The AI Compass
Seems pretty close I’m pretty skeptical, it turns out
Verily
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Birthright Citizenship Upheld by the Supreme Court
Fuck yeah! and fuck you , Trump. I mean, seriously, eat shit you facsist. Trump maintained that the provision was meant to apply only to former slaves, but “wasn’t meant for the entire world to occupy the United States.” Fuck you. By a 6-to-3 vote, the justices interpreted the words, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” to mean that all children born in the U.S.…
Do I Check For Facists When I Buy Things?
tl;dr: Yes. Some folks on Hacker News, like daneel_w here , suggest that people are just being reactionary and should interrogate that feeling. A good suggestion under normal circumstances, as reactionary feelings are sometimes not the most helpful. Especially anger. However, it is also worth understanding that people are allowed to find out something unsavory and make a judgement call on that new…
Mullvad Founder/Co-owner Donated to Far-Right Extremist Group
Oh goddamn it . The accusing article is in Swedish, so I can’t read it directly , but if true then it means that this guy is a fascist. I’m going to wait, tentatively, until I get more information, but I’m fully ready to pull my subscription. Anyone know of good, actually good, services for VPN? Edit: Mullvad’s response is milquetoast at best . They’re taking a…
Goddamn it Amazon
When you buy a gift card for a birthday, and it shows up mangled, Amazon would really like it if you didn’t post about it. Yeah, thanks You can’t post my review because of the ‘packaging’ you know, roughly 50% of the product in question.
My Destiny is Crusin'
Well, I just got back from a trip on the Disney Destiny around the Bahamas. I got to see the Disney’s Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point and the fantastic Disney Castaway Cay . While I have been to Castaway before, Lighthouse Point was new and interesting, if a little generic. The Island(s) Something odd is that the water at the beach in Lighthouse Point was somehow saltier than I had tasted in…
The Mandalorian and Grogu
Oh yeah, time to go see some buddy cop shoot ’em up in space! Hells Yeah! Pew pew!
Easter Candy Vanilla Machta Latte
I had an interesting drink today. It was an “Easter Candy Vanilla Machta Latte”, which had vanilla and machta, but also had some blueberry puree and some stawberry milk. Garnished with some candy bits and a Peep. The peep was lovely Profile view of the drink
Sticker 'Em Up!
I love stickers. I was always apprehensive affixing them to surfaces because, like books, I have a hard time “marring” a surface that makes it unique or “not default”. Slowly, though, I’ve been working on it. My Linux laptop has plenty of stickers and looks good. Since I recently went to San Fransisco , I picked up a couple of stickers that I didn’t know what to…
Why Can't I Think of Anything to Vibe Code?
I know a lot of people are freaking out because tools like Claude Code and friends are able to write, reason about and modify code. This has business leaders absolutely salivating at the possibility of getting rid of a huge chunk of their bulky, expensive … human … capital. However, SOTA is still not going to fully replace anyone. However I find my problem, specifically, is that I…
Hello (and Goodbye) San Fransisco!
HELLLLOOOOOO San Fransisco! (and goodbye) We had a lovely trip to SFO this week. Taking in a whirlwind tour of sights and sounds all over this lovely city. My son and his class were selected to visit and perform in SFO, which meant that the whole family packed up, flew out and did a crazy 3-day tour of the city. I’m exhausted. As you can see, we got to see a bunch of stuff (and stuff I was…
Dungeon Crawling with Carl
As you may (or may not) have noticed on my reading list , that I’ve picked up on the Dungeon Crawler Carl series of books. I’m burning my way through the 4th book (of 8!) my wife is steaming through number 2 and my son is right on my heels at the end of 3. We’re all enjoying the series throughly. It’s not it’s Isekai-esque story beats, or it’s heroic main…
Uh... Okay?
Microsoft’s definitely huffing the good stuff. Wow Needs more .NET
I Feel Noticed
There is a tool for summarizing your 2025 Hacker News interactions . Of course it uses “AI”. However, I decided to try it out. I feel very seen. It's organized! Okay, yes. I should really symlink my toothbrush into .local/personal/bathroom… Here’s the full breakdown:
Screenshot Saturday? 🙂↕️ Screenshot Saturday.
Festive A little jingle to the desktop
We Are Here [====| ] on the Path to Authoritarianism
Know Your Rights As we slide toward authoritarianism, you should exercise what rights you have left while you can.
Whither to Archive or Delete?
What do you do with your email? Do you archive everything? Or are you a person who will delete everything not immediately useful? There are good arguments for both sides . Personally, I try to delete most email. Most of my email ends up being passive information that is point-in-time based, but not really long term . These are things like mailing list messages or notifications from services and…
Don't Be a Sucker
Don't be a Sucker Oddly prescient for a film coming out in the 1940’s
Rules for Thee, None for Me
Danish ass-clown, and Minister of Justice, Peter Hummelgarrd is quoted as saying: “We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone’s civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services.” Which, is of course, comically absurd. If the constitutions and other laws and mechanisms around the world didn’t already explicitly guard personal privacy,…
NPM is a Joke, a Bad One at That
Apparently supply chain attacks on NPM aren’t “so last year”. In fact, the latest one affects a huge amount of packages . That one is debug . In fact, I was almost affected by it just by having the stupid language server installed. head -n 7 package.json { 'name' : 'debug' , 'version' : '4.4.1' , 'repository' : { 'type' : 'git' , 'url' : 'git://github.com/debug-js/debug.git' },…
Last Week, Tonight with John Oliver: Gangs
Gangs A brilliant exposition on the problem with gang databases in the US I have no love for police, but I respect the work they do. However, there are lots of problems with the way they do their work that could be improved. Ideally, there needs to be more public oversight over these “public servants”. Especially since they seem unaccountable for their actions, even when they’re…
Managing Software Licenses
In true nerd fashion. I don’t use a spreadsheet (anymore) to manage the various licenses that I buy for software. CSV files are fine for shorter lists, but become problematic when dealing with more, especially trying to properly format the document. So, I started looking for alternatives. There are a couple of purpose built programs, generally for enterprises, that claim to manage your…
Dog Walk is ADORABLE
Dog Walk is an open source game made in all open-source tools by the Blender Stuido and Godot Engine. Using papercraft and free and open source software, they developed an absolutely adorable game about a boy and a dog looking for bits of a snowman. It’s not a long game by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s absolutely full of heart and soul. It goes to show you how much goes into…
Trying out Task
For this site, I’ve been using a Makefile that automates much of the process of building, indexing and ultimately uploading the static files to AWS CloudFront for distribution to you, my dear reader. Make has been around for ages . Current incarnations use either BSD or GNU variants, but for my purposes, GNU is where it’s at. I use in the following form: SHELL := bash .SHELLFLAGS :=…
I Feel a Little Called Out Here
You get access to a bunch of drunken sailors who spend money irresponsibly I mean, they’re not wrong , either. I just object to being called a sailor. I’ve never sailed in my life.
Stay Out of my (Project) $HOME
I love making files organized. It gives me a sense of control over something in my life without really changing how things work. I'm an ardent fan of the XDG Base Directory Specification , I even use it on macOS to organize the various config files that Linux tools tend to spread everywhere. Patrick Jackson takes this ethos to his project root directory . Wanting to organize the mess of special…
Project: Hail Mary
Project: Hail Mary I’m cautiously optimisitic I’m going to stay cautiously optimistic about the announcement of Andy Weir’s Project: Hail Mary being made into a movie . I loved the book, and his “The Martian”, so there is a lot of good will hanging on this, but I’ve been disappointed too many times this year.
The Cake Bake Shop
We took the family down to Orlando to go to EPCOT and see the sights. It was hot as Hades out, but we found several cool spots to relax in. For dinner, we took the boat from EPCOT’s France gate to the Boardwalk and took our sweatiness to the elegant and decidedly not sweaty Cake·Bake·Shop . Red Velvet Lovelyness Cookie Dough Cake 🤤 Lemon Blueberry Cake Of course, a store with…
You are a horrible person
I hope this peice of shit felt great that he helped fire half-a-million employees and didn’t actually positively affect dick except make his delusional boss feel like he was accomplishing something other than pure chaos and attempt to control the government, privately. Sahil Lavingia: You are a fucking waste. Please, stop interacting with humanity immediately . It’s better for everyone…
On: "The Emacs devotee walks through an ever-expanding mansion whose rooms rearrange themselves to their thoughts."
A post on Irreal about the customizability of Emacs caught my attention today . It talks about how younger developers don’t use Emacs and why they should. It specifically pulls out the following quote from a Hacker News post regarding it: The specialized app user lives in rented apartments; the Emacs devotee walks through an ever-expanding mansion whose rooms rearrange themselves to their…
ChatGPT as Siri
One of the things I’ve been surprisingly pleased with is how good the macOS app is for ChatGPT. I don’t use it often, but when I do, it’s really nice to have it be able to peek into a document open in BBEdit, or look at the terminal to see the output of a command. I don’t know if these are pre-baked integrations or are using some sort of universal AppleScript interface to…
Japan Looks Really Pretty
Kagi apparently had a meetup in Japan. Setting aside the Kagi stuff, I’m always humbled by how nice Japan looks. I know that every city has grimy dirty and poor areas, but even the side roads of Japan look inviting and well kept. I really want to visit it some day. Kagi x Japan Kagi is great, but Japan looks gorgeous
Won't Someone Think of the Children? Not if You're in a Red State.
Fuck you, DeSantis. Nice to know that our cHilDrEn are top of mind when dealing with crisises in our state. Can't get those kickbacks if you're giving children \*checks notes\* food. Beginning in the 2025-26 school year, there will be 37 schools that will no longer be providing free lunch meals through the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). Instead, families with students attending these…
Ever Wanted to Unbind macOS Keybindings in Emacs?
Here's all the keys that get bound in Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/lisp/term/ns-win.el.gz I've changed it to be unsetting these keys, because I find them annoying when I accidentally press them. This gives you more keys to allow for customization on macOS. You may want to wrap this in a when stanza to undefine it only on macOS, but that's up to you. ;;; unset macOS keybindings ( global-unset-key […
I Like Finder Tabs
I’m gonna use them, and you can’t stop me.
I Love Fossil
I love being able to have a local-first bug tracker. One that I can use in a GUI or in a terminal. Fossil lets me have that. I don’t even need to have Gitea or Forjeo installed in a container for it. I just kick off fossil ui and I can post my own bugs, take notes in the wiki and keep them contained and versioned. I don’t need GitHub or CodeBerg. Just my computer, the repository and…
'Never Meet Your Heroes'
Well, another round of dark secrets to turn me off of things I’ve like or like. One of them is old: Scott Adams is a racist . However, it appears that he’s dying of prostate cancer . The same prostate cancer that is killing Joe Biden . So, there’s that. Then, we have Neil Gaiman . He’s accused of serial rape, along with his estranged wife, who, allegedly, helped groom girls…
Andor is the Best Star Wars of All Time
Yeah I said it. Coupled with Rogue One, it is the best Star Wars has to offer. Sure the original prequels were great, and I revere them as such, but Andor is the best. Hands down. It was sci-fi but not sci-fi. It was a real story about loss and finding yourself and being part of something bigger. It’s going to take a while to come down off this show. Disney has some mighty big shoes to fill…
Hot Caturday
Despite it being so hot, they're soaking up the sun and enjoying the hunt for bugs and lizards It looks so nice. But it's really too hot to stay out too long. Despite it being 92F here, being in the shade and under a fan makes it slightly more bearable, enough to enjoy time with the cats on the catio.
Right in the Feels
Last Scene 🥹 Apple is showcasing more of the “Shot on iPhone” movies that folks have made. There is a new one out that not only is shot well , but tugs on the heart strings. It’s called “Last Scene” and is very much worth the watch.
Florida Forces Abstinence-based Sexual Education
Florida, why you gotta be so stupid? We know it doesn’t work . This email is to inform you of recent changes and additions to Board Policy 4.10, which includes Comprehensive Health Education for students in grades K-12 and will go into effect in the 2025-26 school year. Most updates center around reproductive health and disease prevention education and were approved by the School Board at…
Shortcut to Bookmarking
When I find a link that I want to share to the world, I add it to my bookmarks page and upload it. Except, I don’t just have a page of raw links in my repo, I have Hugo generate the page from a much simpler to manage TOML file. This file is fairly long, but orders of magnatude shorter than the resultant HTML, and it’s far easier to manage. That being said, the actual creation of…
Watch the Earth Move in Myanmar Earthquake
Note the light pole (the one with the solar panel on it) and the large power transmission line on the right in the background. The whole area just…shifts about 3-5 feet. Unreal!
New Host, Who Dis?
Just migrated over to AWS/CloudFront/S3/Washtub/Whatever, again. The bill for my very small Hetzner host was far outside reasonable, especially since I wasn’t really running anything on it except this site, Vaultwarden and Miniflux, all things I can run locally or drop on AWS and forget about them. It also means one less thing to have to babysit and take care of. Sorry if my RSS feed blew up…
The Hate in my Heart
I don’t like to hate people. It feels wrong . Yet, I find myself hating people that I don’t agree with. Not everyone I disagree with, but the vocal set of them. Hate is something that I had while I was a much younger man. I ran off it. Rage at the world that I felt was so unfair and uninterested in noticing me. As I grew, I grew to let go of that hate because it wore me out. I…
New Pope. Less Friendly as Old Pope
New Pope; Who dis? Whereas Francis said, “Who am I to judge?” when asked about gay clerics, Cardinal Prevost has expressed less welcoming views to L.G.B.T.Q. people. New York Times Well, lets see how this shakes out.
Disney is Building a new Park in Abu Dhabi
Yep, that’s right . Abu Dhabi, yes that Abu Dhabi . Though, tellingly, they’re not actually going to run or even pay for the park . Just oversee creative matters. How that’s going to translate into guest experience, I don’t know. Bob had some glowing words to say about his new UAE partners: [Miral has] already demonstrated a commitment to quality in that regard. This is…
Sometimes, AI Does Drugs
Today, I wanted to try out my newly downloaded Gemma3 model and see if it could answer a question that had been on my mind lately: There are are quite a few features and similarities between BBEdit and Emacs. Things like scratch buffers, Emacs keybindings and even a full-blown simulation mode that extends BBEdit's controls to Emacs equivalants. Thus, I spake into the mouthpiece: I see a lot of…
Late Caturday
Ellie, not knowing if she wants to go back in, or to snuggle Just loungin' with his dad Ellie is checkin' out the digs, seein' if there's room. Ellie makes room for herself
No More Care to Give
I feel drained, lately. I think it’s, in part, due to me trying to lower my caffeine intake, and part me worrying about too much. I know I shouldn’t. What’s going on in the world is largely outside of my control and that as bad as it is for a lot of people, I’ll likely be fine. While-male-privilege and all. It’s at work, too. Trying to keep face while inside I’m in turmoil…