I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here every Thursday. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive. WikiCity. One more creative way to browse (or fly over) Wikipedia. Every entry is a building in a city made up of the encyclopedia’s 100,000 most-visited entries. For the war-minded among us, there’s an alternate mode where you pilot a plane and can destroy (?) the buildings/entries. This page was intentionally left blank. A print-world convention carried…
Photo taken with Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max Camera: Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max Lens: iPhone 17 Pro Max back triple camera 6.765mm f/1.78 Settings: f/1.8 • 1/2400 • ISO 80 • 6.764999866370901 mm
The Most Likely Person to Read a Book? A College-Educated Black WomanMost of this article is copied below. Bold added.In its look at the adoption of electronic book formats, Pew Research stumbled onto an interesting data point. The most likely person to read a book — in any format — is a black woman who’s been to college.Slate’s Jacob Weisberg spotted the data point buried in Pew’s report, “E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps.” When asked Pew asked people if they’d read a book over the…
Handwriting was always problematic for me. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Cloud, placed a high value on well-formed cursive strokes that she flowed smoothly onto the blackboard. At my desk I struggled to copy her examples and failed miserably. In middle school, with no one judging my handwriting, I abandoned cursive in favor of printing my letters which was slower but at least I could read what I wrote. In college, needing to take notes faster than I could print them, I forced myself to relearn…
In an era of remarkable technology (say, since the early internet of the 1990s) it now beggars language itself to assert that a remarkable aspect of this age's new tools is that the tools themselves can think, reason, and speak back to their 'users.' For example, this was a prompt I set on Dex yesterday: Well, Dex... what do YOU think of that IM outline anyway? (NB: I just set this prompt to Sol Extra High, to see if you can go to depth on this one.) This was what emerged: "The photograph also…
[This post is for RSS Club members only.] RSS Club was started by Dave Rupert as a way of providing RSS-only content. I took it as both a technical challenge and a thought-provoking way of talking about the pros and cons of RSS. One of the things I like most about RSS is that the app usually has a built-in reader that lets you read articles without visiting the website. It’s nicely formatted and you don’t have to put up with ads, popups, videos, and so on. But lately, I have mostly unsubscribed…
bckt v0.7.5 is out, with lots of performance improvements that make a huge difference for blogs with a large number of posts. Get it here or upgrade with brew upgrade bckt.
Hello, loves! Resource designation is awkward, and I think we’re loading them multiple times. Let’s see what we can do about this. Arcade helps out! Here’s the sort of thing we have to put up with: class ContentFactory: def lever(self, *, name): def lever(self, interactor): self.state = (self.state+1)%len(self.resources) interactor.publish('control', self.name, state=self.state) interactor.publish('state_number', self.name, content=self, state=self.state) return False resource1 =…
I spoke to Leo Fan, co-founder of Cysic, about what zero-knowledge proofs actually are, and why they might be one of the more promising answers to the internet’s identity problem.We dig into how a ZK proof lets you prove something is true without handing over any identifying personal information, why that matters as digital identity systems become pushed by governments, and Cysic’s model for verifiable compute. Leo also breaks down why the hardware and cost problems around ZK have kept it from…
For years, a lot of thought and investment went into Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). Agentic development seemed to be their triumph, with tools like VSCode + Copilot, Windsurf, and Cursor bringing development experiences to the next level. But the same agentic development led to the decline of IDEs. The issue is that agents, and not human developers, are writing code. And agents don’t need IDEs to write code. The role of the IDE is now that of a glorified code reader. It makes it…
Anyone using Pop!_OS with Cosmic? I tried it when it was first released, but I looks like they've done a lot of dev work to it and it's improving all the time. Considering installing it again... Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
by The Art of Storytelling There will be at many points in your creative process opportunities to bypass the struggle of working and learning, but availing yourself of those shortcuts will gradually undermine your work in subtle ways that you cannot foresee. So sure, go ahead and use generative fill to clean up your image. No one’s watching. I won’t tell anyone and no one will ever know. But you will pay a very small price in relieving yourself from the duty of learning some new Photoshop…
Hot on the heels of CIDER 2.0, clj-refactor.el 4.0 is out! It’s the first major release of the project in almost five years, and this time around the version bump is not just ceremonial - 4.0 is the biggest batch of user-facing improvements clj-refactor has seen in ages, plus a healthy dose of long-overdue spring cleaning. Unfinished business When I announced clj-refactor.el 3.0 back in 2021, I opened with a confession - we had failed to deliver the main objective of that release, namely…
A lot of people simply don’t understand the degree to which competition matters in B2B software, and what competing effectively feels like. Competition is simply the art of increasing your win-rate when you and a competitor vie for the same customer’s business, and this is what I would tell my team if I had to motivate them to compete hard and win: *** If our market has any value at all, we’re going to have competitors. Many of them will be formidable, because the thermodynamics of capitalism…
Some new priorities landed this week, and I've finally got access to all the tools. Access to Github I finally got access to Github this week. I'm giving myself a gold star for pushing up a fix on the same day to one of our smaller repos. Reprioritisation of work I'm working across two teams. One is focused on iterating and maintaining the core live service. The other is looking at adding new features for specific care settings. Both teams had their work reprioritised this week. Being new, I…
On an old CSS optimization technique that is non-trivial to automate but for which there’s a new tool.
Imagine. You are being put in charge of planning for a future major volcanic eruption. All you have is an incomplete list of volcanoes in the world, some experience of past eruptions, and a few volcanologists as consultants. The politician who gave you the task has little idea of what might be involved and although…
For most of my career, I was an individual contributor. Usefulness was visible: write the code, review the change, fix the problem, publish the document. The output was easier to see.Moving into management changed that relationship before I had a good way to think about the calendar. A 1:1, a proposal review, a stakeholder question, and an escalation can all be legitimate work. Put enough of them together, though, and the week disappears before the decisions and conversations that require a…
Yesterday I published the blog post Apple again black-holed my App Store Connect bug report, which complained that Apple has twice given up on investigating my bug report without requesting additional information from me. This morning I spent some time investigating the bug myself. I believe that I’ve found the cause and a workaround. Funny, isn’t it, how a lone outside developer, in less than an hour and without the server-side source code, can do a better job at investigating an Apple bug…
RapidRAW is a GPU-accelerated RAW editor that the author describes as a non-destructive alternative to Lightroom, with packages under 20MB for macOS, Linux, Windows and Android. The implementation combines a Rust core and WGPU/WGSL shaders with a Tauri and React front end–a much better fit for this kind of app than Electron. The author says it is not yet as polished as Darktable or RawTherapee. It already includes masks, parametric curves, LUTs, HDR merging, noise reduction, lens correction and…
TL;DR - Turn just about any collection of audiobook files (FLAC,WAV,MP3) into a single iPhone compatible M4B complete with metadata and chapters. Mac, $9.99, Solo dev I've been listening to audiobooks since they were called books on tape. I progressed from there to CDs and then to miscellaneous downloads. These days, the gold standard format, at least for Apple fans, is audiobooks packaged as single M4B files regardless of the book's length, complete with chapters and metadata. That way you can…
It’s actually worse than yesterday…
Canadian fires are gifting us with code-orange air quality today. 😷
The companies that refused to adopt SPAs a decade ago are banning AI today. I have watched this pattern before and I know exactly how it ends.
A Git branch is a disposable copy of your project where an AI agent can The post Let the AI Try Something Reckless: On a Branch appeared first on Justin's IT Blog.
I was experimenting with the buildah plugin for Woodpecker CI and had a hard time figuring out how to inject my local certificate authority into the mix…until I realized I had missed something fundamental about Woodpecker CI.
(Thanks to Facundo Tuesca for the name inspiration). If you’re like me, you spend a lot of your working day (and a good chunk of your personal time) reading code online. Increasingly, that means accidentally reading a lot of “slop”1. Personally, slop isn’t annoying per se2: it’s okay for personal software3, for example, to be slop. What makes slop annoying is the feeling of being bait-and-switched: much like the written word, I want to be informed4 before I spend my human attention on machine…
Over on YouTube I shared a video where I demonstrate a more context-efficient approach for integrating existing systems into agentic tools than MCP, one that comes with built in access control mechanisms and that LLMs are already trained to understand: userspace filesystems. Properly designed, a filesystem is a hierarchical organisation of resources that allows for enumeration and filtering of those resources, and random access to their contents. In other words, pretty much anything that you…
