catching up on @dropout.tv's @smartypantsshow.bsky.social and @paulrobalino.bsky.social is amazing

More blogging! I don't want AI agents controlling my laptop. Not because that's not useful, but because it's incredibly hard (impossible?) to do securely: sophiebits.com/2025/09/09/a...

I keep getting into conversations with engineers where I talk about how desperately I want my database to support materialized views with incremental updates and too often I get a blank stare in response. so I wrote a new post about why you should care! sophiebits.com/2025/08/22/m...

@estradiol.bsky.social your username goes hard

I wrote a blog post sophiebits.com/2025/07/21/t...

I have a confession to make. I've gone back and forth on whether to say anything, but I can't keep quiet any longer—not only does this look bad, it makes no sense. Please stop doing the cursor-smoothy effect that Screen Studio does. It's so bad. Not how hovering on things works!! Hello!

you can always do the “5 whys” in your incident review but be careful about going past that because after like 8 whys it’s just “capitalism”

every time you think "maybe I should add a layer of caching in the application", take that energy and make the database faster instead

shinigami eyes a bit concerning when it glitches out

“Important information about disputing online: You cannot change your transgender or non-binary name here but it can be done via mail.” uh, thanks TransUnion

Union square is full of people protesting for trans youth. Over for 4000 in attendance

what are everyone's favorite tiny tools in the form of web pages? for the sake of argument, specifically ones that (a) do something useful and (b) don't send your data anywhere here's three that I always come back to:

large language model the size of a small LLM

Other news contained in this document: Via an official "Slur Update," Meta has decided "'Tranny' is no longer a designated slur and is now non-violating." I have never seen the company (or any other platform) delist a slur before.

transgenderism

weirdest review I’ve seen in a while

kate I found it!!! give this a listen youtu.be/S3ucrGLTI9U

if someone handed you a button that changes your gender instantly and kills a random person somewhere in the world, how many times would you press it?

I wanna hear the untold stories of the huge architectural and data migrations that go into the “smallest” changes like when Slack added the ability to add someone to a group DM and *move past messages* to the new conversation or how Amazon no longer asks which Kindle to send your library book to

mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the eepiest of them all?

it really is amazing how quickly someone arguing in favor of "think of the children" legislation makes it absolutely explicit they think children are property with zero legal rights or protections, all while claiming to be the ones who care about child safety

I prefer CDFs over histograms for empirical data. no sense in trying to differentiate a non-smooth function

@mileswgriffis.bsky.social curious, what do you wear on the front of your flo mask?

I unfortunately never liked Calibri so I’m ready for era 3

the devil works hard but the figma monetization team works harder

parsing is hard

I am a staunch anti-prescriptivist except, of course, when it comes to the words “crypto” and “algorithm”

oh, you’re getting a vaginoplasty? I call that “ding-dong ditch”

I thought birds could only fly in air

certainly not the point but I’m awed by the justified lines of text in this typewritten letter. was that done by hand or were there popular electronic typewriters that buffered then spaced a line?

so in NYT Connections they advertise a new dark mode. but I thought, ok, I wonder if the puzzle in the illustration is a new one. bonus puzzle, I figured! after looking closer, I was shocked to discover that

if you’re carrying your dog and then hold the door open for someone, would you rather hear “thank you” or “cute dog”?

love to all my trans friends today

a subtle note here is that bluesky’s blocking actually can’t possibly work the way described here because it’s not composable — one bad neighbor causes problems for anyone else in particular, the design of such a system must be resilient to bad actors blocking good ones and shan’t destroy the world

I am absolutely delighted to find that out of people I don’t follow, the person followed by the largest number of my followees is… me.

@danabra.mov the app has gotten a lot better in the last 1.5 years

🎎 never seen this emoji before in my life

evidently aquarius ♒️ is symbolized by “water bearer”, also known as “tardigrader”

does anyone besides nyt have a “needle”? i.e. prediction of the final result based on votes tallied so far, rather than a plain tally that skews towards demographics of the precincts that report first

posting for future searchers: proximity pairing with a Zoom Room on my Mac has been broken for months even though it works fine on my phone and on coworkers' laptops! I cleared caches, Zoom prefs, etc. to no avail figured it out today: I had mic mode on "Voice Isolation". works fine on "Standard".

apparently I'm guilty of cyberhacking for *checks notes* posting in an internal Facebook workplace group about a misconfigured HTTPS certificate 8 years ago

Managed to find it in a LinkedIn post!

three months ago I saw a billboard: > Uber riders hit the road with pay by bank from Stripe. and honestly I have not been able to stop thinking about it. this has got to be one of the clunkiest-worded ads I have ever seen in my life

i hate gay halloween what do you mean you were the moldy wall behind jk rowling

new from me: everyone is wrong about that slack flowchart systems are complicated if you make them complicated but you can also make them simple sophiebits.com/2024/10/30/e...

this tweet isn’t doing as many numbers as I hoped but it’s quite honestly some of my best work

has anyone cracked the code on why a freshly warmed tortilla is sublime but a cold one is repulsive?

if everyone keeps hating on “Google is improving its sign-in page with a more modern look and feel” I will become the joker

someone should invent the musical time signature 2/(8/3)

ok please take this boring diagnostic test. done? if you got distracted and didn’t finish, you have ADHD. if you got incessantly annoyed by the (obviously) flawed wording of the questions, you have autism. if not, congrats you’re “normal”