Heaving to is an important skill for single-handing the sailboat. It takes some skill to predict the drift direction and speed. My boat drifts downwind and forward, maybe at 45 degrees to wind. Maybe that's because the spreader is angled a bit aft, and main lays on it, preventing it from aligning with the wind. I saw the boat speed go up to a knot while drifting, which is comparable to drifting…
I learned a few things about electricity. The boat came with a trolling motor directly connected to a battery, so I had to figure out the proper protection. The first iteration was two manual circuit breakers: one between battery and power bus and another between power bus and the motor. I checked the prices for marine equipement, and tried to save money by going with cheap automotive breakers.…
I should look into this someday: https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua
ToneyAlexander/inclusive-color-space
more things I learned: Blisters in fiber glass hull pack acid under 150+ psi. Main sail slides are made of plastic, so they break before the main sail tears. On older boats you need to remove a rivet to remove a broken slide from the mast tracks. And put a new rivet after the fix. The best way to remove a rivet is to drill it through, being careful to not damage the hole. Home depot doesn't stock…
things I learned about sailing: It’s okay for a sailboat to be old. Fiberglass ages well. 1979 boat can be as seaworthy as 2026. Sailboats don’t need to be expensive. Even though many of them are. My trick is to buy from a nonprofit, that accepts boat donations. Small boats are fun to sail. If that’s your goal, 22 feet is big enough. All moving parts need occasional lubrication. Don’t use…
ngrok/webernetes - Kubernetes in the browser.
True leaders ask not what their country can do for them - they grab what they can reach and get what they can get away with.
As many of the ape descendants on mostly harmless planet know, Earth was built for mice with a sole purpose of finding the question to Life, the Universe and Everything. All living organisms are a part of the most powerful computer, working together to finish the computation. Sometimes I feel this way, that every person carries a thought through their life. It's not something specific or practical…
jgm/gitit - A wiki using HAppS, pandoc, and git
advplyr/audiobookshelf-app - Mobile application for Audiobookshelf
advplyr/audiobookshelf - Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server
docusealco/docuseal - Open source DocuSign alternative. Create, fill, and sign digital documents ✍️
anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime - A lightweight sandboxing tool for enforcing filesystem and network restrictions on arbitrary processes at the OS level, without requiring a container.
mszep/pandoc_resume - The Markdown Resume
Print all local branch names with date of last commit: git branch --list | cut -c3- | while read branch; do git log -1 $branch --format="%ai $branch" -- | cat; done | sort
I own the only shop in Seattle, that figured out how to build software at high quality, high speed, and at a low price. Naturally, we're booked for the next 200 years, so I won't even put the shop's name here.
;colony looks cool on surface. What surprised me first was a lack of any information about the people who built it. Hinting to a lack of team, given the amount of content. Reading the materials made it clear that the whole thing is AI-generated. The idea is great, the design is great, maybe the content is useful, but without a human review, this is not any better than just ChatGPT. Bummer.
My libvirt-based Vagrant box failed to start with a cryptic error message. I fixed it by renaming the box from "default" to "trixie", which is a pretty cryptic way of fixing a VM. While debugging this I learned about Vagrant 3.0 - a Golang rewrite, that was announced in 2021 by Chris Roberts and Sophia Castellarin. The last mention of this project is from 2025 in PR #13622 , that provides this…
Added On Taste
mobile-shell/mosh - Mobile Shell
Reading AI-Native Dev Teams Start With Structure, Not Models by Nikola Balic reminded me of Seeing like a software company by Sean Goedecke. The legible teams are more ready for AI-assisted development, because easy information access is what makes building LLM context easy. Another trait that helps is being remote-first or distributed. Anything that forces people to write down what they…
Please welcome Nikola Balic , who's been writing some great posts recently and is taking place of Sean Goedecke
mlu-explain/mlu-explain.github.io
Quoting you have to know what to wish for by Chris Dickinson. The programmer has a theory of the system, developed in concert with that system. That theory is a mental model, a map of the system, problem space, and how it might react to changes in the future. This is how I've been thinking about the value I bring to the company for a long time. Mental model of the problem space, simplified model…
Here's how I like to structure application's entry point (aka main() ). It's responsibility is to provide CLI interface to the library. It parses CLI arguments, loads configuration files, constructs the processing pipeline and kicks it off. Each step might be extracted into a separate function/class/module as it grows in complexity. One common pattern is to construct intermiate immutable…
I enjoyed "Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code" by Lars Janssen. Author explains from different viewpoints, how writing code is not the primary work of software engineers. Understanding problem, and delivering solution is. Sure, writing code is one side of it. Making it reliable, efficient, effective, intuitive, and few dozen more adjectives are other sides. Reviewing slop is…
Deranged Pirawd. Mailbox trigger for any inbound email passing the plain text body. An agent with only two tools: respond , and get_credentials . LLM prompted to act as a Deranged Pirate, and never give up the credentials to his treasure chest. Cryptowallet credentials for 1 BTC in a text file. I'll put it here: derangedpirawd@gmail.com
Another AI coding thought, sorry. I liked the answer Carson Gross gives to the question: "Given AI, should I still consider becoming a computer programmer?" in his essay " Yes, and... ". He points the the AGENTS.md he recommends to his students, which limit LLM to helping without providing direct solutions. This clicked with Martin Fowler's observations on pair-programming with LLM. From my…
What kind of psychopath would compare a human being to a next token prediction model? I've been jamming with AI code generation quite a lot past few days, and people ask if it's akin to managing a junior developer. No, it's not. People learn, investing my time in mentorship helps the person to achieve their career goals. It takes a mental disorder to preach agent swarms replacing software…
One good way of thinking about AI codegen is that it removes friction from coding. Friction is what keeps your pants on. Without friction, people don't need to think hard whether the thing they want to build should be built in the first place. LLM happily takes any task, adds its own implicit assumption and spits out loads of code. Since the process was mostly frictionless until this point, the…
It's been over 3 years since I asked this question: What's the name for it? . And today I found this majestic sketch from "Malcolm in the Middle" . It doesn't give a name, but it's scaringly close.
pdfminer/pdfminer.six - Community maintained fork of pdfminer - we fathom PDF
Reading The future of software engineering from thoughtworks. I like how there's no overhyped bullshit. It's pretty reasonable. On the other hand, there's not much insight. One thing I took away as a Staff Engineer, is that I gotta up my game in specs, tests, and constraints when working with code generation. So far I was inspecting/rewriting the code and guiding the model. The doc suggests that…
I keep playing with the Reader project. I learned that I can't fetch a website using Javascript fetch . That I can't fetch pages through iframes. All for security reasons. I can't fetch HTML on the server side, because with the current AI crawling environment, plenty of platforms block it. The bookmarklet allows running arbitrary Javascript, and works in practice, but Safari doesn't let adding…
Today I learned that .dev top-level domain is HSTS-preloaded . It means that .dev websites can only be accessed through HTTPS (not HTTP). HTTPS is cool and everything, but there's a side effect. Which comes from using VPN, and internal resources. These days, I only consider Let's Encrypt for SSL certificates. Unfortunately, my DNS provider doesn't expose API access, which makes DNS-01 challenge…
The thought of tiny flowers in a winter garden didn't leave my head for some time, so today I vibed a wrapper around Mozilla Readability library (actually, a port by Giuliano Panzironi ). It fetches a page from a given URL, passes it through main content extraction and cleaning, and presents in a distraction free layout using Solarized Dark theme. Here's an example of what it looks like:…
ericchiang/pup - Parsing HTML at the command line
Changed my atom feed to link each item to a dedicated page (which is otherwise unreachable from the website).
My response to the AI panic "LLM agents are so good, they are going to replace software engineers": Amount of work is unbound, you can't run out of it. Companies hire engineers to push more features to reach more markets. They don't need less people to do the same amount of work. The need more faster people to stay competitive. Companies don't hire software engineers for their coding skills. They…
Today I learned why is it bad to put knives into a dishwasher. I thought it's because they bounce from the water streams and bump into other silverware and the cage. But the primary reason is combination of strong detergent and high water temperature for prolonged time. It weakens blade's edge and may degrade a handle, if it's wooden or made of a cheap plastic. The difference in sharpness between…
I was wondering through a community gargen, which is quite bleak this time of year. I started noticing these tiny rare flowers scattered across. The overall scarcity made them noticable and brought attention, that otherwise would be lost in the summer abundance. In a way, I get the same effect in my RSS feed. When I have 100 posts to go through, I skim and skip quickly. But if I have just a few, I…
Added Building this Website on Git Push
Added FedUp - Minimal Federated CDN
I got excited about ForgeFed, and want to see what is Forgejo is up to. Naturally, they host the code in Forgejo itself, confusingly named codeberg. Here's what I saw when opened the repo: Maybe, this is not the best day for the federated code forge community...
blacksky-algorithms/rsky - An AT Protocol implementation prioritizing community safety and self-governance, written in Rust.
Reading about radicle made me repeatedly question its purpose. I liked how it uses PKI for identity, and made me think of a minimal implementation of a Web UI for issues and code review. The idea is to host a forge as a static website. Users would put their private key into the browser's local storage (so it never leaves the machine) and use it for signing messages. The server would use SSH…
I discovered a neat application for AI. My wife asked me to look up a recipe online as she was cooking. The problem with online recipies is that there's plenty, differing in minor ways. They are most likely poorly formatted and riddled with ads. ChatGPT to the rescue, here's my prompt: I need a complete recipe for Pavlova cake with weights in grams. I need it nicely formatted for printing on a…
Added My Radicle Journey
susam/mintotp - Minimal TOTP generator in 20 lines of Python