happy new year

It is surprisingly hard to get computers to do addition with decimals the way a third-grader can. adding floats gives things like 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004 graffitiwall.nexus/graffiti_add...

My Magnificent Adding Machine app has gotten a glow up. graffitiwall.nexus - no floating point weirdness - a bit of amateur web design - timing info - a beefy database behind it I won't say unbreakable, but harder to accidentally break.

my book comes out in precisely a month! it's a practical guide to how to use AI for those who hate the way it's being shoved down everyone's throats but who also know that, every once in a while, it's handy

Do you have a New Year's Resolution to learn SQL? Check out my book! sqlfordatascientists.com

I’ve been intimidated by Postgres for a long time, but now that I’ve got it working I feel kind of silly. It's powerful so I expected to have a painful installation---building from source and modifying env variables---but it turns out Postgres is built to be used. brandonrohrer.com/postgres_int...

A long time SQLite user, I’m using my own Postgres server for the first time and having a real “I know kung fu” moment

me: no need for code hygiene or documentation. I’m the only one who’s ever going to see it. 3- days-from-now-me: what asshole wrote this

seeking database opinions It's a wild swing, but does anyone have experience with a database that 1. handles concurrency well 2. is a columnar store 3. is open source Here is list of 2 with 3, but doesn't help with 1. en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...

Post those buns!

Live with the confidence of someone who starts their version numbering at 1.0

Which LLM is backing this?! It was able to crack 17!

I'm unironically proud to show off my web app graffitiwall.nexus It will add two numbers for you. Whatever numbers you want.

i set up my own personal music server and got my website to display some of my scrobbles and suddenly i've gotten ambitious about being able to code again 😂

“Librarian” is the most punk rock profession. Even more so than “punk rocker”.

New post: Moving your code from prototype to production brandonrohrer.com/hosting8.html So you wrote a cool little weather app that predicts temperatures in your neighborhood. Now you want to be able to share those predictions with everyone of the thousand people who live there.

The longer I look at this the more I snort laugh

You know how you always wish there was a dedicated server waiting to add two numbers together for you? Wait no more. try in your browser graffitiwall.nexus/add?a=56.03&... the results will amaze you

I suppose the list of things Sam Altman cannot imagine is quite long

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

I believe eigen fly. I believe eigen touch the sky.

bring it

You’re not weak, you’re exhausted. Even the most badass dump truck stalls when it runs out of gas. Get you some gas.

You know what to do baby ❤️

A thread of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that look like record covers... because that's EXACTLY what the world needs 1. Huey Lewis and the News: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Got a domain name for a new project so I’m basically half done

New post on the guilty pleasures of triple mode redundancy. Why build one when you can build three at triple the cost? Just because you *can* do something, doesn't mean you should. But if it might be fun, go ahead and give it a whirl. brandonrohrer.com/hosting7.html

When you write something down, you literally manifest it into reality. What was ephemeral thought becomes molecules of ink on paper. It becomes physical, an artifact that you can keep or share. I’m not prone to magical thinking, but something important happens when you do that.

GitHub spiking on downdetector means snowday

I SEE SNOWFLAKES!!! REPEAT BOSTON HAS SNOWFLAKES!!!

The correlation between niceness and trustworthiness is zero. The scatterplot is a cloud.

“you can never read the same documentation twice” in the sense of “you can never step in the same river twice”

“Back to Basics” in a title clickbait for me. And this coming out of the lab of Kaiming He, who helped build the foundations of pre-llm neural networks. It feels pure.

I've been writing a weekly essay for a while now. Tech, culture, the stuff that keeps me up at night. People seem to like it. It's free to subscribe: www.joanwestenberg.com

* googling six seven * How do you do, fellow kids?

New Post: Autoblocking bots and scrapers in your server brandonrohrer.com/hosting6.html This one also comes with code: codeberg.org/brohrer/webs...

the gift for the one who has everything

Little known fact. This is how @johnathan.bsky.social and I write our newsletter every two weeks.

#NaNoWriMo tip for breaking writers block - write the most profane version you possibly can. F-bombs every other word. Make it filthy. If you run out of content, just string together swears.

The Offal Office

One of the huge perks of working at a software company is, when there's something about the product that bothers you personally, you can get your hands dirty and find out why it's basically impossible to get fixed

When @mittechreviewbr.bsky.social is calling out the emperor’s lack of clothing, the game is almost over www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/30/1...

Those of you who've followed me long enough may know that I don't keep my birds in cages. And at some point I start to let them out. They may choose not to come back, but that's a risk I am willing to take if they're ready to live "on their own". This one came back today.

that's why i made this script to automatically let me know when things break. but of course that could fail too, so there's another system that notifies me if *that* breaks. but of course that could fail, so...

Automation doesn’t guarantee that the thing won’t break. Automation only guarantees that when the thing does break you won’t be watching.

a like on a skeet about a green checkmark must be INTENSE

I thought a social media like was a good dopamine hit but goddamn a green checkmark on a pipeline build step is the real shit

On the one hand, I often feel like I'm just writing the same blog post over and over again. On the other hand, I feel like the resilience engineering concepts I'm writing about still have yet to be widely disseminated in our industry.

A deeply insightful post in which Lorin reprises his role as Cassandra. The curse of the systems thinker.

white house has joined bluesky click here to block all official us government accounts instantly bsky.app/profile/did:...