Merry Christmas! “Glad tidings of good news,” as a mighty host once declared to a bunch of people on the fringes: for so, it turns out, we must all see ourselves to be. Not mighty, not deserving, but much in need in every way—and by no doing of our own, delivered. Mystery, wonder, glorious hope.

Small sample size, but: of the three family members I know of who got pushed to iOS 26 with the more general rollout in the past couple weeks, none of them are fans. Their complaints… are exactly the complaints all the tech nerds had over the summer. Almost like legibility and usability matter!

It’s that time of year again, when I am wishing desperately that there were good alternatives to YNAB for zero-based budgeting software—preferably with genuinely great native Mac and iOS apps. There are, as far as I can tell, not. I have evaluated the alternatives. Scoured the subreddits!

I think the 1Password Safari Extension on macOS works maybe 10–20% of the time at this point. It’s gotten the point where it has me seriously evaluating alternatives like ProtonPass on that basis alone—in the little bit I messed with it, that Safari extension worked *way* more consistently.

At intervals.icu, I use this to see the amount of total work done at certain intensity, or to see the differences between intervals of different length, e.g., avg pace/power/VAM/GAP +- std dev for 30"/2'/2'30" intervals, etc.

Things that make no sense in TrainingPeaks: Why can you select multiple laps but it doesn’t actually… select them or let you see their combined data?!?

Excellent @oxide.computer / @bcantrill.bsky.social jokes happening in a private watercooler chat at Vanta right now. (It’s my fault: I started it with “DO WE GET TO BUY AN OXIDE RACK? TELL ME WE DO. PLEASE.” an hour ago.)

Sure, there’s a bit of “monkey’s paw curls” dynamic to this statement, but every time I use `uv` I really think, “Sure would be nice to have this level of performance and polish in the Node ecosystem…” (Yes, I’m aware of experiments with Rust rewrites! Still.)

I know, it’s crazy, right? But it’s true: v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/some-o...

begging pleading for anyone with tsgo perf issues to actually provide the codebase they're testing 😑

It is so cool to see what the good folks at Astral are doing for the Python ecosystem using @rust-lang.org. Look at this! astral.sh/blog/ty#:~:t...

Cool things happening in Unison language land.

Almost every day I think about how much better software could be if we spent 1% of the money and energy being poured into LLMs on improving existing developer tooling in ways *we already know how to do*, whether because it’s just long-desired improvements, or known from academic research.

The Google Docs comment interface is just such utterly terrible design (along with the rest of Google Docs). Would you like to see specifically replies to your comments? Hahahaha good luck with that. The parts of the UI that *should* do that… don’t!

I would really like Sony to make a G lens in the 42-44mm ƒ/2 range—I love my 35mm ƒ/1.8 and my 50mm ƒ/1.4, but something compact in between them in that “perfect single lens for walkabout and daily life” range. The 40mm ƒ/2.5 is close, but old! (The Q3 43 is telling everyone else: Make this!)

Does the 1Password for Safari extension on Mac work consistently for anyone? It sure as heck doesn’t for me. It works all the time on iOS and iPadOS, and in other browsers, so it’s confusing that it doesn’t on Mac. Is this is a Mac Safari issue? Or a 1Password issue? (It’s 1P’s problem regardless.)

I'm happy to announce arborium, a collection of 96 tree-sitter grammars (so far) that compile cleanly as crates and npm packages, for desktop & wasm. It comes with themes, two rustdoc integrations, a clean HTML+ANSI highlighter, get it while it's hot: arborium.bearcove.eu#rust

My gift to the rustdoc team: fasterthanli.me/articles/my-... Merry syntaxmas, everyone!

Big fan of @fasterthanli.me’s new library wrapping tree-sitter grammars up with a really nice Rust API. Spent a bit of the afternoon replacing a Syntect-based highlighting setup with an Arborium-based setup and much prefer it—and tree-sitter grammars are much more robust than old Textmate grammars!

@fasterthanli.me I’m mucking around with replacing a Syntect-based pipeline with Arborium this afternoon, and (1) it’s really nice overall but (2) unlike Syntect, I am not (yet!) seeing a straightforward way to use a single Highlighter instance from multiple threads, given all the `&mut` methods. …

cargo-shear v1.8.0 now reports unused .rs files. github.com/Boshen/carg... Thank you @cathal.dev for spending a long time implementing this.

My most-hated modern web pattern (that isn’t handled by normal ad-blocking). v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/pop-ov... (Yes, reply-guys: I know about Stop the Madness and other such web extensions.)

The lesson, as always, is buy music from places that give a darn about music and artists. Sure isn’t  these days. Was never Spotify. Choose Bandcamp or directly purchasing from the artist whenever you can: the artist makes more money and the source respects you a lot more (and no DRM!).

We live in a world where downloading albums you have purchased from Apple Music doesn’t work consistently. You click the “Download All” button for the Albums or Songs not in your library and sometimes it does: nothing. I miss the days when iTunes was *all about* your library of music.

ECMAScript excitement 😉 Safari 26.2 ships support for: 🔶 Math.sumPrecise 🔶 [Weak]Map.prototype.getOrInsert (aka "Upsert")

Howdy y'all 👋 reminder that our survey of safety-critical Rust users for potential Project Goals in 2026 ends next Friday Check the quoted post for more details! bsky.app/profile/safe...

It’s okay if your impure-pure-impure sandwich is a Dagwood. The point is cleanly separating I/O and “effects” from the “pure” computation in your program—because that makes it so much easier to reason about, to test, to refactor, you name it.

Rust 1.92.0 has been released! 🌈 🦀 This version adds RwLockWriteGuard::downgrade(), adds Location::file_as_c_str(), improves diagnostic and validation for various attributes, no longer warns for unused Result<(), Infallible>, and more! Check out the announcement: blog.rust-lang.org/2025/12/11/R...

There’s a reason I call out “folks at the top” here—I expect (because in my experience this is the case) most of line engineers *want* to do good work that makes for a stable and robust system, and they’re all fighting fires right now.

Someone please remind the folks at the top of GitHub and the owners at Microsoft that being the default code hosting platform is *earned* and *can be lost*. Getting the core value proposition right is *the job*.

I’ve seen TypeScript horrors you would not believe. Union types that bring tsgo to its knees. Type mappings so large they make an Apple Silicon Mac’s fans spin up when you check them. Classes with `getX`, `setX`, and `unsetX` like it’s Java in 1999.

Guess I should promote my own Glass profile too, huh. glass.photo/cfreeman

Offered without comment. Let the reader understand. (This is a deep link, click through.) practicaltypography.com/typography-i....

OH: > My two main wishes for go that IMO mostly fit with its existing philosophy are (1) some things should never be zero-initialized – don't let me; and (2) some things always need cleanup – remind me > > oh and one more thing: (3) some values shouldn't be copied – don't let me Me: «ahem» Rust!!!

The best thing I’ve found to do for general *visual* usability of iOS26 is: Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Increase Contrast. It makes the operating system actually have… contrast.

I really wish Fantastical would split apart “Premium” and “Professional” feature sets and pricing tiers. “Show the date and accept invitations” are pretty different from “Openings” and “Zapier integration” and “Webex support”. I *like* paying for software I use, but the current setup is annoying.

Between pain management, PT, and a central nervous system depressant (wheeeee herniated discs are just *great*, folks), I barely made it through this afternoon even with a nap. But I’m finishing the day strong with Faunts by M4. Still such a great album. After almost 20 years, still a go-to.

Poking around myself and seeing what Claude suggests and… the situation appears to be pretty rough. The best suggestion the LLM has is “render to SVG using `<foreignObject>` and `<div>` to get HTML text wrapping and hope that works” and then render the SVG to a pixel map and then to PNG. 🥴

I have an opengraph image generator I’m relatively happy with, using the `ril` (Rust Image Library) crate, deployed on Cloudflare as Wasm. All good. But AFAICT `ril` doesn’t know a darn thing about ligatures or text spacing and it’s driving me slightly bonkers! Anyone have any recommendations?

I second all of the overarching sentiment from Bryan here! I’d significantly qualify the comment that LLMs make for a good editor—it’s good at checking for grammatical and syntactical and even, sometimes, semantic mistakes. LLMs are *terrible* editors when it comes to style and voice, though.

I have no idea why anyone would make such a point out of saying this. 🤐

oxfmt next week: support formatting HTML, YAML, GraphQL, Handlerbars, Markdown, CSS files by default github.com/oxc-project...

the industry is abound with "don't roll your own X" and analytics in particular is one of the things I like reaching to as a counterexample. finally wrote about it! bsky.app/profile/butt...

🚀 Ferrocene 25.11.0 is out – and yes, it’s open source! Ships our first IEC 61508 (SIL 2)-certified subset of core, enabling certifiable Rust for safety-critical systems across multiple architectures. ⚙️ + updates from Rust 1.89 & 1.90. 🔗 Release Notes: public-docs.ferrocene.dev/main/release...

⚡️ The first Vite 8.0 beta is here! - Powered by Rolldown, bringing significantly faster production builds and more consistency - New features such as tsconfig paths or emitDecoratorMetadata support - Bumping browser targets aligned with Baseline Widely Available Read more in our announcement post!

It’s good! My main task right now at Vanta (when not wrangling organizational growth stuff) is migrating all of our packages to it, even the ones doing crazy shenanigans that tsgo catches and tsc incorrectly let pass. (There are only a handful in our millions of lines of code.) I repeat: it’s good!

We've got some updates on TypeScript 7! The new native port - can type-check any project - supports --build and --incremental - has rich editor features implemented - is still 10x faster and is ready for you to try today! devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/p...

I've taken to disallowing them except when they're dependent on a previous type parameter, which I think generally works pretty well and strikes a balance on trapdoors versus "somebody is gonna have to go dig into this to use it at all"

Another day, another set of confusing TypeScript type errors I helped someone chase down… that all came down to default type parameters. I don’t *quite* think we should ban default type parameter values. But… I’m getting close? 😂

OH at work: “I like DRY, just not in the hands of a cultist.”