The floodwaters left a ring on the outside of the bathtub. - Spencer Holst

8yo: What is puff daddy? 11yo: It’s a rapper. 8yo: Ooh, for what kind of candy? 11yo: No, a rapper is one of those annoying people who says things really fast.

Anyone have a friend at NYT Games? commaok.xyz/post/connect...

Child with chalk…or just SMTP?

If were Kondoizing the internet, McMaster-Carr would be one of the dozen or so websites left.

My 8yo: “We’re making a movie! Do you want a ticket?” Me: “Sure.” Hands me this and waltzes off giggling…

How it started: Error: Process completed with exit code 1. How it's going: Error: Process completed with exit code 1. sigh

Our Calvin and Hobbes books are being loved back into looseleaf. Pages turn up everywhere.

How many years until an American teenager meets someone British and is like “whoah you have an AI assistant accent“?

I love small town parades. More people marching than watching. And fun either way.

When I get into my car, I want my phone call to automatically switch from my AirPods to the car speakerphone, even if I'm still wearing the AirPods. ...said nobody ever.

New blog post: Security through intentional redundancy commaok.xyz/post/securit...

@nickharkaway.com another thing I’ve been wondering about Titans: languages evolve rapidly. Shouldn’t the older ones sound hopelessly archaic? And be befuddled by generations of accumulated unlearned slang? (And that’s not even to mention norms and mores.)

Co-worker nicknames new vibe-coding agent Shelley. I get the poet reference...but miss the "shell" joke. But also: Ozymandias is about vibe coding if it's about anything.

github.com/josharian/vi... Converts a video into an ANSI "text" file that you can `cat` to your terminal to play that video (very pixelated). Demo: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP0Q...

“I keep my car in airplane mode” means something much less exciting in 2025 than I would have imagined two decades ago.

Terminal.app is the IE6 of TUIs.

Our cat has been leaving notes around the house for us asking for wet food, new catnip plants, etc. This one reads (with spelling fixed for clarity): “if you will not let me destroy the cat carrier, let me destroy the car. or destroy the vet. -apples”

Thanks @commaok.xyz for hosting @michael.express and I to talk about a fun bug in Go’s new Green Tea GC and the tools we used to investigate. sigpod.dev/6

I just watched a nine minute video about a vacuum cleaner product launch and I would do it again. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve6J...

Internet Roadtrip is my favorite thing on the internet right now—it’s basically Twitch Plays Google Street View. They started in Boston, spent several weeks on a quest to cross the Canadian border, and are now exploring New Brunswick. neal.fun/internet-roa...

New short blog post: Backoff-with-retry can be much simpler. commaok.xyz/post/simple-... Also, maybe peek at commaok.xyz/post/blog-sc....

Bay Area Gophers: Come to the Go meetup on May 27! lu.ma/fn57nlhh?tk=... (I'll be giving a short talk. But you should come anyway.)

Short story brigade: On Hope, by Spencer Holst. www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/holst_s...

My 7yo, on the way to school this morning: “Do you use the Oxford comma?” So grateful for these teachable moments and the opportunity to raise my kids right.

If you are interested in an easy recipe for a merge queue, sans code review, this is my favorite so far: sketch.dev/blog/lightwe...

I find it rather telling that in ai-2027.com the last humans to have irreplaceable skills are...AI researchers.

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?" (Pride and Prejudice)

We keep finding cups of sugar hidden around the house. With straws in them. We disappear them and move the bag of sugar. Our 7yo never says a word. Anyone know where to buy a food-grade 5 gallon buckets with padlocks?

A cheap, bare bones, fully electric truck. I’m in. www.theverge.com/electric-car...

Bought chili lime crickets on a lark. Opened the bag. Brain says go ahead…but hand is like, yeah nope, can’t fool me, those are bugs, we don’t eat bugs. (Verdict: not bad, really.)

4 weeks to the day after a software update bricked our car, it is functional again.

I have a problem. I will use a crowbar! Now I have lots of problems.

New blog post, on being polite to LLMs: commaok.xyz/post/manners/

Waymo in 3 years: Our route today takes us through a sponsored drivethrough restaurant, but don’t worry, ordering is optional.

The strawberry problem is alive and well.

The dealer: > It looks like the car does not want to communicate with the scan tools we have. It is probably going to be a few more days here. The update may have taken out one of your computer modules. I vacillate between annoyance, amusement, and a sort of self-schadenfreude.

A software update yesterday bricked our car. It’s getting towed to the dealer now. Computers were a mistake.

I wonder whether LLMs trained now will someday be queried extensively by historians trying to understand the 2020s. Weirdest "primary source document" I can imagine, and yet...

Filed a Go proposal: after 'go test ./...' fails, tell me _which_ tests failed, not just the single word "FAIL". github.com/golang/go/is...

Blogged about some of the recent git shenanigans we've been up to (technical, weedy): sketch.dev/blog/jagged-...

New thing I helped make: Have AI resolve your merge/rebase conflicts. Still pretty new/raw/unpolished/buggy, but: merde.ai

Why don’t thermostats accept a temperature range instead of a single number?

My favorites of the books I read in 2024, alphabetical by author, commentary in thread: * Nick Harkaway. Titanium Noir. * Halldór Laxness. Independent People. * Hilary Mantel. A Place of Greater Safety. * Timothy Snyder. On Tyranny. * Adrian Tchaikovsky. Children of Time.

Some people ask for examples so they can understand better. Other people ask for examples so they can prove you wrong.

Are there OSS licenses that mean “BSD/MIT except for training machine learning models”?

Hello, promising-looking GitHub repo, what secrets do you hold for me? $ cat run.sh #!/bin/bash $ Good, good.

8yo: "The chickens got out!" 5yo: "Let's catch them!" 8yo: "OK! You climb up that tree, and I'll scare them over to you, and then you drop down and grab them." What could go wrong?