Parenting is as live as improv theater. The rest of the troupe is here, the audience is here, and there's only one take.When I started my job as a dad, I thought I'd always be able to give it my best. Not in a presumptuous way, but in a will-try-really-hard kind of way.But real life is messy. Kids get tired; parents get tired. There are a million things to care for and problems to deal with. As good of a juggler as you might be, dropping some balls is...
Hello! Hello!Things have been crazy around here, in the way that contracting occasionally gets — for a hot minute I had effectively three jobs, but things are wrapping up and settling in and generally feeling a lot more manageable. Still don’t have news I can share on
Kubernetes: everyone wants to do it, regardless of their scale and business objectives.1 Common justifications include better scalability, cost savings, standardization and being super modern and stuff. It’s the future! In my personal experience, Kubernetes is far from the magical uptime machine that a lot of people think it is, and migrating it...
I was getting the feeling lately that I’ve been writing a lot here lately, and I already had an export of all of my blog posts, so I decided to check my word count each year over the last 8 years. As of yesterday, I’d written
Recently, I’ve become fond of tools that just work, out of the box. This blogpost is an ode to them.
Exploring the key innovations and strategies that transformed Google into a global technology leader
How I built a local-first app for planning trips, and what I learned about the current state of the local-first ecosystem along the way.
Imagine a world where almost everything you read online wasn't written by a person, but by a computer. This isn't a sci-fi movie plot; it's what might happen soon because of something called LLMs (Language Learning Models). These are smart computer programs that learn how to write like us by reading a lot of stuff written by humans. The more they write, the more they learn, and then they write even more. It's like a loop that keeps going.Here are some General...
👉 Creating or breaking habits doesn’t have to be an overwhelming process. Whether you aim to adopt a healthier lifestyle or let go of a not-so-good habit, understanding the basics and applying straightforward strategies can make all the difference. Here's how you can approach habit formation and cessation with ease and effectiveness. The Essence of Habit FormationHabit development can...
ProductHunt has over 1 million user signups. More than 60% of those are bots. How it started I’ve used ProductHunt since early 2014. Besides Hacker News, it was a good way to see the latest product launches in tech. Using the comments on products, I could discover similar tools or collect feedback on my own products. Lately though, I’ve noticed...
Disclaimer I am not affiliated with YC or have any personal insight into the inner workings of YC. It is hard to track YC’s success (with precision) as those metrics are largely not public, and this article is mainly a speculative guess based on limited history. The Thesis Generally, the YC thesis makes a lot of sense. Remove the barrier to entry...
I love bookshops. I enjoy perusing the shelves in search for a new book to read, and the excitement that comes when I find a title that looks like exactly the kind of thing I might enjoy. I love seeing the new releases, searching for if there are new editions out of book series I have been following. I am inspired by how many stories are sitting...
Nine white coffee drippers rest on a wooden stand in a cosy coffee shop in the heart of London. “Can I get a cap [cappuccino] in ceramic?” says one barista as I stand and wait in line. Another barista, who is at the espresso machine making coffees, responds in a melodic tone “Cap in ceramic.” A cup is readied. The drink will soon be prepared....
Using tags is hard. It’s easy to accidentally fall into tagging anti-patterns, such as creating tags that are synonyms to existing tags, or one-off tags for single pieces of content, or tags so vague as to be meaningless in practice. I know because I made those mistakes on this site! Did you know, for example, that there were 14 tags on this site that were only applied to one article? Or that the notes tag was applied haphazardly to articles with...
If you’ve been following AI news lately, you might have heard about the “strawberry test”. It’s a simple question that stumps many AI models: How many R’s are in the word “strawberry”? This seemingly easy task highlights some interesting limitations in large language models (LLMs). Prefer a video version of this blog post? Watch below: Why is...
an Android phone hidden in the Mission is set to Shazam all audio 24/7 and post the roughly 120 songs/day it can identify #
feature package on new ways religious believers are using new technology, from Muslim VR simulators to Buddhist monks on TikTok #
In a SQL database, you can set up a foreign key with REFERENCES: nullbitmap=# CREATE TABLE ab (a INT PRIMARY KEY, b INT); CREATE TABLE nullbitmap=# INSERT INTO ab VALUES (1, 10), (2, 20), (3, 30); INSERT 0 3 nullbitmap=# SELECT * FROM ab; a | b ---+---- 1 | 10 2 | 20 3 | 30 (3 rows) nullbitmap=# CREATE TABLE xa (x INT PRIMARY KEY, a INT...
In a SQL database, you can set up a foreign key with REFERENCES: nullbitmap=# CREATE TABLE ab (a INT PRIMARY KEY, b INT); CREATE TABLE nullbitmap=# INSERT INTO ab VALUES (1, 10), (2, 20), (3, 30); INSERT 0 3 nullbitmap=# SELECT * FROM ab; a | b ---+---- 1 | 10 2 | 20 3 | 30 (3 rows) nullbitmap=# CREATE TABLE xa (x INT PRIMARY KEY, a INT...
Approximately 1,100 Drupal enthusiasts gathered in Barcelona, Spain, last week for DrupalCon Europe. As per tradition, I delivered my State of Drupal keynote, often referred to as the "DriesNote". If you missed it, you can watch the video or download my slides (177 MB). In my keynote, I gave an update on Drupal Starshot, an ambitious initiative...
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86's real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various models that the compilers of the day offered? Tiny, small, medium, compact, large, huge... What did these options...
A book that is both fiction and non-fiction, both wave and particle, both history and imagination, and somehow, something else entirely.
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 10 licenses ($15 value each) for Moom. Whether you know it yet or not, window management on a Mac can change your computing life. Imagine being able to fly windows into organized dimensions and locations with the click of a button or the press of a key. Moom is the best app for managing windows that I’ve...
Given a hash value, an you determine what algorithm produced it? Or what algorithm probably produced it? Obviously if a hash value is 128 bits long, then a 128-bit algorithm produced it. Such a hash value might have been produced by MD5, but not by SHA-1, because the former produces 128-bit hashes and the latter […] The post Identifying hash...
On 17th of September 2024, Peter Eisentraut committed patch: Add temporal PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints Add WITHOUT OVERLAPS clause to PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints. These are backed by GiST indexes instead of B-tree indexes, since they are essentially exclusion constraints with = for the scalar parts of the key and && for … Continue...
I’m still playing catch-up on a lot of things, and I just noticed Zynthian upgraded to the Raspberry Pi 5. The kit is on the expensive side (even without factoring in the Pi itself), but seems like a solid upgrade–I just wish they had a more compact version with TRS MIDI and smaller audio jacks.
Things here likely will remain silent for a bit, as I’ve an absolute ton of work to do to put the blog back on Weblog.LOL after leaving it for WordPress...
Things here likely will remain silent for a bit, as I’ve an absolute ton of work to do to put the blog back on Weblog.LOL after leaving it for WordPress sometime last year, and then quitting blogging altogether earlier this year. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing problematic about Pika except in the sense that I became overzealous about its...
Apparently the last week of online discourse around Meta’s new Orion prototype struck a nerve with me because I posted an all-timer in terms of snark recently. This comes after years of two general frustrations with how some people cover and talk about technology online (especially on social
Diving deep into the lesser-known factors that propelled Apple from a garage startup to a tech titan
How Jeff Bezos' 'Day 1' philosophy turned an online bookstore into a global powerhouse
In this blog post I want to encourage Zig community members, starting from project authors, to take a more deliberate approach towards building communication channels between our communities scattered across various social platforms.Andrew Kelley moved a few days ago some of the "instant messaging" portion of the compiler development discussion from Discord to Zulip (you can find a link to it in the list of Zig communities), after the former platform showed him one ad too many...
Have you ever run a nix build command and had this prompt? $ nix run .#darwinActivations/Sekai-MacBook-Pro do you want to allow configuration setting 'extra-substituters' to be set to 'https://nix-community.cachix.org https://thiagokokada-nix-configs.cachix.org' (y/N)? y do you want to permanently mark this value as trusted (y/N)? y And realise...
I like to make silly things, and I also like to put in minimal effort for those silly things. I also like to make things in Rust, mostly for the web, and this is where we run into a problem. See, if I want to make something for the web, I could use Django but I don't want that. I mean, Django is for building serious businesses, not for building...
Good lord am I seeing a lot people talking about Meta’s new prototype hardware, Orion. Are people losing their minds? Why is this anything of note? Why even comment on this thing at all? It certainly hasn’t caught my attention. No sir, I’m a
NotebookLM is an interesting project from Google that lets you upload a ton of documents about whatever you want, and then "chat" with them. Another thing they just released is the ability to generate a "podcast episode" about the things you've uploaded. The audio
I’m starting to bounce back from the last couple of weeks, but am still not fully there yet. Work remains far too much of a rollercoaster (mostly because I care too much, to be honest), and I’m still trying to find my footing. 3D PrintingI’ve become (too) intimately acquainted with the SK1’s extruder of late, largely because trying to print...
Sean Voisen has a great post about 1) how we as humans think of randomness, 2) how computers simulate randomness, and the difference between the two. He puts forth an intriguing thought: in a world increasingly driven by computation, how does that affect randomness in our lives? Here’s Sean: We could all benefit from more randomness in our lives...
As much as I love virtualizing machines in my homelab and putting the hardware as far away from my desk as possible, the truth of the matter is that there always comes a time when you need “physical” access to the host to deal with boot issues, change BIOS configurations and other types of housekeeping–and regular remote access just won’t cut it...
I recently revived Marky the Markdownfier. In case you missed it, Marky turns any web page into clippable Markdown for storage in notes/organization apps. And I could have left well enough alone, but there were a couple of quirks I wanted to fix. That led to… well, a complete ground-up rewrite of Marky. The old version and the old bookmarklets...
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a bit of a stint watching new-ish movies. That is movies that have come out in the past five to ten years that I missed out on. I used to be an avid movie-goer, but I basically stopped going to the cinema post-COVID. Living in Montréal from 2016-2020 also cut down on my going because Montréal cinemas were...
I came across a link to this paper over on Bluesky: “Generative AI’s Illusory Case for Fair Use by Jacqueline Charlesworth :: SSRN” Jacqueline Charlesworth, the author, is the former general counsel of the U.S. Copyright Office, so I think it’s reasonable to assume she’s familiar with U.S. copyright law. It’s interesting to see how the opinions...
Bill from The Retro Sofa claims that the original Legend of Zelda is Unplayable in 2024 and wonders why that is and what we can do about it. That video was a very timely Stumble Upon as a week ago Florian from the DOS Game Club had: […] this idea of starting reading old game magazines and experiencing the hardware and games from the era “in...
I have two main approaches for producing changelogs, but both are based on the same principles: make it convenient for the author to create them, then make it possible to use the information automatically to benefit the readers.The first way is with a tool such as scriv, which I wrote, but which was inspired by previous similar tools like...
Within the .NET ecosystem, two ORMs dominate, the lightweight Dapper (open source) and the fully featured Entity Framework (EF) by Microsoft. Depending on your project's size and requirements, either of these should work well for you, but there are definitely some known cases where each is a better fit. That's what we're discussing in this...
Godot is a game engine that has risen in popularity over the past few years. It currently supports (officially) its own programming language (GDScript, in both textual and “visual” forms) and C# (via mono), and is able to target most platforms (including mobile, VR headsets and consoles). Unlike Unity or Unreal (which have massive communities,...
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I have 4 (rounded up) beefs with language-y AI bots that have resulted in me sort of avoiding them altogether: They have the personality of a middle manager who writes Google Docs all day that nobody wants to read They’re reallllly good at guessing but not actually that smart, which leads to very convincing lies (see: the “how many Rs in...
Discover the biggest obstacle to success in tech and learn how to overcome it
The views from the Millenium Bridge in London are incredible. Opened in 2000s by Queen Elizabeth II, the bridge connects St. Paul’s Cathedral with the Tate Modern gallery. Standing there a few days ago while on holiday, I found myself gazing at the Tower Bridge. I had arrived in the early morning, as the sun was rising. I stood in a spot where...
Never give up, said the person sitting next to me in the theatre as we chatted in the interval of Hamilton. When I arrived at the theatre in London’s West End, I took my seat and looked around at the room. This was my first time going to see a musical. I was entranced by the building: the architecture, the grandeur. I was early to arrive, and sat...
Delta Lake is an open protocol for serverless ACID databases. Due to its simplicity, scalability, and the number of open-source implementations, it's quickly becoming the DuckDB of serverless transactional databases for analytics workloads. Iceberg is a contender too, and is similar in many ways. But since Delta Lake is simpler (simple != better)...
It has been a busy day, characterised by delightful adventure. You have spent the day doing many of your favourite things, and trying new things, too. Night has fallen on the busy city and you find yourself in the heart of town: the place where you can find any cuisine that you seek. Your feet and legs are tired from the day. You walk one street...
Sweet Caroline, ba ba ba. Good times never been so good., sang, passionately, a group of friends who had just disembarked a London Underground train. I was at the foot of the escalator to go back to street level. As I went up, I saw people glancing, with joy, at the people singing who were down at the bottom of the escalator – the busker, with...
Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a good opportunity to reach across “the great divide” and try to find common ground rather than another opportunity to dunk on each other. Ryan Carniato started the […]