In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer. The Case of Software Some years ago, when it became clear that AI would solve software engineering, my thinking was: In my professional life, I’m happy to move one level up to become a manager of AI agents. I’m literate, I’m a good technical writer, I can describe what I want and…

Andros Fenollosa on why we want small systems instead of decentralized ones when talking about online communities. There are no commercial interests and people know each other. It’s like a shoe shop in a small town. The shop can only serve a few customers because there is little space, you know the owner’s name (maybe even his wife’s) and the shelves don’t offer much variety; and yet you know you will be well served and the owner wants you to leave with what is best for you.

It’s really a small thing in the grand scheme, and not unfamiliar at all to open-source developers, but I can’t help but get excited when one of my pull requests (PRs — basically a suggested change to someone else’s project) gets accepted and merged in with the main codebase. Just yesterday it was one to ESPHome which adds Onkyo RI support ([remote_base] Add Onkyo RI Wired Serial Support), something I’ve been waiting on since August and feels impactful as I receive email about it every month or…

I wrote something down recently, and later I couldn't find it. If you know me, you know why; I put my notes into too many different apps. Once in a while I declare loudly that "I'm using only this app, from now on! I mean it!" and then change my mind a month later. It's just the way I am. This most recent failure was the last straw and finally forced me to deal with it properly. Instead of fixing myself, I built a software crutch. I spent today vibe-coding an indexer and search engine for all…

Manton Reece sharing the flow behind his blog posts:This flow:1. Have a thought. 2. Start writing a short post about it. 3. . It’s not working. Expand into a full-length blog post. 4. . Still no good. Delete the draft and copy the text into a note. 5. . Months later, pull the draft into a better blog post about a larger topic. In other words, always write things down.My process is, and probably always will be, the reverse. Have a thought, think about it for a bit, and write it down before it…

Technically Good is back! With a slightly shorter edition. There's a note at the end of this newsletter if you're interested! ✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: Slow it down!! It's too dangerous!!1!; malware; and "going rogue." 🌞 Good News!: "No AI" seals as a sign of quality 🦭; people are flocking back to human writers. 🐘 Toots and Memes and Such: Age verification, empowerment, and "going rogue" (reprise.) 📯 The Post-Script: The "Inevitability" of AI. Glitched, cropped, and edited…

We now know how the seeds of the NIST elliptic curves were generated: they’re not the hash of some saucy sentence, but the output of drand48 seeded with the time, which was indeed in 1997–98. John Wood, Henry de Valence, Ava Howell, Zack Voase, Lucy Sweet, Amir Omidi, Paul Crowley, Iain McGinniss, Nicholas Carlini, and Steve Weis from Anthropic solved the riddle and on October 15th, 2026, at 01:07:51 UTC, claimed the full bounty I announced three years ago. They chose to donate the prize to…

Signal boosting Laura's post that you should absolutely download and archive the stuff that matters to you. The corporate internet is hostile to art and the things you love do not belong to you unless you claim them for yourself. If you've been around for a while on YouTube, just look at your "liked videos" playlist and see how many of the early ones are no longer available (something you literally have to enable in the playlist settings, it's that endemic). The tools to do this in a basic way…

IMMEDIATE SHUTDOWNMy Final Announcement About Independent PublishingThe complete statement is proprietary content and is available only at unstory.eu.All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction or syndication is not permitted.

For shelf.cafe I wanted to aggregate interesting conversations about a blog post in one place, so people can chat and learn. As part of this, I wanted to “discover” every time a blog post had been shared somewhere else, like Bluesky, and surface that. This is commonly referred to as a “backlink”. While building this out I tackled some very interesting technical challenges so here’s a little write up that covers looking up existing atproto backlinks, subscribing to the jetstream to monitor for…

The Firefox team are asking us to weigh in on proposals for Interop 2027—what features should browsers be concentrating on implementing or improving. Here are my top five: Web app installation via <install> and navigator.install(). Prompts the user to install a progressive web app. Speculation Rules API. Hints to the browser to proactively download pages in the background so they appear instantly when the user navigates to them. CSS var() in size container queries. Such as @container (width >=…

I recently moved my photo library from iCloud onto a self-hosted Immich instance running on an old MacBook Pro in my living room. Importing the main library went pretty smoothly. The (shared) albums: not so much. The starting point My main library was already in Immich: Around 50,000 photos and videos going back to 2011. I got them in there using Parachute, a Mac app that exports an Apple Photos library to plain files and folders. No proprietary format, just a date-based file tree: Photos…

I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book. The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS version of that chapter (which Michael ultimately ended up writing). At the time, I didn’t know what to write. I mean, how do you write a history of icon design for the Mac? It’s rich! To get my creative juices flowing, I started by researching the different docks in macOS through the years and compiled them all into a single graphic (big…

Don't get me wrong: I love Emacs. After all, which Emacs user doesn't? It's the best thing since sliced bread and, if you use enough (()), you can probably slice your bread with it as well.

I've been going down lots of rabbit holes on finding new blogs last day or so - mostly tech as that’s what there is, some accessibility (in tech), some books (about tech) etc etc. Today I was met with this. Look I know I know only too well this is a result of ridiculous UK Internet law. I know its a problem brought about by various streams of idiotic, tech illiterate, hateful UK political parties... but please please if you're a blogger and you want things to be accessible to the UK audience,…

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As announced a few weeks ago, the SAIR Open Math OS is now soft launched. It offers services and web interfaces similar to frontier AI models, though currently we are hosting existing open math models (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Kimi K3, and GLM 5.3 Flash) which are roughly a year or so behind the current frontier models in capability; so not able to perform “one-shot problem solving” of the type we have heard frequently about in recent months, but capable enough for many other useful mathematical…

Cool - without fail the toxic Bear blog meta (that I'm now adding to I know) kicks in and a post responding to mine points out that obviously I'm wrong and stupid and using the wrong search engine. The search engine called 'small web' akshually doesn't search the small web - who knew (not me). no seriously, is Kagi evil? "I realise there are lots of other places to find blogs" and "doesn't necessarily lead to content. Also a large pinch of English sarcasm here too." Sorry can't remember why I…

I’ve been a reMarkable 2 user for a few years now. Bought on a whim, it has become an important part of my digital life, and I’ve recently jumped on its modding bandwagon.One of the reasons I like the rM is that it’s a pretty open system running Linux – you can ssh into it out of the box. Just plug it in to your computer over USB, locate the login credentials on the device, and connect with them.But it’s a little unwieldy. What I’d really like is to sacrifice a little security for comfort, so…

Greetings, programs. Once again, I'm a bit behind on these posts, but I just got back from two weeks of travel and I'm so happy to be home for a while. My last trip was pretty stressful. On the way out, our plane blew a tire (or tires) which required an emergency landing in Dallas (which is where we were scheduled to stop anyway). Everything ended up fine, but as I said, stressful. Then coming home we were minutes from our destination when the pilot had to turn around due to storms. You can…

I know what you're thinking: Jasper hasn't had a new keyboard for ages. What remarkable growth and maturity.126 words · 1 image

Datalab's open-source Marker and Chandra convert images and PDFs into Markdown, HTML, JSON, and other structured formats with astonishing accuracy, even on degraded text. Their hosted service runs an improved version of Chandra that promises higher accuracy than the open weights. It includes $20 in free monthly credits, zero data retention by default, SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, and custom BAAs. Opting into data retention earns a 25% discount (sensitive files are best kept off cloud services in…

Acorn 8.7 is out, and it’s got some fun new features, many of which have been requested for years. Two new brush types: Repair and “Synth Fill”, which let you brush away unwanted objects in your photos. The Repair tool uses Metal kernels to quickly look around the area that needs to be touched up, and fills in using similar pixels to what it finds. Repair is kind of like a super clone tool. The Synth Fill tool uses ML to do a deeper dive into the image to figure out what it can synthetically…

What do you use your smartwatch for? A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about her Pixel watch and what features she used. He'd ignored me when I said I had a non-Google watch. She thought for a moment and said, other than telling the time, all she used were pretty much the step counter and contactless payments. He looked a bit crestfallen at his impromptu user-research participant and somewhat…

https://k.sosnierz.me/08-11-24/ Making an 88x31 book-button using ImageMagick

Intro Rarely, but consistently, people using regular expressions meet a scenario where a regular expression becomes incredibly slow. This is called "catastrophic backtracking". There are multiple solutions for this, but the one I am going to be talking today is atomic groups. Definition An atomic group has the syntax: (?>subexpression) . It instructs the regular expression engine that it should greedily match the subexpression and never backtrack. In other words, once it has matched, the engine…

Do you manage email for your family? Do you run Home Assistant at home? What happens if you're no longer around to manage it? Will your family be able to cope or will they resent your "smart home"? Documenting all of this makes everyones life just that little bit easier when shit hits the fan. This topic might seem a bit morbid to you but I honestly do feel like it's one worth talking about. Passwords and two-factor authentication The biggest problem has to be passwords and two-factor…

Passwords are ubiquitous and have been for decades now. We're told to pick strong passwords and made to shuffle them every so often on some services, but we don't think enough about what makes a good password. Here I want to provide a quick primer on why we focus on secure passwords, how we manage password risk, and why password managers matter.

Each new post on this blog now has a Digital Object Identifier. This post looks at the how and the why of getting one, whether it is useful, and any issues you might experience if you go down this path. Table of ContentsBackgroundGetting a DOI the easy wayLet's Go Rogue!Automatic Submission of New ContentManual Submission of Old ContentGetting the DOIGenerating your own DOIMaking the DOI discoverable in HTMLDownsidesLoss of ControlTracking CitationsLicencingVerificationExcluding ContentDeleting…

In this world full of AI slop, it is so cool to see any creative content made by humans. Here’s an Apple logo stitched by hand for the upcoming event. (Do you also remember Apple TV intro made with practical effects?) Apple Welcome Home event invitation from Greg Joswiak’s twitter Why is it so beautiful? I suppose because of its imperfections. It shouldn’t always be slick and smooth. Looking forward to tomorrow’s event very much. Especially, I’m waiting for a rumored home dashboard device. I…