If OS versions were like browser User Agent strings: Windows/98 (Macintosh; System 8.0) XP Linux BeOS FreeBSD for Workgroups (OS X, like Archimedes MS-DOS Cray iOS Zune Lisa PowerPC Commodore) macOS/Tahoe/26.1 Tandy

My dog, Stanley is pretty smart. He has "speech" buttons that he can press to "say" words (it plays an audio recording of a word like “outside" or "water”). He'll press the "food" button before we'll feed him dinner, and he presses "outside" most mornings as apart […] [Original post on scoat.es]

Pluribus is very good. I have great faith that they’re not going to pull a LOST on us. I have the same faith about Severance. Don’t let me down here, post-television.

Do we have a name for when AI fails at itself? For example, a YouTube video with “GPT" in the title and the auto/ai-generated transcript says “ChachiBt”, “Chachib”, “Chbt”, and probably other failures.

The common trope of technology companies posting a list of logos of “companies that use our software" so often reads like an indictment, these days.

November 6: Bell*> posts $4.5 Billion-with-a-B profit in Q3 November 12: Bell> Due to uh… infrastructure investments… yeah… we're uh… going to charge you more for your internet service starting in February. Also—remember—there are no comparable internet services, so you can't really leave […]

Last night I saw a couple bands you've probably never heard of. Because they're trendy and cool and I'm trendy and cool? Nope. "Probably" because, statistically, you're not a Canadian of a certain age interested in music from 1990-something. I Mother Earth was […] [Original post on scoat.es]

I sure hope Nvidia is using their own chips to model when their bubble will burst and are informed about what to do when chip demand screeches to a near-halt… https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/11/softbank-sells-its-entire-stake-in-nvidia-for-5point83-billion.html

Ohhhh, so that's why I keep seeing Gordon Lightfoot. (The SS Edmund Fitzgerald wrecked 50 years ago today.)

You can do it, little thyme plant. I’m not ready for actual snow season to start in #montreal quite yet.

I love that Mastodon is starting to feel like the reach we enjoyed with Twitter. The Swift/Apple person who triaged my issue from last night found my comments about it here and sent a favourite/like/star. (Not a big deal, but that kind of thing happened pretty often on Twitter, and it feels […]

It's a rough day when you make the compiler crash… so deep into complicated code that you can't reasonably distill it to a reportable case. )-:

TIL about `@_disfavoredOverload` in #swift, to hint to the compiler which function to call if multiple functions’ signatures are satisfied by the calling parameters. (via @opticalaberration ) Very useful for this #hummingbird patch. https://github.com/hummingbird-project/hummingbird/pull/748

I am a little sad that Mamdani did not do his acceptance speech from the garage door at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

You're absolutely right! Now I fully understand.

Was talking with some friends… (who I'm not sure *want* credit, so…) Let's rebrand Daylight Saving Time as “Democrat Standard Time”. Middle-of-the-night tantrum is the best chance we have of abolishing it, I'd say. (Canada will follow the US on this.)

Christmas tree topper firmware ported from MicroPython (that was a huge pain to get an old version running last year) to #Embedded #Swift (that was an even bigger pain to get built, this year—but I finally did it). But pretty nice to have an ESP32 Embedded Swift […] [Original post on scoat.es]

If you're looking for a “bubble pop" catalyst, it's hard to think of a sharper one than “OpenAI prepares for trillion dollar IPO”. 📌 🎈 ↗️

Fifteen years ago (starting in 2010), @preinheimer and I had a technology podcast, *way* before podcasts were cool. We called it Pique Web. The name was for both: – recent/evolving things in technology—and specifically in web tech—that piqued our interests – and a pun on “Peak Oil”; how at the […]

All the #hugops for the subtle Azure shade on the GitHub status page. “GitHub and Azure teams continue to collaborate towards full resolution.” "We are collaborating with Azure teams to restore access as soon as possible.” "GitHub and Azure teams are coordinating to mitigate impact and resolve […]

In 2013, when #montreal was deep into its corruption self-investigation, we almost ran out of asphalt. We'd made a new rule that anyone named during the Charbonneau commission's corruption inquiry was disqualified from being a vendor/supplier for the city. The hitch was that all of the asphalt […]

Is it fully the season when the leaves autumn from the trees, here. 🍁

No. Do not send the signal that this is okay. We paid $3 each for our slightly smaller pumpkins.

I used to think it was stupid to call it X, but now I think it's a good differentiator for "the swamp I didn't participate in" vs. "the Twitter I helped build” (through participation and ecosystem; LOTS of people helped build it).

The event page for @pluralistic 's Enshittification book tour stop in #montreal links to Facebook for full details… The irony of this is not lost on me. (See you there, tomorrow, local friends?) https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

I wonder if the code in Atlas Browser is better than the writing in Atlas Shrugged… Coin flip. /cc @anildash (I don't know if new quote posts notify yet or not…) https://me.dm/@anildash/115419909326576122

I've been dragging a `~/.ssh` directory around with me since at least 2008. I can probably safely purge these, now, though—right? (-; ``` ❯ cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | grep php.net | awk {'print $1'} y2.php.net,69.147.83.197 y1.php.net,69.147.83.196 ``` #php

Reinstalled my OS from clean last week. Tried VSCodium instead of VSCode. That was a mistake. I do not look forward to the near future where the only way to use general-purpose computers is to pay one of 4 companies on a per-hour basis.

Imagine a world where JavaScript code had the discipline of Super Mario Bros speedruns.

Real Parenting™ in 2025: Who's got a good (working) strategy for banning any mention of “6-7" within earshot? Starting to feel like a safety issue over here… (I had a working "no bro talk" rule where I would just over-exaggerate calling everyone "bro" until it was embarrassing for the main […]

After Amazon's services failed in he middle of the night, my electricity at home failed for over 2 hours this morning, came back for long enough for me to get into the shower and then failed again (in a no-windows bathroom). Those outages had depleted my UPS's battery reserves, I think, so when […]

Remember when you could search for something and when there were no results, the computer on the other end would say “no results” instead of forcing you to scan through a bunch of “results” that aren't actually what you searched for in hopes that maybe your answer is there somewhere (but it's […]

US friends: please go be counted tomorrow.

If the AI was as good as they pretend it is, we wouldn’t need MCP. It would use the existing human UI. And if it could be trusted, it wouldn’t output Python—it would generate highly optimized binaries. …or something closer to that, anyway. There are some good bits, but also a *lot* of snake […]

As a Canadian in 2025, I sometimes wonder if like Belgians in 1935 ever remarked to their countryfolk “Remember when we used to take *recreational* trips to Germany?!”

Something for the #beer nerds this morning. In March 2024 (on #orval Day), we got 8 people together to taste my 14-year vertical collection of Orval, and I made everyone take notes. (I have 16 years collected, today.) I've finally compiled those notes into a web site, and this is now maybe the […]

I had to (wanted to, really… more later) put together a web page with a bunch of evaluation data (not for work). Chart.js is pretty nice for this. https://www.chartjs.org/

We’re all old enough to get the emoji joke here (when code formatting is not compliant and needs to have the formatter run). This isn’t a privilege I’ve always had at work.

I am not very good at CSS, but CSS Grid is actually really good. This little course is worth doing if you’re like me: https://cssgrid.io

Me: (asks ChatGPT for an exhaustive list of something) ChatGPT: a, b, c, d, e, f, e, g, h Me: why did you send “e” twice? ChatGPT: “Ah—you’re right! That was just a copy-paste slip. 😅” Get outta here.

Flip side of this: ~3 years ago, I got automated calls from “RBC Visa”. I ignored them. Then my card stopped working. So I called the number on the back of my card and said as much. The agent gave me a hard time: “So you JUST IGNORED our calls about this?” “No; I didn’t know they were you […]

I enjoy the exploration, story, and platforming quite a lot. I do not enjoy boss fights nearly as much as other people seem to (never have, really). It’s a pretty big bummer to me that there’s so much more Silksong that I may never have the “this is supposed to be fun, but dying to the same […]

Hearing talk of how AI is causing software quality to plummet, the most disturbing thing for me is that software quality—when considered next to other engineering disciplines—has never been very good. I’ve long said “If we built bridges like we build software, people would die.” but more and […]

Me on Wednesday (pasted verbatim): “low maintenance on the 4xe Jeep, too, but I do expect their servers to require me to do some stupid update and brick it at some point because they're terrible.” Stellantis on Friday: pushed update that bricks probably thousands of Wranglers. Fortunately […]

We’ve launched Studioworks! (To the public; we’ve been in private beta for a while.) It’s a business management platform that’s launched with a focus on really nice invoicing for creative people, and it’s what I’ve been working on all year. Would really love any help you can offer in […]

#hugops to the subset GitHub folks who are trying to fix the current webhooks outage and aren't normally championing the AI slide over the parts of the platform that we actually want to use and pay for.

I watched this video on how UTF-8 actually works, on the plane yesterday, and I think it’s very good. For example, I learned about how the bits in codepoint bytes work; I did not know that before. Definitely worth the time to watch (especially if you skip through the intro parts near the […]

There sure are a lot of handegg jerseys around London this weekend.

Reading (listening to Stephen Fry read]) [@timbl ’s new book and he makes an interesting observation that at the dawn of popular personal computing, we used to type commands into computers and get text responses “like we do today with AI chatbots.”

I expected them to have a presence, but based on their group photo posing, it feels like *half* of the attendees at @swiftserverconf are from Apple. 🤯