Cory Doctorow (eventually) talking about using LLMS: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback (If you don’t care about Cory Doctorow’s history of blogging, start reading at the point where he says, “Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM…”) Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning…
This whole essay is sobering and kinda depressing. But I found this quote especially enlightening: “I also find myself explaining to them how the iteration and ‘idea’ phase of a project is where the best stuff happens, how exploring things through artistic labor is where your best ideas come to fruition, and why would we want an AI (that we don’t even own) to do that for us with art that isn’t…
I appreciate Maggie’s nuanced take on using AI even as I’m trying to reconcile my own feelings. I especially like the idea of “complementary” vs. “competitive” artifacts of thought that she introduced to me. I like the idea of making my brain work a bit to get answers as a way of ensuring that more answers will come the next time. Check it out: https://maggieappleton.com/lodestone/
I love little web toys like this one. And I love that this generates CSS that I can use on my site. Not sure I’m actually gonna use it, but here’s one I made: .drhayes-splotch { border-image : url (…
Watch the video first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBYudbaqHAk&t=6700s You can play with CellPond right here . The git repo for CellPond is here . I adore this so much. I don’t spend a ton of time thinking about different ways to do the activity we call programming, but I often tell people that the act of typing characters into a text file is not the whole of it – maybe not even the most of…
A truly awesome remake of the Sunscreen speech, including Robb’s video that he made from Keenan’s audio. Just fantastic. Check it out: https://sarajoy.dev/blog/write-websites/
Cloudflare is offering a one-click block of LLM scrapers and spiders when you use their service. I’m still sorting out my feelings about this. Robb has a pretty good write-up about why robots.txt might not be enough . Check it out: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click
Captures a lot of my current feelings about the hype cycle around AI. Hype merchants benefit from the confusion between hype and tech capability. That makes it hard to discern the real benefits of the technology from the marketing. Check it out: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/
Sébastien Benard, one of the devs on Dead Cells, with an interactive demo of all the things that go in to making a game have good feel. And there’s so many things! I love breakdowns like this that show just how much polish goes into creating a great experience. Check it out: https://deepnight.net/games/game-feel/
This template pack contains a bunch of images in the right formats and sizes to help you make nice looking itch.io pages. I love itch.io . The site is a great resource for finding indie games, game development resources, role-playing games, fonts, tools – all kinds of fun stuff. When it comes time to make my own pages for itch.io I have no idea what I’m doing, though. I know the pages need…
CLI tool for running and testing HTTP requests with a flat file config for asserting on the responses: https://hurl.dev/docs/asserting-response.html You can capture stuff from earlier responses to feed into subsequent requests like CSRF tokens and whatnot. I totally want to start piling up hurl files in my repo as all kinds of tests: sanity tests, diff tests, etc. It also has a fantastic name.…
The inimitable Molly White with a hopeful message about what the web could be. In an age soaked in cynicism and irony, hope is punk as fuck. I dig the message she’s writing and I’m hoping I can contribute in some way. Thanks, Molly. This is awesome. Check it out: https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/
We will not look back and regret this decision. Although we were wrong about not admitting women, abolishing racial quotas, US involvement in Vietnam, and divesting from apartheid South Africa, we are confident that this time is different. Skewered. Check it out: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-message-from-the-chancellor-on-the-recent-student-protest
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may like awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of…
Jordan Mechner’s games were hugely influential on me growing up. Playing Karateka and Prince of Persia were formative experiences; the smooth animation! The storytelling! One guy did this?! Once I had wider access to the Internet I found out that his original calling was as a screenwriter; he’d always wanted to make movies. This article is about how his actual first love was comics. The handmade…
Given that YAML wants to be a programming language now it’s probably time to keep this webpage handy. YAML is just full of chaos bombs waiting to blow you up. Thanks, YAML. I fully accept that JSON isn’t very humane or pleasant for regular ol’ humans to type, but I’d argue that – given YAML’s hilarities – it’s a better choice. If JSON won’t due, I’d prefer TOML . Check it out:…
Whether it’s resumes or reports, budgets or broadsides, I’m pretty regularly sent working documents from a wide range of people, and over the years I’ve noticed some consistent patterns that lead those documents to be less effective than they should be. Even very smart, capable communicators routinely send important documents that distract from, or even undermine, their goals. This isn’t too…
I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity and affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets and push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are…
This was the introduction to Godot that started it all for me. I’m not a video guy; I much prefer reading documentation over trying to focus on what someone is saying (ADHD kinda sucks that way). This video was different, though. I set it to 1.5x speed, put on my earbuds, and plowed through it, repeating as needed when I needed more clarity on something. I could jump to things I was interested in……
I found this whole article very moving, from the parable of Ol’ John Henry up top to the notion that perhaps “web programming”, as we know it, is a blip of an industry that exists in the margin of tech/capital inefficiencies. Given that this post is from 2015 it’s pretty prophetic, as well, of the burgeoning AI industry and the forces we engender that are killing our own jobs and exerting all this…
Another article with lots of thoughtful seeds planted about AI tools and the places we’ve put ourselves in because of them. I don’t just like the format of the page (a series of tidbits to think over and mull) but I like and agree with basically everything here. The tools should serve the humans. Only give fucks to things that can give them back, after all. I think there exists a future that will…
As an anti-JavaScript JavaScript developer these themes are present in my mind every time I put my fingers on a keyboard: how many megabytes of software am I going to ship today? At the same time, I see demos like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72y2EC5fkcE I’m jealous of this kind of integrated environment. I want more of this! The real work of software development isn’t “programming”…
How to use Tailscale to link Docker containers together into a private network with magic DNS. That means I can run apps in my home network in Docker containers but get access to them from wherever I am with a minimum of network fuss, which is amazing. My immediate thought was to use this to run Tiddlywiki and make it available wherever I am instead of running multiple copies and worrying about…
Found again via a re-read of a random entry in my journal. Has a great lesson in walking the line between writing about how you’re thinking and writing about what you’re thinking; if you’re interested in writing about the thinking process or showing people your thinking process. And I agree with Robin, here, I like the voices of the two pieces – chaotic, a little rambly, they let you in… but not…
Great listing of topics with great explanations under each one. Some of this mirrors my experience doing DevOps and (wonderfully) some of it illuminates paths we almost took but didn’t. If I agree with this person about 80% of their stuff, then the other 20% is a pretty useful bunch of information.
I do feel like React is overused and shouldn’t be the first tool people reach for in the toolbox, but this post is rather more nuanced than some of the others that I’ve seen making the rounds.