Falsehoods programmers believe about phone numbers, #164: Country calling codes and countries are a bijection.

@greg is this true

So, uh, Google released a free IDE with free and very generous Claude Opus 4.5 tokens… Does this mean what I think it means?

Logged in to my Spotify account on the web once when traveling to update my card, and now the web interface, while logged in with my account they know the country/language for perfectly well, is persistently in a language I don’t speak, even after returning.

Amazing new age verification procedure requires no government ID, no credit card numbers, no photography import { setTimeout } from 'node:timers/promises' const verifyAge = async () => { await setTimeout(568_036_800_000) return true }

So the model powering “GPT-5” in the UI (modulo “routing to the thinking model”) is called “gpt-5-chat” in the API, while the one powering “GPT-5 Thinking” is called “gpt-5”? This has got to be intentional at this point.

Men don't care what models are on ChatGPT. They only care what other models are on ChatGPT.

I am become Parrot, the repeater of words

The beauty we threw away in the name of progress

Vibe coding a web app? Skip some steps and vibe serve it: github.com/lxgr/vibeser...

Turns out Semantic Web 1.0 was really more of a syntactic web

I feel like saying this again: creating systems is generally much easier than understanding systems' behaviour

Naming things isn't hard at all, renaming them is

Disaster narrowly avoided in Vatican voting machine scandal as dozens of cardinals mistakenly enter autoclave

Monty Hall: [opens the door with the car behind it] "Do you want to switch?" Contestant: "Of course I do, everybody knows the math"

o4-mini must be the most overconfident (and often confidently wrong) model I’ve used so far. Its tool use capabilities are amazing, but getting it to use them to produce a correct answer is often painfully frustrating.

1. Simulate Bluesky post

Wait, so Samsung phones and wireless airbuds already support Auracast (Bluetooth multicast audio, i.e. a modern replacement for gyms broadcasting TV audio over FM channels, cinema hearing loops etc.)? www.samsung.com/us/support/a... Where's Apple's implementation? Too busy collecting MFi royalties?

As I end-of-life my Mastodon sunrise/sunset bot, it seems an appropriate time to vent my complaints about Mastodon as a platform. v.cx/2025/04/mast...

I guess I spend too much time on Bloomberg

France, the country of true justice

[looking at a horrible codebase] I can fix her

Most ambitious crossover event in history www.youtube.com/watch?v=htOv...

Ouch.

As punishment for our sins, the next Studio Ghibli movie will be released as a Netflix live action series that ends at a cliffhanger after a mediocre season 2

Sad to see my excessive, long-time usage of en dashes slandered as evidence of LLM trickery and not seen for what it is (i.e. typographic snobbery) www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Somebody should really write an RFC for a canonical "tell me the IP you think this request is coming from" protocol. (Could just be text/plain over HTTP!) There's pool.ntp.org, so why not pool.whatismyip.tld?

Join my patreon to see a second comic I made today: patreon.com/falseknees

So here’s a simple request to Apple. Apple iMessage needs to enable “disappearing messages.” And they need to do it soon. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/03/01/d...

Kind of baffling that there isn't an "ask an LLM questions about the book I'm just reading" feature on Kindle yet.

"[t]hey started out as a quant trading hedge fund [...] but after Xi Jinping cracked down on that space, they used their math and engineering chops to pivot into AI research." This was the real harm of HFT all along: Massive resource misallocation. youtubetranscriptoptimizer.com/blog/05_the_...

A propos nothing, I've always found the German "Sputnikschock" to have a nicer ring to it than the English "Sputnik crisis".

Still my favorite format

Tethers are now called Salvadollars, I don't make the rules

Any of Go's redeeming factors are thoroughly negated by strings in structs defaulting to ""

So omnivore.app has been showing a banner since the end of last year that it's shutting down on Nov 30th, but still works perfectly (and better than any alternative I've tried). Has this now been reinterpreted as 2025-11-30? 😅

A reminder that Telegram is not an encrypted messaging app, unless you know what you’re doing. www.404media.co/telegram-han...

LLMs can be amazingly useful for filing good bug reports. Previously: "Huh, I guess there's a bug in Firefox, but I bet they'll (rightly) ask for a minimally reproducing example. I guess I don't need this fixed that badly." Now: LLM nailed it on the first shot! bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi...

Seems like Youtube is once again tired of everybody efficiently playing back hardware-accelerated videos (using VP9) and is now forcing AV1 on every browser that supports it, even if only in software... media.av1.enabled = false in Firefox's about:config fixes that, though 😌

It's really unfortunate that Manifest V3 as a "brand" is completely burned. Every time I look at my Firefox extension permissions, I wish they'd update. Full access to all websites is not just scary, but often completely unnecessary as well. Access on first extension click makes so much more sense.

Turns out it is: github.com/lxgr/brainch...

I think probably 95% of speculation that your phone is secretly listening to you is overblown, but man the tech industry really does not do itself any favors with that 5% arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Today in purely evil UX patterns: "Accept autocomplete" on macOS is mapped to the space bar. That's... not a pattern on desktop OSes. If anything, it should be "tab", and absolutely nothing other than inserting a single whitespace should happen when I press the space bar on a physical keyboard!

At this point I'm really largely indifferent to DST vs. no DST, but "year-round DST" is high up on the list of most absurd ideas I've ever heard of. The point of DST is to avoid having to reschedule everything twice per year. But perma-DST can easily be replaced by no DST and rescheduling _once_.

Oh look, a great new blog post on my #3 all time favorite ISO standard! increase.com/articles/iso...

1-800-CHATGPT is a very neat tech demo! It ironically currently works better with Siri than Siri's actual ChatGPT integration. One slightly concerning aspect of it, though: How does it know that I'm a repeat caller even when I suppress caller ID? (It definitely does; tested with two numbers!)

Probably not quite in 2024 anymore, but T-Mobile via SpaceX seems to be getting close: www.t-mobile.com/coverage/sat...

It's arguably ridiculous that LLM products are even implemented like that in the first place. Literally showing me the correct answer before redacting it to "I don't know anything about that" for a completely harmless question is so much more infuriating than an outright refusal/lie.

Is it possible to implement a FIDO/WebAuthN-compliant software authenticator backed exclusively by a single high-entropy passphrase? At a first glance, it should be (setting aside for a second the question whether it's a good idea).