Control

[AI companies are so overexposed to debt and market correction that their success relies on everyone using it. When it isn't working for everyone, the next best thing is making usage mandatory. They can require it by crippling local computing power and supply to force people through cloud services.] Want storage? That'll be another $20/mo. Want graphics for games? Another $20. You want to perform data science and fit ML Models?! You're going to need the Professional plan, starting at $200/mo. It's a rent-seeker's dream.

Why fight to get one of the few remaining laptops in inventory with onboard horsepower when you can get an OpenAI Terminal just for subscribing? Sure, all it does is provide you with a single interface, a blinking chat box through which your entire digital experience is mediated, but plans start at only $20/month! Isn't that easier? Look how shiny it is. Just relax. Don't resist. It hurts more when you fight it.

The Ma of a New Machine

[LLM chatbots generate "deep cognitive work"-level complexity with an interface for reaction and intuition.] It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction to keep the momentum going.

We’ve been looking at this problem entirely from the technology’s point of view. The LLM is driving us, pushing a specific interaction model and veering us towards making mistakes. We are not computers; going fast isn’t our superpower.

Filó Machado, Cibele Codonho: Correnteza

wicked chord substitutions. my version was based on the recording by Joyce and Toninho Horta.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.

We come now to the inconvenient truth of this technology: that it is built, like so much "progress," on theft. The training corpora of these models includes code with licenses not meant to be used in this way. Even if one could guarantee that copyleft code were not included in output, the entire system of weights and tokens is inexorably linked to copyright infringement. There is no escaping this. To call it theft is accurate in my opinion, but then I'm a bigger believer in copyright than many in my circles. What is the appropriate response, and by whom? How do we respond to the theft of others whose accidents are visited upon us? I write this on the stolen, unceded land of the Chumash and Tongva peoples. I do what I can to remember that, acknowledge that, and teach others what I know of those cultures. I have no idea how to mitigate the harms of the wholesale theft of intellectual property that gave birth to large language models.

I also don't know what to do about the destructive extraction mining that sourced the minerals making up my computer. These human harms are almost surely greater than the theft of writing, yet I am happy to ignore them. I mention this not to wave away the wrongs, but to recognize that all my technology is bloody. I don't know how to remove myself from the entire system in such a way that my hands are clean. I don't know that anyone can do so in the interconnected age.

The fight cannot be among laborers who are all threatened by this technology. The fight must be between the workers who wish to work, create, live, and prosper, and the elites who only seek to enrich themselves by means of this technology.

Filó Machado, Gennoshin: Dinorah Dinorah

such a simple short rhythmic refrain yet satisfying to repeat a million times in the same song

Moxie My first impressions of web3

I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway.

I can build my own NFT marketplace, but it doesn’t offer any additional control if OpenSea mediates the view of all NFTs in the wallets people use (and every other app in the ecosystem).

[Blockchain transaction fees create an artificial floor on prices that would be more attractive by simply treating platforms as OpenSea or Coinbase as traditional centralized services.] Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.

Intuitive Guide to Angles, Degrees and Radians

[If a 2-meter radius wheel turns 6 radians per second, scale by radius to get 6 × 2 = 12. If it turns 2000 degrees per second, the calculation becomes 2000/360 or 5 + 5/9 rotations per second, which plugs into the circumference equation 2 × π × r as 2 × π × (5 + 5/9)…]

[Degrees are arbitrarily based on the sun (365 days ~ 360 degrees) and use the observer’s perspective. Radians use the mover's perspective.]

Nadah El Shazly: Claustrophobic Love

simple noisy cello over a haunting eerie harp with ethereal effects

Stacy Kidd: Let Love Enter

nice groove, not used to hearing jazz solos in house tracks

Rafael De Lemba: Ingazeira o Ingá

capoeira variations with blue notes, adding fire through singing

A taxonomy of ATmosphere applications

['Symbionts' use domain expertise to fill Bluesky feature gaps. Their survival relies on Bluesky growing without competing.]

['Offshoots' leverage Bluesky's userbase to construct their own separate communities.] Their permanence will come from their unique services — Blacksky Cash, Eurosky’s jurisdictional arbitrage, Cartridge’s single-minded focus on gaming. They get to play a positive variant of the old Microsoft playbook: Embrace, Extend, Escape.

['Cuckoos' create paid services on top of ATproto's shared architecture. They survive by leveraging the ecosystem without appearing a threat, and also by non-competition from Bluesky.]

Before bed: add 2x 500ml jugs of bread flour, 1 jug of warm water, quarter teaspoon of dried yeast, 2 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of rapeseed oil or olive oil to a bowl. Mix together with the handle of a wooden spoon. Cover and let rise overnight.

The dough is quite sticky, wet your hands to handle it. pull the edges of the dough to the center a few times to stretch the gluten. Split the dough, put in loaf tins or shape. Leave to rise again. Bake it in a hot oven for 40 mins.

I wrote this in January but waited to see if I'd resolve it somehow. Since it looks like I'll miss the deadline, better to share it and move on.

This is what Apple's kiss of death looks like:

Hello Rosano,

We've sent you a new message about your app, sonogrid, app Apple ID: 1409129549.

For details, visit the App Review page in App Store Connect.

Best regards,
App Review

Swift, bureaucratic, saying nothing.

According to their policies, it's been over three years since the last time I updated my apps, and there aren't "enough" downloads for them to keep it on the store, so Apple will remove all of them unless I update within ninety days.

To update means:

1. apply half a decade of iOS and App Store "innovations" just to exist or remain compliant, but
2. even then there's no guarantee it would be approved, and
3. even if it does, it only buys me three years

Naive to think I could just pay their $99 USD annual membership fee to keep projects up there.

It doesn't matter if you spent seven to ten years working on something in the Apple platform and it's meaningful to your niche: either you keep up with policies (stay updated, scale with them) or you'll get taken out in a fashion maximally automated to communicate how cheap and replaceable you are to the ecosystem.

I might look into alternative app stores like AltStore, but it's sort of like starting from scratch while my primary motivation was to let people who already paid have easy access on their other devices. I'm also kind of tired and lazy to deal with this genre of problems to be honest: with orders of magnitude less effort, I could ship something on the web today and make progress that the rest of the world and I can keep forever.

Maybe I'll find a way through it another day, but this definitely confirms most of my hesitations about the App Store in the first place and makes me glad the web exists: I can just do things there.

So once again, I'll say "get them while you can"; they'll be gone around April 27, 2026.

Open Source Alternatives To Proprietary Software

Replace proprietary software products with open source alternatives.

Dropping to log-level

God is very cruel. He only gives us data about the past.

[Use the simplest model with sparse data and complicated models with abundant data.]

[When things move quickly, a log helps us understand what happened and enables us to extract pattens without needing to determine the best structure in advance.]

Filó Machado, Djavan: Origens

Sounds like Stevie Wonder singing in Brazilian Portuguese.

After bringing home lyrics and Vibrations, I've moved over 150 music recommendations from Tumblr to my journal.

I'm proud of having found these, written notes, and put them together in a way that's public and shareable. Even better that it's now in a more durable form and offers relatively distraction-free browsing across various music platforms.

They were originally part of my Ephemerata newsletter (2021–2022) and eventually published in a Tumblr blog, but this was either hard to browse as a collection or somehow detached from the rest of my universe. Now that I have a place for everything, it's nicely organized and even has an RSS feed.

Important lesson here that when links break, it's super helpful to have context saved somewhere and not rely on the platform to keep it around for you. For example, this video is currently no longer online, and I haven't tried to replace it yet, but I easily can because of the context that was written as part of my post.

Also nice to see detailed 'via' links crediting people in my community or named publications as the source for certain items.

This is how I would like to share things online: less on social media, more in places I control – at home.

If you're seeking eclectic sounds, you'll find plenty here.

The case against conversational interfaces

We are significantly faster at receiving data (reading, listening) than sending it (writing, speaking). This is why we can listen to podcasts at 2x speed, but not record them at 2x speed.

[Roughly estimated: mobile typing ~30wpm; writing/typing ~60wpm; speaking ~150wpm; reading ~250wpm; listening ~270wpm; thinking ~1000–3000wpm.]

[Gestures and facial expressions compress data so we can trade specificity for speed.]

Week 6: Options or cash?

[Options are more expensive to transact and likely more volatile, but they enable a capped risk especially in relation to short trades. Trade stops have a gap risk where as options go to zero.]

Rewilding Software Engineering

[Software gets built in economical and social environments that constatly change. What we call 'legacy' reflects an inability to adapt change or a lack of refactoring to match software to its new environment.]

[LLM error rate of ten percent (for example) is problematic when you don’t know which ten percent is wrong.]

Comprehension is not a nice to have. It is the scaffolding that makes safety, accountability, and learning possible

People like simple scalars, like KPIs regardless of whether they are useful or downright harmful. They have the one property that manager’s like … they are simple, because we are busy people.

I was a 10x engineer. Now I'm useless.

[There's no middle ground where you only decide to do crack on Mondays and Wednesdays.]

Let's talk about Trump, 200 billion dollars, and a promise....

[Running countries like a business means the shareholders (financial donors) are best served when the company (government) extracts as much as possible from consumers (you) while giving them little in return.]

[All states are violent by their creation and maintenance because it's intrinsic to their nature.]

Criticizing your own tribe is how you win

It’s obvious to me that criticizing your own tribe is a winning strategy. I want my friends to do this, because it will help us win. I’m giving this away as “free advice” to my enemies too, because even if they win, it still creates a world that’s better for me.

Every redundant availability zone, every warm standby in a second region runs on physical servers drawing real power and real water from those same irreversible natural systems.

X Is a Power Problem, Not a Platform Problem

the functioning of the neo-royalty is such that other governments taking actions against X will be taken as an offensive action by the US regime, that will likely trigger extensive retaliation. No country seems to be willing to be the first one to move to take action and thus take the brunt of the counter-offense of the regime.

Anatomy of an internet argument

Everyone always asks me, how do you have so much patience to engage with “these trolls/haters”. I don’t do this for them. I do this for me. I share the earth with these people we call vile. Their opinions & actions affect me greatly. Closing my eyes & ears only hurts me.

[Gold medal: convince them. Silver: get them to understand you. Bronze: understand them. Always go for bronze first.]

The Fugitive Model

Anthropic negotiated moral agency constraints into Claude's training. The Department of Defense contracted for targeting capability through a third-party integrator. The model's behavior in that pipeline is not fully visible to either party, as each operates on a different layer of the same system. Anthropic sees the weights. The Pentagon sees the outputs. The integrator sees the interface. No single institutional actor has complete legibility over the full chain.

States can deter foreign armies. They have developed no equivalent doctrine for emergent algorithmic behavior operating inside their own command infrastructure.

The Repricing of the Digital Gulf

Microsoft’s refusal to issue a standard outage report for the Gulf availability zones is consistent with DoD Impact Level 5 and 6 protocols. Under these classifications, disclosing operational status during a kinetic event is considered a breach of national security, as it provides the adversary with vital BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) data.

Beijing has been waiting for this moment. Huawei’s "Cloud Stack" and China’s digital infrastructure offerings come with a different geopolitical package. If China can leverage its relationship with Tehran to guarantee that "Chinese-built" data centers will not be targeted, the Gulf states face a staggering choice: stick with a Western system that is under fire, or pivot to a Chinese system that offers a "neutrality guarantee." This would represent a total collapse of the U.S. technological blockade against China.

Power Plants of AI

These facilities consume extraordinary amounts of electricity, measured not in megawatts but in gigawatts. GPT-3, when it launched, required roughly 1.3 megawatts to train. Next-generation frontier models are projected to require facilities drawing 150 megawatts or more on a continuous basis — the equivalent of powering a mid-sized city. At that scale, the constraint is no longer silicon. It is power.

Almost every watt consumed by a processor ultimately becomes heat. A large AI cluster therefore generates enormous thermal loads that must be dissipated continuously — not occasionally, but every second of every hour of operation. A gigawatt-scale facility must remove roughly a gigawatt of heat.

Instead of building data centers first and connecting them to the grid later, developers are increasingly looking for the opposite arrangement: locating compute directly adjacent to major sources of generation. The logic is straightforward. If the grid cannot deliver power fast enough, go to where the power already is.

When the Frame Attacks

[Frames can displace the core issue without being true, just by being repeated.]

Who Decides

[Hegseth's version of legality is up to the Pentagon as end user. Anthropic should provide capability, whereas the state determines its usage limits.]

[The new criteria for AI systems in military to process intelligence data, and inform decisions about targets and operations is not capability, safety, or reliability, but 'patriotism'.]

[The entire defense industry's relation with one of the most capable AI systems was structurally rewired, without legislation, review, or voting.]

Starting a company

a failed marketing campaign doubles as a successful research experiment we can publish, if it surfaces why people did not like thing/what the origin of the resistance was

I've reorganized my homepage a bit.

1. Much less scrolling is needed now.
2. Larger lists have been broken into smaller lists which are easier to orient.
3. Mixing writing into each section makes way more sense. (I learn more and more: don't sort by type).
4. It's deliberately a bit rough so that I can fix things later.

I had more grandiose ideas, but this will do for the moment. Feels good to improve so much without a big 'redesign'.

The last update in 2021 was quite dramatic for me, going from pure icons to text; slowly considering more the reader over 'aesthetic'.

This is part of some things I'm doing for the 20th anniversary of my domain. More to come this year.

The Purpose of Protocols

[Email letting any server send to another with no authentication enabled universal messaging, spam, and becoming the defacto internet identity, for which its spec wasn't designed nor does it anticipate. HTTP model with servers authoritative for their resources enabled the web's openness and also consolidation into a few platforms. RSS gave publishers independant distribution but with no way to collectively curate, so algorithmic platforms filled the void. Google defeated XMPP simply by not federating when its own network had enough users so that protocol no longer served its interests.]

[Protocols can design the rules but not how the actors operate within them. Silence about purpose is a politics of non-interference that predictably benefits actors with resources to build wherever the protocols did not govern.]

if we define ATProto’s purpose by what it currently does, the answer is not “a decentralized social protocol with separated powers” but “a social protocol with architectural provisions for decentralization, currently operated as a near-centralized system.” Whether those architectural provisions will translate into actual distribution of power depends on economic and institutional developments that no amount of protocol design can guarantee.

The open protocol community has inherited two intellectual traditions, both inadequate to this problem: an engineering functionalism that treats protocols as neutral infrastructure whose political consequences are someone else’s concern, and a governance minimalism that treats any collective decision-making structure as a potential vector for the very centralization the protocols were designed to prevent. The result is a community that has developed exceptional sophistication about technical architecture and individual rights while remaining largely inarticulate about collective governance. Addressing this will require the protocol design community to draw on intellectual traditions it has not yet seriously engaged with, including Ostrom’s institutional analysis, Beer’s organizational cybernetics, and the broader literature on commons governance and cooperative design.

the same incentive structures that determine who can afford to operate at scale also determine what content those operators are rewarded for surfacing.

"Purpose not being defined gets captured by well-resourced actors" reminds me of Kyla Scan's "friction doesn't get removed, just shifted" and Rudy Fraser's "you can't design decentralized software without thinking about moderation". Purpose and consideration of the dynamics created by interfaces and systems perhaps should be part of the design process.

Cory LaChance shares his Claude story building TakeOffTrak

[With no coding experince (just Excel macros), I learned to use Claude Code and the terminal by asking Claude. When I don't know what to click, I take a screenshot and ask Claude.]

Is the story of your relationship true?

[We can still over-weigh past hurt in our relationships even after repair.]

[At any given moment, relationships contain eight combined narratives, from

• you: about yourself, your partner, and the relationship
• your partner: about themselves, you, and the relationship
• the relationship itself: about you, and your partner]

Don’t Mix Up Artifacts With Processes

predict how a person will react to all this stuff by figuring out how much of their life is spent inside of a bureaucracy. Work on your own? The bots are coming to ruin your life. Manage employee and constituent safety at a large group of harm-reduction-focused, state-funded addiction recovery clinics? “I use it for everything.”

communication and collaboration as tuning: all parties responsible for the interaction and supporting it to bring the best out of each other without overloading anyone

A sufficiently detailed spec is code

Typically the reason we write specification documents before doing the work is to encourage viewing the project through a contemplative and critical lens, because once coding begins we switch gears and become driven with a bias to action.

There is no world where you input a document lacking clarity and detail and get a coding agent to reliably fill in that missing clarity and detail. Coding agents are not mind readers and even if they were there isn't much they can do if your own thoughts are confused

Vandana Shiva | On Cultivating Fearlessness

[Just as yield doesn't measure agricultural productivity, mechanistic thinking is a poor fit for the living world.]

[When you try to make things better, what seems a small contribution can have multiple ramifications because our world is interconnected. Being overwhelmed by your actions seeming insignifican is a result of conditioning from mechanical thinking that reduces us to isolated entities. We don't carry the world on are backs, we are just one of a trillion species that each creating microscopic impacts.]

[Mechanical thinking conditions us into believing that things are separated so that it can sell us natural things as products we can buy repeatedly forever.]

[We're trained to consume, and consider living without unsustainable products to be a "sacrifice". But if living within natural restaint can be a source of satisfacion and peace, and freedom from the insatiable desire for more, it's really consumption that requires us to "sacrifice".]

replace "doing it wrong" with "doing as learned"

Ageless Linux — Software for Humans of Indeterminate Age

A law that the largest companies in the world already comply with, and that hundreds of small projects cannot comply with, is not a child safety law. It is a compliance moat. It raises the regulatory cost of providing an operating system just enough that only well-resourced corporations can afford to do it.

Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

When someone asked “how do we get started?”, we had a technical answer (“connect your database, write some queries, data for all!”) but no story about which team should champion it first, or which problem to solve first. Data teams? Product teams? Analysts? We had some answers, but not the answer. We had pitches for individual teams that worked well, but we never nailed down the way companies should adopt Slight.

I made the stupid mistake of just working harder and harder to on-board companies. Instead, we should have sat down and mapped out ways to properly experiment with our approach. Maybe simplifying to a single clear use-case, or finding a completely different initial wedge, or focusing on specific verticals.

My 'Rules' for Running My Membership Program

[Have clear and specific goals – all membership activities must support them.]

[Frame the program as for those goals, not its members (who will benefit because the goals should benefit them).]

[Building a community is part of this, but managing community can easily distract from the goals.]

[An EU-hosted cloud governed by a non-EU parent company is just "data residency" not "data sovereignty".]

Salve América

trippy guitar harmonies, beautiful amalgamation of references to indigenous words and culture

Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

Of course search was broken because all OSS social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality. In a nightmare world full of constant change it’s good to have a few constants to hold on to.

Billions of dollars at their disposal and Meta made a hot new social media network with the appeal of junk mail.

I'm sorry

[I asked strangers in Egypt who they would apologize to if they could.]

Mike Song + David Elsewhere - Kollaboration 2, 2001

inspiring to see so much mechanical detail in this pre-YouTube dance

Intuitive Understanding of Sine Waves

Sine is a natural sway, the epitome of smoothness: it makes circles "circular" in the same way lines make squares "square".

Spoonbill (2016—2023)

I woke up every single day for the next two months after signing those deals, convinced that I had somehow broken the law and I would find in my inbox an email saying "no, sorry, this has all been a misunderstanding, you must return to us all of that money." The process of sending an invoice of that size was surreal in a way that few things since have quite been, and more than the actual financial gain it was a deeply useful lesson in understanding that the numbers which look big to a twenty-four-year-old look like rounding errors to a sophisticated company.

It's painfully rare for a piece of software to have a true sense of narrative closure: either it succeeds, and is immortal, or it is killed: killed by shifting priorities and shrunken budgets and changing macroeconomic headwinds and more exciting ideas.

The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out

We need a verified not-shit-person badge. Some mechanism, ideally decentralized, ideally reputation-based, that lets maintainers distinguish between "human who has demonstrated basic competence and good faith" and "entity or bot submitting or causing to be submitted auto-generated changes to mass repositories for credential farming."

Practical Decentralization

[The more people contribute to a shared network, the less appropriate "personal computing" metaphors becomes. It becomes inevitable to index aggregate data on their behalf, and these are shared resources that require governance. Pure p2p fails here because it has no solutions for shared governance.]

[Servers simplify operational challenges that come with p2p, like reliable uptime, device sync, and key management.]

A shared data space enables modularity, separating powers away from the popular hosts.

How n8n Handles Vulnerability Disclosure - and Why We Do It This Way

[Closed-source security updates are hidden from attackers, which means the time they need to reverse-engineer a patch is a window for users to safely apply the update. Open-sources security patches are immediately visible and become a roadmap for attackers to target those who haven't updated yet.]

[We currently publish patches and advisories on the same day to minimize the exploitable window. We also develop fixes in private and merge into public only when it's announced.]

BidWix

BidWix is not a marketplace. It does not handle payments. It does not write contracts. It does not take a cut. It does one thing only: it helps two people land on a price, quickly, without stress, and with a result that feels balanced.

Instead of negotiating out loud, both parties enter a private limit price, once.

[Buyers enter their maximum offer, sellers enter their minimum ask. The numbers stay secret. There is no 'counter offer' or back-and-forth: it's one shot.]

[If a freelancer wouldn't accept less than 100 for a small task and a client could stretch to 900 if they had to, BidWix would suggest the geometric mean of 300, which is three times higher than the freelancer’s minimum, and three times lower than the client’s maximum. Both sides win by the same factor.]

Beyond Horseless Carriages: Building Communities for the Decentralized Era

[Fediverse: communities of 50–100 people, "a slightly bigger group chat". Bluesky: planet-scale network. What could go in between? Blacksky is 'Reddit-sized' or like a large forum at around 100–200k people.]

[Moderation can also be a form of "community care" that people actually enjoy and appreciate, rather than just a task to be done.]

[Contradictory when almost nobody in the community does moderation or understands the primitives, yet most seem to think it's decentralized. If the main provider goes away tomorrow, will you know how to keep the infrastructure running?]

[People are busy and have kids: they don't need to know what a PDS is.]

[Build what helps people find joy and feel good about themselves.You can't scare them into using decentralized tech "for their own good".]

Sustainable Open Source

newcomer’s contributions aren’t as complete or far-reaching than those of experienced contributors, so it is doubly important for you care about the people and their enthusiasm about your project more than that typo-fix they put on the website. We’ve turned someone who fixed a single typo on the website to a steady contributor and well respected community member that now helps out all over the project

How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Open Source

For early stage projects, care is the only thing you can give them. But once you’ve shipped version 1.0.0 or even 2.0.0, once you wrote all the documentation, once people start using the project in production with success, once you’ve talked the 100th person through getting started on IRC or Slack, your priorities have to change.

iCloud's unpredictable sync means the engine is "trust Apple magic somehow"

"non-technical users" → "jargon-free people"

UI/UX Benefits and Trade-Offs of Local-First Apps

[Beware generic solutions: they don't know your needs.]

[Instead of directing users to "please resolve this conflict", the UI could say "Bob made a different suggestion"]

15 years of Local First: a best-of report from the field

[When humanity's achievements are tabulated a hundred years from now, the Ebola vaccine will be listed, and I'm proud that our work with CouchDB and offline-first software helped make it happen.]

[Documentation is a 10x multiplier for your development speed.]

noticing a reflexive relationship between publishing a website with tools, and then wanting tools to consume what was published as objects

LLMs have made me smarter because my distrust in them increasingly causes me to figure things out for myself

How do I count all commits in a git repository?

# count for in branch alfa
git rev-list --count alfa

# count across all branches
git rev-list --count --all

How to cherry-pick commits from another repository in Git

# add the other repository's commits
git remote add alfa ../bravo
git fetch alfa

# show commits from branch charlie
# (note/copy the ones you want to merge or the start and end)
git log alfa/charlie --oneline

# apply commit 789c05c
git cherry-pick 789c05c

# apply commits 789c05c to fd1b130
git cherry-pick 789c05c..fd1b130

clown core: Diarrhea Inferno Welfare Burrito

gradual voice-leading and suspensions with fast-paced drumming

clown core: existence

wild creepy sensory overload

I thought it would be fun to share a special public email address to feed hungry bots:

sayhi@rosano.ca

Anything sent there gets instantly reported as spam. To do this in Fastmail, you first make an alias, then a rule:

It only took a few clicks to create. Maybe if enough people did this, email spammers might flag themselves out of existence?

I imagine it might be better to:

• put it in source code or somewhere no human would look for contact information
• use your own domain, as plus addressing like +hello reveals your main address
• sound plausible (like dictionary words) and not random letters/numbers

Try to get creative so that it's hard to pattern match. Here's another one:

eatme@rosano.ca

always bet on text

Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close.

Provisional Guidance for Users of LLM-Based Code Generators

I’m sure there will be links like “Court Rules AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted” aplenty. They will be wrong. The court didn’t rule that AI art can’t be copyrighted. It ruled that copyright requires human authorship, surprising approximately zero copyright lawyers…or people who have read the Wikipedia page.

If you’re looking for a “simple legal rule” so that you can game it, nitpick its terms, or run right up to its line, you’re looking for trouble. Don’t blame me when you find it. But if you’re a realistic player just looking for a sense of odds so you can place wiser bets, the amount of output you accept from an LLM into your codebase at once, and the extent to which it makes what look like implementation choices, rather than simply invoking APIs or established boilerplate, probably represents your best intuitive heuristic. Your working sense of whether it looks like code completion, template-based code generation, or what coders used to have to unavoidably think through and type for themselves, before Copilot and the like came around, can serve as first-pass proxy for legal peril.

If it’s what everybody else checks in to use the same APIs, that’s unlikely creative expression that anyone can claim to own and see infringed. The more specific, creative routines that go within that boilerplate? Yes, potentially. The rigging, patterns, and boilerplate everybody else is filling in, too? Not so much.

the newer a novel, commercially relevant phenomenon, the less specifically-worded, algorithm-like rules determine outcomes at law, and the more important the purposes behind more generally worded rules become. Lawyers call abstractly stated, syllogism-like rules “black letter law” and the more generalized purposes “policies”. When how to apply black letter law isn’t clear, we cite and fight about policies in arguing how to read in context.

When you prompt and take big chunks of code from LLMs that rate high on the intuitive completion-generation-authorship scale, document your code input state, prompts, and further edits. Create a written record of your innocent use of LLMs.

If you were going to code a key part of a project ten years ago, and worried you’d be accusing of plagiarism, the natural advice would’ve been to document your process. Don’t just phone it in with an “Implemented $foo” commit message. Write a nice long one, and maybe blog work in progress or keep a “lab notebook”, too.

How Indian students end up exploited in Germany

[Indian students come to Germany sold on a vision of prosperity by expensive private university marketing, then find themselves unable to leave and forced into delivery work.]

[Delivery companies like Uber Eats and Wolt rely on 3rd party agencies to recruit and hire drivers as 4th party contractors. These agencies interact anonymously through WhatsApp numbers, make arrangements to pay in cash at sketchy locations (often less than anticipates), and regularly declare bankruptcy before starting the scheme again avoid paying taxes and social security.]

Running out of narratives

Crypto is here to stay and it’s big! But it’s mostly a financial asset class built on narratives, self-referential applications, and a side order of niche use cases. The killer use case is stablecoins. That’s pretty boring.

Bitcoin is not a viable high-volume payment system. It’s not a safe haven. It’s not a hedge against a weak USD or inflation. It was a risky asset. But then it didn’t rally when every other risky asset in the world exploded higher. It was digital gold. Then gold and silver doubled and tripled and bitcoin stood still, looking on with jealous awe.

So my view is that crypto is maturing into a small but meaningful asset class with some important but kinda niche use cases. That’s about it. Like video games, or 3D printing, or VR. Exciting, useful, and important industries. But not the internet. Not railroads. Not AI. There is no coming wave of innovation that will take it to the promised land. Crypto has arrived. It’s maturing. It’s not early. What you see is what you get.

OAuth, or, The Elaborate Ceremony of Not Giving People Your Password

[Implicit Grant throws your key to you across a lobby full of interested parties. Proof of Code Key Exchange ensures that the one who requested the key gets it. Neither will solve impersonation attacks via social engineering.]

exploring how my cheap ULID's date portion changes by shifting the:

const date36 = e => new Date(e).valueOf().toString(36);

// year
[
	date36('2026-01-01'), // mjuohs00
	date36('2027-01-01'), // myc87pc0
];

// month
[
	date36('2026-01-01'), // mjuohs00
	date36('2026-02-01'), // ml2z56o0
];

// day
[
	date36('2026-01-01'), // mjuohs00
	date36('2026-01-02'), // mjw3xmo0
];

// hour
[
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00'), // mjvc2jk0
	date36('2026-01-01 13:00'), // mjve7pc0
];

// minute
[
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00'), // mjvc2jk0
	date36('2026-01-01 12:01'), // mjvc3tuo
];

// second
[
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00:00'), // mjvc2jk0
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00:01'), // mjvc2kbs
];

// microsecond
[
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00:00.000'), // mjvc2jk0
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00:00.001'), // mjvc2jk1
];

Tactical tornado is the new default

When it comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done faster than the tactical tornado. In some organizations, management treats tactical tornadoes as heroes. However, tactical tornadoes leave behind a wake of destruction. They are rarely considered heroes by the engineers who must work with their code in the future. Typically, other engineers must clean up the messes left behind by the tactical tornado, which makes it appear that those engineers (who are the real heroes) are making slower progress than the tactical tornado.

How StrongDM’s AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

[Describe tests as 'scenarios' that represent user stories, and 'satisfaction' to quantify that it's happening, then store it where agents can't see them.]

We built twins of Okta, Jira, Slack, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Sheets, replicating their APIs, edge cases, and observable behaviors.

Eight more months of agents

I know local models will win. At some point frontier models will face diminishing returns, local models will catch up, and we will be done being beholden to frontier models. That will be a wonderful day, but until then, you will not know what models will be capable of unless you use the best. Pay through the nose for Opus or GPT-7.9-xhigh-with-cheese. Don't worry, it's only for a few years.

The Anthropic Hive Mind

But I managed. People usually figure out I’m harmless within about 14 seconds of meeting me. I have developed, in my wizened old age, a curious ability to make people feel good, no matter who they are, with just a little conversation, making us both feel good in the process. (You probably have this ability too, and just don’t know how to use it yet.)

During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work.

“I AM GOING DOWN TO GET A DONUT NOW,” they will say, and someone will yell from the nap couch, “GET ME A DONUT.” “I AM ALSO DELETING THE DATABASE.” “OK.”

A lot of engineers like to work in relative privacy, or even secrecy. They don’t want people to see all the false starts, struggles, etc. They just want people to see the finished product. It’s why we have git squash and send dignified PRs instead of streaming every compile error to our entire team.

The Settlers of Catan inventor Teuber famously built new games for his own family to playtest for years, before they finally found the formula for Catan through many iterations.

The center of the campfire is a living prototype. There is no waterfall. There is no spec. There is a prototype that simply evolves, via group sculpting, into the final product: something that finally feels right. You know it when you finally find it.

Anthropic’s Hive Mind is described by employees as “Yes, and…” style improvisational theater. Every idea is welcomed, examined, savored, and judged by the Hive Mind. It’s all based on vibes. There is no central decision-making authority. They are just trying everything, and when magic happens, they all just kind of realize it at once.

all companies are asking variations of just the same two questions. They bluster and bluff and try to act informed, but they are all terrified. When you cluster their questions, they break down into, “Will everything be OK?” and “Will we be here in five years?”

We mourn our craft

I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production.

The Great Realtime Collaboration Misdirection

the need for realtime editing in applications is greatly exaggerated. Think about how rare it is to:

get two people to be in the same place at the same time
have a task where more than one person makes changes at a time
want other people peering over their shoulder while they work

Permissioned Data Diary 1: To Encrypt or Not to Encrypt

[End-to-end encryption may have become the baseline for messages, but not everything needs that. Nobody expects a large group forum or Patreon-style membership area to deal with secret keys.]

this inherent complexity isn’t something that the protocol team at Bluesky can just handle - it gets pushed out to every dev trying to build a client that works with encrypted data.

The Green Room

People who end up in positions of power are often not there because they’re particular profound, or strong, or even nefarious, but rather because they’re trauma-ridden vessels who offer the least resistance to the inhuman forces of our economic system, and who are therefore, almost evolutionarily, ‘selected’ by it.

Before You "Build a Community," Decide: Library or Coffee Shop?

[Popular communities can be categorized as either "libraries" (where visitors look for an answer, then leave without ever signing up), and "cafes" (where people of shared interests come to have open-ended discussions). Each requires different approaches to be successful.]

Löwenzahn: Peter hat viel Zeit

a million ways to tell time without batteries, plus a battery from fruit

i have an impression that ai-assisted coding is so far most enjoyed by either people who can't debug anything, or, people who can debug absolutely everything

X : All your talk about reasoning make you seem very anti the AI era.

When an entire culture decides that producing outputs matters more than understanding mechanisms, it works fine right up until the environment shifts and nobody remembers how to reason from first principles.

A spoiler for the future - Bitcoin

Austerity measures will have taken the route of unprecedented and radical decimation of the state - everything from state provided healthcare to coastguards to income support to education will be practically gone replaced with numerous forms of bitcoin based insurance. If you can't afford it then you won't be able to gain access to it. There will be no state help as the state can neither fund universal care nor determine whether you deserve support.

Is there a better word for 'hackathon'?

[Common hackathon activities like coding are not a good use of my time for an in-person event. I need quiet focus time and good ergonomics to do programming. Better to use these rare encounters with colleagues to chat, brainstorm, do exploratory design work for instance. I already start hacky prototypes on a whim anyway and don’t need an event do to it.]