaving WordPress, and a bunch of others about leaving Discord, GitHub, Codeberg, Photoshop, and more. There are also those talking about leaving the web entirely for the smallweb (Gopher, Gemini, etc). The reasons vary. Pricing changes, AI training on everything you post, a new owner, a new policy, or just the slow feeling that the place stopped being built for you. But the posts all have the…

LibreOffice 26.8, released on August 26th, became the software’s most popular update. LibreOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office that’s been around for nearly two decades. In one week, the installer was downloaded more than 1 million times — not counting updates via Linux distribution repositories. Someone might say the improvements to the writing system and typography are a hit among NGOs, government agencies, and offices that use LibreOffice. I’m putting my money on a…

The other day I was checking out what was surfacing on Bubbles, and I ended up reading this post from Matt Stein about how he likes to hand-draw favicons. At the end of the post, he mentions he would love to make favicons for others, so I decided to reach out and ask him to make one for this blog. After a few emails back and forth, I ended up with this beauty in PNG form in my possession: Then I processed it to get three new versions (ICO, SVG, and "Apple-friendly" PNG) as recommended by Andrey…

It's not brand new, it just has a new theme. Everything is still there from before. I made some changes to the reviews by getting rid of sliders and making it a radar graph. The colors aren't as gross anymore. I do have some image rendering issues on the cards but that's a task for next week. Noodlist ^ Go see it.

In which I show how, over the last few years, the world has rapidly moved from open-source software being produced and maintained by online communities, to software projects being built and maintained in isolation. By single developers, with ever-decreasing input from others. AI coding tools are now dramatically accelerating movement away from code as a collective endeavour to "coding alone". I conclude by describing how such progression need not be considered inevitable. Every step has…

Nobody who told me about it anyway.

This post convinced me to go a step further with the videos I saved! Laura is right, the internet (especially anything Google has it's hands on) isn't forever. I liked keeping them in Anytype1 for tagging and notetaking, but this is the perfect opportunity for making more use out of my pocket notebooks. It's easy to forget that funny, thought-provoking, carefully edited and well-researched YouTube videos are actually works of art when they're served up to you on an unassuming (shitty lol)…

The subject of using AI for blog posts is one that keeps coming up, whether it's writing posts entirely or "just" proof-reading. Readers, generally, don't like it when writing becomes too AI apparent (in one survey 78% of technical readers said they stop reading if a post seems AI authored). This is not an issue that I, as a writer, have ever run up against: I write because I enjoy the process, so it's never made sense for me to outsource any part of that to a chatbot. As a reader, though, I…

Bringing receipts for xkcd.com/2347. adactio.com/links/22794

Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely believe there's a better way. As I've written before, you should sit down and actually test your readme. Spin up a fresh Virtual Machine, go through what you've written, and see if it makes sense. But…

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I understand the argument that if you don’t like what Big Tech is doing, you should vote with your wallet. It’s a simple equation after all. Stop buying Apple products, de-Google your life, and delete your Meta accounts. And if you can —trickier for us knowledge workers— move away from Microsoft. Alternatives abound and, if enough people do it, the companies will get the message. Except I’m not entirely convinced it works like that. — Gordon McLean, Tech sucks? Really? Oh man, I've been writing…

I thought Siri was supposed to be good now?

goatsandgangsters:an interesting linguistics find! so I’m reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing “hp” in the context of “not being at full hp” “applying your full hp to a task” etcand I’m like……. okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don’t mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean and it’s not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant…

If you spend a lot of time on places like Bearblog, Ooh Directory, and Bubbles Town, you run into a few common themes in blogging. One of them that particularly interested me this year is the "feed annoyance" post. I am not calling anyone out specifically: this isn't about something that only happened recently or that a recent blogger did (although many have). This is more about the fact that it happens so often from so many people, and it made me want to think and read about it. I am not…

I read both Gordon's 6 Months of Bubbles and then Hakkerman's response, How to Support Small Bubblers, and thought I would weigh in. Gordon's blog post is basically about how to keep Bubbles a place for genuine discovery rather than another popularity-driven platform that repeatedly promotes the same voices. According to him, those same voices are largely responsible for the domination of popular tech posts. He mentions that Ben, Bubbles' creator, agrees with the underlying concern but believes…

The timeline for a task I needed to do changed from three days to this afternoon. The only reason for this was so that some sales people could show off the feature during a management meeting. When I tried to complain, my co-workers just told me to give Claude code my initial plan and have it generate the code. After feeding it the required documents and information, Claude got to work. It took about five minutes to generate the code, in which I spent the time skimming over the text it was…

As I'm analyzing what is actually coming to my site, there's this huge Google category that really deserves it's own space.

The other day I was reading Dan Luu's post on speeding up his site by 50x. Not bad, Dan, I thought. But as someone who is essentially running a hand coded static website (generated by my home made static site generator) I thought I'd have him beat in terms of page size. Even with a bit of styling! I totally didn't. And it was never even close. Nevertheless, when I loaded up the network tab of dev tools, I was horrified to see that my home page had ballooned to 123 kB. That might not seem like…

Since IMDb forced users to login to see user reviews, I think it is time for another platform to gain consensus on the quality of media.Potential Alternatives: Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, The Movie Db (TMDB), NeoDB.Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.comThis might be the most well-known alternative to IMDb, frequently cited together with the former for general audiences. It is also corporate owned, in this case by Fandango. Evidently, it has been criticized for black and white reviews,…

I’ve previously written about publishing your blog to standard.site and I created annot.at, a service for publishing static blog content to the protocol. I’m a huge fan of the lexicon and the community around it, it’s incredibly cool that it opens the door to sites that make that content discoverable like Standard Reader, and it has the potential to replace RSS feeds for subscribing to blog posts. It’s a great initiative and I’m very happy it exists. I finally listened to the OffProtocol…

A friend of mine was complaining this week that a school's website didn't work for her. It had an over-engineered anti-copying feature which prevented her from (legitimately) copy-pasting the school's postal address. She couldn't select the text, couldn't copy the text, and the content would blur itself right in front of her eyes. "I can understand the need for this," she said, "but it’s just like annoying as am visiting the school for work." Counterpoint: I can't understand the need for this.…

Loved Amanda’s post, Make Email Fun Again! I completely agree. For a year or so, I used Fastmail only for my blogging-related emails. While my Gmail inbox was mostly an exhausting stream of garbage and low-value chores, a red badge on my Fastmail app almost always meant I had something fun and personal waiting for me. Amanda’s post made me realize that this has been a delightful throwback to the early days of email, when only the nerdiest of my friends were using it. There were no spam or…

There has been a lot of talk about website comments on Bubbles. I think it started with a post by Forking Mad, and a bunch of replies are linked at the bottom of that page. My blog posts have had a "Reply by e-mail" button for years. Some of them also link to other places where you can comment. This has been a nice trade-off: giving people the chance to comment somewhere where others will find it, but not having to manage the comments myself. I do enjoy reading comments below blog posts,…

Tech companies and their executives have, broadly, moved to align themselves with investors and adopted a posture of, often, disdain or outright hostility towards their users and employees. If tech companies don't value you, why provide value to them? If they back political positions hostile to your interests, why not return that hostility? I'm not arguing for boycotts, I know that people are bound to different platforms for different, compelling reasons. What I am arguing for is that, given…

Ryan Chandler makes a strong case for keeping PR descriptions human-written, even when agents handle most of the implementation. The piece focuses on ownership, review context, and why a concise explanation from the person driving the change is more useful than a long AI-generated summary. Read more

I’m a Wikipedia editor, and have been since 2004. It’s fun! I don’t do it often enough. My niche is jazz and transit articles, though I spend as much time fixing templates, formatting, categories, and page formatting. Recently I’ve been getting email and DMs from a few people asking if I can help them or their clients “fix” Wikipedia articles. These invariably involve scrubbing references to contentious topics, actions, and/or positions. It’s telling how nobody ever pings me asking for…

My blog used to use Crimson Pro as the main body font, something that threads the needle of being serif-y enough for the Possession-esque posts, but not too out of place for the technical macOS Messages debugging ones. You should consider customizing anything you use, and the font is no exception. Let's tweak it!

I have a quick question for regular readers: did you ever start reading an article on this blog, found the topic interesting, but then had to give up halfway through because you could make heads or tails of it?The reason I’m asking is that I want the writing to be accessible — probably more accessible than it is today. Without an editor, it’s sometimes hard to predict which terms may be unfamiliar to most readers, or notice an ambiguous “this” or “it” that makes a key sentence hard to parse. On…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] I decided to start learning about machine learning a couple of weeks ago. Partly because it sounds interesting, partly because I think I have enough math to handle it, and partly because I felt it was important to have a deeper knowledge if I want to criticize AI. I started with a library copy of Friedman and Mendhekar’s The Little Learner but decided to…