🕸️ Got a bit excited when I found this 13 year old LG Nexus 5 Android at the bottom of my "Test Devices" drawer. It boots and everything is surprisingly snappy. Unfortunately no recent browser versions can be installed on it – would have made for a great "worst case" test device.

Been going down the rabbit hole looking at a Sentry issue that's being for one of my customers. Something that should be a `number` is actually a `string`. Turns out they're overriding `Date.now()` to return an ISO8601 string instead of the milliseconds timestamp. Why......

Holy shit, again? #cloudflare #down

New STRICH (strich.io) release undergoing QA. Important to test with real, physical devices, especially low-end ones. @infrequently.org has great guidelines for device selection here: infrequently.org/2025/11/perf...

✨ Built a free tool because I got tired of using barcode generators that are riddled with ads, slow and don't generate vector output. barcode.new is free, fast (WASM, on-device, no server roundtrip) and isn't spammy.

Finally adding Micro QR Code support to STRICH (strich.io), my library for barcode scanning in the browser. Error correction is buggy, that's why it's scanning gibberish. Seems like I'll have to deep-dive into Reed-Solomon error correction – pretty fascinating stuff.

💾 Strong swag game by CashCtrl (cashctrl.com/en), Makes me want to switch my accounting software. (not affiliated)

I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-w...

I'm unreasonably excited about my new RPN calculator, a SwissMicros R47. In high school (1995) I got an HP 48G (still works) and was initially confused... RPN is a stack machine, to calculate 1 plus 1, you enter 1 <ENTER> 1 <ENTER> <PLUS>. To the left is my dad's HP 32S II, which unfortunately died.

OpenAI: „Trust, security and privacy guide every product and decision we make.“ OK. 😂

GitLab marketing mail: "AI is not actually making developers more productive. Here's you can AI anyway". ... you know, or just *NOT* use it.

🕸️ World‘s largest spiderweb found at the border between Greece and Albania, housing >100’000 spiders in complete darkness. Instantly remindend me of „Children of Time“ by @aptshadow.bsky.social . Amazing sci-fi, a must if you haven’t already read it. www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/m...

It's that time of the year again. My daylight lamp is super bulky but I found it helps with the blues.

Mozilla deployed an AI bot that overwrote 20 years of volunteer Japanese translations, without consultation. JP community leader resigned, and the offer from Mozilla is to "hop on a quick call to understand why they're struggling". FFS. HN discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4583...

Having fun working on some slides for my next talk.

It's wild that mobile apps are so entrenched that even the EFF doesn't pause and ask "waitaminute, we haven't really had this problem on desktop for decades... now what invisible force has kept those platforms in check all these years??"

A bit sad to see GitLab also jump fully on the hype train.

Really enjoyed @rich-harris.dev talk „Fine-grained everything“ at #perfnow in Amsterdam. Wish they‘d choose a less attractive venue though, I missed a lot of other talks due to this beautiful city. 😂

Bro on the right waiting to finally take over.

We keep seeing startups who want to replace something valuable (therapy, counseling, tutoring, artistic expression) with some tech bullshit under the banner of democratization. But why do we need to invest so much in bad tech that doesn't work instead of just giving people access to what they need?

built on theft and at massive environmental cost and most importantly, numerous studies keep demonstrating that genAI tools often work a little better than by chance. how is it that we can’t expunge these slop machines out of our institutions and communities www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Decided to cross-post my latest blog post on Why I don’t use AI code generation to Medium, as I still have a profile and a decent-sized following there. Turns out on mobile you can‘t even reply without installing their app. 🤦‍♂️ That‘s a hard goodbye now.

For the next iteration of strich.io, my JavaScript barcode scanning library, I‘m using animated SVG icons for switching cameras, zooming and flashlight toggling. It was fun to learn how to build these by hand, with the amazing Whimsical Animations course by @joshwcomeau.com. Highly recommended!

Fall is probably my favorite time of the year. 🍂

There‘s any number of reasons why complex distributed systems can f^H^H^H It‘s always DNS.

I hoped this would be a quiet day. But it seems a major AWS outage is currently ongoing (us-east-1). news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4564...

Safari bugs don't just make Safari worse, they make EVERY OTHER BROWSER on iOS worse. #AppleBrowserBan

Charmingly quaint. I wonder if they used ChatGPT to generate the email...

Having a lot of fun with @joshwcomeau.com new course "Whimsical Animations". Revamping some icons in my camera HUD. Hand-written SVG and CSS transitions, so much fun!

My take on on AI code generation: alexsuzuki.com/posts/cretac...

The Web is the platform you are looking for. Pass it on.

✍=💡: "If we leave writing to AI chatbots, we won't just lose a craft and the skills. Because writing is more than that. Writing is thinking, involving cognitive processes. The one is not downstream from the other, they are co-emergent" ethz.ch/en/news-and-... 1/🧵

(solemnly) You've had mail.

Just tuned in to pumpkin head‘s speech at the UN and barely lasted more than a minute. It‘s so incredibly criiiiiiiinge.

My mind will never comprehend.

Added `ty` (type checker by Astral, makers of uv and ruff) to my Python project and I'm blown away by the feedback and raw speed. What Astral is doing to the Python tooling ecosystem is amazing. github.com/astral-sh/ty

Something that infuriates me on a regular basis is macOS reverting default file associations to 'Xcode'. I have yet to encounter a single person who would want to open Xcode to edit a .json file.

LLM-powered NPCs are one of the few applications of the technology that I find exciting. Bonus points if it involves cool hacks like this one: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4519...

Pretty sick animation on this page. 🤩 tempo.xyz

👽 I can‘t help but be disappointed by the Chinese 3 Body Problem TV series (Tencent). More faithful to the source material for sure, but overly long and with way too many flashbacks and dodgy CGI. Will be interesting to see how they approach the second book.

I recently got tired of SQLAlchemy ORM and decided to just raw dog it: plain SQL, direct DB driver access and model class validation (Pydantic). I am now questioning the wisdom of that decision.

realistic Star Trek

Bought an Elgato light to create some video content. Firmware update dialog pops up. That feeling of being torn between being the cranky old guy who dislikes FW updates because rarely do they improve anything, and the simple appeal of "new". Anyway, update is stuck and device is unresponsive now. 🤦‍♂️

This was Google I/O in 2011. Android Honeycomb (/w tablet support) was out, everybody got a free Galaxy Tab to start hacking. Simpler times. Today's announcement is truly sad, and IMHO the end of an era. Yes, I know I'm a sentimental bastard... so be it.

🤖 As a former Android developer, I think this is terrible for Android as an ecosystem. As a fan of the web platform, I think this is one more reason to go all-in on the web. Maybe this will be a shot in the arm for PWAs? android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elev...

This is getting a bit tiresome. Can we have one tool that does NOT include an LLM?

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

More Safari iOS weirdness. The favorites suddenly disappeared, they're no longer displayed when opening a new tab or starting to type a URL. I checked Settings, they're enabled. Anyone know how to fix this?

I swear to god Safari, I'm going to kill you if you ask me one more time for camera permission on a site where I've granted it a hundred times before. Of course how long the setting actually persists is anyone's guess as there is NO DOCUMENTATION.

Them: "Here's your new Junior dev with PhD-level intelligence, he's really eager to flex those PhD-level muscles and create a lot of PRs in your repository, so you only have to review and not code anymore!" Me: *runs away*