Margaret Hamilton passed away on September 30, 2026, at the age of 90. Her life’s work was recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whose citation noted: “Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon.” Margaret Hamilton,…

Made an appointment at the urgent care after how bad last night was, because they said they had to see me again instead of just giving me another round of antibiotics, which I get is responsible but still. I get there, and the receptionist says that it's going to be expensive, and I was confused cause it wasn't that bad last time, but apparently they hadn't told me (they insist they did but I know they didn't) that I'll actually receive a seperate larger bill for the labs that were taken. So…

Erin Vest’s art is dreamy.

gracejli.com is fun. I suggest clicking that teleport button.

The first time I used a coding agent, I was mesmerized. Before the agent, I was copy/pasting between my IDE and an AI chat interface. It was amazing to see an agent edit files directly and fix its own errors in real time. After a few days, the honeymoon wore off as I encountered frequent bugs. The agent would stop responding entirely until I restarted it. Development workflows felt stiflingly primitive, and the agent would often declare tasks finished when work had barely begun. This was in…

My thanks to NAS Reborn for sponsoring the site this week. It turns an iPhone 6s, iPad Air 2, or anything newer into a network drive for the Finder, the Files app and even Windows Explorer. Check out the TestFlight beta for iPhone, iPad and Mac at nasreborn.com.

First fire of the year and Sid is loving it. Not sure we appreciated the giant queen wasp that came bumbling out of the chimney though. 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.

Chrome 154 lets an iframe grow to the height of its content with one line of CSS without having to measure, without messages, and without resize scripts. But the page inside the iframe has to agree to it. That catch is the most interesting part of this feature, so this article spends some time on it. The problem I faced I have built many checkout pages that use a payment provider’s iframe. The goal was always to have the card form feel like part of the page. The user should not notice that it…

E.J. Swift's Clarke Award-winningnovel connects policy decisions withsocietal change and progress.(Image via Goodreads)Although the word “Pollyanna” is now a pejorative term for someone who is excessively optimistic and passive in the face of calamity, the protagonist of Eleanor Porter’s eponymous 1913 novel displayed an optimism that was neither passive nor uncritical. The Pollyanna for whom the term is named is a character whose optimism spurs her to action in the face of adversity, leading…

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Love lies just beyond The screaming heat Designed for pain Through rage thrown To wound It presses past charred earth To reach the light outside Crossed wires Crossed arms Crossed hearts turning Frustrations easing Understanding dawning To cool tempers Love builds ships Across bruised egos Unwilling to forgive Journeys towards Horizons unknown To find our way Home.

The quickest way to ruin your hobby? Start a YouTube channel about it. Over the past decade, I have dabbled in a number of hobby-based side hustles and creative projects. These include writing short non-fiction books on Amazon KDP, releasing some cringeworthy dance music on Spotify, and publishing a couple of courses on Udemy. All of these were fun little distractions that filled a lot of my time, before fatherhood came along and changed everything. All good changes, by the way. There is a…

TL;DR: An Apple M5 Max can compile code and run local models at ridiculous speeds, but macOS still insists on cinematic, half-second UI animations for everyday interactions. Here are some Terminal tweaks and settings I've used to strip out the artificial lag. Photo by Marc Sendra Martorell on Unsplash I recently picked up a new MacBook Pro—an M5 Max for work. By every measurable hardware metric, it is an absurdly fast machine. And yet, right out of the box, it often felt sluggish. Not because…

The concept of nominative antideterminism, or when your name goes against everything that you represent, whether intentionally or not. Cecil Fielder, sadly, wasn't a great fielder.Today in Tedium: If I lived my life in a nominatively deterministic way, I would be a Muppet blacksmith. But unfortunately, I live in the real world, and my lot in life has put me on newsletter-writing duty. So I don’t quite live up to my name. But lots of other folks don’t, either. Recently, though, I had a bit of a…

No Such Thing as a Witch by Ruth Chew, 1971, 2013. A new neighbor moves into one of the apartments in the brownstone next door, and the first sign that Nora and her brother Tad notice that this new neighbor isn’t a normal person is when they spot a squirrel who appears to be reading a tiny newspaper. The “newspaper” turns out to be one of the neighbor’s business cards. Maggie Brown has a business taking care of people’s cats and other animals. She seems to have a strange ability to communicate…

I’ve improvised an extra tented keyboard angle that’s a little more comfortable for my wrecked shoulder. I hope this tendinitis improves soon.

A weekend in nearby Colorado so Joan could attend a class. Read More ... Continue reading Hiking some ancient canyons at PMags.com.

A friend recently shared with me a story about how his coworker betrayed him at a previous job. After telling the story, everyone we were chatting with started sharing their toxic workplace stories (everyone had one). Someone then said: "The experience honestly gave me PTSD. And they wonder why people would rather work from home." I thought that particular comment was interesting. For years I struggled with working in the corporate world. I was a "job hopper" and never stayed at a job longer…

I'm being propelled forward the explosion behind my left eye. The body trailing as the backwash, the smoke after the explosion. The left eye leaving the way.

"Yesterday" cover by Jacob Collier. So, so good!https://youtube.com/shorts/Nj6e09qBDbk?si=BG9CsbmU8rXWXw4Y

I think I’m right in saying that Kiss the Hippo have about a dozen shops in London, of which I’ve somehow visited zero. I’ve had beans from them a couple of times in the past, however, always with good results, and these are also proving to be a hit — rich without being overpowering. Reply by email

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…

“Mental istid” (mental ice age) is the name of a song from 1981 by the Swedish punk rock band Ebba Grön. The lyrics are about computers becoming the center of people’s lives. The song came on when I was at the gym. I couldn’t help but reflect upon how much it resonated with the age of AI we’re living in. 45 years have passed since the song was released. We’ve made enormous progress in technology. At the same time, we’re descending deeper and deeper into a “mental ice age”. But it’s not so much…

It’s almost too obvious to state aloud, but there’s a lot to be said for the games we actually play. Case in point, Enchanted Ivy, the solitaire game by Sarah Joshua. When I sat down this morning to begin writing this review, I went through the usual steps. Picking and editing the images. Uploading the template and arranging everything into logical order. Glancing through a few notes. But then I thought to myself, maybe I don’t understand this game yet. Even though I’ve played it well over…

💡Go read Flanders, George and His Pimavanserin now!Are you a big fan of crows?I confess my obsession is more with pigeons⁠—my favorites! But writing a story from the POV of a bird is hard enough without benefitting from the intelligence of a crow. It’s hard to imagine Pimavanserin snatching french fries off the ground, adorable though that is.Have you ever had an extended interaction with a crow or witnessed one do something impressive?Haven’t we all wanted to? We’ve all seen videos of crows…

We barely knew ye... Read here.

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 178-180: [Foreign Minister] Matsuoka … was wrongly convinced of a swift German victory over the Soviet Union (as were many others, including some in Britain and the United States), but he was now rightly worried about the risk of a severe Anglo-American retaliation should Japan decide to occupy even more of France’s colonial territory. That would unduly advertise Japan’s greater ambition in the region, sending up a flare…

In early 2025, a group called Must Read Magazines acquired a suite of six well-known genre fiction magazines: Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. My July 2025 blog post about the acquisition, and the ensuing backlash over unfriendly contract terms, has all the details, but here’s the TL;DR. The Backstory News of the acquisition came out of the blue. But…

Above: Custom stained glass window at our friends’ place We begrudgingly packed our bags and did one last loop through Lander, Wyoming. But before leaving town we enjoyed a really good lunch with Brad and company. (There wasn’t a dud dish on the table at The Middle Fork — can highly recommend.) Brad was my first connection to the town through work, and we found significant overlaps of interest: photography, technology, music and travel, to name a few. We could’ve jabbered on for hours after the…

Danmei Web Novel Review: The Tyrant's Beloved Empress by Xiu ShengThe StoryThey say that hindsight is 20/20. An Changqing has to reach the end of his life before he realizes that he had misjudged his husband. The story opens with him dying from poison but no miracle cure appears. He dies and his spirit lingers for years afterwards watching his husband. The son of a concubine An Changqing was married off to Xiao Zhige, the general of the Northern army when he was 18 years old. Believing the…