Bryan Cantrill returns in the wake of Oxide Computer Company's $100M Series B. Bryan tells us how he's avoiding an appearance on Silicon Valley (ding), why their uniform compensation is working, where Oxide fits in the AI datacenter, what scaling to 50+ rack orders looks like, and more. (GitHub has no CEO and saving Intel)++

{{ post_description }} So I started this blog last year, then got too busy and gave up. Over the last couple of months I've been looking at other blogging platforms just to see what's out there so I can start again. I wanted something that's hosted for me, simple to use, not too opinionated, and allows me to bring my own CSS. Folks, I tried like 10 different tools and all of them failed in at least 1 of my requirements. The only one that passed all of them was good old, Bear Blog. It also has the added fun of a cool way of getting our content discovered. So why the hell did I waste time looking at other tools? I dunno, because it's fun I guess. 🤷‍♂️ Anyway, I signed up for a lifetime license and I'm here, ready to do this blogging thing again. So expect more rants, more opinions, more of me moaning about my life, work and everything else. Actually, just more of me. God help you all! Peace ✌🏻 Reply by email  ( 2 min )

There's something I love about opening a text-only webpage. They're a refuge from the GDPR cookie banners, the trashy ads, the email opt-ins, and the god-forsaken auto-play video. A text-only webpage is clean. It's readable. It's fast and it's simple. The page is just made of text, so it's infinitely reproducible. You can paste the whole thing into an email to a friend. You can put it in ChatGPT to ask questions. Hell—you can post the whole thing on X and pretend you wrote it! You can read it right there, or you can send it to Kindle, save it to Matter, or print it on real-life paper. It's going to work everywhere because it's just text. If you click on a link, it loads lightning fast. It doesn't need a CDN or to pre-load on hover. Hosting text is so cheap it often doesn't have to be monetized. The entire website could be running off a Raspberry Pi. When you're reading, you can skim if you're bored, and then slow down to a crawl when you want to savor the words. You never ever come out of a haze, guilty after reading text for hours. So thank you to everybody who writes and publishes text-only webpages. You've probably lost some engagement by keeping things so clean, but you're contributing to a simple, calm, and happier internet. And I love it.  ( 4 min )

Being in the parking lot of a shopping center next to a stroad in some nondescript suburb When people at networking events do that thing where they very obviously size me up to see if they think connecting with me would benefit their career Country pop music That calligraphy font that everyone uses at weddings (I banned it from my own wedding and that made it weirdly difficult to find decorations!) When I'm at the airport and a previously closed security lane opens up and I'm too far back to go to it and everyone in front of me just stares at it like ??? Squished rat in the alley When I just got into bed and am all comfy cozy and then I realize I forgot to brush my teeth AI art tarot decks Anyone talking about disliking cats Going into a Walmart  ( 2 min )

Dr. Ewelina Kurtys is leading the way in biocomputing at FinalSpark where she is working on the next evolutionary leap for AI and neuron-powered computing. It's a brave new world, just 10 years in the making. We discuss lab-grown human brain organoids connected to electrodes, the possibility to solve AI's massive energy consumption challenge, post-silicon approach to computing, biological vs quantum physics and more.

There are some conversations I’d give anything to hear again. Not because I’ve forgotten the words, but because I want to feel the moment they were spoken: the air in the room, the weight in my chest, the way time seemed to slow down. The last one I had with my grandmother is etched into my memory with the kind of clarity that comes when you know you’re living a goodbye. In August 2014, I flew halfway across the world to see her. Our visits were rare due to life, and distance, but she was rarely far from my thoughts. She was, without a doubt, one of my favorite human beings in this world. Outside of her declining health, she had recently took a tumble, and we knew we were running out of time. This particular trip wasn’t for catching up or eating my favorite home cooked meal by her... it wa…  ( 7 min )

When I go to visit my parents, on the way home I usually get a slice of pizza from this pizza shop that's in the train station there. They sell these incredibly greasy pizza slices that, as far as I know, are just sitting there out in the open the whole day, being kept slightly warm the whole time. I usually go for this slice that I don't really think I'm even entirely equipped to describe. It's like, 90% cheese. Just an entire layer of cheese. I don't think there's even like, tomato sauce or anything below it - with the cheese layer probably being at least half as thick as the actual crust of the pizza. On that cheese layer there's pieces of kebab meat. Which kind? Who knows lol. Above that is some sort of mystery sauce that i think might be hollandaise, but I honestly have no idea. Anyways, I'm not gonna beat around the bush here: It's the highlight of my trip every time. It's like the platonic ideal of shitty pizza - and I honestly mean that in the best possible way. It's peak comfort food for me. Sometimes you just need some bad pizza. And, that's it honestly. I don't really have some grand message to pivot into here, some underlying argument. Sometimes you just wanna exercise your free will to talk about some shitty pizza. So, thank you to the people running that pizza place. I appreciate it.  ( 3 min )

When you are younger, it is almost suspiciously easy to make friends. You sit next to someone in school, or you both get assigned to the same team for kickball, and suddenly you are inseparable. There is no scheduling, no “let’s find a time that works,” no weighing how much social energy you have left for the week. You just... hang out. As an adult, most new friendships come from work. You see the same people every day, go to team lunches together, complain about the meeting that should've been an email, and before you know it, you have formed some sort of friendship. But when you work from home full time, that pipeline basically dries up. Unless you are ready to take a random hobby class, join a running club, or walk up to a stranger in a bar1 and say hello, you are left wondering where e…  ( 10 min )

This is part 3 of a 3 part series on digital hygiene. I suggest starting at part 1. Whenever I watch heist movies, I always roll my eyes at the "hacker" character. They can consistently hack building's camera system; or download the contents of a target's phone for use later in the heist. They also manage to hack the bank, which questions the need for a heist in the first place. While there are real-world programatic attack vectors that can be exploited, they're generally opportunistic. When a new vulnerability has been discovered, nefarious actors try to exploit it at scale before it’s patched. The chances of finding and executing a "hack" on the spot (via bluetooth or something equally ridiculous) is highly unlikely. Although, I digress. The most common vulnerability is significantly mor…  ( 7 min )

Heya! So, as you might know, I've been using gmail since starting this blog. Honestly, the reason for that was just pure lazyness. I have the gmail app on my phone and can't uninstall it because it came with the thing. I know, it kinda sucks. Anyways, thats why I was using gmail. I've been meaning to switch for a while because its really really not great to voluntarily give google more data. I've been too lazy to do that for a while now, but today I actually sat down and pulled the trigger. You can now reach me at kami@kamiscorner.xyz! I know, fancy custom email. I will still check my old gmail ocassionally and try and see if i cant get all mails auto forwarded from there to my new adress. We'll see. Anyways, thanks for reading!  ( 2 min )

Though I hope to post about literally anything else moving forward, I think it's only fitting that the beginning of a new era for me start by paying respects to the prior one. Paladins was so many things to me: a formative video game, my first solo CM job, my first design role, and above all the outlet for my passion. Every day working at Evil Mojo was one spent pouring who I was and wanted to be into this misunderstood gem of a project. From the moment I started my internship at HiRez, I had begged to be placed on Paladins. It's not that I didn't enjoy SMITE or their other titles but instead was because I knew at my core it was the best fit. The community it had built over years of living at the most niche of intersections between fantasy, hero shooters, and build crafting spoke both to m…  ( 7 min )

Extremely silly mood and admission: I’m mildly annoyed when I see so many others online stressing about changing hosters, tools and more. Completely ridiculous feeling to have, because that doesn’t even affect me at all. It’s not my life, so why am I getting annoyed by others constantly switching up their tools and services and talking about it? It’s just another link to follow, a new look, a new navigation, or them using another software to organize. Whatever, no problem! Some of it is even interesting! So? I might just be tired of watching so many people struggle and run in circles right next to each other, believing the next thing will finally be just right. I see many people on this side of the web praise one thing as the thing to beat them all, the thing that finally “feels right”, th…  ( 8 min )

You know, sometimes I like to reflect on my past, and see what things I've accomplished across the years, like doing art! and making it somewhat possible of a thing I can do for a living! that's neat isn't it? Yet, sometimes I get reminded of my mistakes, of my errors, and they always hurt... But it's fine, I'm smiling as I know I'll get through them like I did before. Even then, whenever I remember them they feel... too real. Like I'm reliving them again. Like the times I was bullied in school, I was made a joke of for most of it, and I still remember their laughs. I tried to join in the fun of it, but at the end of the day I was just a clown not fitting at all in that group. But hey, I'm smiling, clowns gotta smile! don't you remember? (Even if that bullying ruined my school progression …  ( 3 min )

This post is a tribute to Anas al-Sharif, one of the most prominent Palestinian journalists in Gaza, who was killed by a targeted Israeli strike on a tent for journalists near al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on 10 August 2025. Six more people were killed in the strike, including the Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa. It is also a tribute to the hundreds of journalists and doctors that have been killed for standing by their moral duty to carry out their jobs in the face of Israel's deliberate targeting. Anas al-Sharif's was a death foretold, as forcefully argued by the Committee to Protect Journalists. I am posting below his posthumous message on X in homage and to preserve it. The emphasis is mine. May his words …  ( 4 min )

There’s no other way to put it. We have all heard about the male loneliness epidemic. The proof is everywhere. We are the proof. We are the reason, we are lonely. Not women, not social media, not dating apps or anything else we like to blame and cope. My closest guy friends are my co-founders, istg. It’s sad af but we are all boring nerds who’d rather be coding than partying on weekends. Or it could be a sign we are getting older. Anyhow, I digress. Apart from them, my closest friends are women, always been. I can name more than one occasion where a girl (space) friend of mine told me some guy asked her out because she was there for him after a breakup. The moment a woman shows the slightest bit of empathy, we bois pathetically fall in love. Why? Because we're fucking starved for affection…  ( 3 min )

This is my first post and I just wanted to say hi. I've been looking for a way to share my language learning journey, and BearBlog seems just perfect for that. It's so nice to rest from the AI crap, even if just for a moment. I've been struggling to find an online community to share my passion. I don't do big tech social media. The old school forums are dead. In the era of global connectivity I feel more disconnected than ever. Don't we all. So I'm really looking forward to growing this little static, undisturbed, refreshingly calm online place. And I'm quite excited to be a part of this community. Nice to meet you all.  ( 2 min )

If you follow me on Bluesky, it's probably not a secret to you that I have not enjoyed the newest Magic set. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of the cards individually, and I greatly enjoy the story and art of this set, but one of the main ways I engage with Magic is playing Limited, and this set is one of the worst draft formats I've played in a long time. I'm not alone in complaining about this; I think overall sentiment on the draft environment is that it's below average to bad. A notable datum here is that 17lands' users have a worse winrate than usual with this format, but the players who usually win less are doing even worse. This is explained by three factors: The format robs players of some skill expression by overall having more non-games, as the mana fixing and card flow is quite…  ( 5 min )

So, I was looking at my statistics a while ago, and I saw the apparently I have one pageview from someone using Yandex Browser? Honestly, I didnt even know Yandex had a browser. I think it's kind funny, the things you discover by just looking at some stats. On that note, there's a few other interesting things going on in my analytics. Apparently my posts have been linked on someones patreon multiple times. Alas, it doesn't say which patreon. I'm also apparently part of some weird AI generated podcast? I'd ask them to remove me from the feed they use to generate their podcast episodes, but I just don't really care enough, honestly. I mean, who would willingly subject themselves to AI podcasts about random unrelated tech topics anyways? I've also got one or two mentions on a colorful assortment of various fediverse social media. And a bunch of online rss feed readers. I might make a review of all the feed readers people use to read my stuff at some point in the future, that'd be fun. Apparently I also have a couple pageviews from AndroidBrowser. Which, I think, is the built-in webview thing that android has? Curious how the heck that happened, pretty sure that usually gets overwritten by chrome or whatever other browser is default. I've also apparently got a couple views from people on chromeOS. So, yeah. Its fun seeing some of the unexpectedly weird stuff thats in my analytics. It's probably one of my favorite bear features, honestly. If you're reading this using the Yandex Browser, email me. I want to examine your brain. And convince you to switch to Firefox. But mostly that first thing. So, uh... Thanks for reading! If your stats are as weird as mine, tell me about it! Or don't. But y'know, I'd appreciate it.  ( 3 min )

I spend an inordinate amount of time merely contemplating time. I don’t inhabit the present as fully as I want to. Too often, I’m only partially here, while my mind runs two parallel loops: one assesses if I have used my time well, the other wonders if now is the right time to begin at all. They are ponderous with judgement and reluctance: Was this day productive enough? Did I waste too much of it? Could I have done more, been better? Should I start now or wait until I am more prepared, more deserving of this moment? What I didn't realize is how these two mindsets feed each others. The more I scrutinize the past, the more I hesitate to act in the present - out of fear of future regret. The more I wait for the right moment, the more I look back and ruefully wonder why I didn't start sooner. It's a perpetual cycle rooted in the same quiet fear that I might misuse the only time I have. And yet, in a strange paradox, it's in trying too hard to guard this time that I am losing it. Now, I am actively trying to approach time differently, to stop treating it like a scarce commodity. Time is not a currency: it can't be saved or invested for later. It will move with or without my permission. The present is always here, steady and waiting, and I should soak in it before it's gone.  ( 2 min )

📌 This is part 2 of what might end up being a 3-part series on our San Francisco Elopement. If you haven’t yet, I’d recommend starting with part 1 about our photographer, Zoe Larkin. Photos by: Zoe Larkin I never wanted an extravagant wedding. The idea of standing in front of a crowd with all eyes on me made me anxious. Planning something big turned me into a bundle of nerves. I wanted quick, simple, and easy. There were days I joked with LC that I’d be perfectly happy just picking up the marriage certificate and calling it a day. That all changed after we hired Zoe. Once we had someone documenting the elopement, suddenly everything needed to be perfect (as it should). The first order of business? Hair and makeup. How I Found My Hair & Makeup Artist Signing with Rebecca, Founder of Shine…  ( 8 min )

I'm a vegetarian. Don't worry, I'm not pushy about it. But I do think it's cool when people want to eat less meat, even if it's just doing meatless Mondays or something. If you're veg-curious, here are some recipes I like a lot (all very much loved by my omnivore husband!) Crispy Buffalo Cauliflower Bites I've tried a lot of buffalo cauliflower recipes, and I find that this one comes out the crispiest! Vegan Tofu Taco Crumbles I find this recipe pretty bland as written, so I use a lot more cumin and cayenne than they suggest. I just kind of eyeball it. Easy Vegetable Biryani I really like adding roasted chickpeas to this one! Potato Hash with Peppers, Onions and Soyrizo I find that I generally need to cook the potatoes for about 5 minutes longer than the recipe suggests. Slow Cooker Enchilada Quinoa This one is so incredibly easy, love to just dump a bunch of stuff in a crock pot and then have a delicious dinner several hours later.  ( 2 min )

The problem I have dabbled with keeping journals in the past, but I've never managed to continue it for more than a year. The pattern is always the same: I struggle to write in the journal with any regularity, and sooner or later, I fall out of the journaling habit entirely. My problem is not that I run out of enthusiasm, but that I have trouble maintaining a reasonable scope for my entries. Completionist impulses are my downfall. I'm prone to being too thorough – I want to record every event, document every detail, and capture every worthwhile thought from the day in service of compiling a meaningful chronicle of the life I've lived. But, as a logistical matter, this approach has proven untenable. Writing entries in that maximalist style takes hours. Eventually the task of recording a new…  ( 9 min )

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #8 2025 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/660761d6-862d-43a1-9fb4-955d4e3e1066 Tue Aug 12 1900 CET London Emacs (in person): M-x drinks https://www.meetup.com/london-emacs-hacking/events/310360735/ Tue Aug 12 1830 Europe/London OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Aug 13 0900 America/Vancouver - 1100 America/Chicago - 1200 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1800 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Aug 14 0000 Asia/Singapore M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Aug 20 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs…  ( 4 min )

Open source maintainers share their regrets, Thomas Dohmke steps down as GitHub CEO, James Kettle breaks down HTTP/2 from a security perspective, PHP is getting the pipe operator this November, and a class action copyright suit threatens Anthropic and the rest of the AI industry.

Just last year, my colleague and I were called into the principal’s office (we’re teachers by the way, not students sent in for trouble 😂). She wanted to give us some feedback on our Sports Day programme, which we were planning for the following week. When we walked out of the office, my colleague looked at me, clearly upset, and said, “I don’t get how you put up with the principal.” “What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled. The principal had given perfectly logical feedback. Nothing unreasonable at all. “She’s always so rude and blunt. It feels like we’re just robots doing her bidding. There’s not even a simple acknowledgement of our efforts!” Then it clicked in my head. Nothing seemed wrong to me because the principal and I had the same working style, we were both Thinkers. We can be... a …  ( 6 min )

Just random snaps from today. I swapped my Ricoh GRIIIx for my Fuji X100V as my daily carry today. It’s been a while since I’ve used the X100V, and I’ve missed it so much. First we went to our monthly dachshund meet-up -- photos of said dachshunds not included. We took some photos (of each other). Then I took photos from the sunroof of a moving car. ...and saw a fruit stand with no humans around. The End.  ( 5 min )

I read only one Bear Blog with regularity. There are some that I check every so often and am sure to catch up on (if by some chance they read this, they know who they are haha, keep up the good work), but only one that I check every day. I will not be telling you which blog that is. On the small chance that anyone reads this, I don't think they would want me to be directing additional traffic to their posts. Their posts are personal. And small. And that's what I enjoy about them. That they seem to post here, almost as if there is no audience, even theoretically. Occasionally I do upvote their posts, so they must know that someone is reading them, even if they don't check their analytics. Or maybe they never look at their past posts to see if they even got upvoted. In which case, they may not think that anyone is reading. But I am. And I enjoy them. Most posts aren't memorable, but there's been an occasional post that has a line or a topic that really resonates with me. No real point to this post. Just something that I wanted to share. Yours Truly, [Redacted]  ( 2 min )

I'm turning 42 years old this month. I've been thinking about my annual review for a few days now. It's a good opportunity to take a step back. I often lose sight of the big picture in the day-to-day routines of life with a 9-year-old, but it's encouraging to see progress build up slowly. Parenting is still my primary activity, but I want to sketch out some things to think about over the next year in case I can nudge my life in those directions. These notes might also help my future self travel back in time and remember what it was like. My previous yearly posts cover almost all of the past 21 years. (Half my life! How different I am now, and still how much I can recognize from those days.) By month A+'s growing independence More time with W- because of retirement More predictable foc…  ( 190 min )

You close the refrigerator door at 6 AM and decide not to open it until tomorrow. The hum of the compressor fills the silence. Your stomach gurgles its mild protest. This is what agency sounds like: the click of a voluntary boundary, the calm satisfaction of choosing your own constraints. Apparently, you're the kind of person who finds power in saying no to perfectly good cheese-and-meat poetry. When you choose to fast, you're conducting an experiment with your own machinery. The metabolic switch flips from glucose to fat, from immediate fuel to stored reserves. Your brain shifts into a different gear — sharper, quieter, less cluttered by the constant background noise of digestive processing. This is voluntary darkness: closing the shutter to make the picture clear. But scarcity will eithe…  ( 6 min )

Today is apparently National Book Lovers Day -- a holiday I didn’t know existed until I saw a post about it on Noelle’s blog. As someone who is very much a book lover, I couldn’t not write about it. So, here we are. Books have always been my portal to other worlds and lives, and one of the main reasons why I was so sleep-deprived as a child. I never needed any encouragement to read more. When schools and restaurants rolled out the Book It! program, offering a personal pan pizza for reading a set number of books, I happily accepted the free pizza. But even without the incentive, I still read. This was before e-books, when I had to wait months for a reserved library book to be available, especially the popular ones everyone wanted (back in the days when Harry Potter wasn’t cancelled). In the…  ( 6 min )

I think it's great that people can make a living posting cool stuff online. But I also think we lost something along the way. People started making "content". It's now, more than ever, accepted to treat art as something consumable and easily replaceable. It's how we got into the whole gen ai mess we're currently still living through. It's a sentiment I occasionally see on bearblog as well. For all the high budget, high effort, well produced and polished videos i see on youtube, the most memorable video I've seen in the last few months was a short where a person made a basque cheesecake. It was recorded on their phone, without any editing or fancy camerawork with the only impulse for creating it being that someone in a comment section somewhere told them they should make a basque cheesecake…  ( 3 min )

A picture of Cocoa in one of her most favorite spots: in the car, on her booster. She likes having a direct line to the middle console so she can look out the front when she wants to take a break from her own backseat window. Although not a #throwbackThursday post, this photo was taken in 2022 -- and those brown spots are now slowly turning gray 😔  ( 5 min )

Gerhard calls Kaizen 20, 'The One Where We Meet'. Rightfully so. It's also the one where we eat, hike, chat, and launch Pipely live on stage with friends.

Bs in Blueberry There were screenshots of a classic LLM issue floating around Bluesky after the GPT-5 launch yesterday, and I asked GPT-5 myself to confirm. Sam Altman touted GPT-5 as a “PhD level expert in your pocket”, but this PhD doubled down on incorrectly answering the oldest trick for LLMs in the book. When GPT-4 launched, I (and many others) believed that GPT-5's launch would be the “AGI moment”. Cherry picking “bs in blueberry” as a failure of the model and declaring that AGI is never coming is stupid. But it leads to doubts. And there was something else in the keynote that was quite a bit more disturbing. Custom Colors for ChatGPT Threads “We’re now allowing you to customize the colors of your chats, with a couple of options exclusive to our paid subscribers” They admitted that…  ( 3 min )

Email threads have got to be one of the worst possible forms of communication. You've been here before. A perfectly respectable morning is passing by. You're working through your items at a chipper pace maybe humming a song you heard on Spotify that morning. Then, the dreaded email thread comes through. Innocently, you click into the top email. The only text is "[Your Name] see below." I hate this and I bet you do too. Suddenly, you're transported into absolute chaos. You're now a corporate archeologist and firefighter all in one. Forced to decode the two week long thread of baloney while being asked to complete some ambiguous task. Well, guess what? I don't read them, not anymore. If an email thread comes in that's longer than a few paragraphs, you're going straight to Copilot. It gets to decipher the weeks long back and forth bickering to get to what I need to know. Please, please - stop email threads. Emails: Written communication that needs to be documentable or a complex task Documentation (Confluence, Word, etc.): Repeatable process and procedures or recordings of key decisions IM (Teams, Slack, etc.): Actual communication Meetings: In the best possible way, arguing. If we meet and cannot possibly disagree, then it should have been an email. Save a vibe today and send an IM instead of an email thread.  ( 2 min )

As part of the #blaugust blogging month of August most people do an introduction in week 1. We are running out of days in the first week, so I think it is time to get to know me. Those who regularly read my blog (thank you) will know some or all of what follows, but there may be a nuget or two that is new. I tend to keep my online life quite generic and I don't share a lot of personal details, but enough to stimulate some interest in Me as a person, rather than a collection of words online. The Basics My name is David, my pronouns are he/him, I am currently 55 years young. In my head I am around 26 but the bag of bones insists I am mid-fifties. I was born in Scotland, and now live my life between Southern Scotland and Southern Spain. I float between the two regularly as my work-life …  ( 5 min )

With the rise of LLMs, I am seeing tech professionals blatantly skipping over the fundamentals. For example, in my world of data analytics, SQL is table stakes. Yet, I see people blindly trusting LLM outputs to develop SQL queries, without knowing how to explain or debug them. I am getting increasingly impatient about how people and organizations are using LLMs. I worry that we are being over sold on a promise that LLMs will magically make up for a lack of proficiency in an area. It can get you to the answer faster, but you still need to understand what is going on, if you want to pass it on as your work. As organizations try to integrate AI into their processes, I hope that the fundamentals are not forgotten. Maybe another industry of cleaning up vibe coded messes will be a thing? :-)  ( 2 min )

⚠️ I tried not to repeat some of the things I said in last year’s intro post, but some parts are inevitable because I haven’t changed that much. We’re a week into Blaugust, and I’ve been putting off writing this intro post for the past few days. I never like talking about myself, which is a little bit odd considering this blog is all about myself, but you know what I mean. Anyway, I figured it’s probably time I re-introduce myself, just in case you’ve stumbled here and are wondering who I am, and what this blog is about. That way, you’ll at least know what you’re getting into if you decide to keep reading or even -gasp- add me to your RSS reader of choice. I’m Jedda, but also known as JC (Probably?). I live in the Bay Area (California, in the US for those less familiar), and tend to write…  ( 6 min )

When I find myself shying away from writing again, I try to go back to my first few posts and remind myself of my reasons for starting. When I first began, I felt incredible: so creative! so excited! & so in touch with a piece of me that I thought had shriveled up and died. Still, life gets in the way and I am - unfortunately - highly susceptible to changes in momentum. It only takes a small stone underfoot to trip me up and send me tumbling back down the mountain of self-assurance, right into the pit of doubt. So, I've been thinking a lot about where the flinch comes in. I could write a hundred thousand posts about the long line of hurdles I place in front of myself in an effort to circumvent disappointment, but in the end it would just be another small way to stall: psychoanalyzing mysel…  ( 6 min )

There is apparently a thing people do where they blog every day in August. Similar to Weird Web October (which I wasn't able to keep up with lmao) or inktober or what have you, I guess. I am excited that some of the blogs I read regularly are trying to do Blaugust. I won't link to them directly because I don't want to add to the pressure, haha, but maybe I'll link to them later??? August is just getting started and people deserve a moment to get going, I think. I have been blogging every day since Cohost announced it was shutting down and I decided to start blogging again. I've already written once or twice about what that's like, but here's an update: I started off with a two-week queue that functioned as a very long, safe buffer for me. I kept this up for about 3-4 months before the queue finally depleted. I currently have very little queue and rarely have more than 2-5 posts in the hopper. Recently, in July, I was in a situation where every single day, I had to write the post for that day. I found that a little unpleasant. I often write multiple posts in advance on the same day when I'm feeling like I have a lot to say. This sometimes, but doesn't always, happen on weekends. I almost never write posts on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, which are my days that I'm Big Busy in my real life. Posting a link roundup one day a week is a great way to reduce the amount of work you have to do to blog every day. Presumably you have an RSS reader if you are the kind of freak who is trying to do this... just tag stuff you like in the reader and summarize it as you go. I build my Sunday link roundup posts bit by bit during the week. Weeks that I miss a chance to do the roundup are weeks where I was too busy to use my RSS reader very much. Enjoy blogging. It is great and good. You don't need to blog every day but I recommend doing it if you think you can. I want to see all your yammering. It's good to yammer. The more you yammer, I find, the more you have to say in general.  ( 4 min )

We're LIVE at the historic Oriental Theater in Denver, CO with Nora Jones. Nora is the founder of Jeli.io, recently acquired by PagerDuty and she's been shaping the way we think about reliability, incident response, and human-centered engineering for years. We get into the real story behind the deal. Not just the headline, but what it’s like selling your company, what it takes to actually integrate a product into a larger platform, how customers responded, what changed for her team, and why her new role at PagerDuty is basically everything she was building Jeli for.

In a previous incarnation on Bear blog, I wrote a couple of posts that ended up on the Discover Trending feed. One post even got up to number 5 on the top 20 page, and as you can imagine, the number of views for that post shot up. Also, the number of likes, or toasts as they call them here, was suddenly huge. (I am using huge there to describe a number more than 50, and once over 100, which was huge for me) But strangely perhaps to some, I wasn't properly comfortable each time it happened at all. I mean, it is thrilling at first—'Wow, people are reading, and liking it' and all that—but then the introverted, private and the not very social—possibly even paranoid—part of my brain pipes up. "Wow, loads of people are reading that, total strangers now know exactly what you are thinking. Are you…  ( 7 min )

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on digital hygiene. I suggest starting at part 1. Over the past few years I've cultivated a decent relationship with my phone. Not a good one, mind you, but one I'm fairly comfortable with. There is a part of me that yearns for a return to simple, black-and-white phones, with Internet access limited to whichever room in the house had the phone line and computer. But there's no going back; and so I had to find a way to live with the Internet (and the hyper-connectivity it entails) in my pocket. Developing a good relationship to your phone is an intentional process. It doesn't happen by accident. All apps and media, by design, are fighting for your attention. I've heard the term "attention economy" thrown around, and I feel like it's an apt description of th…  ( 5 min )

Previously, I wrote about stepping away from technology and escaping the pull of algorithms. But changing habits is harder than writing about them, and my previous attempts have been utter failures. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that these platforms are undeniably useful tools.YouTube has helped me learn music production. Reddit has pointed me toward better routines, ideas, and insights. But there is a fine line between using these platforms and being used by them, and that line is deliberately blurred as companies spent billions making sure it stays that way. Working in tech myself, I also feel the constant urge to keep up and stay informed, which only deepens the pull. The internet still holds value, but only when I treat it as a tool rather than a default place to pass time. There is no shortage of ideas on what activities to do instead of browsing - at least in theory. Making music, practicing instruments, reading, cooking, walking. But past attempts to change my habits were not mindful enough. I did not give my brain the space to adjust. Without the usual rush of stimulation, frustration quickly set in, and the old habits returned. This time I am starting smaller. The first step is cutting off internet access on my Mac after 22:00. If I want to work on music late into the evening, that is fine. But there is no reason to be online. The ancient Greeks said that night brings counsel. I hope the quiet helps me reflect. YouTube has also been stripped down using the Unhook extension. No Shorts. No comments. No recommendations. If I need something specific, I will search for it directly. I know this will not be perfect. I will probably still find ways to drift. But two steps forward and one step back is better than standing still. I am not aiming for a radical reset. Just small and sustainable shifts. I will check in again after a week. This is not about rejecting the internet. It is about reshaping how I relate to it. Less feed. More focus.  ( 3 min )

So, a couple of days ago I finally finished a blogpost I had been working on for a good while.1 When I published it, it got a total of two views. Bearblog is the first time I've actually been able to share what I write with an audience larger than just my immediate family. At first, I did actually care a lot about metrics. But I can't say I wasn't disappointed when a post got less toasts or did worse than my previous ones had. I think a lot of social media encourages this, in a sense. Likes, shares, views... They all give you that sweet, sweet dopamine, yknow? Humans love watching numbers go up. I should know, I finished cookie clicker. But, you also feel a bit of diminished self-worth when your new stuff isn't doing as good. That's inevitable, to some extent. At least I don't think most p…  ( 4 min )

Lately I've been trying, and failing, to think of what to say when I come back to this blog. I'm not leaving (I like blogging far too much!), but I have made myself rather scarce lately. But what is there to write about? The urge to write comes and goes. I didn't really have any moments that made me stop and think, I need to write about this later. But I started this as a daily life archive, and so it will be a daily life archive. I've been back home, real home, the past few days—and only a few days. I'm going back to the city soon to attend my first ever research conference! It took a lot of convincing my parents, a lot of logistics help from my friends, and a lot of money out of my bank account, but I'm finally going. I feel kind of bad for insisting so hard on it when it's such an inconvenience to take me back to the city, but I really, truly do want to go see how conference presentations work. I'll be working on my thesis soon since it's finally(!!) senior year in a few weeks, so I've been meaning to see for myself what the standards for presenting are. In the meantime, I've been spending lots and lots of time with my family. And my dogs. My mom found my childhood Bible last night and read out my answers to some of the fun pages. I think I did a pretty good job of pretending not to be embarrassed. Apparently I wanted to be a singer as a little kid, which honestly surprised me—it must've been written before I ever learned what self-consciousness was. I hope little Valentine is proud of me, now that I can say that I take every single gig I can for the love of the game. August really crept up on me, too. I still haven't decided if I want to join Blaugust again this year since I'll be busy as hell with the start of senior year, but I'll still try my best to come back here anyway. Here's to a fun August!  ( 3 min )

If you follow me and read this blog then you know that my most regular posts are weekly release lists which I do every Friday. Despite the amount of new music released every week and all the albums that line these humble blog posts, for some reason I am having difficulty recalling anything that has stuck with me at all this year. Usually at this point in the year I have a spreadsheet, or notes app page depending on how disorganised I was earlier in the year, with tens and tens of albums that I’ve really enjoyed throughout the year. All fighting for their place on my shortlist and then on to my albums of the year list which I post online (will be here this year) as well as on the Heavy Matters podcast end of year show. The problem though is that this year, already in to August, there is no such list. Granted I’ve listened to less albums in general but I’ve still been compiling the weekly release roundup, I’ve still been listening to new releases every week and yet I haven’t felt inspired enough by anything to keep a list and to keep revisiting stuff. I’ve been through my Bandcamp purchases and my wishlist as well as my library on streaming as well as the physical releases I’ve bought and there is stuff there, some stuff I really liked and will probably make that list come December. Yet I can’t stop wondering what it is this year that’s different. Is it me? Am I feeling a bit burnt out by it? I have done a lot less reviews this year so that’s a possibility I guess. Is the quality just not there in as much abundance this time around? I’m hesitant to say this is the case but at the same time, there’s not a lot I can instantly recall that made an impact on me. More work is required to go back through and find what I’ve enjoyed as well as to see what good stuff I’ve missed and also hopefully, there will be some great stuff before the year is out. So what do you think? Are you in a similar position or are you flush with albums you’ve loved and wondering what I’m talking about. Please, me know. Hails!  ( 3 min )

Back in December, I wrote about my Seasons of Writing, where I compared my inspiration to write to seasonal shifts and changes1. At that point in time, I felt like I was in a writing winter: quiet, introspective, and a little bit frozen. I tried to be patient because I knew that eventually, spring would arrive for me and I’d start writing again. But honestly, I’m not sure if I ever left winter. A majority of this year has been spent in my own head, similar to last year’s predicament when I talked about living inside my head too much. The ideas are still there, but the words are not quite coming out the way I want it to. There’s always a long list of things I want to reflect on and write about, but rarely does any of it come to fruition. Between wedding prep2, trying to get myself back into…  ( 6 min )

听人说：「人生如建塔。」刚开始还觉得浓浓的「鸡汤」味道，却又越咂摸越觉得有道理。 可不可以这样说，我们每个人，从出生那一刻起，就成了一个建筑师？只是，这个建筑师有些特别：工地是预先划定的，材料是随机配发的，工期是不确定的，而图纸，需要自己去画。 这让我想起十多年前接表弟放学时，他向我分享在学校玩积木的心得。有的小朋友分到的乐高，色彩鲜艳，形状规整；而有的只有几块磨损的木头，边角都不太齐整。但奇怪的是，最后搭出来的东西，精彩程度往往和材料的好坏没有必然联系。有人堆出平庸的方块，有人却搭出了奇妙的结构。 在人生这场建筑游戏里，什么是我们能够掌控的，什么是必须接受的？ 显然，有些东西是改不了的。基因决定了我的身高上限，出生地决定了我的母语，时代背景决定了我会遇到战争还是和平。这些就像地基，我可以在上面建造，但不能把它们挖掉重来。 但同样明显的是，有些东西是可以塑造的。例如，知识可以学习，技能可以训练，性格可以打磨，关系可以经营……这些就像可以自由使用的建材，虽然获取它们需要努力，但至少努力是有用的。 更有意思的是那些介于两者之间的东西。比如童年经历，它已经发生，无法改变，但我对它的理解和诠释却可以不断更新。父亲曾语重心长地说，同样的贫困童年，有人看到的是匮乏，有人看到的是简朴；有人记住的是饥饿，有人记住的是分享。记忆的砖块还是那些砖块，但可以选择用哪一面朝外。 说到选择，这可能是整个建塔过程中最关键的部分。因为塔可以有无数种建法：可以建成碉堡，坚固但封闭；可以建成灯塔，高耸而孤独；可以建成钟楼，定点报时；也可以建成了望塔，专注远方。 选择建什么样的塔，本质上是在选择什么样的人生。而这种选择，往往通过我们的价值观来体现。 我曾问过一位耄耋之年依然勤奋工作的科学家：「您到这个年龄了，为什么还要这么拼？」他想了想说：「年轻的时候没有赶上好时代，三反五反、文革，耽误了太多时间。现在我头脑…  ( 2 min )

Alex Kondov knows when you've been vibe coding. (He can smell it.) our friends at Charm release a Go-based AI coding agent as a TUI, Jan Kammerath disassembled the "hacked' Tea service's Android app, Alex Ellman made a website that provides up-to-date pricing info for major LLM APIs, and Steph Ango suggests remote teams have "ramblings" channels.

Emacs Carnival 2025-08: Your Elevator Pitch for Emacs - Take on Rules (@takeonrules@dice.camp, Irreal) Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/308826076/ Thu Aug 7 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto - 2300 Etc/GMT – Fri Aug 8 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0430 Asia/Kolkata - 0700 Asia/Singapore Atelier Emacs Montpellier (in person) https://lebib.org/date/atelier-emacs Fri Aug 8 1800 Europe/Paris Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #8 2025 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/660761d6-862d-43a1-9fb4-955d4e3e1066 Tue Aug 12 1900 CET OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Aug 13 0900 America/Vancouver - 1100 America/Chicago - 1200 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1800 Europe/Berl…  ( 3 min )

2025-07-31-10 July 2025 #monthly #review Text from sketch July 2025 Summer! Park playdates, swimming, exploration 🎇 Swimming, poi, fireworks 🏊 High Park pool 🥖 farmers market bread 🎮 Minecraft at the park 🏊 somersault, somer-pepper 🎮 Stardew Valley Expanded 🏖️ sand restaurant; supermarket sims 🦈 more diving toys 🛍️ errands: clothes, books 🗘 poi 🧺 snacks 🏊 3 breaths while swimming 🂡 card games 🏊 swim checklists, lessons 🏊 deep end test, water slide 🏊 needs more practice to pass 🪄 LEGO Glinda and Elphaba's dorm 🤖 LEGO Mindstorms ⚔️ lightsabers 👕 clothes shopping 🥣 mulberries 🤖 LEGO Spike Prime 🚴 bike playdate 🏊 last swim lesson; Sunnyside party 🏊 doing our own thing at the pool 😃 Biidaasige Park, ziplines; Korean BBQ 🏺 KidSpark; potter…  ( 19 min )

At 30, I've realized the internet isn’t what it once was. Growing up, being online meant proudly identifying as a nerd, forming genuine friendships through forums, games, and self-hosted servers. It was a community built around passion, not profit. Today, algorithms dominate our digital lives, prioritizing outrage and endless scrolling over meaningful interactions. Social media and platforms like YouTube push promotional content, burying posts from friends I genuinely care about. Even gaming, once about enjoyment and camaraderie, now feels overly competitive and validation-driven. Yet I find myself caught in the algorithm too, spending far too much time online, despite no longer truly enjoying it. Reflecting on the Chinese term Jishu (技术), meaning technology, I've recognized it’s time for a change—not by trying to reconnect digitally, but by consciously stepping away. My new goal is clear: spend more time offline and use technology intentionally, as a practical tool rather than a source of distraction and dissatisfaction. This blog marks the beginning of my journey toward reclaiming control from technology and rediscovering life beyond the screen.  ( 2 min )

I am a little mad at the false expectations that AI hype and marketing have fostered. Sure, that’s marketing for ya, nothing new, right? But I’m bothered about the way this impacts my work. My boss has started this project of optimizing the process of generalizing certain documents, meaning: there’s an original and we want the copy to have no corporate design, no brand names, and other specifics missing and if needed, placeholders.1 Additionally, some minor edits are supposed to be inserted as well. Of course, the hype has infiltrated my place of employment too, so instead of this being done by hand like it always was (much of it via finding and replacing in Word), they want AI to do it in one fell swoop instead of a human doing this for weeks as the documents are not that small and other …  ( 9 min )

Photos by Zoe Larkin I recently mentioned that I got married. This is the start of a (probably more than) 3-part series where I’ll talk a bit about the vendors we used for our San Francisco City Hall elopement, along with other details that may help anyone considering getting married there. How We Found Our Photographer Applying to Work With Zoe Pre-Wedding Support & Planning The Elopement Day What Comes Next How We Found Our Photographer Shortly after LC and I got engaged in 2023, I casually started looking for a San Francisco wedding photographer. We never planned on having a big wedding. From the start, we knew we wanted something small and intimate. I’ve never wanted to be the center of attention, and neither does LC. Around that time, we also heard about how grand San Francisco City H…  ( 8 min )

Ethical AI is an obvious goal to strive for, however it is far more complex than most give credit to. This is the first in a series of short posts which explores some of these rough edges. What is ethics anyway? Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with moral principles and values, wrestling with what is “right” and “wrong”. To attempt to evaluate what is “right”, several ethical frameworks offer useful lenses. Consequentialism judges actions by their outcomes. For example, a firm adopts sustainable practices because the benefits (lower emissions, reputational gains) outweigh the costs. Deontology focuses on duties and rights, regardless of consequences. For example, a company refuses to sell user data, not because it’s illegal, but because it’s the right thing to do. Virtue ethic…  ( 7 min )

You don’t rest — you disappear: scrolling until your thumb aches, binge-watching until your eyes give out, lying there marinating in the anxiety that comes from avoiding the very thing your nervous system is begging for — nothing. Real nothing is an act. A refusal — to let each moment justify itself through output. It’s a rejection of the idea that the animal inside you should be treated as if it were a machine — expected to keep going simply because it hasn’t broken yet. Every act requires practice. You can’t suddenly decide to stop performing and expect your body to remember how to exist without function. Start stupidly small. Find a corner of your space — one that doesn’t scream productivity. Not your desk. Not facing your vision board. Definitely not anywhere your phone can make eye co…  ( 7 min )

Edit: Happy Blaugust 2025! I miss the days of cool, translucent colors in all sorts of electronics from the 2000s, along with unique phone designs, headphones, mp3 players, computers. Remember Apple's iMacs and iBooks? My Tumblr is dedicated to reblogs of retro tech and electronics that hit my nostalgia so good. Earlier this year I started looking at tech blogs again (trying to escape a bit from the real world) and discovered Nothing, a company out of London who's mission was to make tech fun, just how it was about 20 years ago. I really liked the look of their earbuds and line of affordable-yet-futuristic looking mobile phones. I thought to myself "I'll bounce back to Android since I'm getting bored of Apple's sameness", plus, with the new iOS 26 of "liquid glass", I wasn't a fan since i…  ( 13 min )

I don't typically participate in month long challenges in this blog, but I figured this would be a good way to motivate me to publish more photos in the month of August... so here we are! Hello Blaugust, it's nice to meet you. Please enjoy my (almost) daily photos in August. Expect lots of photos in the Bay Area (California) and beyond. First up is the Embarcadero in San Francisco, CA... it's one of my favorite places to be. ♾️ Related: Iconic Landmarks in San Francisco  ( 5 min )

🎈 Oh hello, August! (aka my birthday month) A year has come and gone, which means it's time for another round of Blaugust. This will be my second year participating, and I’ve honestly been looking forward to it all year. I’m hoping it gives me the push I need to write more, especially since I’ve been stuck in a writing slump ever since I shared about being in my slow season back in December. 1️⃣ What is Blaugust anyways? (& when does it happen?) Blaugust is an annual blogging event that happens in August. It was originally run by Belghast, but this year it's being hosted by the community, as mentioned in this post by Nerd Girl. The goal is to challenge yourself to publish a post every day throughout the month, with weekly themes available if you’d like to follow prompts. I didn’t really s…  ( 6 min )

Adam & Jerod (plus zero other randos) dig into Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey results. We discuss SO's decline, the desire for younger devs to have real chats with real people, the rise of uv and more Python winning, why people are frustrated with AI, and more.

After abstaining from social media for three days, relapsing on the fourth, and using it in limited bursts on the fifth, I’ve started to realize that social media is like cigarettes. When I was spending 50 hours a week on social media, it felt like chain-smoking. During those three days of abstinence, I craved a hit of social media content every hour. To cope, I turned to chess.com, focusing on playing rather than winning. At first, playing against bots and learning was satisfying, but soon it only felt fun when I was competing against real people. Now, as I use social media for a few minutes whenever the cravings hit, my interest in chess has vanished, and something feels lost in my mind—like a sense of control or mental discipline. Using social media like a cigarette every hour or so is making me feel aloof and less driven. I believe social media should be classified as a controlled substance.  ( 2 min )

I haven't yet written about the whole Collective Shout/Visa/Mastercard adult art censorship thing currently roiling Games World but: it's fucking stupid you can't buy whatever legal porn you wish to buy. It's particularly stupid that itch.io, of all places, ended up at the heart of all this. It's home to raw human creation, which means that a lot of the most "objectionable" material on that site is laughably-amateur, absolutely not-worth-discussing porn games exactly like No Mercy, the one which kicked off this whole chaotic mess. You can see a censored, no-visible-nudity example of its first 20 minutes here. If you're curious, I do recommend checking it out, if only to see for yourself how profoundly amateur and pointless it was. You can see the whole thing sampled in a playthrough here..…  ( 7 min )

Still a ton of things to process, a lot of behind the scene photos to review before we get the official ones from our photographer, and memories to reminisce on. I'll probably write something in the near future when I've processed everything but for now, this will have to do. I'll be writing about these vendors later but... Hair / Make-up by Rebecca Beardsley of ShineForth Salon Floral / flowers by Momo's Flowers & More  ( 5 min )

Every day I like to check the news in the afternoon for the latest, and though it does get tiring, I think it's worth being up to date on the things going on around us. You'll see the sort of daily or trending headlines surrounding Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Iran, Yemen, parts of Africa, and all these conflict zones competing for the front page alongside other noteworthy updates on what Trump is babbling about today, how the economy is doing, or insane natural disasters. For some, a lot of these things are quite distant from us. For others, these are things that are affecting your daily life. For this post, I will refer specifically to conflict zones. I have the privilege of belonging to the former camp where I live in a fairly peaceful part of the world with little worry to about beyond my…  ( 3 min )

It took me four days to relapse into using social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and X, primarily to cope with feelings of depression. Fortunately, I kept the duration limiters on my iPhone, restricting each app to 30 minutes. After using them, I felt slightly better. However, over the past three days, my productivity in research work was exceptional while avoiding social media, averaging about 10 hours per day. Today, it will likely be just a few hours. I plan to go cold turkey again and aim to surpass my previous three-day streak. This experience highlights the need for an alternative leisure activity to keep my mind occupied and distract me from life's challenges, as social media isn't a sustainable option. I tried using eBook reader apps, but they feel clunky and cumbersome.  ( 2 min )

Greg Osuri, Founder and CEO of Akash Network joins us to share the backstory in his testimony before congress on the energy crisis and what it's going to take to power the future of AI. From powering datacenters, to solar, decentralized AI compute, to zombies in SF.

我们要去走一条路 木栈道已经建好 但是草木疯长 像是很久都没有人从这里走过 – 我们用手掌拨开两米… Continue reading 彩虹 →  ( 20 min )

Anyone can generate an app now. You open Cursor, describe what you want, and out comes clean, well-formatted code. It even has comments. It runs, and the linter’s happy. You scroll through the code and think, “Yeah, this looks right.” So you pat yourself on the back. You built an app. Except you didn’t. You built something that looks like an app but doesn’t behave like one. It ignores the messy reality of systems, users, failures, and edge cases. You haven’t tested it against the world. It’s just a convincing guess. The problem is, it feels real. The structure, the syntax, the polish all trick your brain into thinking the hard work is done. But you're seeing what the model guessed you meant. It’s pattern-matching, not understanding. The illusion is powerful because it runs. Because it doesn’t throw errors. Because it looks right. In the real world, writing apps is an interaction between what you think the system should do, what it actually does, and what you observe when you try to make it do that thing. You write code, you run it, it breaks, you fix it. Through that loop, your mental model gets refined. You stop guessing. You start knowing. AI shortcuts the loop. It gives you code that seems finished, so you skip the part where you question it. You don’t test strange inputs. You don’t simulate failure. You don’t push the system to its edges. You just trust the vibes. That’s vibe coding: building on a model’s guess and assuming it works because it looks good. Eventually, something breaks. And when it does, you won’t know why. You never touched the system deeply enough to understand how it behaves. You weren’t building an app. You were reviewing a guess. Vibe coding feels fast. It feels clever. But it skips the part where apps becomes real. Real code gets tested. It fails. It surprises you. And through that, it gets better. If you’re not in the loop, you’re not building. AI can write code. But only you can make it work.  ( 3 min )

Felt like writing a little summary with pictures about what I've been up to recently. ---.𖥔 ݁ ˖ 𖥔 ˖ ݁ 𖥔.--- My guest post at Steven's is out! It's about my favorite in-game homes. So, if you want to see my Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley and Palia homes, you should go check it out. I've also started playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure and greatly enjoying it. I'm 50 hours in now, and I often play it while on my indoor bike: I also got a cute Cinnamoroll to attach to my bags: I love Mocha and Big Challenges the most, but they don't really get merch, so Cinna it is. In the meantime, I've also published two more translation/summaries to GDPRhub. I have three wiki entries up now, currently working on a fourth. There's also been a lot of MtG lately, especially in the LGS. My wife was at an Edge of Eternities Prerelease event (I love the set, but I suck at Limited, so I avoid that). I still need to pick up my two Commander set preorders. But look at this cool card she pulled: After my rough day earlier this week1, she was so sweet and got me flowers and gifted me a Normandy brick set <3 It lives next to my screen for now. By the way, she left a glass of water in the freezer for a little too long and it resulted in this whacky looking ice mold of the glass she was able to pull out of it: As you can see, she's been heavily into painting her minis lately. My coworker also had too much zucchini in his garden and gifted me two massive ones, totaling 2.5kg. Here's one filled with minced soy, rice and vegan cheese: And finally, I've made a meme to make fun of me hitting Bearblog's anti-bot protections every now and then by accident. Thankfully, Herman is always so patient with me and my blog shenanigans. (based on this song by PinkPantheress. Epilepsy warning starting at 0:22.) Reply via email Thank you for all the kind messages :)↩  ( 5 min )

Tired of this constant barrage of censorship hidden under the guise of protecting children, MasterCard/Visa monopoly setting the global standard of what is and isn't acceptable, and frequent attacks on encryption in EU law as well. Being online isn't worth all that. You aren't getting my ID for services like this. And I wish more big services would just pull out temporarily and geoblock instead of bending the knee - would love to see the hell the MP's would be living in if Meta, X, Google, Wikipedia, XBox, PlayStation and more would just not be a thing anymore in the UK for now, even rendering devices near useless. Boycott that shit! Let them squirm and undo it under pressure. The UK isn't even that huge of a market compared to others. All companies get by complying with it is suddenly hav…  ( 8 min )

This past month I stumbled upon a desire, or really a fixation, on watching a movie every single day for the entirety of July. Initially it was a coincidence - we just happened to watch a movie for the first 3 days of July and as someone that averages only about 4 movies per month for the past few years, it spurred a single stray thought that changed the entire month's trajectory. Movies 1-3, not including the special In The Mood for Love 2001 short that followed the screening. Here are a few things I learned, about myself or in general, throughout this month of watching a movie every day. It is actually extremely hard to watch a movie every single day for an entire month. Maybe this isn't news to some people. Maybe it's not even news to me, given that I'm not a huge movie watcher in the…  ( 6 min )

I was email chatting with B, and she brought up a really cool question about online zine clubs. I shared a few places where I hang out online for zines, but there isn't really a little "club" that I know of to chat all things zines. Like: tools, questions/feedback, sharing process and pics, or bouncing ideas off each other. Sometimes zine making can feel a bit lonely, so feeling a part of a group can be really fun, and encouraging. There are a few Discord places and Reddit channels that I like, but they sometimes feel a bit busy/big that my introverted self gets a little shy about sharing these types of things. Writing on my blog and on my Kofi page is still a way I love to share, but when it comes to gathering like-minded makers, I feel like there are no simple platforms for this. Tumblr has "communities" now, which actually could be fun. Like a tiny Bearblog zine space? Hehe. I'll have to think about it. If anyone has any ideas/feedback or knows of any online "club spaces" that are low-pressure, pls email me :) I added a digital version of my zine How To Share Your Zines Without Social Media in my Kofi shop. I like to send extra little treats through the mail with my zine orders, but I know sometimes it's just easier to print them at home!  ( 4 min )

Contributing to open-source projects is a goal of many programmers. Issues tagged with "good-first-issue" is one way to find something to work on. When newcomers (people who never contributed to the project) browse issues in a repo, GitHub will hit them with a banner "If you're ready to tackle some open issues, we've collected some good first issues for you.", which will take you to an issues page filtered with the label good-first-issue. Think of this page as a landing page for your repo to newcomers, since it's pretty much the first thing someone will look for when they're looking to contribute (most repos will also link this page in CONTRIBUTING.md). But I've found this page to be downright unhelpful in most cases. Usually it's filled with issues which fall into one of these buckets: Stale Issues The implementation is no longer required, but no-one bothered to update the issue. Unattended Issues There is a PR (or multiple) linked to the issue but no one has attended to it. Ambiguous Context The issue is written as if the newcomer is supposed to understand a lot of context. Someone has asked a clarifying question, no one has answered. Issues is not the way work is done is repo Usually the most pertaining factor, because GitHub issues suck. There are tribes of developers working on something off GitHub (Discord/Email/Whatever) and issues is where end users come and report bugs or feature requests. I don't know what is the best way to start contributing, maybe it still might be browsing this page, I just wish more projects took the time to making this page more useful. When you create a "good first issue", think of it as paying it forward. You enter a contract with a fragile newbie; be precise, helpful and unassuming.  ( 3 min )

EmacsConf 2019 (Nov 2, online): Propose a session: https://emacsconf.org/2019/cfp (before Aug 31) Share ideas: https://emacsconf.org/2019/ideas Emacs configuration: (emacs-init-time): what's your emacs init time? hardcoremacs: �� A lightweight emacs config cus-edit+ - Let Customize know about changes made outside it {emacsmirror/GitHub} (Reddit) What are the worst default emacs bindings that we usually don't change? Emacs Lisp: Perceptron: a Lisp, Elisp, Clojure, Scheme implementation tutorial Comparison between Magit's 'transient' and 'hydra' prism.el: Highlight Lisp forms according to depth makem.sh: Makefile-like script for building and testing Emacs Lisp packages Emacs development: Instructions on how to test the portable dumper with Spacemacs. The portable dumper is a feature…  ( 3 min )

Help wanted: EmacsWiki: Carnival - looking for a host for August (@ctietze@mastodon.social) #123 - Reader stutters and consumes high memory on High res scaled display - divyaranjan/emacs-reader - Codeberg.org (@divyaranjan@mathstodon.xyz) - help wanted testing high-resolution monitors with fractional scaling Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs Berlin (hybrid, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Jul 30 0930 America/Vancouver - 1130 America/Chicago - 1230 America/Toronto - 1630 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2200 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jul 31 0030 Asia/Singapore M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Aug 1 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore EmacsATX: Emacs S…  ( 4 min )

Jono Alderson takes aim at SPAs thanks to modern CSS, copyparty turns almost any device into a file server, Ernie Smith honors the Game Genie's 35th anniversary, Anthropic shares how their teams use Claude Code, and Drew Lyton tells why he believes the future is NOT self-hosted.

There's something grotesque about the way we expect other people to be convenient for us. We want people to be emotionally available, yet low maintenance — like a houseplant that texts back promptly and never makes things weird. What we’re really after is connection without complication — the sanitised version, the one that doesn't require us to bump into the messy subplot of someone else's emotional arc. I was in line at an organic grocery store in Ubud. A woman was paying at the only register, casually asking the cashier a couple of questions about those impulse items near the counter — stuff designed to seduce you while your card is already in hand. In front of me, a guy in yoga wear exhaled hard, then cut her off with a sharp “Are you buying or not?”. My first instinct was to tap him o…  ( 7 min )

I recently read Ralf Jung's blog post "There is no memory safety without thread safety" which mentions that Go is not a memory safe language in the presence of data races. "But Go comes with a built in data race detector1" some might say. This reminded me of a quirk in Go's dynamic data race detection that causes it to miss data races in executed code that could easily be spotted by a human2. Here is the code the data race detector struggles with: package main import ( "fmt" "sync" ) var counter int var mutex sync.Mutex func increment(wg *sync.WaitGroup, id int) { defer wg.Done() mutex.Lock() counter++ fmt.Printf("Counter: %d\n", counter) mutex.Unlock() if id == 1 { counter++; } } func main() { …  ( 5 min )

[drawing from 2008] So the "jetgirlart" screen name came about during college... 22 years ago. I got a bachelor's in fine art and used it to get various graphic design jobs here and there between having kids. I kept the screen name for all my social media and games but after college I didn't really keep up with making "art". In college they taught us all the techniques and such to get your work into juried shows or galleries. That's what a fine art degree does vs a graphic design degree. But the problem I instantly ran into was that I wasn't good enough to get into those shows. I didn't have a personal style or theme that set me apart from the other artists. That is a huge deal and you need to figure that out asap when you start wrapping up your fine art degree. I didn't, and fell out of t…  ( 6 min )

There’s been posts in other places I read recently that made me sad. They all had one thing in common: Defeatism about changing anything about tech use. They treated apps as universal, specific companies as a must-have. And sure, I get that perspective; I myself have made the connection between Google and utility services. However, it was all woe is me. “No one is going to stop using these apps anyway.” “I know no one cares about this.” “I know it’s unrealistic to ever switch.” “It’s hopeless.” And I just wanna grab them by the shoulders and shout: “No!!! I’m here! So many people are here and doing just that! See, we’ve done it and we’re willing to share how and what we’re doing instead! We care, just like you! Look around the world. While someone in the US thinks iMessage and Facebook Mes…  ( 5 min )

My phone just chimed, notifying me that I spent an average of 8 hours of screen-on time last week. When I checked what I was spending most of my time on, I noticed that Instagram, X and YouTube were my most frequented activities on the phone. In fact, I had spent an average of 51 hours on these media apps over the last 3 weeks. This is alarming and seems to be an indicator of my loneliness or other issues. I have decided to take drastic action and cut these off completely by setting time limits on my phone and browser on my desktop. I know conventional wisdom says that stopping cold turkey doesn’t normally work and that it’s best to wean off these gradually, but I don’t think I can manage that. Once I open them, I think I won’t be able to stop. The drawback is that I won’t be in touch with the news, but I realize that most news websites report everything from social media anyway, so I can stay apprised of the news without these apps. This also explains why I haven’t been making progress on my research work. It brings to my attention that if I spent this much time on my research work, I would be making considerable progress. The thing is, spending 50 hours on social media has nothing to show for it. It’s not like I’m creating content on these platforms—just consuming them.  ( 2 min )