advertisement: do you want to talk to me about something you're working on / thinking about? ⭒˚.⋆ limited time offer ⋆.˚⭒ get in touch with me and we can talk! (offer available only while I remain alive.)

CSS Q: Is it possible for a parent div to have two children A and B, so that the parent's width grows as A grows, but the parent's width is completely unaffected by B's width, which is constrained to be at most the parent's width (which in turn comes from A)? Ideally A and B are in a flex column.

ashes to ashes, dollars to donuts

Last 5 years (?) everyone's been making websites where when you scroll down new stuff fades in. It's so counterproductive and distracting and it makes me so mad so mad so mad. What is this called? Where's the blog post explaining how much it sucks that I can send to people who use it?

Unnecessarortmanteau

happy spooky season here is your pumpkin owl (www.artic.edu/artworks/633...)

watering pets

A banner morning for hearing birds outside my house. Merlin sez: - American Robin - Black-capped Chickadee - Cedar Waxwing - Dark-eyed Junco - European Starling - Golden-crowned Kinglet - House Sparrow - Northern Flicker - Spotted Towhee - Steller's Jay Which is your favorite?

Vendoring your dependencies is the best way to own the libs.

Does anyone here know a lot about monads & applicatives & such? I'm curious about how to make spreadsheet-style data-flows "monadic". If that sounds interesting please look at my scattered notes at typst.app/project/rnf1... and lmk what's going on. Quick motivation in thread...

Less than 24 hours till the LIVE 2025 Q & A / Discussion session! Watch the presentations: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Join us to chat about them: links at liveprog.org Hope to see ya there!

I don't yet have anything insightful to say about distorted tourist maps of cities but I'm very excited by them.

12 exciting live-programming projects will be presented at LIVE this year. It's free, online, and coming up soon! Sat 9/27: Videos premiere Sat 10/4: Q & A and discussion over Zoom Details on projects are up already at liveprog.org; more schedule & links coming soon. Hope to see ya there!

heads up: I got @nmbot.bsky.social running again and it's as good as ever.

me telling you about a new bagel place but it becomes clear ive been eating specific block-stencil-branded life preservers at the dock

today in surprisingly poetic nerd jargon: "mip" in "mipmap" comes from "multum in parvo", meaning "many things in a small place". (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap)

rotate line of pixels 2° every frame nearest-neighbor interpolation (w/ @obtusatum.bsky.social)

temporal median of koi

caught some bugs getting nasty on my flower (1/10x speed)

Do you write TypeScript? Enjoy Automerge? Love building both tools and community? You might be a great fit for our ✨new✨ Automerge TypeScript Maintainer role! www.inkandswitch.com/jobs/automer... (Remote role, 🇬🇧 UK-based preferred but not required)

LIVE got so many exciting submissions. Thanks all! Now we gotta plan the dang thing. Does anyone have advice / experiences / resources to share about running online conferences? I'm especially curious how to cultivate good conversations – both focused (on talks) and unfocused ("hallway track").

One week until MONDAY, JULY 21st, which I call "LIVE Workshop Christmas". (It's Christmas for me and the PC, cuz we get to look at all the cool stuff you submit! I guess for you it's more like "the submission deadline".) liveprog.org

REMINDER: More LIVE Workshop office hours coming up in ~10 hours! Come on by. 🙂

I often try to do things with computers and fail. I figure I should start logging these. JOSH IS BAD AT COMPUTERS #1: Google Docs uses ⌥⇧⌘Z / ⌥⇧⌘X to switch to editing / suggesting mode. I thought this sucked and tried to make ⇧⌘S a toggle with Tampermonkey. Couldn't do it!

For software to be malleable, we need ways of building and modifying programs that are accessible to many more people. Are you working on new interfaces for programming? Share your progress at the LIVE workshop! Submissions are due July 21st. liveprog.org (Happy to chat if you have questions!)

I don't know if I've ever said the word "seldom" out loud in my life... I wonder what other words are just, like, not in my repertoire.

Computing could be a more harmonious and empowering force in our lives if we could mold it to our needs. We wrote a little about this vision of "malleable software" – past, present, and future. www.inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...

I used to have a credit card with my birthday as expiration date and my wife's birthday as CVV. I think that's amazing. 👍

it's crazy to think about how sleeping is, like, the main thing I do

passionately smitten with Steller’s jays rn 🖤💙

Just learned tennis scoring; thanks @pte.bsky.social. I thought the terminology was overcomplicated, until I saw that it turns an infinite state-space of scores into a finite one. Q1. Is this bisimulation? Q2. Generalize: Which winning-score sets A, B ⊆ ℕ² can be tracked with a finite # of states?

just occurred to me that I hold mugs really weird

"intentional grounding" sounds way deeper than it actually is.

The Ink team at Ink & Switch is starting something new — publishing our internal lab notes. These are (mostly) unedited, with all our puzzling and musing and prototypes unfiltered. Take a peek: inkandswitch.com/ink/notes/

Seattle: www.smashputt.com is recommended as an exploration of "minigolf as a floating signifier"

Ok now that I've earned some social capital with shameless early-2000s-nostalgia engagement bait, it's time to get back to what really matters: MATH FUN. I've got a hint that may help you solve this puzzle! (Maybe!)

million-$ idea: retro Winamp-style skins for these confounded LLMs

The newly-formed Seattle chapter of Wanderers Union is hosting our inaugural event this coming Saturday, February 1st. It's a 4Z – 4 urban zones (by foot and public transit) in 4 hours. All are welcome. DM me for details!

permutations of four elements, with some orders you can use to prove the Erdős–Szekeres theorem (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%...) h/t @nickeliferous.bsky.social for getting me into this stuff!

MATH FUN: A "composition" of N is a way to write N as the sum of positive integers in a particular order. E.g. for N=3: 1+1+1 1+2 2+1 3 For each comp, multiply its numbers. Then add up these products across all comps. E.g. for N=3 we get 1·1·1+1·2+2·1+3=8. Q: If you start with N, what do you get?

@joshuahhh.com and I invite you to explore our experimental visual programming environment (which takes place in a dungeon) Features - dissolve the bounds of decision and explore all possibilities at once - use sigillic incantations, delve into recursive caverns vezwork.github.io/drostes-lair-post

is anyone else getting this ludicrous obtrusion every time you type anything in VS Code?

"I made plans to see my pal in NYC last weekend, but as my train pulled in I realized we forgot to pick a meeting spot! Freaked out for a sec but then realized I should just head to Coney Island." "Huh? Why?" "It's a shelling point!"

It's kinda weird that inverse-square central forces and harmonic oscillators both produce elliptical orbits, but they're /different/ elliptical orbits: ISCF makes the force center a focus, HO makes it the ellipse center. Is this just coincidence? (There aren't enough two-parameter closed shapes?)

I always know when 8pm rolls around cuz my screen gets yellower. I'm very fond of this! it's a rare instance of sensitivity to natural cycles usually lacking in computer-world, communicated in a perfectly "environmental" way (subtle, "shown rather than told", noticeable, pervasive).

Do you see how the arrows connecting labels to their referents have extra "switchbacks"? I like this a lot. Does anyone know what it's called or where it comes from?

can someone explain why "unified" (unifiedjs.com) is the way it is? its design makes no sense to me I thought unified packages would provide functions that transform inputs/ASTs/outputs into one another. instead, they provide "plugins" that run in "phases" in "processors". ???

Sometimes we use computers to make things. Sometimes we use them to consume things others have made. Do we ever do these together? Are there examples where the process of consumption also creates? (I'm looking for something more integrated than the back and forth dialogue of, say, fan fiction.)

you can mull just about anything if you set your mind to it

guy who is wary of doing simple, potentially-life-changing things cuz it would be embarrassing for simple things to change his life