While you're here, please keep the following in mind: Be kind to people (except fascists) Stop feeding the patriarchy until it starves to death Talk to real humans and spend more time without being numbed by a screen Much love 🫶🏻 Reply by email
After a multi-year detour wading through the quagmire of bloatware that is modern software I’m back to coding in Sublime Text.I am finally at peace! Do you know how relaxing it is without the daily “update available” and “view release notes” ritual? There is nothing I dread more than release notes. Between VS Code and Zed, I must have glanced at a million lines of sloppy commit summaries. Can I remember seeing anything of value? Nothing comes to mind…Modern software sucks. It’s built by…
Owning media again This year, one of my aspirations is to rely less on the big streaming services for my entertainment. Why? Well, for one thing, if we give too much power to large corporations by getting overly attached to their services, that leads to monopolies, inequality and ultimately, democratic decline. How’s that for a positive opening? Finding alternatives is easier said than done, because Tech Morality is Hard, and I would generalise that to “Corporate Morality is Hard”. Namely,…
aka the LLM agent productivity boost is a trap As the tech startup scene continues to find more and more advanced ways to use LLM agents to build software, complete tasks, do research and marketing, and anything in-between, I’m wondering if we’re losing track of what matters. While people are posting about whether or not you still need to do (or should do) code review, or how they’re building their software factories, I’m starting to struggle to see how it relates to actually accomplishing the…
I'm bullish on AI, but I also feel this pull to leave tech behind entirely, and I've been struggling to figure out why. This is my attempt to crystallize my feelings.
"Thank you for using RSS." "I love RSS." A badge in the footer. A little heart, a blogroll. Community. Belonging. I love TCP/IP. I love HTTP 1.1. I love DNS resolution. Where is my badge. Where is my directory. Nobody forms a tribe around plumbing. You use it. You don't announce it. You don't put a sticker in your footer that says "I love packet switching." RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don't love…
Andreas tells a story of seeing an image of cats on social media with several many comments decrying it for being "AI generated". Do we now have the obligation to check each and every picture, video, quote, text, post, etc. that we come across for whether it's human or AI generated? Do we have to apologise profusely if something slips through and we accidentally share slop? Do we have to police each other and check other people's posts and point out to them (with proof!) that they posted or…
Of course, for my first post of Blaugust, what would I be writing about other than blogging? In all seriousness though, this is far more about UI/UX and accessibility, and I think it touches on something both important and neglected by the IndieWeb community. In some webweaving circles, you'll see websites created that only work properly on a desktop screen. Sometimes this is due to coding difficulties—I've been there many times myself, media queries in CSS can be a difficult beast to tame! But…
In the late 20th century, there was a gorilla named Koko who made waves by displaying an apparent ability to talk to humans in sign language. This would've had shocking implications for life as we know it, but the science determined that what she was doing wasn't actually "using language". Through reinforcement learning, she had come to realize that mimicking the hand signals of her human handlers would result in certain outcomes. She knew that making the hand signal for "food" might convince…
I cannot understand Mozilla. We took time off of X, but we’re back. The internet is changing again, so we’re here as an independent voice for our users and the open internet. @firefox · Jul 20, 2026 They either do not know who their user base is, or they know but those are not the users they want. I care about the open web and I care about privacy. I'm much more in the LLMs are a tool camp, but I still don't want "AI features" shoved down my throat or baked into everything these organizations…
Someone says something true and sharp. The response is never "you're wrong". Never "here's why". Always "your language is inappropriate". The content vanishes. The tone becomes the trial. The person who said the thing is now defending how they said it. The person who did the shit walks free. IRC, fediverse, the office, corporate email, academia. Same script. No argument required. The tone was the crime. Someone gets censored. Their response: "it just felt weird". Not "this is nonsense". Weird.…
POSSE. Webmention. ActivityPub. AT Protocol. Fediverse. IndieWeb. Micro.blog. Bearblog. Pika Pulse. /now page. /uses page. Discovery feed. Own app . Own icon. Own font. Same rats, smaller cage, better lighting. You didn't escape the cult. You just found one small enough to feel like a founder.
Idiot challenge, #shitfest, stupidity festival. Post every day, link something, reply to someone, send 100 emails. Every day, every month there is some circus. A man announces a challenge, thirty people link to it, they all post about posting, they link each other's posts about linking. The circle closes. Until next call. Peasant writes because there's something to say. Member who sends 100 emails or writes 100 posts doesn't have 100 things to say. He has one thing to say 100 times: "Look, I'm…
The other day I saw this post about "Stolen Buttons". It is a browser extension that "steals" a button from every website that you visit. You can see the creators collection of "stolen" buttons here: Stolen Buttons | Anatoly Zenkov If you scroll through the list there will likely be a few that catch your eye, as they are a little bit different. It might be the shape, the colour, or the font used that makes them stand out. The majority of the buttons though are flat and pill shaped. They are…
After Iceland, we traveled to Oslo, Norway. Summers can be hot in Atlanta, so we wanted to visit another country with cooler temps. Norway is amazing! So much natural beauty and quiet. We took a tour of the islands in Oslofjord (and learned it’s not technically a fjord because it was created via tectonic plate separation rather than glaciers). Here we learned about cabin culture in Norway: I think it’s around 80% of people either own or have access to a cabin. July is the main month for folks…
screenshot from video from afarTV on YouTube 31 July 2026 This week a massive iceberg floated into webcam view at Ilulissat on the west coast of Greenland. It was so massive that it filled the camera screen (screenshot above). Greenland map from Wikimedia In less than three hours — from 5:03am to 7:47am — it collapsed, flipped and largely disintegrated. Then its remnants floated away. The video below from afarTV on YouTube condenses 2 hours and 44 minutes into just over 10 minutes by speeding…
mv gives you no progress output at all, which is not much fun when you are moving 100+GB of Google Takeout archives and cannot tell if anything is happening. Two tools fix this: watch and progress. With your move already running, open a second terminal and enter the following: watch progress -w This refreshes every 2 seconds and shows a live view of the running process. Progress probably needs installing first, but it is a quick job with your package manager. On Bazzite, I installed it using…
It's the final day of July, and I'm in a contemplative mood. Tomorrow begins Blaugust 2026, a fun event where bloggers are challenged to write 31 blog posts in 31 days. Will I participate? Well, every month has been Blaugust for me since November 2025, as I've written at least 23 posts every month since then. Although I haven't yet had a month where I've successfully blogged every single day, so maybe I will. What I want to talk about, though, is not blogging. At the start of the month, Dan Q.…
Almost a year ago, I decided to give blogging a try. I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing my posts (I put a lot of effort into them), but seeing how little traction my writings got was usually disappointing. My best-appreciated blog post was very short; I suspect that was part of its appeal. What I consider to be my best post was very niche, so I understand why it didn't get many upvotes. After that one, though, I tried to write about things that I expected to be appealing to a larger…
Hugo is an open-source static site generator. Building websites with Hugo is much easier than creating dynamic websites that are far more complex.
Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms. For example, there’s the hamburger menu (≡) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to the constraints around screen size. It has since spread to many other parts of software interaction design and will likely remain prevalent for a long time as a terse way of indicating “more…
Photo by N I F T Y A R T ✍🏻 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 |
Mt Haku (白山, haku-san) or quite literally "White Mountain" is a 2702m elevation mountain located on the borders of Ishikawa and Gifu prefectures. We hiked Mt Haku as a day hike in mid-July, which turned out to be the perfect time to enjoy the alpine flower fields that line the trails. As well as being one of Japan's Three Holy Mountains (along with Mt Fuji and Mt Tate), Mt Haku is also one of Japan's Hundred Famous Mountains. This list is based on a book written by author Kyuya Fukada - and as…
Why read the book? Peter Thiel explains how to build companies that create new value instead of improving on old ideas. He shows that the best businesses escape competition by solving unique problems and securing monopoly positions. The book draws on his time founding PayPal and investing in firms like Facebook. Thiel stresses that copying successful products only leads to small gains. Real advance happens when you invent something no one else has. He rejects the common view that competition is…
This spring E took down her WordPress blog and replaced it with a static website. In the past weeks she did the same for her business website (and added her own sales channel to it, with just the payment provider as third party element). Now I have static website envy. Until 2002 I had static websites, hand coded in a text editor. Still the easiest way for simple websites, I’m amazed to say. Then from 2003 I used a CMS for my blog, first Movable Type for about a decade and then WordPress from…
The old Postville Courthouse in Lincoln, Illinois, via The Library of Congress. Abraham Lincoln practiced law there from 1847 to 1859. Well, as a surprise to me, my silly little Gravatar article was posted to Hacker News. This has called a lot of attention to the post, and made for some interesting comments. The most interesting of this is the claim that I have “cognitive dissonance”: We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don't you'd go insane. This article is…
If you look at the changelog for my site, Brennan.day, you'll notice two things. First, I am working on this project way too much, and second, my attempt at good git commit message hygiene. There is a problem, though. Across over a thousand commits, 448 were prefixed feat: and 417 were fix:. Nearly the same count, for wildly different kinds of work. A new 2,000-word essay? feat:. A corrected typo? fix:. An automated comment sync running at 3am? feat:. A CI pipeline toggle? feat:. Everything is…
(July)replying to the Absurd Pirate's post. The Absurd Pirate writes: I think of a friend who moves away, and that you only talk to online anymore. By all intents and purposes, they're now mostly an "online" friend. But does that really change the bond you made with that person? Is the fact that person is now on a screen for all of your communication make your friendship any less valuable? I had never thought of it that way and it makes sense. In fact, my closest friends are online friends. A…
If you aren't a privacy nerd then you might have missed this exciting new development in the world of web browsing! Containers have landed in Firefox and Brave and I'm pretty stoked for it.The question is, what are Containers? How do they work? And how can you use them to use the web more efficiently – and perhaps even more privately?What is a Browser Session?Containers are a way of separating your Browser Sessions into, well, containers. To really grasp how these work, though, it's important…
