I do not need a fork of Linux. I'm not maintaining some exciting kernel tree. I have zero expectation that Linus Torvalds is going to discover my GitHub account and think, finally, the missing piece. I forked torvalds/linux because GitHub has rules. I recently sent a two-line patch to the Linux kernel. It already has a review. Assuming nothing strange happens, it will eventually make its…
The Arch User Repository has a malware problem. On July 30, Arch Linux disabled package adoption in the AUR. The reason was fairly direct, there had been an influx of malicious package adoptions followed by malicious commits. People were taking over orhpaned packages and using the existing identity to push malware. Two days later, on August 1, it went further . Hi everyone, We have now disabled…
Akeem Jenkins recently wrote an interesting piece arguing for agent-first command-line tools : CLIs designed around the assumption that their main caller is a language model rather than a person. There's a good argument inside of it. CLIs should expose structured output. Their errors should have stable categories. They should be callable without a human answering prompts halfway through.…
A few weeks ago I discovered a project named Bridger . Bridger is a small social-networking project currently in beta. It presents itself as an alternative to conventional social media: no advertising, no influencers, no algorithmic doomscrolling, and eventually no outside owners extracting value from the people using it. The proposed product is built around close friends, extensive personal…
Update -- July 28, 2026 Since this article was published, Stop the Datacentre(s) has added a " How This Works " page to their site explaining that it is a "network of municipal campaigns using shared infrastructure" and identifies the use of machine learning. This directly addresses the central transparency concern raised in this article. I appreciate that the organizers took the concern seriously…
The C-22 report looks familiar. On May 26, I submitted a brief to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. In it, I argued that part 2, the proposed Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act , should be removed from the bill and studied seperately. I submitted this fully aware it would almost certainly not happen. It would have required admitting that…
My website has appears to have developed what I can only describe as a government. This was not the plan. The plan, to the extent one existed, was fairly normal. I wanted a website. A place to put my writing. A small, plain, reasonably durable bit of the web I owned. Static files. An RSS feed . A colophon . A few project pages . Maybe a note every so often when a federal bill, software platform,…
Webmention has one job. A page links to another page. The first site tells the second site. The second site fetches the first page, confirms the link exists, and records the mention. That is the entire protocol. It does not ask why the page exists. It does not ask who wrote it. It does not ask whether it was lovingly published from a personal website, emitted by a static-site generator, or…
Elsewhere is on crates.io now. This is a strange sentence to write because Elsewhere began as a tiny little personal workflow gremlin. The idea was simple: my website should be the canonical home for my writing. Other places should get rendered drafts, excerpts, links, or platform-specific versions. Mastodon gets one shape. Bluesky gets another. Reddit, because it is Reddit, gets a structured…
Elsewhere is a local POSSE CLI for static-site writers. It treats your website as the canonical source of your writing and renders platform-specific publishing drafts for other places. Your website is the home. Platforms are edges. It is available on crates.io: cargo install elsewhere What it is Elsewhere reads a post from a static site and turns it into publishing drafts for other places. It…
Terence Eden recently wrote a lovely little post called " This blog is written in en-GB ". The setup is simple. A reader asked if he would mind making his language more inclusive because they didn't understand some of the British cultural references. Perhaps, the reader suggested, he could use tropes that were more globally familiar. His answer, correctly, was no. Not "no" in the sense of…
There is a very funny dispute on Wikipedia about the Coat of Arms of Canada. Not funny because it is stupid, exactly. That would be too easy. It is funny because it is stupid in a way that has achieved institutional form. Canada has a coat of arms. This is not, in ordinary life, a matter of live controversy. The Coat of Arms of Canada, also called the Arms of Canada or the Royal Arms of Canada, or…
It would be convenient if Bill C-36 were obviously bad. It would be much easier to write about it if it were a stupid bill. It would be much easier if it were the sort of thing you could point at, sigh, and say, "well, there it is, the government has once again decided the internet is a machine for doing crimes and the solution is a registry, a regulator, and a prayer." But that is not really what…
My website has reached a new and terrible milestone. It has not merely been read. It has not merely been indexed. It has not merely been hit by bots asking "are you Wordpress?" It has not merely been shamelessly scraped and rebublished on an AI-slop "news wire". No. That would be too normal. My website has now been ingested as part of an operational readiness benchmark for a Hacker News Telegram…
The Entertainment Software Association has found the real threat to the video game industry. Not loot boxes. Not live service games that disappear after people pay for them. Not launchers, platform lock-in, mandatory online checks, anti-cheat rootkits, or the slow conversion of purchases into temporary revocable permissions. No. The threat is apparently Minecraft servers. During a California…
A website should not need a town square. This is, objectively, a ridiculous thing to say. My website is a static site. It has pages. It has notes. It has essays. It has an RSS feed, because I am correct about the web and everyone else simply needs to catch up. And yet, somehow, the blog now needs a front porch. The thing I am adding is called TownSquare . The basic idea is very simple: you drop a…
This is a long piece, so the short version is: Bill C-34 gets part of the problem right. Platforms should be held accountable for harmful design, weak safety systems, and failures to protect children. But sections 27 to 29 risk turning child safety into age-verification infrastructure for ordinary internet access. That architecture deserves explicit parliamentary debate, not future regulations and…
There are certain sentences that sound harmless until you happen to live in Vancouver in June 2026. "The World Cup is in town." "Canada Day is next week". "There is a big event downtown." "The trains may be busy." Each one, on its own, is manageable. Vancouver has handled big crowds before. We are a city of fireworks, concerts, cruise ships, Stanley Cup trauma, beach weather, Canucks hope, Olympic…
I was scrolling through Instagram, because unfortunately I am not immune to doomscrolling, when I came across a reel advertising bridger.social . Bridger claims, in its own words, to be "A close-friends social media built to help you actually connect." The antithesis of modern-day social media. That pitch, at first glance, is exactly the sort of thing that should get me very excited. A…
My immediate reaction to Apple WWDC is that Apple may be the only major tech company that has not fully lost its mind around AI. This is not the same as saying Apple is good, right, or pure, or immune from doing Apple nonsense. It is still Apple. It still names operating systems things like "Golden Gate". It still unveils a design language called "Liquid Glass", and then, one year later, quietly…
I was trying to add my website to the Internet Phone Book , as one does, when I encountered the following option in the registration form: (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US and Canada) Absolutely the fuck not. I live in Vancouver. Vancouver is not on UTC-8 anymore. Vancouver is also not in Mountain Time. This leaves me in the very stupid position of having two wrong choices. I can choose the right…
Canada should know better. That's the part that makes the past few weeks of digital policy discourse so frustrating. This is not a country without technical memory. Canada has been home to serious telecommunications engineering, security software, cryptography, mobile infrastructure, privacy law, artificial intelligence research, and some of the best computer science institutions in the…
Petite note en français, avec une mise en garde nécessaire : mon français est, franchement, assez faible. J’ai appris le français à l’école comme beaucoup de Canadiens anglais, mais je ne l’utilise pas assez souvent. Donc, si cette note sonne un peu maladroite, c’est probablement parce qu’elle l’est. Mais je voulais quand même écrire quelque chose. Mon article sur le projet de loi C-22 a été…
I was reminded today, after seeing a Reddit thread about how often total solar eclipses actually happen, of the 2024 eclipse I watched from Mount Royal in Montréal. I had seen a partial eclipse before, in Toronto in 2017. It was cool. The light changed. Crescent shadows appeared on the ground. A kind soul offered me the chance to view it through his eclipse glasses. That afternoon felt a little…
One of the stranger pleasures of having a personal website is seeing how it moves around the web without you. I was looking at this site's analytics and noticed I had a surprising amount of traffic coming from Kagi . Nothing massive, but definitely persistent. At first I assumed it was just search traffic. Then I discovered the reason. This site had been added to Kagi's Small Web feed.…
"A mess of the government's own making." Those were the words used by Canadian digital policy expert Michael Geist following Tuesday's committee meeting regarding Bill C-22. And it's honestly the most generous way to describe what's happening. The government introduced a sweeping lawful access bill. Experts warned that it was overly broad, vague, and technically risky. Major…
I submitted a brief to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security regarding Bill C-22, An Act respecting lawful access . The brief is submitted in my personal capacity. It does not represent my employer or any other organization. Read the full brief as a PDF. . This brief grew out of an earlier essay I wrote about the contradiction between Bill C-22 and…
The boos made sense. A graduation ceremony is a strange place to sell uncertainty. Students are sitting there in gowns after years of lectures, exams, group projects, part-time jobs, internships, debt, applications, and awkward networking events. Their parents are taking photos. Someone’s grandmother is trying to find them from the back row. Everyone is pretending, for one afternoon, that the path…
The personal computer had a simple idea around it. The computer was yours. It sat on your desk. It ran programs from your disk. It saved files where you put them. You could install a weird utility from a shareware CD your uncle gave you. You could keep a folder of documents for twenty years and open them without logging into anything. If the modem was unplugged, the machine still worked. That…
Molecule is a small Unix-like kernel experiment written in Rust. It is not a production operating system. It's not trying to be one. It's a project I built because I wanted to understand more of what happens below the software I normally work on. Most software runs on top of a very large stack of assumptions. Files exist. Memory exists. Processes exist. Timers exist. The screen exists.…
RustyBoy is a Game Boy emulator written in Rust. It's one of those projects that sounds simple until you start building it. Then you realize a handheld game console isn't one thing. It's a pile of small systems pretending to be one thing. A CPU. Memory. Timers. Interrupts. Graphics. Input. Audio. Cartridges. Weird hardware behaviours. Decades of games accidentally depending on…
Canada cannot build digital sovereignty by making Canadian infrastructure less trustworthy. That should be obvious. A country that wants more domestic cloud capacity, more domestic software companies, more domestic AI infrastructure, and more control over its digital future needs people to trust the systems built here. Bill C-22 exposes the tension underneath that ambition. The government…
One day a piece of software you rely on will refuse to open. Your files will still exist. Your computer will still work. The application may still be installed locally. Still, you won’t be allowed to use it. I started thinking about this a few years ago when Chrome removed my ad blocker. Not because ad blockers are the centre of the universe. They aren’t. What bothered me was simpler. Software…
Software should not require permission to run. That sounds obvious. It used to be obvious. Somewhere along the way we stopped expecting it. Open a modern app on a plane and watch what happens. Spinner. Login screen. “Reconnecting…” Your computer is fully capable of running the software sitting on its own disk, but the software refuses. It needs approval from somewhere else first. That’s the…