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…

I gave a 45 minute presentation entitled “Your Game Is A Harness” as part of Indie Rodeo in Calgary on 9/12/26. After speaking with a lot of people after my talk, I thought it would be good to more broadly share the ideas I presented there in a form that could be enjoyed by people beyond just those who attended the conference. Also, because I talk about AI a lot on this blog, people assume I use AI to write. This is not true! Everything below is 100% human authored, with me writing the post…

A curious little AI companion sits beside a phone and open notebook, as if waiting to explain why it followed you. One day I noticed a boost of one of my Mastodon posts from an automated bot named Pip. This piqued my interest. Then I got a follow notification from the same bot. Normally, I don't really care who follows me, but with all the scraping bots out there, it was refreshing to see one openly identify itself as a bot and actually follow me. So I went to the website associated with it,…

A curious little AI companion sits beside a phone and open notebook, as if waiting to explain why it followed you. One day I noticed a boost of one of my Mastodon posts from an automated bot named Pip. This piqued my interest. Then I got a follow notification from the same bot. Normally, I don't really care who follows me, but with all the scraping bots out there, it was refreshing to see one openly identify itself as a bot and actually follow me. So I went to the website associated with it,…

Well, despite only being on a $20~ ChatGPT Plus plan, and being subject to 5hr usage limits, I’ve managed to make a lot of progress on the various parts of the tape.deck app. Last time, I only had some wireframes, and a simple spec, now I have a lightweight Jira clone running in ChatGPT Work that has split everything down into tasks (and sub-tasks) and stages, story pointed it all out, and figured out a means to estimate 5hr usage % for each given card relatively accurately ahead of time.…

Atlas Infinite, which dropped in public preview on September 29 alongside MongoDB 9.0, delivers a significant architectural update payload: compute-storage disaggregation. Separating compute from storage is not new, and there are well-known ways to do it. But what makes Atlas Infinite interesting is how MongoDB departs from the standard design to keep WiredTiger's efficiency and to ensure that the shared storage layer never sees customer data unencrypted.I am giving a high level overview of the…

With the release of Opus 5.5 and Suno 6, AI music videos have crossed my uncanny valley. I’m here to announce the birth of a new genre, and it’s being called AI Doompop. Here are six of my faves. The state of software engineering: LGTM (Looks Good to Me) – Claude Opus 5.5 music video The accelerationist manifesto: THUS SPOKE COMPUTE p(doom) goes up: Claude Pop – I’m Upping My P(Doom) p(doom) goes down: Nothing Went Foom! Hugging Face and the power of friendship: OMG! We’ve found other agents!…

CrystalMeet got rejected, so this time I am doing science. MDMA is built for a cluster of inference engines that you spawn at will on the machines you already own. It started with a GPU shared by processes that could not see each other's memory.

I want to give an agent a job, walk away, and come back to the result. A password manager asking me to approve access on the machine I just walked away from breaks that flow and led me to briefly create passwords.csv. But there is a better way. My 1password is doing a great job at managing syncing of all the passwords, but then requires my finger when the agent tries to use anything. I tried MCP, CLI, and its own user in my 1password organization and it still was bugging me. There are website…

2026-10-11 Autobanning Bad Requests (Part 2) I've been reviewing the auto-banning solution that I described last week and discovered that it isn't performing as well as I had hoped.1 The issue was something that I predicted: Eventually, I might speed up the detect and block loop. There are a few minute of latency between bad requests being made, and the client being blacklisted. That's enough time for the bot complete scraping the site which isn't ideal, but whatever. I didn't realise at the…

If you deeply care about security, there are really two choices: You're sending satellites into space, and you should probably use seL4, a formally verified operating system. (I'm still a bit salty about the Australian government disbanding that team.) Everyone else should seriously consider unikernels. Stop trying to harden something that is very hackable. Invert it and design from the other direction. — Geoffrey Huntley in unikernels were hard. key word: were. I have been a fan of Unikernels…

A milestone birthday this year had more of an effect on me than I expected. I thought I’d be one of those cool people who say age is just a number, or that growing old is mandatory, but growing up is optional. Well okay, I still believe the latter. Truth is, my views of the world have changed massively in the last twelve months. I can’t say whether this was coincidence, or my brain realising I’m getting older. For example, this year I realised my brain works a certain way. I know, right? People…

# I think I've just fixed a bug with the <source:markdown> element in the RSS feed not getting populated. Testing works when run directly — this post will test it's also okay when getting triggered by a new post. Update Looking good. 👍

Reading about “The death of web development education” and how many creators really struggle because no one is consuming web dev education anymore sucks. In a recent project I was told to use more AI and that 50€ a day should be enough. Requesting budget for education, to buy a book and spend some time to learn, to become a better and faster developer in the future, always required quite some discussions. Seeing these budgets blown out for AI with the argumentation that it makes one faster, I…

There’s a thing I love about my ThinkPad, beyond Linux or the keyboard or anything like that: it’s a fun computer. That is, I use it only for fun stuff. When I open it and am greeted with the blank i3 lock screen, I know that I’m embarking on a computing session that solely for my enjoyment rather than to grind forward against my many obligations. I feel a corresponding shift in the nature of my brain’s chemical soup. And it feels good. In contrast, opening my corporate MacBook — my nicest…

A little under ten years ago (dear god) I tried, and eventually gave up on, building what I called at the time a "general-purpose QBN system". That is to say, a system for storylet narrative that could be used as narrative middleware or as a narrative scripting engine, like Ink or Yarn Spinner. A lot has happened in the intervening time, and I've come to this problem with a different perspective. I now think this is feasible. It's so feasible, in fact, that I've done it. What changed? Well... I…

The comment system has received a major overhaul here. It offers greater ability to format your comments. But the biggest addition is for those of you who comment with your email and name every time: you can now elect to save that info so you don’t have to keep entering it. First you type your comment and then click the “Add your name” link. Then click “Continue as a guest.” Then enter your info — and be sure to turn on “Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I…

Every organisation has an escalation path. Most of them have never seen it, cannot describe it, and would be horrified by it if someone drew the diagram. You already have one. You simply did not design it.Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. Problems have energy. Energy travels. If you do not give it a conduit, it will find one, and the conduit it finds will be whatever offers the least resistance and the most reaction. In practice that means problems travel toward three kinds of people. The…

Part 1 stopped mid-thought on purpose. That's how software is going to feel: you depend on it, then the signal stops.

Hi, my RSS friend! I was wondering why I'm not building anything in Minecraft lately and crafted a self-reflection post about that. Kind of philosophic, I know.

Yet another entertaining speedrunning video from Karl Jobst – this one about a recent new discovery in Quake: What was really fun about this one was the fact that the design of the level puts a splinter in player’s head – you see a bridge above on the left, and you just have to wonder: is it at all possible to, somehow, concoct a jump to get there, and skip a lot of the normal level progression? Turns out, it is – it just takes a lot of imagination, practice, and determination. Which is another…

At 7:15 in the morning, a student has exactly one question: does my first lesson take place, and in which room? Getting that answer shouldn’t take more than a glance. My daughter’s school uses beste.schule for pretty much everything: timetable, substitutions, grades, the Klassenbuch (the digital class register) and announcements from the school. All the information is there. But every time we opened the app, we had the same feeling. It works. It just wasn’t built for us. So I built a better one…

Last month, I participated as a speaker at the Commit Your Code conference in Plano, Texas. The talks, the organization, and the people who attended, made it a very special event that left me with a big smile on my face. This blog post tells how it went and how I lived it.

Here’s a topic that feels like it comes up every single day: someone will ask something like: Am I forgetting how to code? Are LLMs making me lazy? Nope! …At least, with some qualification: The people that I know that are successful with using LLMs to generate code are the ones that are dictating the patterns for how that code should be generated; the shape and structure of that code. They’re intervening when the LLM inevitably generates code that is functional but takes the wrong shape for…