Scarf and Coat Weather Means she Returns to her Perch Pretty much for as long as she's been alive, Possum has enjoyed perching on my shoulder like a parrot; when she was a kitten this was achieved by CLIMBING UP MY LEGS (hence why I usually wear motorcycle-grade denim lmfao) but in her later years she went to full-bore athletic leaping. I'm not active on TikTok anymore but for about a year, the only thing I used it for was filming her (as well as Snowapple and sometimes their brother Kindy)…

Forgiving You For My Mistake I once noted that when someone takes away a false impression of you, and you can make them recognize their misunderstanding, they may correct their false impression, but it will feel to them like forgiveness. They're forgiving you for their misunderstanding. And you'll be on probation going forward: After all the explaining, you won't have cleared yourself. You'll have been given a reprieve. They'll frame it like forgiveness. They've forgiven your…

I wrote recently about a wave of vibe-coded apps replacing proprietary utilities with slicker faster and less bloated free alternatives. A month ago we were talking about smaller helpers, like mouse button remapping, but it has already started getting bigger with external camera monitor or audio streaming. The scale of operation has got significantly bigger now. ArtCraft is a suite of apps reimplementing the functionality of the whole Adobe Creative Suite (think image, photo, sound, and video…

Here’s a tidbit of OpenZFS Mastery about replication. Replication also greatly simplifies migrating data, even huge amounts of data over ridiculous distances. With enough data, even 40-gigabit Ethernet in the same datacenter seems slow! Maybe you have to migrate a massive dataset to the other side of the country, or across the planet. Suppose you have many tebibytes of data undergoing constant minor churn, such as an orders database for a busy ecommerce site. Copying that data across the…

At the cat lab, it has been a banner year for moving away from surveillance capitalism ecosystems and toward privacy-respecting alternatives. From operating systems and office suites to streaming platforms, home automation, and security cameras, the goal stays simple. We want tools that respect your personal boundaries and your data. One area that often gets overlooked is the humble RSS reader. RSS is a simple way to subscribe to websites, blogs, news outlets, and more so new posts come…

You turned down a role with a better title and more money. You decided that your weekends were protected, and the laptop does not come home. You were angrier than the situation deserved when somebody else took credit for your work.These are not three separate events. They are one thing showing up three times.You did not weigh any of them up from scratch. Something decided them for you, and it has been doing that for years.The pattern was running before you named itValues aren't found. They are…

events: communication operations as values Wrapping events Composing choice Building on events Guard events Handling cancellation Cancellation in the print service Wrapping up loose threads closeing thoughts References Appendix: Events beyond channels LLM use disclosure: This post is primarily written by a human. However, I've used LLMs for speech-to-text, basic grammar correction, feedback about the writing and for adding inline API documentation links automatically. The Go programming…

events: communication operations as values Wrapping events Composing choice Building on events Guard events Handling cancellation Cancellation in the print service Wrapping up loose threads closeing thoughts References Appendix: Events beyond channels LLM use disclosure: This post is primarily written by a human. However, I've used LLMs for speech-to-text, basic grammar correction, feedback about the writing and for adding inline API documentation links automatically. The Go programming…

by Nolan Lawson This complements the previous link I shared nicely: most developers don’t properly use the platform, but why? This goes into possible reasons without being judgemental, and to me they make a lot of sense. When I first started going all-in into front-end development I’ve been a part of all of those cases, I guess. In a way, writing less code and relying on the platform are signs of development experience (or battle scars).

I made a post at the beginning of October about my plans for this month, and since we're halfway through, I thought it'd be good to check in and see how I'm doing. Books and Short Stories My plans: Read Parasite Eve Read Frankenstein Read 13 ghost stories As you can see by the strike-throughs, I've finished both Parasite Eve and Frankenstein. I liked them both, although Frankenstein was definitely the better read of the two. I found Parasite Eve to be over-descriptive and too vile for my horror…

There's a genre of complaining that's popular online, that talks about how everything sucks in India. There's a whole lot of you out there. I'll only punch up and say this article by Manu Joseph is the kind that I'm speaking of.I am sympathetic to these views. It's worse for those with less economic and social privileges, and definitely downright unlivable for some.However, I am only addressing the privileged Manu Joseph class of people, who have money and cushy well-paid jobs (often in tech),…

Beyond the Supernatural was always one of those games I kind of liked from afar. I bought various Palladium RPGs over the years. I always enjoyed reading them and even working on a character or two, but these days the rules are a little too overwrought for my tastes. I owned Beyond the Supernatural, both the 1st and 2nd Editions. I picked up 2nd Ed a while back at a Gen Con, and I held on to it for years. I kept meaning to play it, picking it up and reading it, but eventually sold it back at an…

“Users want…” Said by someone senior. In a meeting with no users in it.Personas. Made up in a workshop, laminated, never met.Research to validate. The decision’s already made. Research is the receipt.Insight. A quote picked to back up a slide already written.User needs. Written after the thing was built.Co-design. Everyone gets a pen. The decisions were made last month.Empathy. A day in the life, for an hour.Usability testing. With colleagues. The happy path only.Data driven. Clicks counted.…

Today’s post is a bit late, I had to pick people up from an airport late last night, but fortunately for me today’s topic is already decided: tomorrow is the beginning this this year’s two-day online Roguelike Celebration! Here’s Roguelike Celebration’s Youtube channel, which has archives of past talks, including those of the preview event they had last month. And here’s this year’s schedule. And you can get a ticket here, which has a suggested cost of $30 but you can pay what you want, and…

Link: From Producer to Builder: My Journey as a Product Manager Through the Web — Sara Hicks Sara Hicks explains what a product manager is and how it’s changed over time, in the best articulation of a squishy and ever-changing role I’ve ever read. Today, she writes, PMs are just builders versus managers. “The job is less about translation between people who have ideas and people who have the tools to execute them, and more about judgment: knowing what’s worth building at all, and remembering…

Sebastian Sparrevohn Under Review:Suzanne R. Black. Between Novel and Network: Technology and Literary Form in Fiction and Fanfiction. LSU Press, May 2026. Networks are with us all the time now. We are entangled and embedded in them. The internet has long ago ceased being a place we go and is instead something that envelops us. This notion once suggested a utopian imaginary; the internet was imagined as a medium that enabled radical possibilities and creativity. However, that utopian imaginary…

It’s been a few years since Current (and before that, Kafka Summit) was in San Francisco, but here we are—on November 4 & 5 we’ll be there, and I’m excited to continue a tradition that started back in 2019 with a run over the Golden Gate Bridge.

I’m fairly certain that most software should be open source. Over several decades I’ve developed the habit of starting projects that I strongly desire to be around for many years only to find them difficult to maintain and host securely and within a budget. For example, 14 years ago I built a personal side project called Nilai, a to-do app for bookmarks. My vision for that app, at the time, was to build something that would be around well into the future. So I decided to charge for it in the…

AI might not yet be eating the physical world. AI is still eating the world of news, and I am finding less and less opportunity to post about other things. My backlog of items grows across most of my secondary topics and I haven’t had time for any side projects. The monthly, no matter what, is sacred. We continue. Table of Contents Home Alone. The Men Have Never Been Okay. Antisocial Media. While I Cannot Condone This. Zero Marginal Product. Good News, Everyone. 100 Good Television Shows. For…

And they shall beat their data centers into plowshares, and their Teslas into pruninghooks.

The Plough and Stars, a pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has begun hosting “philosophy nights”, and they’re a hit. Last month, people piled into the place for food, drink, and a talk by Agustín Rayo (MIT) on math and certainty. photo via The Plough and Stars Later this month, Helena de Bres (Wellesley) will be giving a talk there on “What is meaning in life?” and reportedly there are around 120 people on the waitlist to attend. While there is a high concentration of academic and…

I just finished watching the film, KDE: The Documentary — The Story of Free Software Underdogs. I’m not a Linux user as my main computer although I could see myself using Linux very easily. Whether you are a KDE fan or not, this is an interesting film. I enjoyed it!

I reread Stephen King's Carrie last night, because I last read it when I was nine, and mostly what I remembered was the false bill of goods it provided on the wonders of puberty. (Still waiting for my telekinetic powers....) This morning I am shelving books, minding my business, when suddenly I get burn-the-school-down mad over this: In the book, we're told that Carrie's mom supports their household on an entry level job at a laundromat. We're not told, or given the impression, that Carrie has…

NASA/ESA/P. Jefferies (STScl) Illustration of the stages of a dying star as it collapses into a black hole. A core-collapse supernova occurs when a massive star reaches the end of its life. After running out of hydrogen and other light elements to burn, the star makes a last ditch effort to counter gravity, fusing ever heavier elements at an ever faster pace. Eventually it reaches the point where heavy fusion extracts energy from the core rather than adds it. The core rapidly contracts, then…

by Jim Nielsen Jim gives his notes on an amazing talk by Alexander Petros, and the topic is super relevant for any web dev. It goes into how many of us, when modernizing our tech stack just for the sake of modernizing it, end up with objectively worse results than we’d have if we stuck to the tried and true. HTML’s ideological goal is to make websites good for their users. React’s ideological goal is serving Facebook, which mostly wants to serve you ads. Both have completely different…

I see that today is Oscar Wilde's birthday (born 1854). Here is something I wrote some years ago about him – or rather about an altogether extraordinary Max Beerbohm essay, 'A Peep into the Past'...'Browsing my overcrowded bookshelves with a view to some thinning out, I came across a collection of previously uncollected pieces by Max Beerbohm, A Peep into the Past (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972) – definitely a keeper. The title essay is a quite extraordinary piece, written in 1893/4, when Max was a…

I don't (and try not to) rant on here very often. This morning, however, I was once again presented with a situation that has convinced me of my position on a couple of things. So, here is the simple backstory: It is 6:30 a.m. I am on my way to work and hit the drive-through at McDonald's on the way. Simple order: two sausage McGriddles and a large Diet Dr Pepper (yeah, healthy, I know...). It's not busy, there's one car ahead of me, and my order is not complex or specialized. I pull up, she…

Now you have found your land, navigated the law, built your cabin, kitted it out with furniture, collected your food, and bought your cheapest possible computer, you might want to include some services that provide connectivity like internet. How about Starlink for £19 up front and £9 monthly? Starlink have given me a personal referral […] The post [non-free] Cheapest possible Off-Grid Connectivity appeared first on Circuspam.Coffee.