Kind of amazed Claude has never called me out on my awful code. Like it's bizarre to interact with it and never have it mention how much your code sucks.

One of the many joys of using AI for programming is the creation of huge PRs on complex topics that the authors barely understand, but still suggest "because they work". Here's a great example from #OCaml github.com/ocaml/ocaml/... Kudos to OCaml's maintainers for handling this so gracefully.

I think this is where things settle out in the long term (post bubble pop): LLMs (or smaller models when they're good enough) are just interfaces that understand the human language and can dispatch structured queries to specialized tools (not just search). It's basically "agentic" but more contained

Skeuomorphism is back! Seriously this thing is awesome. It's responsive too, which is trippy: it looks like a physical box with physical buttons, but the whole thing grows and shrinks and rearranges itself as you change your window width. Trippy.

Unsurprising! But the dominance of Linux in the self-hosting space is one reason most people don't want to self-host. They just don't know that OS. Tech people do (survey also shows 80% of self-hosters are tech people), but non-tech people need something more gentle to get started. @selfh.st

I've been listening to a lot of playlists lately and wanting a way to learn more about the currently playing artist without pulling out my phone. I put together a little raspberry pi setup to sit on our shelves and display info about the current playing artist.

"There are still questions of whether the internet is worth building on and what to build. " wat ?

Dearly lacking discourse in local-first... the prerequisites for "data ownership" is it must be freely addressable (e.g. via the file system) and one must be able to adversarially do things with it (e.g. open/ubiquitous formats).

The future is now! 2025 is the year of sharing... a file.. between two devices!! 🎉🎊🍾🥂

Since I just had reason to use it again, this is an appreciation post for the always-reliable

Thriving in independent media for 25 years, without a) getting hoovered into some larger media org & subsequently axed, b) getting ruined by some hedge fund guy, c) falling afoul of any short-lived "pivot to video" style trends, or d) going broke... ... is a genuinely remarkable achievement! Kudos.

This is, of course, a fascinating thread from Kate asking why Google is effectively cannibalizing its own market for both digital ads on third party properties and search ads, by effectively taking away the incentive to click through to third party sites. I have a theory as to why they're doing it.

As an engineer first and software guy second, I really feel this. Ethics is an important part of engineering education. You don’t cut corners or fib results! People might die if you do (ask Boeing about this if you don’t believe me.)

I've built a new library that provides a local-first like experience but without the complexity. Count Cachula takes a different approach; it uses the Cache API, the stale-while-revalidate pattern, server-sent events and cache tags to give you the same full-sync experience.

This is a great milestone to see for Mastodon, in evolving towards its new community-focused governance structure. I’m optimistic about what this portends for the platform and how its features & future evolve. (And it’s fun that I was there for the photo being taken!) techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/m...

some other familiar grocery store names that are brands for producer-owned agricultural co-ops: Blue Diamond Bob's Red Mill Land O'Lakes Tillamook Welch's

Bought an M1 iMac back in 2021, spec’d up enough to reach £2049. Went though the Apple trade in flow to see how much they will give me now… £130 ⚰️

Dropserver progress update for October 2025: I talk about shipping for the Mac and for Linux on arm64 🎉 plus some work on the Windows version. Also, some talk about sandboxing on MacOS. olivierforget.net/blog/2025/dr...

I've always found the OAuth auth flow sequence diagram to be useful to understand how what gets passed where and when. Here's the AT Protocol OAuth Authorization flow as a mermaid diagram. Is this useful for anyone else? tangled.org/strings/alex... If something's not accurate, let me know!

I've been tempted to record my screen while I scroll down quickly on one of those sites. If you scroll fast enough (not crazy fast, just "I'm busy and I'm looking for something fast") all you see is the background of the page. Like, it's blank. I'd do it and post about it, but, I'm busy.

also just chuck everything behind @tailscale.com so your boxes don't get popped due to running something ancient.

Your periodic reminder that most CLI password prompts accept Ctrl+U to fully clear input so you can try again. Leave that backspace key alone.

Making the web work with no-JavaScript is a noble goal, but it tends to lose credibility when folks neglect accessibility in their pursuit of it. So, now when people say no-JS or CSS-only, I'm immediately skeptical.

"The mainstream understanding of AI is as an interefering piece of shit which doesn't work" pt II www.askamanager.org/2025/11/the-...

The ratio of ratios on this is epic.

What happened with the P2P computing movement of the 2000's?

Another very cool website. And very useful too if you're shopping for a cargo bike.

This is huge: graze.leaflet.pub/3m4yjmbnyec2c Journalists are organizers – like political organizers – but of information, knowledge, and culture. In my most humble opinion, I think journalists _need_ to be using tools like this, on their own terms. It's scary, but so is being a socialist in NYC.

Write code to make being human easier. Rip code out if it makes being human harder. Write code to make caring for each other easier. Rip it out if it makes caring for each other harder. Empathy driven development has literally never failed me. It’s done me better than everything else combined

Truly personal AI will require credible exit for agent memory. The alternative is gacha game girlfriend AI. Credible exit helps reduce the principle-agent problem by letting you pick up and leave.

And I wish there was more skepticism exhibited towards giant corporations who exist to make profit for shareholders. I don't care if people like pods, but I *do* care if options which let consumers figure out ideal dosing for themselves are artificially worsened as it sure seems like they are.

This goes for self-hosting too (of anything, not just social media stuff). We need tinker-less servers.

Sending your family or friends a plug-and-play Tailscale device can help out both sides: with exit node access, remote tech support, file sharing, and more. Here's our guide to setting up a VPN by mail: tailscale.com/blog/exit-no...

One of my favourite videos of all time. Pure art. There was no need to go this hard, and yet he did. youtu.be/IkssYHTSpH4?...

We cannot be a meaningfully representative democracy until we replace the Senate & single-member districts as currently structured with actually representative & democratic institutions

I just released Dropserver 0.14.4 This includes a build of ds-host for MacOS! I'm still experimenting with Mac's sandbox feature. So far I don't have it working. I'll write more about this in the October progress update. github.com/teleclimber/...

The only thing that's gone wrong with my @frame.work laptop since I got it 4 years ago is that the USB cable fell apart. They just sent me a new one free of charge. I didn't have to argue or anything (I think they don't mess around with anything that carries a decent amount of electrical juice.)

I also cannot agree more with this. The ability to empathize with a "normie" end user is actually a talent quite a few designers and programmers lack and they simply never consider the "one button" approach. This is not a bad thing necessarily, but it definitely hinders wide spread adoption.

So much this. It's why I am literally right now working on making Dropserver run on MacOS, and I am trying to get it working on Windows too (without VMs or WSL2 or Docker). I still do have a lot of work to do in terms of config files and installation process, but I'm working towards it.

Once you have subdomain delegation there are lots of options. eg. LetsEncrypt could offer a service to reserve a free subdomain of some domain, you get a delegated CA cert, then your CA issues LAN certs however you want. Like tailscale's .ts.net domains but without needing a corp sponsor.

Everybody's so excited about forcing HTTPS, and I'm just here thinking, sure would be cool if all my private servers didn't have their names unavoidably published in the public CT logs so everyone can see what I'm doing. Also if localhost could get a cert at all

I’ve played with LLMs a fair amount and noticed something that these studies that show using LLMs degrading intellectual performance may not be picking up: What if having pretty good critical thinking skills makes LLMs less appealing/satisfying to use in the first place?

I wrote up a few thoughts on HelpSpot turning 20 today ianlandsman.com/helpspot-tur...

The state of CSS tools is abysmal. We should have had this a decade ago. There are gradient editors as browser apps, but I work in a code editor. Why can't these things be ported there?

Dropserver version 0.14.2 is out 🎉 I fixed the released binaries to support arm64 builds, including fixing broken ds-dev binaries for macOS. This also lays the ground work for releasing ds-host for Mac, which is pretty much ready to go, I just need to write some docs. github.com/teleclimber/...

My “not building a nuclear weapon” headline has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my headline

Whoahhh there's now a Servo browser available to download and test! servo.org/download/ github.com/servo/ser...

Progress update for Dropserver for September (finally!) I write about Bubblewrap, sandboxing, Tailscale in the real world, work on the Leftovers app, and the installation experience for ds-host (which will be separate blog post.) olivierforget.net/blog/2025/dr...

I finally got around to building Dropserver for arm64 Linux. I tested it on a Raspberry Pi 4. The sandbox start time is around 300ms. A bit slower than I'd like but it's tolerable for such a cheap device. (My little Intel box where it runs in a VM shows about 150ms start time for the sandbox.)