Guys, the purpose of tailscale is to keep idiots *off* your network

Went for a mountain bike ride yesterday. I'm really grateful for the nice hills I have close by. It's excellent for clearing my head, getting a hard workout and enjoying nice views.

Some very fun examples of quirky but useful personal projects people built for themselves with LLM agents in this podcast: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/p... It's really interesting to think about where this goes in the long term. In the future what software will people build versus acquire?

Yep. This is why I read (and pay for) the guardian.

Ryan Model 69 Vertijet.

I like that the same day a guy was like “this place will never be Twitter” this thread gave us the most 2015 Twitter experience (complimentary) imaginable.

New blog post: De-Googling → dubroy.com/blog/de-goog... …in which I tell you about some great services & companies that I'm very happy to have discovered.

ooo I hadn't seen @robinrendle.bsky.social's file system site design yet robinrendle.com and @davatron5000.bsky.social's so screw it I'm going full monospace followup daverupert.com

I love seeing OSS get paid but I'd prefer if Astro received large donations from several competing cloud vendors instead of being swallowed whole by one.

I don't care about NextJS but it's good to see Deno doing so well here.

i like hetzner, but odd how today i got 1. notice from the 'abuse' division, forwarding a report from 2. the german gov re: 3. vulnerabilities in older versions of n8n.io, which i am self-hosting via 4. my cloudron.io instance (germany) unsure which layer there makes this possible… kind of creepy

Before the head element it was hard to read web pages because the body element would run around like a decapitated chicken.

Until the table element, websites were presented to clients on the floor.

Until JavaScript all Java was passed down via oral tradition

projects solve the creator's need. products are the intersection of the creator's capacity to build a solution, solving other people's needs, and their means to compensate you for it. no intersection, no product.

Today's toy: atlogin, an OIDC provider for the AT network, compatible with Tailscale custom OIDC. Try this: login.tailscale.com and login as user "<your-bsky-handle-without-the-@>@at.apenwarr.ca". You'll join my test tailnet (ACL isolated from other users). Source: github.com/apenwarr/atlogin

I want this next generation of software development tools to run on my own computer. Vim and Emacs helped democratize software development and made it accessible. We shouldn't allow this AI wave to take us backwards. I really hope the open source community can keep pace.

the only agency I feel nowadays is to make my own software

“Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them” noheger.at/blog/2026/01...

as a teacher who did this with HS Seniors in Dallas, I learned 2 things: 1, this needs to be a unit every single year, K-12, across disciiplines, because it's that difficult to teach well and, 2, kids actually like spotting fakes and really get into this if you give them the skills to do so

Blog post: Dropserver progress for November and December. I talk about the difference between bog standard server software and Dropserver, and why I need to rip out old assumptions from the code. olivierforget.net/blog/2026/dr...

Hello Tim Cook I worked at Tumblr when you gave us 48 hours to get rid of all the consenting, adult boobs. Up all night at your whim, out of the blue. But you're still cool with Twitter and its CSAM and revenge porn and whatever the fuck this is? Why do you even HAVE guidelines?

Holy crap Tailwind CSS had to layoff 75% of its engineers because of AI? When LLMs are used instead of documentation sites, you can't push your paid add-ons any more. Result: ✨poof✨ your revenues are gone. This is a blow for sustainable OSS library and tools. What to do instead?

Wow, Stackoverflow is cooked.

Tailwind 4 switching around the order of their utility classes is making me miss 3000-line append-only CSS stylesheets this morning. At least I got my NY resolution for 2026: rip out TW from my projects finally.

TIL: Compression Dictionary Transport 💡 A new HTTP feature that can dramatically shrink the size of your responses, especially when serving content that changes often but includes a lot of repeated structure (think: JSON, JS, CSS). Learn more 👇 developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/...

My seven year-old is the same. I think most are. Children understand fairness. Then at some point the ideals of fairness and caring are educated out of them and replaced by competition and getting ahead.

More and more web devs are vibe coding apps for personal use. Dropserver.org is ideal for hosting such apps. The apps are sandboxed, user management is built in, and backups, restores, moving the hosted app around is easy. Now I just need to get LLMs aware of DS! nolanlawson.com/2025/12/28/a...

I feel seen

A new Ringspace release with some helpful updates! - Ring servers now have a homepage with member listing and built-in validators - Ring servers can serve any ring, not just default rings! codeberg.org/mttagga...

now i get it. it's not as clean but let me exaggerate for effect: mastodon is the "everything really really matters" network. like classroom serious. bsky is the "nothing really matters" network. that's why the jokes here are better, and the mood is better, and there's dancing on the volcano.

Omg people on here think my car is cool. I'm in the right place.

We lost the package manager fight, and now `curl myhost/install | sudo bash` is everywehre.

This is a good question and my take is: because AI working in ways that both match what the tech is actually good at and what people would buy obliterates nudging and the tech monopolies can't maintain their margins if they can't corral people against their preferences. Brief 🧵

Part 2: It's hard to overstate just how much of the top of the tech economy rides on using UI to control people against their will. The entire search engine market, worth tens of billions, rides almost only on that. Same browsers. Same anything privacy-invasive. Same app stores. It's a long list.

I imagine this is going to down like the "I can't believe you used to smoke inside bars" reactions from the young ones. "I can't believe you used to let every car into the city for free? Didn't you have gridlock, pollution, and dead pedestrians?"

Threads is effectively shelving their fediverse integration, after it saw marginally little use Zuck has played the game well, harming both open protocol movements while growing his platform, getting good PR and distracting regulators connectedplaces.online/reports/fedi...

I understand that CBS is circling the drain. That's on them. But why the heck is Bank of America putting their name on this? I don't have high expectations about large institutions at this point, but come on.

Happy slightly belated 90th birthday to the Douglas DC-3, an airplane whose impact on the world of aviation is hard to over-estimate. Virtually every major airline in existence today operated it either directly or somewhere in its lineage, from launch customer American to KLM to Ethiopian.

I love to create things, and will keep doing that.

We really need to start paying attention to this underlying need that is driving the demand for "AI". This is a real human need. We know that because it is making people do things that are objectively not very smart. People will compromise their reasoning and their values to get their needs met.

Great blog post from Matt Haughey on driving a VW Buzz from Texas to Oregon. When the Buzz was announced, I was hoping it would look a little more old-school VW, but seeing one in person they look really good. Seems mostly well designed inside too.

I remember those days of smoke everywhere. Don't miss them. I remember going out in NY soon after the smoking ban, and it was fine. People get over things easily when it's clearly the right thing to do.

What we are working on right now: blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev We all need more virtual machines. We keep building software to work around the fact that VM infrastructure is clunky. Let's have good VM infrastructure instead.

this field biologist does a great job highlighting the insidiousness of AI editing these one-click AI edit buttons are incredibly appealing to many photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, and are framed as innocuous this is worth sharing and educating people about

Right-on-red is imho the biggest signal [sic] of how much the U.S. prioritizes driving

Being into retrocomputing, it's interesting how UIs from the 90s mostly feel just right to me—and I don't think that's just purely nostalgia or growing up with it. Things like window borders that are visible so you know where to resize things and scrollbars that indicate the current viewport.

Sometime it feels too easy to dunk on the idiocy that is Boom Supersonic's unfulfilled promises and fanciful vision for the future. So maybe it is fitting that the company pivoted to an AI-focused play with a partner that believes in orbital data centers. paxex.aero/boom-pivots-...