Elaborated on this just a tiny bit here: v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/rust-boo…

Thinking a lot about the comments in blog.rust-lang.org/2026/06/25/v... about the perceived maintenance state of The Book. We disclaim in the README what the maintenance approach is, and why—time and print, both of which complicate maintenance on it a LOT—

It’s been a bit since I was indie, but I’ve spent much of my career working that way, and it can get a bit lonely. We have structures to support the legal and financial needs of indies; what if we tried to build some for the social needs of indies, too? v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/collab…

It’s been a bit since I was indie, but I’ve spent much of my career working that way, and it can get a bit lonely. We have structures to support the legal and financial needs of indies; what if we tried to build some for the social needs of indies, too? v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/collab…

As usual, I turned my thread here into a blog post: v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/do-not-d…

got frustrated recently at work about people writing using AI instead of using their brains! here's my take on it: sophiebits.com/2026/06/25/t...

thought about this and had to write it, the gist is that it's weird and bad for people to use llms to try and get people to care about them or their projects and the mean take that unfortunately i believe is that most people are cowards when it comes to writing and art macwright.com/2026/06/24/a...

My ethos has always been “winning slowly” (winningslowly.org); it’s just that the “slowly” part is sometimes nearly crushing. But “winning” in the ways that matter *only* happens slowly. So: show up, do the work, keep on.

On these days, the thing I do is: remind myself that “little likelihood” (which is not hyperbole but reality) is not the same as “no chance”. And what *is* the same as “no chance”? Not finishing the work at all. An unfinished symphony definitely won’t get played.

Some days, it’s nearly impossible not to despair of ever having my music find an audience. Say I finish the symphony: simple math still says it’ll likely never be played, even likelier never be recorded. (Getting a new symphony played, still less recorded, is *very* hard.) This is one of those days.

One of our engineers was able to start rolling out code to take advantage of the `using` keyword and `Disposable` contract in our Node backend and it’s such a big win for readability and reliability. So many things you no longer have to wrap in try/finally blocks!

Reminded again of the sheer number of footguns that exist in the JS ecosystem (especially but not only Node) because the strange history and intersection of bundlers, compilers, and runtimes affects every single part of the developer experience. There’s just *so much* to help new DX devs ramp up on!

If, by some chance, I happened to beome exceedingly wealthy from my work on software, I would, in order: 1. Endow funds to care for the poor in Colorado. 2. Build a building or three like Saint Thomas on 5th Av. in Manhattan for the Anglican churches in Colorado. Everything else would be gravy.

I’ve spent at least twenty minutes composing three mornings this week. Over an hour! That’s not much—truly—but it’s more than I’ve done any other single week in 2026. Building momentum is the thing, and I’m doing that. Of course, I’m traveling for work next week. 🤦🏻‍♂️ We’ll see what I can make stick!

I am so fed up with products I pay for polluting the user interface with AI-related visual clutter Google Docs now has a Gemini button hovering with no way to turn off. I do NOT want it or need it. I pay for Google Workspace, but do not want Gemini, do not need Gemini, and yet cannot turn it off

I installed the macOS 27 beta in a VM—so I cannot try the Apple Intelligence features, but that’s fine 🤪—and my judgment there so far is: definitely step in the right direction design-wise, but… I’d still much rather use Sequoia.

How in the world had I gone until today and not heard Copland’s Symphony No. 3—and therefore never realized that he integrated “Fanfare for the Common Man” right into the fourth movement? And here I’ve always worried about plagiarizing myself even a little bit. 😂

The thing with Claude Code and Codex since that big bump last fall is: they do in fact very often she things that work. And also when you poke at *how* they get things to work, it is very often a nightmare that will punch you in the face. Doesn’t mean they’re useless. Sure does require vigilance.

I miss writing poetry. Stumbled back across this one from 12½ years ago, and: I still like it! v3.chriskrycho.com/art/way-wor...

Update: MD Thermochrome version 0.5 is out today! This update adds 19 new icons, 14 new currency symbols, and support for the Latin M character set (430+ languages). futurefonts.com/mass-driver/...

I cannot be the only one who notices that Terminal’s typing latency is meaningfully lower than iTerm2’s, right? @danluu.com literally *measured this* years ago, and I was relieved that his finding matched my experience and that I’m not crazy. It drives me bonkers!

For folks with a mix of TS and Rust (and maybe other languages as well) living in medium-sized monorepos, have you found directory layouts that work well? We’re building some internal tooling in Rust at Vanta (!) alongside our client and server TS monolith, and these tools will need good homes!

This felt really good: actually spent 25 minutes composing this morning. Made a bunch of meaningful improvements to Movement II. A long way left to go, but if I can build some momentum, maybe—just maybe—I can actually do what I’ve planned and finish a draft of the whole thing this year!

Started training for the Boulderthon marathon today, and I feel like myself again! It's not that I haven't been running or training for the past couple months since Boston, but I haven't been working actively toward something specific. Now I am, and it feels right. Weird and a little bit funny. 😆

Posted this little bit on notes on books in notebooks last night: v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/trying-a…

Yeah, this (non-dismissible? I cannot tell) “assistant” view that makes it impossible to actually read the paper is totally want I want to see when I open a page for the paper. As we said in middle school a long time ago: NOT! Note to self: redirect from alphaXiv to arXiv. 😮‍💨

And *this* evening, I got redirects set up so that every legacy true-myth.js.org page redirects to the corresponding page on true-myth.dev – as evidenced by the link card here, in fact!

Reposting this 🧵for the ”normal daytime hours” crowd:

A most excellent birthday present from my wife! Looking forward to toasting 39 with this tonight.

Took a bit of time this evening and got true-myth.dev up and working! It has lived at a js.org site for many years, and that was wonderful (seriously, much credit to those folks!) but as I’ve slowly pushed this project toward being a bit more “professional”, it felt right to give it its own home.

LLM-*generated*, not LLM-*authored*.

I would like to never read another LLM-authored document again. I hate them so much.

I was recently diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. It's a "disease of chaos" that completely upturned my life for a couple months. I wrote a blog about it that goes into more detail and discusses prognosis. :-) burntsushi.net/encephalitis/

I pretty regularly wish, when working in TypeScript codebases, for a `penultimate` keyword: “You can subclass this… but only once. No deep hierarchies!”

iddqd, or the hardest kind of unsafe Rust. My first post for the @oxide.computer blog! Goes deep into the pitfalls of unsafe Rust and how to reason about it. A lot of labor went into the post -- please have a read! oxide.computer/blog/iddqd-u...

This is a great write-up. forums.swift.org/t/recent-impro… HT: @massicotte.org

Krycho family summer house rules: • If you’re bored you get chored. • If you’re mean you go clean. This is hilariously motivating so far. 😂 Hopefully it sticks!

Don’t forget that all the “productivity” tips out there—even the good ones—need to be adapted and personalized. For some reason, it took me until last week to seriously reevaluate the 25-minute duration of pomodoro sessions, for example. Make it your own! More: v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/exper...

Essay: submitted. I’m sure there will be revisions to do, but I’m proud of it and it’s off my plate for a bit. Feels good. And now I’m able to turn my attention once more to other good things, not least composing!

Well, this looks to be an absolutely incredible resource. Definitely going to be (a) watching it and (b) bookmarking it to return to for future reference… like, say, when I finish drafting and revising this symphony, so I can prep the score for hopefully (hopefully!) finding a performing orchesetra.

So if my music going forward echoes Vasks a little bit more, this is part of why. 😁

This essay written almost entirely to the works of Pēteris Vasks. Tonight, his works “Oboe Concerto”, “Vēstījums”, and “Lauda”.

Truly, I think this is the single most difficult essay I have ever written. The aim is to call for better metaphors and language for machine learning and large language models—and to provide a few as a good starting point—for a well-educated but non-technical audience. In 3,000 words. A hard task!

A thing I have been thinking about a lot working on this essay: How many opportunities have we missed because the dominant—very nearly the only—design metaphor we deploy around LLMs is *chat*? It’s a deeply misleading metaphor, and I wonder what metaphors truer to the models might lead to.

The second hardest part of every essay I write is the introduction. The hardest part is its conclusion. I’m working on both tonight. I think I finally have an introduction I am content with. The conclusion… not yet.

Second this take, and this shouldn’t be controversial. The reason it works is it has clear and coherent *geography* and *narrative*, which are the things that cinematic battles must have to be good. The prequels got progressively worse about this (the opening of Revenge of the Sith is bad!) and…

Apropos of switching to use the Ulysses inspired by it: I miss the Editorial app.

Had cause to make this just now at work 😂

Officially pacing the 3:30:00 group at the Colorado Springs Marathon on October 3! Come run it with me! runsignup.com/Race/CO/Colora…

Seen just now in work Slack. 😂 Is this winning? I think it is.