Recently John Gruber, whom I’ve followed for decades, published . It’s short and I’m not going to try to summarize it so go read it if you haven’t already. But here are two key quotes: “I see

What happened was, Lauren’s NZ family includes a nephew who’s currently living in Brisbane and got married last month, so a dozen or so Kiwis and three of us Canadians got on airplanes and converg

Our neighorhood has many deciduous trees, which means, in Canadian October, lots of bright colors overhead and also on the ground. The camera (from its corner in my office) and phone (from my poc

“The purpose of a system is what it does.” Such a neat little turn of phrase; it makes you sound wise and cynical and like a person who sees through things. But it’s mostly wrong and almost alway

Nate Silver’s latest is , noting the general convulsion of fear provoked by the AI Guys’ it’ll-kill-us-all palpitations. From which:A supermajority wants to slow AI down In parallel, the IETF

Meet , an who lives on an island and has you’ll ever see. Those URLs start with now; until recently it was . But that site, there for many years, is down now, and not coming bac

I just landed a PR that fixed a nasty data race in . Which shouldn’t have been technically challenging, but I took side-trips into Erlang, unit test footguns, whether or not I should go on ac

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the GenAI giants “watermarking” their output, which to say hiding some data in it so you can tell that it’s been generated by ChatGPT or Gemini or C

Fools have said that the Prairies are boring. This cannot be true, because in the absence of hills and trees there’s more distance in each direction you might look. Also, Prairie landscapes includ

It’s been a rough few years, for the earth, for the societies that populate it, and for my family. Like they say, “sandwich generation” There’ve been weeks when I’ve struggled for a smile. I susp

Those first three words in the title name the members of the family, cylindrical West-African drums that you usually put on a stand to play. Think of those sizes as Papa bear, Mama bear, an

The world is, I mean. Bottom-up. Maybe that’s just me not understanding? It doesn’t surprise me that there are people who are stupid and/or evil. The surprise is, the others not voting them ou

I spent last week at a summer music camp put on by WCAMS, the West Coast Amateur Musicians Society, pronounced “Wickams”. My goal in writing this is to influence a few readers in the direction

This summer has been very sporting; in the course of a couple of weeks I attended a World Cup match and a minor-league baseball game. Took pictures and thought about enjoying this stuff. I know th

Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s going downhill. Where by “downhill” I mean any combination of less useful, less safe, or less fun. It’s time for something better,

It’s been a while. February was the last entry in this ; I never stopped working on it but there hasn’t been much blogworthy. This piece offers a progress update for those who’ve been enterta

The piece you’re now looking at exists because curation of interesting not-lightweight material included quite a few focused on our dominant malaise, namely you-know-what, I mean it’s in the

Hey everyone, I know you’re overloaded because everything has . Long-form reading or writing or art or music, who’s got time for that? Fortunately there are those who still do and here’s som

The best thing about long-lived incumbent technologies like JSON and XML is that nobody really has to think about them much any more. Except for, I do occasionally, because while I’m of eithe

A person watching over my shoulder asked “How are you switching around so fast?” and I realized that while most readers here know this trick, some may not, and it’s awfully useful. [Update: I