There are two wolves inside of me, lol. Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”. On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something “good”. Making something function often results in a reaction of “Wow, that’s so cool! It didn’t work before and now it does! And I could’ve never made that, nice job!” And sometimes it’s like, good job, you made a bear ride a…
Subscription-based coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex famously have 5-hour and weekly quotas on their LLM usage. Both of these are understandable: 5-hour quotas help stagger usage so the servers don’t get overloaded, and weekly resets prevent users from dumping an entire month’s worth of usage into a single day which a) also prevents overload and b) stops the user from just unsubscribing after they do so. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have played around with quota limits, from doubling…
Holo is an experimental native macOS utility that turns the desk around a MacBook into four assignable tap zones by listening through the selected microphone and extracting acoustic features.
Synology just released DSM 7.4 highlighting their new “storage efficiency” feature. Note that you can’t actually use this feature unless you’re dumb and/or rich enough to fill your NAS with only Synology’s own overpriced drives. It’s unavailable to the other 99.9% of us paying users. I’m so over their antics.
A few years ago I published vanity-keygen, a small Go program that brute-forces ed25519 SSH keypairs until the public key matches a regex. It did about 250k keys per second on my 32-core machine: a minute for love$, days for [pP][cC][aA][rR][rR][iI1][eE][rR].This week an LLM rewrote it from scratch in Rust, with all of the cryptography hand-rolled in a single OpenCL kernel. I provided direction, benchmarks on my hardware, and an RTX 4090; every line of code, including the test suite, is its.…
Hot on the heels of my ESP32 display detour–which went from Cydintosh to Flying Toasters on an ESP32-S3 and then, inevitably, R-Type–I ended up with an M5Stack Tab5 on my desk as a very indirect consequence of chasing e-paper displays. I have followed M5Stack for years and have a couple of their ESP cameras running, plus one of the original stackable Core modules (complete with battery) somewhere in a drawer, but I had not written code for any of them in quite a while (the cameras are running…
I just like saying that. Clearly you should use whatever you want. “What is the SLAP stack?” you ask. Well, I just invented the name on Mastodon a few days ago. I don’t even want to do a web search to see if it’s already taken because that will take the wind out of my sails and I won’t finish this blog post. But first, there’s something you should know about me. I have this aphorism I live by: everyone is weird and everything is complicated. The former is mostly meant as a compliment. But…
The AP explores one important facet of why US soccer, even with an eager and enormous population at its disposal, struggles to produce world beaters.→ AP News
FastMail released a native, cross-platform app a while ago. It's an Electron app, so, basically web pages and web browsers running locally. It looks almost exactly like its web page. FastMail desktop app on the left, FastMail web page on the rightThe only discernible difference is that the native app doesn't show the mail capacity indicator for unknown reasons, but the rest is pretty much the same. So, you expect an Electron app be the better version of a web page. In FastMail's case for…
Over the years I've built quite a lot of stuff for Bear Blog. Themes, add-ons, plugins, fun little widgets, and more. I've always had the same approach: make it "complete and perfect" before publishing. Investing a lot of time, tweaking and testing, then hitting the publish button. Now I feel like trying something new to challenge that OCD way of doing things. Instead of "perfecting" things, whatever that means, I'll just put it out there and build it up piece by piece. I've had an idea for a…
Have you head of the Swiss Cheese model? You see it sometimes in descriptions of how complex systems fail. The visual usually goes like this: The whole idea is: even if you have multiple layers of safety – like many slices of cheese – there are always holes in each slice. Typically, a hole in any slice is covered by a non-hole in the previous one or the next one. (For example, a car might not allow you to grab your keys if you have not shifted to park – or, if you start driving with a handbrake…
Setup a Simple, Self-Hosted Web Server with OpenBSD 2026-07-18 This website is being served to you from my HP T630 thin client, running OpenBSD and httpd. Pretty cool, right? And best of all you can do the same! I’m going to walkthrough how to host your own websites locally on OpenBSD. This guide is going to be kept simple on purpose, so feel free to expand on it as you see fit! Requirements Getting Started Wireguard The VPS The Local Server Basic Web Server Give Back to the Community…
Hello, loves! OK, let’s do the thing we love: find something to improve, and improve it. Shall we start where we left off? Result: Not as joyful as some days. We pared down the RoomView by removing its references to layout, dungeon, and dungeon view, passing them as parameters when they were needed. Pretty much what the received wisdom would suggest and I’ve done it many times and don’t recall ever regretting it. There is a place for encapsulating a bunch of objects that need to be processed…
Good morning, programs. I'm currently at a conference (Day of Data), but thankfully one just down the road. I'll be back tonight, and thought I'd take a break between sessions to share some links. I'll be presenting later today one of my favorite talks, "A Beginner's Guide to Wrangling Asynchronicity in JavaScript". I love the talk, but given I'm up against eight other talks at the same time and I'm not talking AI... well it may be a small personal affair. We shall see. Building a Blog with…
The AYN Thor is an Android handheld with two screens and, out of the box, no opinion about what either of them is for. The upper screen is wide and bright and obviously wants to be where the game happens. The lower screen is smaller, nearly square, and close to the controls. It wants to be a menu. The hardware makes this arrangement feel inevitable. Android does not. Android sees displays, activities, tasks, focus, and a default screen. It can put software on both panels, but it has no idea…
With several developers and a great deal of production servers we need access to, managing SSH keys and access across them all was getting complex with potential for mistakes and missed authentication. Instead, we decided to set up a bastion/jump host (with a redundant backup) - this means the client servers need just 2 SSH keys added and we manage authentication and access for the team in a central location. Note: This post has been sitting in my drafts for years and I'm posting it out of…
praeobscura:I am cross-posting my resource list for the Noemata zine here. Alas, if you lose this post, you must endure the long journey of searching for where else* I have linked them.(*The updated description of the zine page.)——ConlangingPolyGlot: Spoken Language Construction Kit - Free software for keeping track of multiple conlang projects in a single database.Quothalinguist - The personal website of Jessie Peterson, the professor of linguistics who created the well-known Conlang Year…
Under partial failure, retry loops can rearrange history. If order, duplication, or staleness matters, retry needs state.
I’ve cancelled my Claude Pro subscription. It wasn’t out of any dissatisfaction with Claude; on the contrary, I still think it’s the leading LLM for general use and especially for coding. No, my choice was more because I realised I was wasting money. I already pay for Kagi, and even upgraded to their Duo plan so I could give my wife a search engine that works for her (versus the other way around). As part of that subscription, I can use Kagi Assistant. For general-purpose ‘consolidated search’…
I was recently a ‘guest’ on Dan Hon’s new online event type thing – How People Work…LIVE!. The session is on Youtube – I will never, ever look/listen at that but maybe you will. It was a pretty nerve wracking occasion given some of the folks who attended (at least three of whom I was directly referencing) and the format which was very free-flowing and podcast-y. Which I do like but it does spike the adrenaline somewhat. Dan has upcoming conversations with Pavel Samsonov and Russell Davies (and…
How do I get the audio output from my stereo to somewhere else?
For most of us, I think the picture is obvious. The job we did for years, picking up a ticket, opening Figma, digging through the codebase, typing code into a file, adding a test, debugging the test, jumping to Stack Overflow, getting in the zone, and grinding on a single task for hours, those days are ending. Everything that took us so long to get good at, learning the language, memorizing shortcuts, understanding Git, all of it, can now slowly be handed off to agents. It’s the same reason we…
ℹ️ TL;DR I taught my software test suite to record training videos. They star the real application, they narrate themselves with captions, and when the app changes, I rebuild them with one command instead of re-filming anything. The system was invented in an evening to teach one person her own custom software; the next night it made a forty-nine-video library for LocallyGrown.net. This is the story; a companion post has the technical details. Modern software developers write automated tests for…
ℹ️ TL;DR The technical companion to part one. If your web app has a Playwright end-to-end suite, you already own most of a training-video studio. This post walks through what it takes to turn one into the other: a small helper vocabulary, an injected overlay, honest fixtures, and a build pipeline, with the lessons I picked up at each step. Part one told the story; this post is the how. The pitch, one more time for the people who came straight here: I generate silent, captioned training videos…
This is how I'm grabbing optional keyword arguments in MiniJinja with a fallback to a default if the arg doesn't exist. Rust Cargo.toml[package] name = "get_optional_keyword_arg" version = "0.1.0" edition = "2024" [dependencies] anyhow = "1.0.103" minijinja = { version = "2.21.0", features = ["custom_syntax"] } src/main.rsuse anyhow::Error as AnyError; use minijinja::syntax::SyntaxConfig; use minijinja::{Environment, Error, Value, context}; fn main() -> Result<(), AnyError> { let env =…
♠ TIL: brew pin. For reasons to be elaborated in another post, I am currently prevented from upgrading LogSeq to its latest version in homebrew: % brew outdated [...] logseq (0.10.14) != 2.0.1 [...] LogSeq v2 introduces breaking changes to my workflow. I found this out the hard way. As put by Valodim in HN: And now after several years of complete stagnation, the supposed improvement is a database format to fix their technical issues, so I can no longer keep all my data as markdown files? At a…
Last week we found the first indications of support for phones as linked devices in the source code of Signal for Android. The new functionality allows users to use their Signal account on an additional Android phone, without registering a separate phone number. The linked Android phone synchronizes chats and messages with the primary device, allowing users to access their conversations from multiple phones. Source: Signal allows Android phones to be linked as secondary devices (beta) Finally.…
AI;DR – This blog post and the debug memory manager it describes were developed with significant help from Claude. If you don’t want to read “AI slop”, stop reading now. I recently added a new import functionality to the GExperts Code Librarian. During the test phase I found a nasty (preexisting) bug: After deleting a folder branch, the whole file became corrupted. On the next open it failed with a “Stream Read Error”. Deleting the branch had shown no error at all. From the user’s point of view…
