It sucks how a few bad cults give all cults a bad name.

A #Genuary design becomes a Xmas card. These cards are now on the way to participants of #ptpx25! Thank you @paulbutler.org for organising it! Happy New Year! #ptpx #creativecoding #p5js

Preparing for the plotter postcard exchange #ptpx #penplotter

6th annual #ptpx by country 🇺🇸 USA — 34 🇩🇪 Germany — 16 🇫🇷 France — 13 🇨🇦 Canada — 5 🇳🇱 Netherlands — 5 🇬🇧 United Kingdom — 3 🇨🇭 Switzerland — 3 🇮🇹 Italy — 3 🇵🇹 Portugal — 2 🇪🇸 Spain — 2 🇦🇹 Austria — 1 🇫🇮 Finland — 1 🇧🇪 Belgium — 1 🇹🇭 Thailand — 1 🇮🇪 Ireland — 1 🇳🇿 New Zealand — 1 🇸🇪 Sweden — 1 🇸🇮 Slovenia — 1

#ptpx 2025 Postcard Exchange- sixth year of the exchange! You sign up to send a number of postcards, and the same number of people receive your address, so you will get their post cards in the mail! Thank you @paulbutler.org for organising this! #penplotter docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Watch @paulbutler.org talk about CRDTs as a temporal data structure. youtu.be/b4fDzmNE50U?...

"CRDTs as a temporal data structure" @paulbutler.org gave a brilliant talk, explaining how to use the Yjs CRDT toolkit to store temporal data.

When I was getting my BMath people would ask “oh, what will you do with that, teach?” and I’m jealous of people taking math now who can come back with “yeah that or pope”.

My pet peeve is when people use “misnomer” in a way that is in itself a misnomer.

Claude Code now supports resuming sessions, which means that session logs (including tool/llm calls) are stored locally. My curiosity got to me, I figured out the format and wrote a CLI tool to dump specific conversations github.com/paulgb/claud...

I replaced all my fancy notetaking tools with a vibecoded bash script called `note` that opens ~/notes/{date}.md in an editor, and it's been great.

Now that it's so easy to create software for personal use, I want a way to have a bunch of personal mini apps in a monorepo and automatically deploys all of them behind basic password auth. Before I build it, does this exist? Ideally something I can self-host on a VPS.

This is a talk I've wanted to give for a while, and I can't think of a better place to give it!

Today marks SlateDB’s one year anniversary! It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks to @rohanpd.bsky.social @flaneur2024.bsky.social @almog.ai @vigneshc.bsky.social @paulbutler.org Jason Gustafson, David Moravek, and many others for joining the project. 😀

I met a couple who introduced themselves as engineers but instead of writing JavaScript they drive trains.

markets soar as investors realize that mommy didn't actually disappear, she was just hiding behind her hands

Years in, WebAssembly on the server remains incredibly secure because you still can't do anything with it.

Always nice getting surprise #ptpx mail! Bottom left is @verytiredrobot.bsky.social’s exploration of latent space of a facial autoencoder. Top and right, Daniel Catt’s work using a stamp with a plotter, and a nice photo booklet of the process!

Never ask a barber if you need a haircut or a foundation model company how long your tool call descriptions should be.

Very speculative question for people smarter than me: if we ran 100 replays of humanity from 1955 or so, in many is there a manned moon landing before y2k? Thinking about failure scenarios like a series of failures dampening political support, or global events destroying the necessary conditions.

are there really so many people expensing onlyfans that it needs to be in the autocomplete dropdown 🫣

working on some forevervm experiments for @jamsocket.com… ever wanted your AWS account to diagram your infrastructure for you?

This was fun to host! We’re doing it again in NYC next week, it’s full but I’ve saved a few spots for people building things on MCP ;) lu.ma/mcp-nyc

"Speed" but it's a software update

SlateDB 0.5.0 is out! Features: - Checkpoints - Clones - Read only client - Split/merge database foundation - TTL filtering on reads - Last version with breaking byte format changes By the numbers: - 62 commits - 2 new contributors - 10 total contributors github.com/slatedb/slat...

Thinking of doing a Cursor vs. Windsurf video where I just use Claude Code in the terminal of both, as a bit.

People who primarily don't use Windows, how do you test things on Windows? Thinking of getting a cheap Windows machine, but wondering if there's a cloudy way.

Setting clocks for DST. My microwave clock has AM/PM. How down bad do you need to be to want to know what half-day it is from a microwave?

It seemed impossible to me that Gemini was able to decode a hidden message this fast. I finally had a chance to reconstruct the chain of thought and tool calls from logs and figure out how it did it.

Sorry guys, mom says I’m not allowed to vibe code on school nights.

A Bluesky feed that only shows posts with external links from people you follow would be fun, does anyone know if one exists?

One take-away from AI Engineering Summit: people are pretty excited about Model Context Protocol. A two-hour MCP talk got moved to a 2x sized room to meet demand and still filled up.

TIL Berkshire Hathaway is a trillion dollar Fortune 5 company because Buffet bought it for revenge in 1965. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshi...

Go ahead, include anything I write in your AI training set. I prefer if you do. I don’t want to have to use an LLM that isn’t familiar with my canon.

Someone asked me about the difference between UTF-8 and Unicode, here's my explanation in case others find it helpful.

ForeverVM is open for business! (well, free for now, but you can sign up and try it out)

After my post on smuggling arbitrary messages through unicode, some people asked me if AI could decode it. Gemini Flash is pretty fast at it! Have had good luck with Claude too. So far no dice with OpenAI models. This uses block.github.io/goose/ and forevervm.com

My post is on the front page!

This is really clever and fun! @paulbutler.org found a way to hide text 'in' an emoji by hacking the way unicode works. paulbutler.org/2025/smuggli... He also build a tool to encode en decode your own messages. 😎󠅇󠅟󠅧󠄑󠄐󠅃󠅟󠄐󠅩󠅟󠅥󠄐󠅑󠅢󠅕󠄐󠅤󠅘󠅕󠄐󠅓󠅜󠅕󠅦󠅕󠅢󠄐󠅟󠅞󠅕󠄐󠅤󠅘󠅑󠅤󠄐󠅖󠅙󠅗󠅥󠅢󠅕󠅔󠄐󠄹󠄐󠅘󠅙󠅔󠄐󠅑󠄐󠅝󠅕󠅣󠅣󠅑󠅗󠅕󠄐󠅙󠅞󠄐󠅝󠅩󠄐󠄲󠅜󠅥󠅕󠅣󠅛󠅩󠄐󠅠󠅟󠅣󠅤󠄯󠄐󠄻󠅥󠅔󠅟󠄗󠅣󠄐󠅤󠅟󠄐󠅩󠅟󠅥󠄑 emoji-encoder.vercel.app?mode=decode

New blog post: smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji paulbutler.org/2025/smuggli...

Two nice updates to foreverVM today thanks to @jakelazaroff.com: - charts! If a Python call returns a matplotlib chart, we render it. - new example buttons on forevervm.com

I finally get to share what we've been up to at @jamsocket.com! We built the code execution abstraction I've always wanted: a REPL that “runs forever”, using memory snapshots to hibernate behind the scenes so that it costs almost nothing to preserve state while idle.

we've been cooking

The hardest part of working with model context protocol server is counseling Claude through his learned helplessness.

Private equity gets a bad rap, but is there anything inherently bad about it, or is it just that if you make a lot of bets on companies that were headed for bankruptcy some of them will fail in spite of your efforts?

You can hide arbitrary messages in one emoji character by abusing unicode variation selectors emoji.paulbutler.org

When someone introduces themselves as Jason I like to say “oh, like the human-readable language independent data interchange format?” and see how long they just stare for.

Cheat codes in video games are neat but did you know if you are in an argument with someone on the internet you can just hit command+w and walk away without taking damage?

A little peek at something we're working on at @jamsocket.com

I like how they lock some of the levels until you complete missions.