Wrote a short bit on how thankful I am for the good parts of the internet, and some questions I have about how to amplify it and ensure it carries on https://notes.billmill.org/link_blog/2025/11/Essentially_Contested_Concepts.html

For #caturday, here's my cat and our neighbor cat looking for things to kill in the same yard

Dug into an issue that's been bugging me where Firefox won't load parquet files into duckdb Turns out that if you make a request with both a `Range` header and `accept-encoding: gzip` to github pages, it returns you a range of the gzipped file, which is of course invalid Firefox probably […]

Chesterton's fence-paralysis is when you have so much respect for the reasons that your predecessors put something into place that you never change anything

Got my Lichess blitz rating back over 1800 for the first time in a while (I never study, just play for kicks, so it fluctuates pretty randomly)

Federation is dumb but data ownership is not

This weekend I took a hike up Mt Osceola with my family, it was a great hike on a lovely day. Attached is the view northwards to Mt. Washington. It was my boys' first 4000 foot hike in the Whites, and they did great. I wanted to put up a photo gallery for my […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

I love how aggressively my office plant reaches for the sun

every six months or so, I have to listen to every Fiona Apple album back to back

It's very easy to disincentivize people from doing the careful work of making this work *well* and instead focus on churning out features

This squirrel on my neighbor’s roof has been shouting all morning and I would like it to stop If you’ve never heard squirrels shout, consider yourself lucky.

"OK, I'm overthinking things, let me simplify" followed by several thousand lines of overthinking

I'm feeling really feckful today

reading kafka release notes reminds me of the predicament of its namesake

Somehow got "every sperm is sacred" stuck in my head this morning, brains are so very weird https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk

I biked to my favorite lunch spot today to enjoy a burrito before summer ends Meanwhile, federal secret police are active in my town sneaking into school parking areas and kidnapping parents of my son's classmates I don't have a lot of ideas for how to deal with that

I didn’t really want to see the time I guess It’s actually bizarre they shipped this #ios26

Computer Anonymous Portland has been meeting up for more than 12 years and it was still nice to see people tonight, people who have been coming the whole time and new faces

Really enjoyed a pair of articles from the same author via lobste.rs: - https://www.seangoedecke.com/invalid-states/ - https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-engineering/ Wrote a short response in the link blog […]

TIL how to disable Gatekeeper from running on your terminal (slowing down compilation) by adding it to the "Developer Tools" panel in system preferences: https://notes.billmill.org/computer_usage/mac_os/Avoiding_gatekeeper_in_your_terminal.html I wasn't able to find a way to script it, which is […]

OpenTelemetry is conceptually simple, but the tooling is universally bewildering

On spotify, the artist Ka is the 31st search result for "Ka" (yes, yes I know spotify is bad)

Web scrapers are using random real sites as referrers in the hope of avoiding blocks. I was wondering where all the hits from the Guardian and Edmunds were coming from

GitHub's new PR review interface is not fit for purpose; on an even moderately large PR it's incredibly unresponsive, bordering on totally unusable. I'm on a fast computer here too, really impressive inefficiency on display

I got to open Wireshark today, what a vital tool to have in your toolbelt for a web dev. It's one of those tools that helps turn your computer inside-out and give you a peek under the hood, so satisfying

I just showed my kids some homestar runner for the first time and my older son nearly choked on his dessert he was laughing so hard

Iosevka Term is the greatest terminal font of all time, I am now thoroughly convinced. I switched to the fira code custom version and it's fantastic, lovely and condensed https://typeof.net/Iosevka/customizer

Hiked 19 miles in the White Mountains yesterday, up Mt. Madison and all the way across the presidential range to Mt. Pierce. Very intense experience; I didn't take many pictures because we didn't have a lot of time to stop and gawk, but here are a few I like […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

I have an AI code review script that I've found very valuable, so I cleaned it up a bit for release and wrote about it and how I use it: https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2025/07/An_AI_tool_I_find_useful.html It catches enough errors for me that I rarely submit a change without running the code […]

at Glacier national park for a work retreat. Pretty spectacular scenery. First one is avalanche lake from a beautiful 8-mile run, second one down the Lake Mcdonald valley, third one from a trail run behind our hotel. I forgot the bear spray for that run but thankfully was not eaten by a grizzly

I wrote a little bit about the value of not making libraries, and wondering if we ought to do more to support "toolboxes" of code https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2025/07/A_pretty_decent_retry__and_not_a_library.html

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings did a fantastic Tiny Desk concert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfGdjdxxOuU I used the opportunity to update my giant list of Tiny Desks I have enjoyed: https://notes.billmill.org/music/Tiny_Desk_concerts.html diff here […]

I made a little script for downloading full albums from youtube with yt-dlp which properly sets file metadata, which is pretty fiddly to do I use it for grabbing music to put on my kids' music players. https://github.com/llimllib/personal_code/blob/master/homedir/.local/bin/yt-album

Code remains liquid at room temperature for like a month. After that you need re-heat it to work on it again

There's an article going around today about downloading youtube videos and sending them to ai for transcription. The whisper transcription model is really fast and runs great on most computers! You probably don't need to send your video to openAI, you can transcribe it locally just as quickly […]

Lunch at my favorite spot on a hot day. Maine's summer is unbeatable

Nix is a hair shirt for unix ascetics to wear and its language the cat o' nine tails to thrash themselves with

Some people tried to tell me that a modern open source project should set up an IRC server, so I gave it a try today: - There's no clear client to use - A server which promises channel history without a bouncer didn't deliver any channel history, and I have no idea why - Users have to choose […]

Following a conversation I had on a private Slack, I wrote a little bit about why I think federation is mostly a waste: https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2025/06/Federation_is_extremely_expensive.html Part of the reason why I think I *had* that conversation on Slack instead of on an open chat […]

TIL that GitHub has an option to change all input boxes to a monospaced font: https://github.com/settings/appearance I wish I had known this years ago!

My watch buzzes to warn me my heart rate is too high, which of course is stressful and counterproductive

It was easier than I expected to set up geocoding locally using OSM data and nominatim. I wrote up the steps I took: notes.billmill.org/gis/geocodin...

Sometimes you get to write fun stuff plausibly for work

I love the idea of curating cursed knowledge, I've gathered so much in my life but not recorded it https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge/ ht @Crell @gvwilson

That feeling when you get a letter from the IRS... open it in terror and find out it tells you you're getting money back pure distilled relief

your PR description should explain why you made every single change in the PR, future you will appreciate the completeness because you won't remember why you changed that simple thing

> I’ve been havin' visions of Nat Turner holdin' his master’s head > Like Yorick and Horatio in Hamlet > Smackin' it like a tennis racket, underhanded - Black Thought my favorite line from the greatest freestyle of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prmQgSpV3fA

love to upgrade one package and have a 15,000 line package-lock.json change, good system we've got going here

My relief at seeing this graph is so deep

Hop Along's "Painted Shut" came out 10 years ago: https://open.spotify.com/album/7bR9KYRb6jfhlle5Y9U4BD?si=jm0YWi9yQjyvBMekdz0Siw One of my perfect albums for sure. Completely unique vocal delivery, great variety, strong writing