Alternate-world person-tool etymology: Protractor used to be someone who made meetings drag on longer by considering new angles (some say this role still exists today) digitalseams.com/blog/compute...

Happy new year! I'm thankful for all the little interactions with people here and looking forward to more!

There are three kinds of Bluesky alt text

What a journey, I fear SVG now lyra.horse/blog/2025/12...

I hope this email finds you under his domination you will never be free again.

And... they've disabled tag notifications, presumably because they can't handle the abuse: github.blog/changelog/20... what a shame

At my first IETF in Montreal! #IETF124 @bibo7086.bsky.social , meeting you inspired me to fixup some bugs on my Bluesky alt text stream, thanks! bobbiec.github.io/bluesky-alt-...

generally speaking, people should be eating way more candy than they do. next time you find yourself reaching for fresh produce at the grocery store, consider a bag of candy instead

Me as a birdwatcher messing with the guy interviewing me: "After a great deal of practice, many bird-watchers can identify a bird by the ‘way it looks’... They even have a name for this brute property, which they call the bird’s ‘jizz’."

The Student's t-test is "named" after a brewer at Guinness. It's not Henry Gosset's t-test though; he published under the Student pseudonym so that rival breweries wouldn't realize the value. I wonder what other discoveries are bottled up in some corp right now?

Visited the Eames chair exhibit at the Transamerica Pyramid recently and it was delightful to realize that so many iconic chairs were designed by the same couple. And the staff there were really knowledgeable too!

In the World War II draft, 8.8% of men failed dental examinations, mostly for missing the required 12 teeth! Twelve! web.archive.org/web/20190627...

"Users are much more vocal about things not being possible, than about things being hard." Loved this post!

An update on better alt text for Bluesky images: I was really overconfident in how easy it would be to transcribe screenshotted text.

A clever phishing attack today against developers on GitHub, using GitHub issue notifications to send a legit-looking message from an official GitHub email. Another supply chain attack attempt?

Somewhere out there, there's a talking head vertical video saying this same thing (with captions that highlight each word)

Shoutout @andrewhinton.bsky.social for adding to the ~20% of Bluesky images with alt text. For everyone who wants that number to go up (myself included): consider turning on "Require alt text before posting" under Settings > Accessibility to never forget again!

Great to see you today!!

This week's blog post: an investigation of image descriptions (alt text) on Bluesky

Lately I've been thinking about vanity milestones: little achievements that are nice to celebrate, but not something to aim for directly.

Why does @beehiiv.com let random people sign me up for newsletters? It's a real stain on their brand. I usually fill out the report abuse forms but I'm tired of this. Maybe I should just mark as spam and let all the Beehiiv emails go to spam.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and a dog that plays basketball

This is the best form of landmark photo and you can't convince me otherwise

My team at work shipped this!

Refreshingly honest postmortem of a vibe coding security incident: aldenhallak.com/blog/posts/d...

I had some vanity milestones for my blog but none of them involved being aggregated into an AI ""news summary"" site

I'm collecting image descriptions from the Bluesky firehose for analysis, and watching the alt text scroll by I had two thoughts: 1. Wow, there's a lot more smutty content on Bluesky than I thought 2. These are easily some of the best (most detailed) image descriptions of the entire dataset

This week on Digital Seams - I started writing about a birding app and ended up with a manifesto on creating magical software: digitalseams.com/blog/what-bi...

Haley Nahman on memories of early parenthood: "I’m stunned to recall the depth and variety of experiences I underwent, the majority of which have now been lost to me, and which may be recalled only in bits and pieces over the rest of my life."

Saw some excellent birds in Sausalito this weekend

Same but this was delightful www.sftransit.fun

Inspired by @eatonphil.bsky.social to be more of a cheerleader today: "So much of life and work is drudgery such that when you see something positive... taking initiative [or] doing something with their skills, how can you not feel an overwhelming urge to cheer them on and hope to see more of it?"

Just spun up bademails.org - surprisingly, lots of people are unaware of services to create throwaway emails. Although throwaway emails can be useful for privacy, they're also massively used for spam and free trial abuse - this site is a lightweight way for site owners to check on their accounts.

I wrote 1000+ words on the history of this keyboard shortcut: digitalseams.com/blog/why-do-...

In 2021, I should have bought more steaks subsidized by VC-funded grocery delivery startups. What's the equivalent today? digitalseams.com/blog/the-ai-...

Rest in peace Bill Atkinson, a legend in our field.

Kissner’s law: Cryptography converts many problems into key management problems, and key management problems are way harder than you think.

Google Maps step-by-step instructions

"Relational labor is an essential layer embedded alongside manual and cognitive labor — rooted in presence, context, commitment, and care." www.workingtheorys.com/p/the-job-is... by @theanu.bsky.social

The periodic table of image formats strongly implies the existence of a .hog file 🐷

I see they're updating the street signs like I update my document names

Here's a baffling use of Google Classroom invites as a messaging app:

The D̶a̶l̶a̶i̶ ̵L̶a̶m̶a̶ tech CEO walks into a p̶i̶z̶z̶a̶ ̵s̶h̶o̶p̶ strategy meeting and asks, "Can you make me one with everything?"

Kids these days won't understand the krrzzzz beep boop beep nostalgia, but they might hear its successor in the office: digitalseams.com/blog/the-dia...

Working in fraud and security is just learning about new and exciting ways for people to avoid getting a normal job

"Freedom is a skill you can build... Agency is not the same as success, and it’s not innate. It’s something you can learn." - loved this post from @cate.bsky.social

Apparently Google maps doesn’t know how street addresses work. It will happily map addresses on the wrong block of the wrong street or in the wrong city. These errors have real-world consequences for the businesses affected randomascii.wordpress.com/2025/04/24/g...

Made it to this week's Digital Seams link post: digitalseams.com/blog/assorte...