Stream

This is a mirror of my tweets in an attempt to follow the indieweb movement.

February 23, 2025

If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

It feels like we’ve lost this decades-old art form; the individuality of design and the uniqueness of content you used to see on these webpages. The notion of experimenting with HTML and CSS without worrying about something looking weird or out of place. The beauty of a website built by a person, because they wanted to.

So, once again my digital call to arms: build your own website. Make it fun. Make it pointless. But most importantly: make it yours.

Damn i could almost quote the entire article. A must read on this times.

From This page is under construction - localghost

February 17, 2025

Screenshot of website

I found this website called Floor796 and its AMAZING, it rememebers me of the good old days on the internet. Amazing, i love it.

February 7, 2025

February 7, 2025

Frameworks are lame. Iโ€™m just looking for a few libraries to build a website. Why does everything have to be a lifestyle choice?

Every time I have to run a CLI tool to initialise a framework I cry a little inside. My codebase is 100 megabytes and Iโ€™ve yet to write a single line of code. My projectโ€™s root directory is littered with JSON, YML, and dot files.

From Framework-mania is running wild! โ€“ David Bushell โ€“ Web Dev (UK)

February 6, 2025

The need for prompt engineering, on the other hand, puts us back on square one of computer use: the pesky old conundrum of a human user having to think like a computer, instead of the other way around.

A modern chess engine can easily outplay even the top ranked chess players of the world. It can be useful for practice and even developing new styles of play, but using one in a chess tournament is considered cheating. Such use is considered cheating for the same reason it’s also considered uninteresting: Humans want to watch human feats. To most people these days, a computer playing chess comes off as an extremely computery activity. Everyone understands that chess is a closed - albeit complex - system. Everyone also realizes that a modern computer can make deeper, faster and better predictions than any human is capable of. It isn’t interesting, impressive or entertaining - at least not the same way a 12 year old human chess prodigy is.

A computer that can detect a certain type of disease is of course more interesting and beneficial than a highly competent chess engine, and is going to be accepted by the vast majority of humanity as something good. It’s not cheating, it’s helping. Yet, it’s not much to hang a bunch of hype on: Like with a chess engine, or halfway decent machine translation, it’s simply a computer finally doing one of the many things we’ve always been told they should be able to. A one trick pony, basically just another piece of medical software, more like Word or Excel than a thinking machine.

This also applies to self-driving cars. Driverless vehicles in closed systems have been in use for a long time. The Copenhagen Metro, for example, has been in operation since 2002 - but like a chess engine, it isn’t “AI”: it’s simply “automated”. Currently available software may very well make human drivers both more comfortable and safe, but the hype has promised completely autonomous cars reliably zipping about in rush hour traffic.

If we’re going to be able to use LLMs to replace certain professions, they must at the very least match the average human, yielding consistent, reliable and reproducible results while making fewer and less costly mistakes. And, they should of course be capable of this without extensive and tedious prompt engineering. The question of responsibility and liability is a pressing one here, too.

I may, of course, be completely wrong. Perhaps we’ll all soon be replaced by a handful of very small shell scripts interfacing with a distant AI’s API. But, deservedly or not, it seems more likely to me that winter is coming.

From Is Winter Coming? | datagubbe.se

February 6, 2025

Iโ€™m going to quote Ted Chiang again. He proposes that a more accurate term is applied statistics. I like that. It points to the probabalistic nature of these tools: take an enormous amount of inputs, then generate something that feels similar based on implied correlations.

I like to think of โ€œAIโ€ as a kind of advanced autocomplete. I donโ€™t say that to denigrate it. Quite the opposite. Autocomplete is something that appears mundane on the surface but has an incredible amount of complexity underneath: real-time parsing of input, a massive database of existing language, and on-the-fly predictions of the next most suitable word. Large language models do the same thing, but on a bigger scale.

From Adactio: Articlesโ€”โ€œWeb3โ€ and โ€œAIโ€

February 2, 2025

January 30, 2025

Contrary to oft-repeated wisdom, the internet isnโ€™t written in ink. Physical ink on paper is often a far better method for carrying data forward into the future. Manuscripts that are hundreds and even thousands of years old are still with us, and still being discovered every day. Will the same be true of our own data a hundred years from now?

Physical collections benefit from their form: by taking up space in the real world they demand attention and care. Digital collections more easily fall into the trap of โ€œout of site, out of mindโ€. How many online services have you signed up for, added data to over time, and then later forgotten about? How much of our data, the traces of our lives online, are permanently lost?

Itโ€™s amazing how fragile weโ€™ve let our data become.

Managing our data has only gotten more difficult as personal computing has gotten more sophisticated. So much of our digital lives have moved from our machines and into the cloud. Our documents, photos, and music used to exist on our devices where they could be backed up and preserved, but now they exist more and more in privately-owned corporate silos.

Our computers should be databases! We should be able to script them, access them using browser APIs, browse them via a first party application, etc. They should accrue data and knowledge over the course of our lifetimes, becoming more useful as we use them. They should be ours, something we can control and back up and preserve long after weโ€™re gone.

All of our emails, recipes, playlists, text messages, Letterboxd reviews, TikTok likes, documents, music, photos, browser histories, favorite essays, ebooks, PDFs, and anything else you can imagine should be something we can own, organize, and eventually leave behind for those that come after us. An archive for each of us.

From We could all be archivists | Chase McCoy

I couldnt agree more with all its said in this post. I was highlighting almost all paragraphs.

January 20, 2025

User adoption doesnโ€™t work if itโ€™s forced; it has to come from a genuine user belief that the new feature can help them achieve their goals. And it certainly doesnโ€™t work if the feature actually creates a worse user experience and degrades the quality of the product.

Google implementing AI search results has led to countless examples of misinformation, factual errors and hallucination. Google was already excellent at ranking information, guessing the intent behind a search phrase and modifying its results accordingly.

But in my opinion, the tech industry desperately needs less disruptive new shit for the sake of innovation and more listening to the actual problems users are facing out there.

From Faster Horses | Max Bรถck

January 19, 2025

We put so much pressure on ourselves to be continuously productive. But we all know, deep-down, that this is an unsustainable, and frankly, highly unenjoyable way to live.

We know we need the rest, and yet we feel guilt. We feel shame. We berate ourselves for not being able to fully submit ourselves to our labour. We apologise for not getting that thing done, even though there was no arbitrary deadline.

Productivity and progress is not only measured by deliverables, such as lines of code, features, or blog posts. You are more than what you produce. You are your ideas, your thoughts, and your actions.

From Itโ€™s OK to have a slow day

January 19, 2025

๐Ÿ“– Starred Mysterious Box by War and Peas

๐Ÿ“– Starred Work is meaningless, and it almost killed my husband by whitep4nth3r.com RSS Feed

๐Ÿ“– Starred How making an impulsive purchase made me realise I’m not OK by whitep4nth3r.com RSS Feed

๐Ÿ“– Starred Itโ€™s OK to have a slow day by whitep4nth3r.com RSS Feed

๐Ÿ“– Starred Your live coding stream does not need a bigger audience by whitep4nth3r.com RSS Feed

๐Ÿ“– Starred I conducted a community survey and hereโ€™s what I learned by whitep4nth3r.com RSS Feed

๐Ÿ“น Starred The Making of LEGO Island - DOCUMENTARY by MattKC

January 17, 2025

Look how cute! In 2015 average web page size was approaching shareware version of Doom 1 (2.5 MB):

Source

Well, in 2024, Slack pulls up 55 MB, the size of the original Quake 1 with all the resources. But now itโ€™s just in JavaScript alone.

For a chat app!

From JavaScript Bloat in 2024 @ tonsky.me

January 17, 2025

Thereโ€™s a wonderful article by Sebastian Bensusan: โ€œWe need visual programming. No, not like that.โ€ (the dot is part of the title ยฏ\_(ใƒ„)_/ยฏ).

In it, Sebastian argues that we shouldnโ€™t try to replace all code with visual programming but instead only add graphics where it makes sense:

Most visual programming environments fail to get any usage. Why? They try to replace code syntax and business logic but developers never try to visualize that. Instead, developers visualize state transitions, memory layouts, or network requests. In my opinion, those working on visual programming would be more likely to succeed if they started with aspects of software that developers already visualize.

From Where Should Visual Programming Go? @ tonsky.me

January 17, 2025

๐Ÿ“น Starred Tried shooting stop motion with Kinder Toy.ใ€Coretoysใ€‘ by Animist

๐Ÿ“– Starred Patchwork 10 ยท Beyond prose by Ink & Switch

๐Ÿ“– Starred Patchwork 06 ยท Simple branching by Ink & Switch

๐Ÿ“– Starred Patchwork 05 ยท Edit groups by Ink & Switch

๐Ÿ“– Starred The Datagubbe Survey Response Survey by datagubbe

๐Ÿ“– Starred https://lizclimo.tumblr.com/post/772950213684068352 by Hi, I’m Liz

๐Ÿ“– Starred Understanding the JavaScript Modulo Operator by Josh Comeau’s blog

๐Ÿ“– Starred JavaScript Bloat in 2024 by tonsky.me

๐Ÿ“– Starred Where Should Visual Programming Go? by tonsky.me

๐Ÿ“– Starred The value of a prototype is in the insight it imparts, not the code. by Addy Osmani

January 16, 2025

In other words, the web was about retention and accumulation of content. An ever growing library that by its very nature was self-indexing and cross-referencing. And this is what is being actively killed these days.

From Witnessing the death of the web as a news medium | Christian Heilmann

An interesting review and timeline on how the web is dying.

January 16, 2025

When the web started one of the best parts about it was the naming of things. To โ€œsurf the webโ€ implied fun and adventure and to โ€œbrowseโ€ implied serendipity. And we seem to have lost that. Letโ€™s go back.

Finding information on the web was a journey, an adventure. And people wrote about the most random things, went down many rabbit-holes and of course also published things nuttier than squirrel droppings.

Nowadays the web has taken over the mantle of most in your face medium trying to force you to consume and purchase things. And it โ€œdoes the research for youโ€ and pushes you into bubbles. Spending time aimlessly browsing for content is touted as inefficient. Operating systems and browsers come with โ€œamazing AI featuresโ€ that give you summaries of content instead of allowing you to get your own impressions and draw your own conclusions.

Sure, on the surface this seems great, but it feels like weโ€™re pushed into a world of faster and faster consumption without allowing us and our minds to wander.

Aimlessly browsing to find things you may not have heard of yet is as important as discovery is exciting

We need to browse more, find things we havenโ€™t looked for and discard or embrace them. You donโ€™t often go to a clothes shop to buy one special item. Itโ€™s fun to try on a few things and maybe find a new style.

Letโ€™s be browsers again, letโ€™s embrace the weirdness of the web, a library curated by racoons on drugs

So letโ€™s keep looking around for the strange, the overly detailed and the just bonkers web. And โ€“ hey why not โ€“ start contributing to it. You can publish, nobody is stopping you.

From Letโ€™s bring back browsing | Christian Heilmann

January 16, 2025

Can I find what I’m looking to do? Do the pages work on mobile? Does the site load? Is the main content the main content item? Does this web site work for all people? How are images used?

From What is good web design, and bad web design?

January 16, 2025

Hello! The other day, I started wondering โ€“ has anyone ever made a FUSE filesystem for a git repository where all every commit is a folder? It turns out the answer is yes! Thereโ€™s giblefs, GitMounter, and git9 for Plan 9.

But FUSE is pretty annoying to use on Mac โ€“ you need to install a kernel extension, and Mac OS seems to be making it harder and harder to install kernel extensions for security reasons. Also I had a few ideas for how to organize the filesystem differently than those projects.

So I thought it would be fun to experiment with ways to mount filesystems on Mac OS other than FUSE, so I built a project that does that called git-commit-folders.

From Mounting git commits as folders with NFS

Another interesting approach to git internals by the great Julia

January 16, 2025

๐Ÿ“น Starred Euler’s Disk by Vsauce

๐Ÿ“น Starred Text Columns - Inkscape Inkdrop by Martin Owens

๐Ÿ“น Starred This mirror has a secret function. by Unnecessary Inventions

๐Ÿ“– Starred Witnessing the death of the web as a news medium by Christian Heilmann

๐Ÿ“– Starred Letโ€™s bring back browsing by Christian Heilmann

๐Ÿ“– Starred Lines of code โ€“ how to not measure code quality and developer efficiency by Christian Heilmann

๐Ÿ“– Starred The forest beckons by Lunaโ€™s Blog

๐Ÿ“– Starred What is good web design, and bad web design? by Remy Sharp

๐Ÿ“– Starred Mounting git commits as folders with NFS by Julia Evans

๐Ÿ“– Starred Inside .git by Julia Evans

January 14, 2025

Hello! I was talking to a friend about how git works today, and we got onto the topic โ€“ where does git store your files? We know that itโ€™s in your .git directory, but where exactly in there are all the versions of your old files?

From In a git repository, where do your files live?

Im a lover for this kind of deep dive/look into internals and Julia always writes them in a nice exploratory way.

January 13, 2025

๐Ÿ“– Starred Virgin Mary by War and Peas

๐Ÿ“– Starred https://sarahcandersen.com/post/770488479034605568 by Sarah’s Scribbles

๐Ÿ“– Starred Ep. 1037 - Lunartic by Safely Endangered

๐Ÿ“– Starred whoops, forgot to post this here! by Hi, I’m Liz

๐Ÿ“– Starred https://lizclimo.tumblr.com/post/770729269848670208 by Hi, I’m Liz

๐Ÿ“– Starred Using less memory to look up IP addresses in Mess With DNS by Julia Evans

๐Ÿ“– Starred Some Go web dev notes by Julia Evans

January 12, 2025

As I weave through double parked cars and brave pedestrians, I see that this bicycle with an electric motor has returned the hope Iโ€™d lost over the years. Here, listen, it whispers: tech doesnโ€™t have to be a con or make us the worst versions of ourselves. Look: technology has kept its promise and genuinely made the world better!

My e-bike is pulling me into an alternate dimension where tech isnโ€™t designed to be a grift from the start, as these two-wheeled bad boys arenโ€™t only here to generate shareholder value; theyโ€™re designed to help.

Iโ€™m halfway through my ride now and itโ€™s dawning on me that this little e-bike of mine offers a critique against tech culture as a mere profit-generating tool, sure.

Hereโ€™s the kicker though. E-bikes arenโ€™t cool because of the way they look or how loud they are and theyโ€™re certainly not cool because they turn heads or make strangers jealous. Instead, e-bikes donโ€™t care about cool. They argue for a new kind of world where technology is genuinely helpful, where technology doesnโ€™t have to be cool at all.

Technology can just do the job itโ€™s meant to.

As someone whoโ€™s worked in tech for more than a decade (sorry) Iโ€™ve seen how a lot of folks in the industry are terrified of making something merely useful. It must be important! It must scale! It must have a million eyes on it!

From This Glorious Machine

January 12, 2025

Good user experience should be good SEO. People prefer fast websites; fast websites will rank higher. Good markup and metadata improves accessibility and happen to help ranking algorithms. Where interests align thatโ€™s a bonus.

I canโ€™t be the only one seeing the quality of search results tank? Letโ€™s be honest, as despicable as Google are, their search results were miles ahead. Now it seems Google has given up. They donโ€™t even pretend to care about quality. Apparently Google are using โ€œAIโ€ in their algorithm now?

From Weblogging: Part 3 โ€“ David Bushell โ€“ Web Dev (UK)

January 12, 2025

๐Ÿ“น Starred AOL Desktop Still Exists in 2025โ€ฆ Is It a Ripoff? by Michael MJD

๐Ÿ“– Starred This Glorious Machine by Robin Rendle

๐Ÿ“– Starred An AVR Programmer for the C64 by www.linusakesson.net

๐Ÿ“– Starred The Tenor Commodordion by www.linusakesson.net

๐Ÿ“– Starred A letter to open-source maintainers by Xuanwo’s Blog

๐Ÿ“– Starred DoubleClickjacking: A New Era of UI Redressing by Paulos Yibelo - Blog

๐Ÿ“– Starred What is the smallest phone number? by Cadence’s Blog

๐Ÿ“– Starred Static initialization blocks in JavaScript classes (#tilPost) by Stefan Judis

๐Ÿ“– Starred Weblogging: Part 3 by David Bushell

๐Ÿ“– Starred In case of … by Blog of fearless web developer Silvestar Bistroviฤ‡

๐Ÿ“– Starred Deliver the Bare Minimum by bt

January 11, 2025

But, doing it this way taught me a lot. It also helped to demystify the black box that someone else built, to give me the confidence that I could come to understand this tool as well as the creator, no matter how brilliant they seemed from a distance.

My action item to you, developer: when you start using a brand new, shiny technology, talk about it! Ask questions, write blog posts, share on social media, and be open about your findings. You never know who you could be helping! And the more you share, the easier it will be for other people to find you and return the favor.

From Apollo Mission - The Pros and Cons of Being an Early Adopter of New Technology

December 24, 2024

๐Ÿ“น Starred i made a laser hairdresser that cut off my head by I did a thing

๐Ÿ“น Starred This 3D Printed Marble Machine Fits in your Hand by SeanHodgins

๐Ÿ“น Starred Can I Solve This Unsolved Math Problem? by CodeParade

๐Ÿ“น Starred This PS4 Controller is a Music Sequencer (Secret Santa 2024) by Becky Stern

๐Ÿ“น Starred Making A FLAMETHROWER ORGAN by LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER

๐Ÿ“น Starred A COLD Knife is ok BUT thisโ€ฆ. by colinfurze

๐Ÿ“น Starred Win or Get Electrocuted - Taser Operation Game by Emily The Engineer

๐Ÿ“น Starred The Ultimate Maker Gift! by Kids Invent Stuff

๐Ÿ“น Starred The Handsomest Set of Handy Hand Tools by Xyla Foxlin

December 21, 2024

๐Ÿ“น Starred We’ve run out of rods. โ–  Reverse Trivia 2x03 by The Technical Difficulties

๐Ÿ“น Starred World’s Most Advanced HUD | Real Life Power Armor (Part 3/6) by the Hacksmith

๐Ÿ“น Starred Installing NetBSD on the Nintendo Wii! by Michael MJD

๐Ÿ“น Starred The First Amiga Virus - Something Wonderful Has Happened by Modern Vintage Gamer

๐Ÿ“น Starred this is a HUGE problem. (the future of AI?) by Low Level Learning

๐Ÿ“น Starred the US government is considering a HUGE ban by Low Level Learning

๐Ÿ“น Starred Am I the real Wallace and gromit #colinfurze by colinfurze

December 8, 2024

๐Ÿ“น Starred Why are the best snacks always in the back seat?!? by Unnecessary Inventions

๐Ÿ“น Starred Heavy and Gigantic Ancient Whale Resin Art by Thalasso hobbyer ใŸใ‚‰ใใปใณใ‚„

๐Ÿ“น Starred Tall, dark, and gruesome. โ–  Reverse Trivia 2x01 by The Technical Difficulties

๐Ÿ“น Starred What if we made a camera that sees in reverse? by Stuff Made Here

๐Ÿ“น Starred A chair built for your half-dirty clothes by Simone Giertz

๐Ÿ“น Starred Testing The World’s Smartest Crow by Mark Rober

๐Ÿ“น Starred I Built An Emordnilap Machine by Vsauce

๐Ÿ“น Starred DRIFT5 #RCDriftTok #parody #stopmotion #toycar by omozoc

December 7, 2024

There is a cognitive bias known as the curse of knowledge, which occurs when one assumes that others possess the same level of knowledge during communication.

This phenomenon is quite common in software development. People who have experience writing certain types of code and those who don’t often struggle to communicate effectively, even if they share the same theoretical foundation (algorithms, programming languages, or domain knowledge). The reason for this lies in the significant flexibility of software engineering; there are multiple ways to implement the same functionality, each with its own set of challenges.

To eliminate such communication barriers, various technical fields have developed their own set of idioms or design patterns. New projects built on these practices can avoid a lot of unnecessary trouble. The same is true for the field of databases; however, due to its niche nature and high degree of commercialization, knowledge circulated among the public is very scarce, and engineering practices are scattered across various open-source projects.

In this article, I will build a SQL IR from scratch based on my own best practices, which will facilitate the progressive sharing of some design considerations.

From What I Talk About When I Talk About Query Optimizer (Part 1): IR Design

December 7, 2024

To break from talking about actual DNS features, check out this little snippet instead:

dig +short TXT {0..92}.vid.demo.servfail.network | sed 's/[" ]*//g' | base64 -d | mpv -

Requires bind-tools, mpv. If it doesn’t work, try adding @8.8.8.8 just after dig, or replace mpv with ffplay

From SERVFAIL: the first 100 days

December 6, 2024

You have a unique voice that others donโ€™t have. Not everyone learns best from the top teacher out there, not everyone enjoys the writing of the most prolific blogger you know, and not everyone uses the most popular app for their problem. You donโ€™t know who might benefit from what you offer, and you wonโ€™t know until you go for it!

From Ship it anyway

December 6, 2024

But they should not be afraid! Libraries are not magic. They are just code someone else wrote. After all, I pasted the entirety of is-number above, and nothing in there is too mysterious. And beyond librariesโ€”languages are not magic, operating systems are not magic, nothing is magic. Dig into the source code and you will find code you can read and understand.

If you are a proponent of tiny libraries, I encourage you to overcome your fear and try writing the code yourself. You are more capable than you think.

From Micro-libraries need to die already | Ben Visness

December 6, 2024

But this stuff right hereโ€”adding things that never happened to a pictureโ€”thatโ€™s immoral because confusion and deception is the point of this product. There are only shady applications for it. Looking at a lot of the examples here I canโ€™t tell whatโ€™s real without inspecting themโ€”the crashed motorcycle has a bicycle tire for example but man I would never look this closely in most situations.

So right now I think this stuff should be straight up illegal.

From No oneโ€™s ready for this

December 6, 2024

๐Ÿ“– Starred Ship it anyway by Cassidy Williams

๐Ÿ“– Starred Beating the compiler by Matt Keeter

๐Ÿ“น Starred DRIFT4 #stopmotion #PresidentTrump #donaldtrump by omozoc

๐Ÿ“น Starred The Man Who Saved The World by Vsauce

๐Ÿ“น Starred Argh! Real Angels! by Weebl’s Stuff

๐Ÿ“– Starred Micro-libraries need to die already by Ben Visness

๐Ÿ“– Starred Safety and stability by Robin Rendle

๐Ÿ“– Starred A message in binary by Robin Rendle

๐Ÿ“– Starred No oneโ€™s ready for this by Robin Rendle

๐Ÿ“– Starred Every webpage deserves to be a place by Robin Rendle

December 4, 2024

Communities function like that Tamagotchi. You canโ€™t play with them until you feed them and care for them. Unless you keep those health and happiness meters high, they will not behave in the ways youโ€™d like them to, potentially undermining your efforts and investments.

This goes for any community. Whether it is one you created and managed for your product or open source project or one that previously existed (though especially the latter).

One of the fun aspects of the Tamagotchi was that it could be unpredictable. They had personalities and they evolved in stages, which also affected their behavior. You had to invest time and effort to care for the Tamagotchi, but the outcome was unpredictable because the personality was intrinsic to the specific Tamagotchi and not something you could control.

In much the same way communities tend to have a personality. Existing communities will have already established one that you need to invest time to understand and adapt to.

Instead of tracking the outputs, track the inputs. What are the activities we did to foster the community this month?

Done right, community efforts can pay off immensely

From Remote Synthesis | Community is a Tamagotchi

December 3, 2024

File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use those files in another app at any time. Not an export. The exact same files. Itโ€™s good practice to test this with any self-proclaimed file-over-app app you use.

โ€œStainless steelโ€ is a self-guaranteeing promise. You can test it yourself on any tool that makes this promise, and the stainlessness of the steel cannot be withdrawn.

Terms and policies are not self-guaranteeing. A company may promise the privacy of your data, but those policies can change at any time. Changes can retroactively affect data you have spent years putting into the tool. Examples: Google, Zoom, Dropbox, Tumblr, Slack, Adobe, Figma.

A self-guaranteeing promise about privacy gives you proof that the tool cannot access your data in the first place.

Encoding values into a governance structure is not self-guaranteeing. Given enough motivation, the corporate structure can be reversed. The structure is not in your hands. Example: OpenAI.

From Self-guaranteeing promises โ€” Steph Ango