Sixth Fleet images, some 40 years ago this month. How about this surreal photo of a 44,000-ton Soviet Kiev class (Project 1143 Krechyet) “heavy aviation cruiser” (CVHG) seen from across the deck of a Sovremenny class destroyer, Mediterranean, August 1986. USN Photo DN-ST-86-11164, via NARA And this full-length version, sans Sovremenny: USN Photo DN-ST-86-11165, via NARA How the Kiev and the Sovremenny stack up to the rest of the fleet: DD-ST-86-06685 The above CVGH is believed to be the Minsk,…
When AI-generated code breaks something, the real problem is often how we reviewed, understood, and trusted it.
One obscure, but very useful Bash trick is CTRL+X CTRL+E, which will open $EDITOR to edit the current line. This means I can switch to a Vim session with whatever I was typing on intact. This is handy for those times where I need a search-and-replace operation or fix things in a long command or build a long complex command from scratch. I’m aware of Bash’s vi-mode, but I prefer using the default Emacs keybindings because I also work in other’s remote servers. Also, it’s a Vi emulation. I’ve…
Last Sunday we packed up the maximum our Corsa E could handle (volumetrically speaking) and headed to Wowo. Jeremy described this as “not like normal camping, more like the Soho House of family campsites”. Every pitch has a fire pit. It has a stream, woods with big muddy slopes to scrabble around in, evening entertainment every night and an on site shop that only sells organic things and a large number of items with a “Great Taste” award. On Monday afternoon I headed off for a massage and a…
If you frequent the trending page, you may have noticed the recent commentary stemming from Scholarch's post directed at Robert (who replied in turn). It seems to have caused quite a stir, especially if Scholarch's guestbook is anything to go by. I don't care about the drama of it all and frankly its all rather banal and appears to have been blown completely out of proportion. I'm entitled to that opinion, just as you are entitled to yours even if it may be in complete disagreement. From what I…
So the title of my last post was originally “Online Friends vs Raising Satan In Your Basement,” which I reposted with a new title: “Online Friends vs Summoning Goats In Your Basement.” Why the retitle, you may wonder? Well, that post refused to appear in Bear’s Discover feed, which is just… weird? I’m not getting into the whole “censorship or code of ethics” debate with this, but was the post really hidden because the word “Satan” was in the title? I wasn’t, you know, promoting Satanism or…
I've been at my current company for just over 9 years. It seems a long time to be in a single place, but when I think about it, it hasn't really been the same job. And I think that's why I've managed to stay there for so long. I started as an iOS Developer, then I was dabbling in some SpringBoot services, and also a bit of Terraform. That was about 2 to 3 years. Then the company was acquired, so we had a year of picking up a new bespoke tech stack, middleware, and ways of working. It started…
Come write HTML with me this Saturday. HTML Day is an annual celebration of getting together and writing HTML, created by Elliott Cost and Laurel Schwulst. Saturday, August 8, 2026, is this year's date, and I'm running two online sessions again, same as last year. Sessions Two one-hour sessions, so folks across time zones can join in. Oceania Time — 6-7pm AEST European Time — 6-7pm CET The European session also works out to 9-10am PT, 11am-12pm CT, and 12-1pm ET, if you're in North America. No…
Performing circus can teach kids about hard work, dedication, teamwork, performance, etc. Most importantly, it teaches kids how to fail in front of a crowd, get back up, and try it again. “Smile and Style” as they say. The crowd, for their part, will cheer even louder when you get it the next time.
I kinda like this framing of doing work vs. going to the gym: At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.
Now, let me just preface this with a disclaimer: … and get used to this puppo, as you may see this a few more times in this post :’). In light of continuing my bumbling foray into the hardware hacking landscape, I bought a bottom-of-the-line $10 TP-Link TL-841N(EU) router off a random fellow on Facebook Marketplace, in a thrilling, high-stakes deal conducted in the middle of… a nearby mall.
[🎶 Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man ad! 🎶] Surprise! You don’t really own your BMW.Link: https://www.techspot.com/news/113327-bmw-putting-spider-man-ads-dashboard-after-promising.html
Celebrating 25 years of blogging with gratitude, reflection, and a sweet slice of success surrounded by creativity and joy. August 6, 2001, 25 years ago. I started blogging. I had a website made by Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GTE (now Verizon) in the homepages they offered back in those days for residential customers. In fact, your ISP provided everything for you. You had so much website space and an ISP-provided email, which you lost if you changed providers. That's foreign today. But I…
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You can buy my book Permissionless…
This is a survey for developers about everything but coding, that is accepting answers up to September 5. If you’re a developer, it’s worth participating! It doesn’t take long to fill and can help understanding the current environment of the dev industry in such chaotic times.
Low resolution, high compression, wonky colours and press-the-button-and-hope photos! Yes, it's the shitty camera challenge!
We were on a challenging hike recently, and a few of us got to talking about what a lovely analogy hiking is for life. When you’re working your way up a steep climb, you have to take it one step at a time. There’s little point looking back at how far you’ve come or ahead at how far is left — both just pull you out of the only step that matters, the next one. Along the way, you cross paths with all sorts of people, each on their own version of the journey. And the encouraging thing is that…
General anesthesia using gases for surgery is one of America's great nineteenth century medical achievements. In early 1845 dentist Horace Wells used nitrous oxide to painlessly extract a tooth. In October 1846 dentist William T.G. Morton successfully demonstrated ether anesthesia in Boston during an operation by John Collins Warren. The Morton/Warren event soon made it's way around the world. The Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology outside Chicago maintains an extensive timeline that covers…
As part of building a service for automatically publishing blog posts from RSS feeds into atproto's standard.site lexicon, I implemented atproto OAuth for logging in and getting access tokens to publish for the user. This means that any user with an atproto account, whether they created it on Bluesky, Eurosky, or Blacksky, or any of the other Personal Data Servers available, can log in to your service. Atproto OAuth does not require pre-registering clients with a service, one implementation…
Another interesting recent topic of discussion in the OSM community has been on corporate influence on the project. The concern about corporate influence on OpenStreetMap is fairly old. For some time there had been substantial concern about a direct takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation by large US tech corporations. I had commented on this in the past. But i realize that the focus of that discussion had been somewhat one sided, looking mostly at the influence of individual business…
In which my brain hits itself in the face
I’d mentioned earlier in the spring that Kim picks up two new hanging ferns every year so the birds can nest in them. This one has had two separate momma birdies choose it to birth and care for their young this year. And yes, that’s a lot of poop! 🤣
tl;dr: After almost seven years my Netgear Nighthawk M2 has started rebooting on its own, reporting nonsensical battery percentages and ignoring most of my presses on its touch buttons, so I spent the past three months replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800), a 5G NR Sub-6 travel router with two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, Wi-Fi 7, a 2.5 GbE port, two USB-C ports and a removable 5380 mAh battery. It is the most capable mobile router I have owned, its 13.5-hour battery rating is…
After CalAction I wanted to experiment a bit with SpriteKit and try to make a small game for iPhone. I don't usually play any games on my iPhone myself, because most are overrun with garbage like ads and loot boxes. With Burst I wanted to do things differently. The bubble shooter genre (if you can call it that) has a lot of games in the App Store currently, but again most are either overrun with ads and scammy in-app purchases, or they haven't been maintained in many years. Burst has zero ads,…
Wavyleaf basketgrass (photo from Wikimedia) 6 August 2026 Have you seen this plant? Its wavy leaves are nothing like the plants I’m used to in Pennsylvania so I was surprised when I saw it at Bear Run Nature Reserve in late May. Was it a new wildflower? No! This is wavyleaf basketgrass, an extremely invasive plant that is just starting to take hold in Pennsylvania. This month the Pennsylvania iMapInvasives Program is holding a statewide blitz to find it so we can beat it back before it covers…
A minute in the world's life passes! To paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that! To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate... give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our time. Cézanne title here
Following up on yesterday's post. If you're not interested in the AI bubble, you might want to come back next week because this thread is going to be running through Friday.Here is Ed Zitron discussing the AI industry's huge off-the-books debt. Before we jump in, however, there's one point I want to emphasize (we'll dig into this even deeper tomorrow when we discuss Patrick Boyle's analysis). This story is Enron-esque. It is Enron-reminiscent. It is "a little bit Enron." It is not, however,…
♠ Today I learned: Atuin ships hooks that capture commands executed by AI LLM coding agents into the same shell history as mine. As of today there are hooks for Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Pi. % atuin hook --help Manage AI-agent shell hooks Usage: atuin hook atuin hook <COMMAND> Commands: install Install hooks for an AI agent to capture commands in atuin history help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s) install --help doesn’t list which agents are supported, but a bogus…
We were recently in Puck, a small town on the Bay of Gdańsk (Poland), to take a closer look at the town and the harbor. It was a lovely walk, and of course, as always, I was magically drawn to the water. I can’t really imagine a vacation without the sea. At the pier, a few water sports enthusiasts were getting their surfboards ready, and a couple were already out on the water. The wind in this area is apparently always quite brisk, and I found it absolutely fascinating to see how fast one of…
Our new addition to the family, Nelly, has arrived and she's causing havoc already. 🤣 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.
