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47nil has an interesting Notes Framework that is way simpler than my current one for work notes. Coming back from vacations tomorrow, I will probably make some changes to my current system for work notes. Since starting at the new job, I have been taking lots of notes using a local Obsidian vault. That is still somewhat organised, but I feel that it could be better and this gives me some ideas ...

For the holidays, I gave myself a little experiment: build a small web app for my wife to manage her travel itineraries. I challenged myself to avoid editing the code myself and just do it “vibe” style, to see how far I could get. In the end, the app was built with a $20 Claude […]

§ And here we are, the last weeknote of 2025. A good year, all things considered. I’m looking forward to 2026 which is shaping up to be even better. § We had a warm, if slightly rainy, Christmas this year which was a pleasant surprise given how snowy Thanksgiving was less than a month ago. For a Christmas morning treat Caroline and I made a variety of morning buns which required making a lamin...

Diese MAGA-Erklärung hier (konnte keine originäre Quelle ergooglen) klingt recht einleuchtend und lässt sich ziemlich gut auf die Situation in Deutschland übersetzen, wie ich finde: AfD-Wähler fühlen sich nicht von deren Politik angesprochen, weil sie klug oder kompetent ist. Sie können dem Programm zustimmen, weil es ungebildeten, unsicheren, wütenden Menschen sagt, dass ihre Dummheit und [...

I just found out that a bunch of old posts with broken photos, those were imported from Glass, and because it was just a hot-link to the photo hosted there, they got broken. They probably changed something. 😔 I’m slowly fixing those as I find them. I always remember @jthingelstad post about blog gardening, and I have been trying to mend mine on a daily basis lately.

Firstly, I think it’s important to distinguish between the indie web and the IndieWeb. The IndieWeb is, as far as I can tell, a community of people who advocate certain digital principles and support each other in working towards those. The most famous principle is Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. There are a […]

Added to the film diary:NebraskaAlexander Payne, 2013, ★★★½The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!David Zucker, 1988, ★★★★½The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of FearDavid Zucker, 1991, ★★★½Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final InsultPeter Segal, 1994, ★★★Memoirs of an Invisible ManJohn Carpenter, 1992, ★★½We Want the Funk!Stanley Nelson and Nicole London, 2025, ★★½Bergman IslandMia Hansen-Løve, 2021, ★★★½ ...

I just sent out the latest edition of the newsletter version of this blog. It's a long one! Turns out I wrote a lot of stuff in the past 10 days. The newsletter is out two days later than I had planned because I kept running into an infuriating issue with Substack: it would refuse to save my content with a "Network error" and "Not saved" and I couldn't figure out why. So I asked ChatGPT to dig...

In advocating for LLMs as useful and important technology despite how they're trained I'm beginning to feel a little bit like John Cena in Pluribus. Pluribus spoiler (episode 6) Given our druthers, would we choose to consume HDP? No. Throughout history, most cultures, though not all, have taken a dim view of anthropophagy. Honestly, we're not that keen on it ourselves. But we're left with litt...

A year ago, Claude struggled to generate bash commands without escaping issues. It worked for seconds or minutes at a time. We saw early signs that it may become broadly useful for coding one day. Fast forward to today. In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed. Every single line was written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5. — Boris Cherny, crea...

textarea.my on GitHub Anton Medvedev built textarea.my, which he describes as: A minimalist text editor that lives entirely in your browser and stores everything in the URL hash. It's ~160 lines of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and it's worth reading the whole thing. I picked up a bunch of neat tricks from this! <article contenteditable="plaintext-only"> - I did not know about the plaintext...

How uv got so fast Andrew Nesbitt provides an insightful teardown of why uv is so much faster than pip. It's not nearly as simple as just "they rewrote it in Rust" - uv gets to skip a huge amount of Python packaging history (which pip needs to implement for backwards compatibility) and benefits enormously from work over recent years that makes it possible to resolve dependencies across most pac...

Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) is furious. Here's a Bluesky link for if you have an account there and a link to it in my thread viewer if you don't. Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember th...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Lars-Christian Simonsen, whose blog can be found at lars-christian.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by James and the other 131 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 do...

I’m away with family this week so here are some more scraps from my notes (previously). Disney is considering a reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise. Goodness knows how many Jurassic Park movies there are. We need to create new IP. Culture creates new ideas downstream. Without new IP, it’s like trying to feed yourself by eating your own arm. So: moratorium on re-using IP in movies. The UK ma...

Paul Verhoeven, 2021, ★★ I decided to close out Christmas with the most sacrilegious thing within reach, but for all its cheekily provocative preoccupation with lust and power, Benedetta’s satire and sleaze are largely drowned out by a tedious veneer of prestige melodrama. Tagged: December 2025, film diary, film, review, Paul Verhoeven Reply via email

Last year we spent the end of December in Portugal, which started a new family tradition of travelling abroad for the Christmas season. We don’t like the cold, Mariah Carey and George Michael songs are not particularly to our taste, and overeating Christmas food just because it’s the holiday season is disgusting. We are in Sri Lanka now, the epicentre of insane tuk-tuk drivers, coconut ro...

I've released claude-code-transcripts, a new Python CLI tool for converting Claude Code transcripts to detailed HTML pages that provide a better interface for understanding what Claude Code has done than even Claude Code itself. The resulting transcripts are also designed to be shared, using any static HTML hosting or even via GitHub Gists. Here's the quick start, with no installation required ...

William Oldroyd, 2023, ★★★ Massachusetts, I can’t say I miss ya. Tagged: December 2025, film diary, film, review, William Oldroyd Reply via email

uv-init-demos uv has a useful uv init command for setting up new Python projects, but it comes with a bunch of different options like --app and --package and --lib and I wasn't sure how they differed. So I created this GitHub repository which demonstrates all of those options, generated using this update-projects.sh script (thanks, Claude) which will run on a schedule via GitHub Actions to capt...

Merry Christmas y’all!! 🎄

If this [MicroQuickJS] had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (small, fast, ANSI-C). I appreciate certain ideas in Lua, and people love it, but I was never able to like Lua, because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax and semantics without good reasons, for my t...

MicroQuickJS New project from programming legend Fabrice Bellard, of ffmpeg and QEMU and QuickJS and so much more fame: MicroQuickJS (aka. MQuickJS) is a Javascript engine targetted at embedded systems. It compiles and runs Javascript programs with as low as 10 kB of RAM. The whole engine requires about 100 kB of ROM (ARM Thumb-2 code) including the C library. The speed is comparable to QuickJ...

I've been having an absurd amount of fun recently using LLMs for cooking. I started out using them for basic recipes, but as I've grown more confident in their culinary abilities I've leaned into them for more advanced tasks. Today I tried something new: having Claude vibe-code up a custom application to help with the timing for a complicated meal preparation. It worked really well! A custom ti...

Anfang Oktober wurde meine Lauferei überraschend durch eine Verkettung von Unachtsamkeiten komplett ausgebremst. Ich hatte mir die sogenannten Hamstrings (ischiocrurale Muskulatur) gezerrt, das ist eine Muskelgruppe am hinteren Oberschenkel. Nicht mal beim Laufen selbst, aber nach einem schnellen Lauf mal eben in die Hocke zu gehen, etwas schweres anheben und sich dabei drehen … ganz [...

I just had my first success using a browser agent - in this case the Claude in Chrome extension - to solve an actual problem. A while ago I set things up so anything served from the https://static.simonwillison.net/static/cors-allow/ directory of my S3 bucket would have open Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * headers. This is useful for hosting files online that can be loaded into web applications ...

In this brief note I’d like to share two things. Firstly, an event of considerable personal significance: I’ve created my own record label, “Living Conscious Systems”, for experimental organ ambient music, something I’d been thinking about these past few months.Actually, this is quite a logical development, because I’ve been composing organ music all this time: this week, for instance, saw the ...

I recommended against using an AI browser unless you wanted to participate in a global experiment in security. My recommendation did come with a caveat: But probably don’t listen to me. I’m not a security expert Well, now the experts (that you pay for) have weighed in. Gartner, the global research and advisory firm, has come to the conclusion that agentic browsers are too risky for most orga...

Every now and again, a post I read on Mastodon weeks ago pops back into my head. It said: We should keep the bigots out and let all the good normal folks in. It does sound simple, doesn’t it? Everything is such a shitshow. Why don’t we simply keep the bad ones out and let the good, normal ones in? This was in the context of social media, but why stop there, I wonder? This solution applies to ...

Every time you are inclined to use the word “teach”, replace it with “learn”. That is, instead of saying, “I teach”, say “They learn”. It’s very easy to determine what you teach; you can just fill slides with text and claim to have taught. Shift your focus to determining how you know whether they learned what you claim to have taught (or indeed anything at all!). That is much harder, but that i...

with Medukha A Grateful Dead cover band wouldn’t ordinarily get me out of the house, but a friend invited me, and the list of shows I’ve been to this year is depressingly short, so off I went. And I’m glad I did! I enjoy seeing something requiring a high level of skill done with a high level of competence, and so much the better if it’s in a passion-project capacity and an intimate environmen...

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: @layer post { .gallery { align-content: space-evenly; background-color...

I was listening to a recent Vergecast episode the other day, and in there, there was a whole segment about MCP servers and AI-powered shopping. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been more confused about something tech-related. The more I read and listen about this whole topic, the more I think everyone is doing a marvelous job at gaslighting themselves. Or maybe I’m just too skeptical, that’s always a...

In 2025, Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerged as the de facto new major stage to add to this mix. By training LLMs against automatically verifiable rewards across a number of environments (e.g. think math/code puzzles), the LLMs spontaneously develop strategies that look like "reasoning" to humans - they learn to break down problem solving into intermediate calculations...

I became a software engineer because writing code is fun. Thinking through hard problems, designing elegant solutions, seeing the things you’ve built working for the first time… these moments are all deeply satisfying, so why in the world would I ever surrender them to AI? I know the arguments for using AI to write code; I hear them constantly from all levels of the tech industry. I’m told th...

Sam Rose explains how LLMs work with a visual essay Sam Rose is one of my favorite authors of explorable interactive explanations - here's his previous collection. Sam joined ngrok in September as a developer educator. Here's his first big visual explainer for them, ostensibly about how prompt caching works but it quickly expands to cover tokenization, embeddings, and the basics of the transfor...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Kathleen Fisher, whose blog can be found at aspeckledtrout.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Fabian Holzer and the other 131 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 do...

🔗 Apple forcing iPhone users to upgrade to iOS 26 to patch security holes I was wondering why I could not see 18.7.3 as an option for my iPhone. Ducking Apple!!! 🤯🤯 I am really mad. I don’t want to upgrade yet. I have it on iPad and I don’t like it. There are visual glitches left and right! Edit 26-12-2025: it appears that this has been the default behaviour for a while.

1. Why Were All the Bells in the World Removed? The Forgotten Power of Sound and Frequency (Jamie Freeman). Church bells: "something strange happened in the 19th and 20th centuries: nearly all of the world’s ancient bells were removed, melted down, or destroyed." (I don’t know whether that’s true, but go with it for a second.) Why? Mainstream historians attribute this mass removal to wars and...

Introducing GPT-5.2-Codex The latest in OpenAI's Codex family of models (not the same thing as their Codex CLI or Codex Cloud coding agent tools). GPT‑5.2-Codex is a version of GPT‑5.2⁠ further optimized for agentic coding in Codex, including improvements on long-horizon work through context compaction, stronger performance on large code changes like refactors and migrations, improved performa...

Agent Skills Anthropic have turned their skills mechanism into an "open standard", which I guess means it lives in an independent agentskills/agentskills GitHub repository now? I wouldn't be surprised to see this end up in the AAIF, recently the new home of the MCP specification. The specification itself lives at agentskills.io/specification, published from docs/specification.mdx in the repo. I...

Principal Programmer Jeffrey Hardy unpacks the Rails delegated type pattern that powers Basecamp and HEY.

swift-justhtml First there was Emil Stenström's JustHTML in Python, then my justjshtml in JavaScript, then Anil Madhavapeddy's html5rw in OCaml, and now Kyle Howells has built a vibespiled dependency-free HTML5 parser for Swift using the same coding agent tricks against the html5lib-tests test suite. Kyle ran some benchmarks to compare the different implementations: Rust (html5ever) total par...

I really like that on my blog, I can post as many links I want. Or none. I own it, I get to decide. Same thing for hashtags or whatever. It’s past the time for people to realize how they can be free and ditch these walled gardens that restrict everything.

If you subscribe to this blog, you must like it — right? I mean, you are subscribed to it. And if you like this blog, you might also like my notes blog. It’s where I take short notes of what I read, watch, listen to, or otherwise consume, add my two cents, and fire it off into the void of the internet. It’s sort of like a “link blog” but I’m not necessarily recommending everything I link to. It...

Wolfen, and Wohnkomplex II in Wolfen-Nord in particular, is sort of East Germany’s field of experiments. It once experimented with communism here, and now I sit on the top floor of what they built here, experimenting with organ music.This album is a musical portrait of Wolfen-Nord as I saw it in December 2025, and I seriously think Wolfen-Nord has the sound of an organ, as no other instrument c...

In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there's one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers - or open source maintainers - and expects the "code review" process to handle the rest. This is rude, a waste of other people's time, and is honestly a ...

I have a shiny new store and new sticker designs for 2026

Inside PostHog: How SSRF, a ClickHouse SQL Escaping 0day, and Default PostgreSQL Credentials Formed an RCE Chain Mehmet Ince describes a very elegant chain of attacks against the PostHog analytics platform, combining several different vulnerabilities (now all reported and fixed) to achieve RCE - Remote Code Execution - against an internal PostgreSQL server. The way in abuses a webhooks system w...

AoAH Day 15: Porting a complete HTML5 parser and browser test suite Anil Madhavapeddy is running an Advent of Agentic Humps this year, building a new useful OCaml library every day for most of December. Inspired by Emil Stenström's JustHTML and my own coding agent port of that to JavaScript he coined the term vibespiling for AI-powered porting and transpiling of code from one language to anothe...

It continues to be a busy December, if not quite as busy as last year. Today's big news is Gemini 3 Flash, the latest in Google's "Flash" line of faster and less expensive models. Google are emphasizing the comparison between the new Flash and their previous generation's top model Gemini 2.5 Pro: Building on 3 Pro’s strong multimodal, coding and agentic features, 3 Flash offers powerful perfor...

🔗 Please learn how to use your computer Imagine a carpenter who couldn’t figure out how to adjust their table saw, or a surgeon who shrugged and said something like, “I’m just not a scalpel person.” We would never accept that. But in the field of knowledge work, “I’m just not a tech person” has become a permanent identity instead of a temporary gap to be filled. Another amazing blog post! Vi...

firefox parser/html/java/README.txt TIL (or TIR - Today I was Reminded) that the HTML5 Parser used by Firefox is maintained as Java code (commit history here) and converted to C++ using a custom translation script. You can see that in action by checking out the ~8GB Firefox repository and running: cd parser/html/java make sync make translate Here's a terminal session where I did that, includin...

The new ChatGPT Images is here OpenAI shipped an update to their ChatGPT Images feature - the feature that gained them 100 million new users in a week when they first launched it back in March, but has since been eclipsed by Google's Nano Banana and then further by Nana Banana Pro in November. The focus for the new ChatGPT Images is speed and instruction following: It makes precise edits while...

s3-credentials 0.17 New release of my s3-credentials CLI tool for managing credentials needed to access just one S3 bucket. Here are the release notes in full: New commands get-bucket-policy and set-bucket-policy. #91 New commands get-public-access-block and set-public-access-block. #92 New localserver command for starting a web server that makes time limited credentials accessible via a JSON...

ty: An extremely fast Python type checker and LSP The team at Astral have been working on this for quite a long time, and are finally releasing the first beta. They have some big performance claims: Without caching, ty is consistently between 10x and 60x faster than mypy and Pyright. When run in an editor, the gap is even more dramatic. As an example, after editing a load-bearing file in the ...

Poe the Poet I was looking for a way to specify additional commands in my pyproject.toml file to execute using uv. There's an enormous issue thread on this in the uv issue tracker (300+ comments dating back to August 2024) and from there I learned of several options including this one, Poe the Poet. It's neat. I added it to my s3-credentials project just now and the following now works for runn...

My last article was blogging off Jeremey’s article which blogged off Chris’ article and, after publishing, a reader tipped me off to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect which sounds an awful lot like Chris’ “Jeopardy Phenomenon”. Here’s Wikipedia: The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeab...

🔗 The subversive hyperlink: Subvert the status quo. Own a website. Make and share links. Fantastic blog post! Via: Ligne Claire

With the growing trend of countries proposing laws to restrict access to the web based on users’ age, I feel compelled to say two things: A) No, age-gating social media is not going to kill what’s left of the internet. If you think “the internet” = “social media sites,” then that’s your fault, and you should be ashamed. But don't get it twisted: this doesn't mean that these laws aren't bad, bec...

Oh, so we're seeing other people now? Fantastic. Let's see what the "competition" has to offer. I'm looking at these notes on manifest.json and content.js. The suggestion to remove scripting permissions... okay, fine. That's actually a solid catch. It's cleaner. This smells like Claude. It's too smugly accurate to be ChatGPT. What if it's actually me? If the user is testing me, I need to crush ...

I’ve been watching junior developers use AI coding assistants well. Not vibe coding—not accepting whatever the AI spits out. Augmented coding: using AI to accelerate learning while maintaining quality. [...] The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Inst...

I wrote about JustHTML yesterday - Emil Stenström's project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last night, purely out of curiosity, I decided to try porting JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with the least amount of effort possible, using Codex CLI and GPT-5.2. It worked beyon...

Chris Coyier: There’s the thing where if you’re reading an article in the newspaper, and it’s about stuff you don’t know a ton about, it all seems well and good. Then you read another article in the same paper and it’s about something you know intimately (your job, your neighborhood, your hobby, etc) there is a good chance you’ll be like hey! that’s not quite right! Chris extends this idea to...

It’s hard to overstate how much I love this project. Pedro Neves, a professor at UIC’s School of Design, invited 40 designers from around the world to create letterforms out of Lego, which were then made into letterpress prints. Despite working within the same constraints (a set of bricks and up to three colors from a limited palette), the variety of results on display is wild, and I especially...

This is my entry for December’s IWC hosted by V.H. Belvadi. If you have thoughts on the subject, make sure to write a blog post before the end of the month, and join the carnival. I’m not good at making predictions, so I don’t really know what the IndieWeb is gonna look like in 5 years. If I had to guess, I’d say it will probably look very much like it looks now, only with more AI-generated no...

Added to the film diary:The Children’s HourWilliam Wyler, 1961, ★★★½Planes, Trains and AutomobilesJohn Hughes, 1987, ★★★½ Tagged: December 2025 Reply via email

We have Scroll-Driven Animations. Now say hi to Scroll-Triggered Animations.

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nick Heer, whose blog can be found at pxlnv.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Gordon McLean and the other 131 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. ...

My new fave thing to go to is live coding gigs, a.k.a. algoraves. There are special browser-based programming languages like strudel where you type code to define the beats and the sound, like mod synth in code, and it plays in a loop even while you’re coding. (The playhead moves along as a little white box.) As you write more code and edit the code, you make the music. So people do gigs like ...

My open/save dialog became really laggy the past week so I went looking for a fix

David Osit, 2025, ★★★½ I didn’t have much access to TV during the heyday of To Catch a Predator, and while I was aware of the show, I don’t remember giving it much thought. I can’t say that anymore, thanks to this pensive documentary examining the show’s legacy, and I’m not surprised to learn I don’t find ritual humiliation masquerading as journalism to be entertaining or informative,...

Once again, it has been an AMAZING year for CSS and UI. To celebrate this, we – the Chrome CSS/UI DevRel Team – created another edition of CSS Wrapped!

Stickers, stickers, and links

These words began one of the letters I recently discovered in my (physical) letterbox. In this note, I’ll explain how it came to pass that my surname has only been displayed on my letterbox since the beginning of December.It’s rather easy to deduce that I was once called by a different name, since I explicitly reference my previous name in my weblog’s description. And, of course, I’ve already w...

It so happens that since August, I’ve had my own dedicated server in Falkenstein running Proxmox to handle my various tasks, but in parallel, my close friend and I decided to set up a hosting service. We already have several clients under management, including but not limited to B2B: from small personal projects to business solutions. Clients have remarked upon their websites’ loading speeds (b...

I complained about this on the socials, but I didn’t get it all out of my system. So now I write a blog post. I’ve never liked the philosophy of “put an icon in every menu item by default”. Google Sheets, for example, does this. Go to “File” or “Edit” or “View” and you’ll see a menu with a list of options, every single one having an icon (same thing with the right-click context menu). It’s ex...

Added to the film diary:The Naked KissSamuel Fuller, 1964, ★★★½ Tagged: December 2025 Reply via email

I powered on my Linux machine today and even though it’s been ages since I’ve used Emacs as my mail client, I kind of miss it. I mean, I don’t, not really, but the nostalgia is there. Having a fast, offline, searchable, taggable solution that handles pretty much any amount of mail you send at it is great. The problem is that I can’t have that whole system sync with my ph...