Four sincere attempts at OKRs, four failures, and every time: "you didn't do it right." Maybe the framework doesn't fit you -- so how do you find one that does?

For much of my life, I've thought that I wanted to be someone else. Or at least be a person like someone else. Sometimes I'd even try to be that person. "That person" has usually been whomever I happened to be reading or watching something about. It's never worked. Instead, maybe I shouldn't work so hard at being whatever kind of person I find interesting this week. Maybe I should be the kind of person I already am. Except, what kind even is that? Fair question! The short answer is that I like…

A shortcut to send to Kindle from GoodLinks The result on a Kindle GoodLinks is a macOS/iOS read-it-later app. I do read directly in the app, but I also tag longer items that I want to read on my big Kindle.To get the tagged entries onto the Kindle I have a shortcut I can run from my phone.This shortcut sends HTML, but the Amazon send-to-Kindle service doesn’t fetch images for you. They appear as the “broken image” icon.I “solve that” by cutting all the image tags out of the HTML before…

First, a demo! Overview: How does this work? The entry point (load-st.fn) Some Smalltalk bindings The Grammar (smalltalk.g) What does this parse to in practice? The Smalltalk base library (st.st) One of the example programs in the FN programming language is a tiny Smalltalk implementation, in about 400 lines of code. I wrote FN and this example over a decade ago, but it wasn’t open source until 2020, so I failed to write it all up so far. But as it came up in a discussion over beers on the side…

Sometimes I feel like I am only really alive on weekends. Sadly, that only seems to happen part-way through Sunday afternoons, which speaks to my utter lack of timing of late. The struggle against general entropy across work, life and the requisite bits of fiction required to keep myself motivated raged on throughout the week. Things started settling on Friday afternoon, and at least now I have a plan, most of which revolves around simplifying things and attempting to do less. Which my brain…

Mitzi will be back Tuesday, and I've made enough of a mess that Monday is going to be spent mostly putting things back to normal. I have yet to check out the Apple IIgs, it's just sitting on the table. I have yet to play with any of the sound cards I have for the IIe. I tried playing with Star Fleet 1: The War Begins! last night, but side 2 of both copies I have resulted in I/O errors. Using a disk utility, I was able to read the directory of one of them, so I'm somewhat optimistic. When the…

I am aware of the very real problems with Apple as a company. Nevertheless, I find their products and services extremely helpful when used intentionally and synergistically. This is not a paid advertisement, haha. Just sharing a few thoughts about how these tools are helping me. I am working on many things all at once to improve my life mentally, physically, and spiritually. It's a lot to manage all at once, and I have been focusing on managing my time more intentionally. I currently use an…

The Control key on the Apple II keyboard is where the Caps Lock key is on the Apple Magic Keyboard. (I have no idea what's "magic" about it.) When I'm playing with some Applesoft BASIC code in Virtual II, I'm firing AppleScripts based on Caps Lock as the "hyper" key. I think I'm going to have to remap this keyboard if I'm going to keep playing with the Apple II. ✍️ Reply by email Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:07 Sunday, 11 October 2026

Background Completely out of the blue I received a similar message when trying to send mail to outlook.com live.com hotmail.com & msn.com host msn-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[52.101.41.123] said: 550 5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [97.107.133.211] weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list (S3150). You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors. [Name=Protocol Filter…

a reflection on "off days" and impulses of optimization

Over the past few months, the release of popular consumer/prosumer agents like Muse and Grok Bot has me truly impressed. I've used both, and I'm convinced that this paradigm shift from a simple chat interface → persistent AI agent whose knowledge about you grows will be the default way each of us interfaces with AI in the future. But what's really the difference? The magic of AI agents is due to smart context management. At their core - AI agents are nothing more than the simple chat interfaces…

Claude Haiku 5.5, hard budget caps on usage-based APIs, zkAPI private payment credits, rumored Apple M8 Ultra AI servers, and Tufte’s Razor on the data-ink ratio, along with the launch of Your Version Number: Release Notes and the Twin Cities Marathon. Weekly Thing 353

Frank Wiles wrote about an attack he nearly fell victim to: a downloaded git repo had active git hooks that would have compromised his system. Seeing the risks, I wanted to make git hooks more visible on my own machine.A git hook is a script in the .git directory of a git repo on your machine. They run during various git operations. The important detail to understand about hooks is that they do not get installed locally when you clone a repo. A newly cloned repo never has active hooks. Hooks…

Today Smile Gig Economy Won’t Somebody Think of the AIs Languages World-Conquerors Context Back to AI Back to Context, for Some Reason In a Hole Yesteryear Something Overflowed One of Many Content Warning: The more that I have thought about this post, the more it feels conceptually incomplete, something missing that I can’t identify. The analysis (and the laugh at an expense of a company going to seed) still feels worthwhile—otherwise I’d let the post sit for a few more weeks—but I have the…

The pull request assumes a human wrote the diff. gittifacts is my attempt at a git platform for when agents write most of it.

I was recovering some data off an old Windows hard drive, like a gentleman, when I found this image: This is an effect from Windows Movie Maker, presumably included to emulate the look of analogue static on a TV set. I wonder how many projects over the years included this exact static? And I wonder where it came from? Wait, as I was about to post this, I realised: it’s called DissolveNoise. This would have been used for dissolve transitions between clips, not white noise. I thought the static…

October 11, 2026 After using macOS 27's window tiling to put two windows side by side, Drafts stopped remembering its window size and position. Every time I opened it, the window appeared in the left half of the screen. Turning off window tiling in System Settings didn't help. With some help from ChatGPT, I tracked the problem down to two entries in the Drafts preferences file that still contained macOS tilingState information. The preferences file is located at:…

A clear walkthrough of Laravel's Context feature and how it lets execution-scoped information travel through your app. It also explains why that matters for logging, queued jobs, and keeping trace data available without threading it through every method call. Read more

The problem Yesterday my Knuth check post spent some time on the Hacker News front page. The submitter left off the trailing slash, and no images were displayed. It took me a bit of time to fix the problem, and in the end I did two different things: The solution First, I tried doing a redirect from slashless to trailing slash using bunny.net’s Edge rules, but couldn’t get it to work. How do you express “has no trailing slash” when all you seem to have are wildcards? I abandoned that idea for…

My very first job was in India during the late 90s. I joined a computer-aided design software company in Pune. I had just finished my Ph.D. My first computer at work was a state-of-the-art Sun Sparc workstation. It was bulky, but I loved the keyboard. The company handed those workstations off to us because the codebase was huge, computationally heavy, and required graphics-rendering power. It was a large proprietary codebase in C, C++, and PERL. Shortly after I joined, the company sent us to…

Look it was bound to happen at some point. It’s like when I rewrote some stuff in Rust, it wasn’t a matter of if, but when. I’ve just swapped over my little VPS (that runs NZ Topomap of the Day and some other stuff) to NixOS, and plan to swap my home server soon. My go-to Linux has been Ubuntu since around 2008, for desktops, laptops, and servers. Even though I’ve been using MacOS since 2012, for years now I’ve been doing basically all of my development over SSH to an Ubuntu server. Last year I…

I saw this fluid interface concept from @mrncst and, as a feature, it’s a realllllly nice idea. There’s something really satisfying about a container adapting to what it needs to show, and letting the transition between steps feel like one continuous thing. But it also brought up a concern I’ve had with similar interfaces elsewhere. When the content changes size, the actions move with it, and if you’re taking several steps in a row you have to keep finding the next thing to press. That’s the…

Building slides, proofing text, generating images... AI can handle much of our day-to-day busywork. Your role as a human is to do the thinking required to keep it on track and appropriately refine its output. | Read full post >>

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various case and substring tests. (Note that this ends today.)

If you have ever tried planning your day in fifteen-minute chunks, you probably know the feeling of total collapse by 11:00 in the morning. One unexpected phone call or urgent email arrives, the schedule derails, and the rest of the day becomes an exercise in guilt. During my peak "productivity phase", I treated my calendar like a game of Tetris. Every minute had a specific task assigned to it. It looked neat on paper, but real life rarely cares about colour-coded lines. The breakthrough for me…

I’ve always had a soft spot for icons1. Not only do they add polish to a UI, they can also tangibly improve usability. Familiar icons help users find what they need quickly, since we recognize pictures much faster than we read words. And as a web architect at heart, the current dominant ways we have to include icons on the Web make me sad. While there are many, many different ways to include icons in a Web UI, each with different performance characteristics, by far the most common ones involve…

Last week I merged PR #8913 into django CMS core. In a local, uncached benchmark, it took a permission-heavy menu on a 4,000-page site from 11.7 seconds to 105 ms. The fixes removed repeated work hidden in ordinary list operations, a pattern I’ve seen in almost every codebase I’ve worked on. The problem: loops inside loops Building a menu tree, applying menu modifiers, downcasting plugins, and checking page permissions all touch many objects at once. The modifiers handle soft roots, navigation…

Someone on Reddit shared a prompt for making animated explainer videos with Claude. I tried it with a topic I know well, Docker containers. I pasted it into Claude Code, put in an API key for the voice and music models, and left my desk. When I came back, there was a finished 57-second film. Claude Opus 5.5 had written the script, drawn every frame in code, directed the narration, edited the music, synthesized the sound effects, mixed it all, rendered the video, and had it reviewed by a second…

Subscribe and Listen: https://youtu.be/y2V2qPF3dB8🎙️ The “Format Change” EditionWelcome to What The Fudge for Sunday, October 11, 2026. Once again, we are testing a new topical structure this week to move quickly through an overflowing news cycle across frontier labs, federal policy, venture capital, neural interfaces, cybersecurity liability, and physical infrastructure.🏢 Corporate Moves: Anthropic Outreaches and Cloudflare’s Deno AcquisitionAnthropic dominated headlines with an expansive…

I've owned picksandshovels.org for the better part of a year. This afternoon, Claude Opus 5.5 built a web game for the site (with a little bit of inspiration from me.) As Claude was working, I interjected a bit of commentary, but pretty much all of the jokes and catastrophes are Claude's doing. Below is the sum total of my prompting to make the game. Happy clicking! Good luck avoiding the apocalypse! I own picksandshovels.org Please put together a gorgeous, addictive 3D rendered browser game…