Posts

A good list about how anybody can be exceptional at something:

Bill Gates pretends to be good but has had his hand in many sketchy things including Epstein and climate denial here with Bjorn Lomborg.

I missed out on the entire NeoVIM movement and found the entire thing somewhat difficult to get into. Not so much with Helix which just works and is pleasant to use.

After having kicked out Wordpress and moved to a Hugo generated static site, next up are two other useless subscriptions that aren’t doing anything other than costing me money:

Congratulations Django! One of the programming frameworks that has had the most impact on my professional life and has always been nothing other than good to me.

I’ve gone similarly deep on Dioxus more than a year ago as one of the candidate technologies (along with Leptos, Svelte and Gleam) for the long awaited new frontend for Cuppings.

A revealing account of how using LLMs to do the thinking for you is not actual thinking but a sub-cognitive shortcut.

it never works out

Now we see the inevitable walk backs of “coding agents will replace all software engineers”.

When I read the details of the Mongobleed exploit, I gasped. It’s so stunning in its naivete.

The number of sources of authoritative information is indeed limited enough that the proposal of cryptographically tagging verified output is not that outlandish.

Nice to see Amos creating his own Rust open source cinematic universe with advances in a wide area of topics. It’s refreshing to see somebody be skilled at something and then deploying that skill with abandon like here.

I hate Github as much as the next person. A platform with a lot of promise has—in Microsoft’s hands—devolved into a veritable dump.

And with that we are over to a new blogging system. It’s not exactly because blogging is still a thing, but I use this site as a personal content store providing backing for the things that I share. Having it under my control and in markdown is useful.

I’m going through my old drafts on this blog while I prepare moving off Wordpress and I really should have read my own writing.

It’s interesting to see that amidst a lot of scepticism around GraphQL, new projects like Sourcehut will still choose it and clearly argue for it.

https://netzpolitik.org/2025/dsgvo-reform-beim-datenschutz-ist-deutschland-inzwischen-dem-silicon-valley-naeher-als-dem-rest-der-eu/

Do you want some flashbacks to the horrors of trigonometry? Here’s fizz buzz in cosines.

Dependency cooldowns were the first thing we instituted after tj-actions forced us to hash-pin all the GitHub actions we pulled in. Glad the industry has now also caught up.

With the price of solar panels continuing to go down, there’s no reason any surface that you see outside couldn’t generate electricity. That’s what they mean when they say Kardashev.

AI sales targets are down. Github Actions prices are going up. Most of their software is second tier at best. Microsoft is still, Microsoft.

“RDS goes down too. And when it does, you’re still the one getting paged, you just have fewer tools to fix the problem.”

“AI is expected to approach human reasoning”

I’m glad that Robert Yang is still making games like these. One of the more original and interesting thinkers in game design/development.

I read this paper right after I read the book by Piketty thinking that there would be some interesting economic debate. Unfortunately I was proved wrong and this seems to be exemplary of the stagnation of the economic field.

Refreshing to see Brian Cantrill talk about ’trust’ and ‘accountability’ in the tech industry. These days it almost seems as if both of those have become dirty words.

I get started late after jetlag keeps me up between 2-5am. Then when I finally catch sleep, it’s time to rise and leave. The Fitbit clocks me at 3h47m of sleep.

I wanted to write how I got to Ise in the first place and why that was such a terrible experience.

Another day and yet another short night. Getting up at all is not easy, let alone getting up early.

Well before 7am I grab a quick breakfast at the local FamilyMart and supplies for the day ahead. I’m glad that these things are open 24 hours, but how is this possible? Maybe it’s better to not ask any questions1. No coffee to be found anywhere at this time, but the hotel espresso machine does a decent enough job.

Musk’s attacks on British politics have been bizarre to witness. Imagine the richest man in the world waging an influence operation trying to put the far right in power in your country.

Both in software engineering and in engineering leadership, fads come and go but the fundamentals stay the same. Larson makes a good throw at collecting those very fundamentals (and gives you a way to gauge yourself against them).

Not sure how many people know that this kind of deep data modelling is possible to do in Notion. I love tools with a high skill-cap and Notion is definitely one such.

I am yet to read the Differential Dataflow paper but still interesting to read this explanation of how and why decorrelation works in database engines. LATERAL JOINs and query plans have become something of an interest of mine over the past weeks.

Servo is a massive achievement. One of the more unknown but potentially very impactful things about the project is that its modular nature allows parts of the web rendering stack to be embedded elsewhere (in game engines and such).

Watermarks are just one part of Flink which are difficult to wrap your head around but this interactive explanation does a good job of explaining them. Now for all the other parts of Flink…

A hilarious comedy of errors that is a unique feature of the Javascript ecosystem. When even the simplest code can fail disastrously if you don’t have all the right checks in place.

Both placing these ads and serving them should be illegal in any reasonable market/democracy.

The quality on every Meta property is low and people are there mostly because they can’t leave due to the network effect. This is market failure and it couldn’t hurt for Europe to bring down the hammer here.

Love to see this being in 2025 and Germany still hasn’t figured out how to get an adequate amount of bandwidth to everybody in the country. Maybe they’ll never figure it out.

Hydrogen! Which irrelevant technology will Germany be financing next?

Spectacular execution of the idea of having a physical terminal through which to input Unicode characters. Real custom keyboard enthusiasts should have one of these on their desk.

This spring when I was in London, I stayed there with Sonder and even when they were still in business the entire process was somewhat sketchy.

China is steaming ahead also with self-driving car technology.

Window managers have become a bit of a special interest of mine. After being a Rectangle user for most of my macOS life, I tried out Amethyst and Yabai and finally settled on Aerospace.

“That this sounds radical – that one might believe in a democracy that creates laws, affords companies economic freedom within those laws, and enforces those laws against companies that choose to violate them – says much about our divisive times.”