just took damage on realizing that the generation of people who will not understand this joke from Star Trek IV are already alive

there's a great quote from Ursula Le Guin about books at the point of reading becoming a collaboration between the author and the reader like music is between the composer and the musician; the story is created somewhere in the middle even though it's all written down already

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Where did we get the letters of the alphabet from? And why does English use them so strangely? Here’s an excerpt from the new book, “Why Q needs U: A history of our letters and how we use them”, which takes you on a linguistic odyssey through the history of the alphabet:

@andreubotella.com Ben Allen @softwarechris.com @legendecas.bsky.social @jessealama.net @jasnell.me @bakkot.com @nicr.dev @bridgear.bsky.social @naugtur.pl

ECMAScript Excitement 🎉 This week, at its 110th meeting, TC39 advanced these proposals: 3️⃣ Non-extensible applies to Private 2️⃣.7️⃣ Import Bytes 2️⃣.7️⃣ Iterator Chunking 2️⃣ Native Promise Predicate 1️⃣ Array.prototype.pushAll 1️⃣ Native Promise Adoption

Neurodivergent conditions are only disabilities because we live in a world not designed for us. Easy to imagine a flipped narrative in a world run by neurodivergents,eg “Patient insists others decode hidden meanings behind their words and compulsively makes eye contact for excessive amounts of time“

AuDHD (Autism + ADHD together) in particular bring a host of superpowers when it comes to entrepreneurship & innovation, and many of the greats are speculated to have been AuDHD by today’s diagnostic criteria: Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Tesla to name a few.

Second, neurodivergence is simply a different way that some brains are wired, and comes with strengths and weaknesses. Many (most?) great innovations of our time came from brilliant neurodivergents who happened to hyperfocus on the right thing.

First, neurodivergent conditions have a very strong genetic component and are highly hereditary. It’s just as unlikely a medication could give you autism as it would be to give you green eyes.

The recent commotion around Tylenol and autism reminded me how many neurotypicals are so uninformed about neurodivergence they think neurodivergent conditions (autism, ADHD, OCD etc) are some sort of plague that you can catch if you’re not careful enough.

ECMAScript excitement 😉 This week TC39 advanced these proposals 🎉 3️⃣ Non-extensible applies to Private 2️⃣.7️⃣ Import Bytes 2️⃣.7️⃣ Iterator Chunking 2️⃣ Native Promise Predicate 1️⃣ Array.prototype.pushAll 1️⃣ Native Promise Adoption

ECMAScript excitement 😉 Congrats to @styfle.dev on advancing the Import Bytes proposal to Stage 2.7 today at TC39 🎉 It lets you import raw bytes as a readonly Uint8Array 👍 import bytes from "./photo.png" with { type: "bytes" } Similar APIs are already available in Deno, Bun, & bundlers.

I don't have a problem with making new RPC systems! I can stop any time I want! But I don't want to. So I made a new one for you. It's called Cap'n Web. It's like Cap'n Proto RPC, except focused on working great in browsers and JavaScript/TypeScript servers. blog.cloudflare.com/capnweb-java...

One time, it was Jay Leno. Personally. Inviting us to check out his garage.

WASM 3.0 is released! And guess what gets a mention? @spritelyinst.bsky.social's Hoot! webassembly.org/news/2025-09...

As of today, you should have npm and yarn ignore-scripts configured globally. This may break your binary dependencies that do not provide precompiled variants on npm, as esbuild does for example. It is fair to file an issue and ask your employer to fund the work. sentry.engineering/blog/publish...

“Don’t put in place foundational elements that inherently shut you off from brilliant, brilliant talent going forward.”

I’m gathering notes on how to protect yourself and others in the npm ecosystem from postinstall attacks like the Shai-Hulud worm wending its way around at the moment. github.com/endojs/endo/...

Due to the npm postinstall script worm that’s working through our ecosystem, you absolutely must not install any packages until you’ve integrated @lavamoat/allow-scripts in your workflow and opt-in scripting needs to become default behavior for all package managers. www.npmjs.com/package/@lav...

Pythagorean Triple Square Day, as one man affectionately calls 9/16/25, is a day like no other this century.

Terry Goodkind’s “wizard’s first rule” is that people will believe what they want to believe and what they are afraid might be true. This is ostensibly a manual for manipulation, but it is much more importantly an inoculation against manipulation.

It is unclear to me how it is possible that wasm-bindgen is not called escargo github.com/wasm-bindgen...

Hey, I learned elvish before seeing the movies. But, on the other hand, the movies didn’t exist yet.

This is the last day for the Murderbot + Witch King and my other fantasy Humble Book Bundle: www.humblebundle.com/books/martha... We've raised $89,000 in donations for World Central Kitchen so far!

Linguistics

The Amphora of Great Intelligence (AGI) #webcomic #krita #miniFantasyTheater

Wherein @katelynsills.com, five years ago, speaks to how to mitigate a supply-chain-attack on, you know, Chalk. youtu.be/hP00w4r4zhg?... This is what LavaMoat is for: github.com/lavamoat/lav...

I would be negligent in this moment if not to point out that you can really kick the legs out from under JavaScript supply chain attacks by running your app in LavaMoat and setting up to opt-in for postinstall hooks with allow-scripts. github.com/lavamoat/lav... www.npmjs.com/package/@lav...

In order to get this out of my hindbrain and into yours, this is a place-holder for a future article explaining “Weight Watching Splay Trees”, a complication on the Sleater-Tarjan splay tree that allows it to emit change events equivalent to a flat sorted array. kriskowal.com/wwst

RIP Graham Greene. Every time he popped up on screen when I was a kid, my mom would excitedly point him out for being an actual Native on the screen. Able to be deadly serious and infinitely hilarious (even in smaller roles like Last of Us), he ate up the screen. Nʌki’wah brother.

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

I’ve added some words about “size” to my screed on Naming Things kriskowal.com/naming-thing... …and if you try hard and believe in yourself, you’ll find my new ad for Basic Binary Board Book. I intend to be insufferable about this until *at least* until all 1024 are gone.

And now, having laid our trap, we wait.

Hot take: An array has a width. A 2d array also has a length. A 3d array also has a height. A 4d array also has a duration. JavaScript got this wrong. If something has a size, it must be a product of multiple dimensions. Golang got this wrong.

and produces narwool.

A sheep with one horn is a ewenicorn

Fifteen years later and I’m now monetizing 3rin.gs with an advertisement. See if you can spot it.

Read “The Word for World is Forest” right now. Read it again. Not every LeGuin book will hit you when you’re ready, but it will eventually, and this is probably the right time for you to read this one.

Slightly diminish a band: Manganese Ingénue

Slightly diminish a band: Blimp of Thllium

🎉

Achievement unlocked: the irresponsible impulse-buy two-day shipping button for Basic Binary Board Book button activated. www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9VCF3TN

“Bequeath the beneficient boon of binary for all born beneath blue. Between binary binding, in Babylonian Bibliothec, beats bountiful bits beyond billions. Buy Basic Binary Board Book before blinking!” — B is for Binary kriskowal.com/bbbb

ECMAScript excitement 😉 Congrats to Richard Gibson on conditionally advancing Immutable ArrayBuffers to Stage 3 at TC39 this week 🎉 ArrayBuffer.prototype. get immutable() transferToImmutable(newLength) sliceToImmutable(start, end) The data in an Immutable ArrayBuffer cannot change 🔒

Today is my birthday (turning 29), which is the only time all year that I ask for a repost 🌿 I hope you get lost in fantasy worlds as much as I do 🔮

Baby’s Basic Binary Board Book Buy Button Been Born! kriskowal.com/bbbb amazon.com/dp/B0F9VCF3TN

ECMAScript Excitement 🎉 Today, TC39 advanced these proposals: 2️⃣.7️⃣ Intl Era and Month Code 2️⃣ Import Buffer 1️⃣ Module Global

ECMAScript excitement 😉 Congrats to @bakkot.com on advancing UInt8Array ↔️ Base64/Hex to Stage 4 at TC39 this week 🎉 UInt8Array.prototype. toBase64 toHex UInt8Array. fromBase64 fromHex It lets you convert directly between binary data and Base64/Hex strings 👍