We published all the talks from the final XOXO, possibly the best day of talks we've ever had. I wrote a bit about how we booked speakers and the themes that emerged this year.
I added the quotes because no matter how they sugarcoat the A17 Pro, it’s not the upgrade I wanted for my mini 5 in either CPU, display, camera or anything else short of the USB-C port and TouchID (yes, I prefer TouchID). Given the PR-only prerelease and outrageously spaced out refreshes it’s obvious the mini isn’t a priority for Apple, so I have...
For more than a decade, Tesla’s mission to create electric cars that accelerate the transition to sustainable energy has been subsumed by a new mission: to create cars that drive themselves. For much of that time, Tesla has been collecting thousands of dollars from its customers to deliver a level of self-driving capability that it […]
PATH tips on wizard zines New Julia Evans comic, from which I learned that the which -a X command shows you all of the versions of that command that are available in the directories on your current PATH. This is so useful! I used it to explore my currently available Python versions: $ which -a python ...
Today’s job, add a file list below the edit box. Each item in the list represents one of your drafts.
Repetitive text compresses efficiently. Text like the lyrics to Jingle Bells ought to compress more efficiently than ordinary prose, assuming the compression algorithm can exploit the repetition. The idea of the Burrows-Wheeler transform is to permute text in before compressing it. The hope is that the permutation will make the repetition in the...
Back in May when the latest iPad Pros were announced, there was some consternation about how the Apple Pencil story was still confusing, and I wrote:I think it’s a sure thing that the 11th generation iPad will one day be a thing, and while I’m
Let’s start with a brief, mostly subjective history of web tech. A long long time ago, web development was pretty much a single discipline where any developer would work throughout their stack. Most would be armed with a backend language or framework, HTML and CSS, with a sprinkle of JavaScript. Then the demands for richer and richer user...
Being cautious is a survival skill. Being paranoid is just an annoying personality trait.
It's time to mint a new blog tag… I want to write to pour praise on some software I recently discovered. I'm not up to speed on Pipewire—the latest piece of Linux plumbing related to audio—nor how it relates to the other bits (Pulseaudio, ALSA, JACK, what else?). I recently tried to plug something into the line-in port on my external audio...
Arturia Microfreak. © CC-BY-SA 4 I nearly did, but ultimately I didn't buy an Arturia Microfreak. The Microfreak is a small form factor hybrid synth with a distinctive style. It's priced at the low end of the market and it is overflowing with features. It has a weird 2-octave keyboard which is a stylophone-style capacitive strip rather than...
There's a meme floating around at the moment where you ask ChatGPT the following, and it appears to offer deep insight into your personality: From all of our interactions what is one thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself Don't be fooled into thinking there's anything deep going on here. It's effectively acting...
Creating magic with code: simple PHP programs for beginners
Welcome to the enchanting world of PHP! If you’ve ever dreamed of crafting your own web applications, managing databases, or simply adding a dash of interactivity to your website, you’ve stumbled upon the right place. In this article, we’ll explore some simple yet magical PHP programs that will serve as a fantastic introduction to this versatile...
When Evan You announced VoidZero, I'll admit - I got excited. And a little nervous.
There are few pleasures greater than getting to be profiled for an interview series that you've been reading for months, and last week I got to do exactly that. To browse Manu's site — not just this interview series — feels a bit like walking on a quiet beach in autumn: there's a sense of peace and timelessness that is hard to find in the hustle...
There are few pleasures greater than getting to be profiled for an interview series that you've been reading for months, and last week I got to do exactly that. To browse Manu's site — not just this interview series — feels a bit like walking on a quiet beach in autumn: there's a sense of peace and timelessness that is hard to find in the hustle...
One of the reasons we introduced multithreading was to get around that fact that our read and, to a lesser extent, accept and write, block. In our initial single-threaded implementation, rather than pushing our server to its limits, we spent a lot of time idle, waiting for data to come in. Multithreading helped to unblock the main thread so that...
Let’s not beat about the bush: I have no compunction of classifying this as my worst year at the company (and believe me, there were a few doozies before that). Fortunately, I am certain things are going to improve–after months in a limbo of sorts, things started making sense again yesterday–something I will eventually write about separately....
Casey Newton many weeks ago: Three apps that made me more productive this yearA year ago this week, I wrote here about why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter. In short, it took me too long to learn, software can’t automate your thinking. But I
Kyle Orland for ArsTechnica: Apple study exposes deep cracks in LLMs’ “reasoning” capabilitiesThe results of this new GSM-Symbolic paper aren't completely new in the world of AI research. Other recent papers have similarly suggested that LLMs don't actually perform formal reasoning and
200× faster, persisted, multiplayer-native Shells at Replit
Engineering EnigmasEngineering Enigmas is simplified Tarot reading for working engineers. is simplified Tarot reading for working engineers. Any time you feel stuck and need help in finding a way forward, open that web page and follow the advice given. You may have to be creative in how you interpret the advice in order for it to apply to your situation – that’s intentional. Any time you feel stuck and need help in finding a way forward, open that web page and follow the advice given. You may have to be creative in how you interpret the advice in order for it to apply to your situation – that’s intentional. Don’t refresh the page until you get advice that suits you better. Take what you are given... Don’t refresh the page until you get advice that suits you better. Take what you are given...
I wrote a JavaScript snippet that shows alt text below all of my images, so I can see when it's missing, and review it while I'm editing.
I don’t think I’ve ever used so many different keyboards in a year. But I am happy that things have been improving so fast that I can actually feel the difference between them. The Keychron K2 HE The Keychron K2 HE is a very different beast from the K11 Max I reviewed earlier this year, and I was lucky enough to try out its Special Edition...
In Penn & Teller’s Masterclass (no. 12 “Principles of Performing”) they explain how one of their favorite ways to design a magic trick is to come up with an idea and then act it out as if they already know how to do it. Here’s Penn: We still start with an idea for a trick, how we want the whole thing to go without knowing how we’re gonna do...
I saw a fun post this week about interpreting colours as vectors and the way you can exploit that interpretation to nicely represent certain operations you might want to do on those colours. As the author notes, you can perform an operation on a colour via a matrix multiplication if and only if that operation is linear. Linear maps obey and One...
I saw a fun post this week about interpreting colours as vectors and the way you can exploit that interpretation to nicely represent certain operations you might want to do on those colours. As the author notes, you can perform an operation on a colour via a matrix multiplication if and only if that operation is linear. Linear maps obey and One...
Forgive the somewhat vague title, but I wanted to point folks to a series of articles I've had published on the Frontend Masters blog the past few weeks. I started writing for them recently, and while I note my "external writing" on my About page, I wanted to specifically call out this series. Over three articles, I discuss reading and writing to...
And I blame Henrique—and, to a lesser degree, Luk, as he’s the one I made fun of for carring that small colourful keyboard everywhere (another NuPhy Air 75). Somehow, for some reason, I never gave keyboards that much thought. How weird considering typing is how I make money and has been for the last 17 years. Huh. It seems to be a self-expression...
My Jina Reader tool I wanted to feed the Cloudflare Durable Objects SQLite documentation into Claude, but I was on my iPhone so copying and pasting was inconvenient. Jina offer a Reader API which can turn any URL into LLM-friendly Markdown and it turns out it supports CORS, so I got Claude to build me this tool (source code). Paste in a URL to...
In July, boats presented a compelling vision in their post pinned places. With the Overwrite trait that I introduced in my previous post, however, I think we can get somewhere even more compelling, albeit at the cost of a tricky transition. As I will argue in this post, the Overwrite trait effectively becomes a better version of the existing...
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 2 Universal Standard licenses ($199.99 value each) for OmniPlan. OmniPlan is the ultimate way to manage a project, seeing all of the moving parts at once with start and end dates for tasks, Gantt charts, support for automation workflows, and a project assistant to provide extra functionality. Multi-project...
One of the bad things about the current social network configuration is that when you see something you want to refer to later, you either like it or RT it. But now, an hour later, I can’t remember which of the networks I saw it on. It’s good that Twitter’s monopoly has been broken, but […]
Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol (GNAP) RFC 9635 was published a few days ago. GNAP is effectively OAuth 3 - it's a newly standardized design for a protocol for delegating authorization so an application can access data on your behalf. The most interesting difference between GNAP and OAuth 2 is that GNAP no longer requires clients to...
I Was A Teenage Foot Clan Ninja My name is Danny Pennington, I am 48 years old, and between 1988 in 1995 I was a ninja in the Foot Clan. I enjoyed this TMNT parody a lot. Tags: youtube
I like Fedora Linux. It’s the Linux distro that stopped my habit of distro-hopping. Big deal? Ooh, big deal! It’s stable in day-to-day use, ships with up-to-date software, and the software selection is adequate out of the box. It also ships with a fresh Linux kernel version1, resulting in a good experience even on modern hardware. I’ve been...
If you’ve been reading this for awhile, you know that part of the reason for registering this particular domain was an intention to restore over twenty years of blogging from across various and different sites, services, and domains. You can gather as much from the posts page. As of this week’s return to a previous service after returning to...
In nearly twenty years of blogging, I’ve unfortunately felt more and more isolated and embattled. It now feels like anything I post earns severe blowback, from ridicule on Twitter, to pseudonymous comment trolls, to scary and aggressive email bullying campaigns. Reflecting on this, though, I came to see that such strong reactions are an...
Welcome to the wonderful world of Python programming! If you’re new to coding, buckle up because Python is one of the easiest, yet most powerful, languages out there. Whether you’re looking to automate tedious tasks, build web apps, or dive into data science, Python is your gateway to coding success. In this beginner’s guide, we’ll walk you...
Slightly unusual genre --- with this article, I want to try to enact a change in the world. I believe that there is a missing IDE feature which is:
This year, one of the projects I was involved in at Sentry was the launch of The Open Source Pledge. The idea behind it is simple: companies pledge an amount proportional to the number of developers they employ to fund the Open Source projects they depend on. I have written about this before. Since then, I've had the chance to engage in many...
I was talking to a friend recently, and zie1 lamented that a Rust web framework uses YAML for its configuration. I'm far from one to defend YAML2, but dug in a little to understand zir issues with it: is it the trauma here, or is it something else? Ultimately, zie wanted something that I also seek in Rust: compile time errors over runtime errors....
This year, one of the projects I was involved in at Sentry was the launch of The Open Source Pledge. The idea behind it is simple: companies pledge an amount proportional to the number of developers they employ to fund the Open Source projects they depend on. I have written about this before. Since then, I've had the chance to engage in many...
FYI A break from our usual type of article here but it is very important we do because WordPress powers nearly half of the web. You may or may not be aware of the situation unfolding with Automattic and their CEO Matt Mullenweg against WP Engine. I recommend reading the following to get up to speed. We’re not in the business of adding opinion to...
Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object Kenton Varda introduces the next iteration of Cloudflare's Durable Object platform, which recently upgraded from a key/value store to a full relational system based on SQLite. For useful background on the first version of Durable Objects take a look at Cloudflare's durable multiplayer moat by...
Haitian divorce lyrics Babs and Clean Willie were in love, they said So in love, the preacher’s face turned red Soon everybody knew the thing was dead He shouts, she bites, they wrangle through the night, yeah She go crazy, got to make a getaway Papa say, “Oh, no hesitation No tears and no hearts […]
The original form of radio broadcast was amplitude modulation (AM). With AM radio, the changes in the amplitude of the carrier wave carries the signal you want to broadcast. Frequency modulation (FM) came later. With FM radio, changes to the frequency of the carrier wave carry the signal. I go into the mathematical details of […] The post Why...
Steven Aquino writing for Forbes: Home Depot’s Rollout Of Apple Pay Reminds Apple Pay, Accessibility Are OneMy friend Chance Miller reported this week for 9to5 Mac that Home Depot is ending its laggardness by finally beginning to roll out support for Apple Pay in its stores.This
It’s interesting to visualize functions of a complex variable, even very simple functions like f(z) = 1/z. The previous post looked at what happens to triangles under the reciprocal map w = 1/z. This post will look at the same map applied to a polar grid, then look at the effect a shift has, replacing […] The post Shifted reciprocal first...
An LLM TDD loop Super neat demo by David Winterbottom, who wrapped my LLM and files-to-prompt tools in a short Bash script that can be fed a file full of Python unit tests and an empty implementation file and will then iterate on that file in a loop until the tests pass. Via @codeinthehole Tags: llm, ai-assisted-programming, python,...
Wikipedia: The musica universalis (literally universal music), also called music of the spheres or harmony of the spheres, is a philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a form of music. The theory, originating in ancient Greece, was a tenet of Pythagoreanism, and was later...
I love the js-framework-benchmark. It’s a true open-source success story – a common benchmark, with contributions from various JavaScript framework authors, widely cited, and used to push the entire JavaScript ecosystem forward. It’s a rare marvel. That said, the benchmark is so good that it’s sometimes taken as the One True Measure of a web […]
Mastodon recently added the ability to natively add author labels to links on Mastodon. Basically, when a link is posted, you can have your Mastodon account automatically tagged so people can more easily find you.I would have written up an explainer on how to do it, but Robb Knight