Worse is better
The most popular technology may not be the best.
Testing is fucking awesome
Read "Testing is fucking awesome" by Michael Tromba. I used to have a pretty negative sentiment on testing. Unit tests, integration tests, anything that required writing code to test other code I alre...
Evaluation order and nontermination in query languages
June 2026
Structural Correctness — sao.dev
Type systems are great: they catch huge swaths of bugs at compile time, and contribute to a grammar/vocab of forward development for your app. Like type systems, modern tools for verifying correctness leverage structural descriptions of the problem, via graph-…
One Man's Delusion Is Another Man's Dream.
There is a particular type of person found everywhere, but especially online. They stand at the side-lines of life, watching others take ris...
On Hopping Claudes
I vibe-coded a dashboard for hopping Claudes. It allows me to see which of my agents are working, stalled, or waiting on me. Under the hood it captures each agent's hook events into a local SQLite database.
When Impressive Performance Gains Do Not Matter
Even order-of-magnitude improvements in performance may not matter.
European ISPs Want Rightsholders Held Accountable for Overblocking Damage * TorrentFreak
For years, rightsholders have pushed for broader site blocking orders, with no direct liability for overblocking. EuroISPA want to change that.
Docker Desktop Linux X11 Forwarding from Container to Host | no dogma blog
This was much harder than it should have been. If I were using the Docker Engine instead, it probably would have worked with only a few steps. But I like Docker Desktop, and I want to stick with it. This post explains how to run GUI applications in a Docker co…
Anti-Meme Explosion
A brain-dump about antimemetics: ideas that resist transmission, the four kinds I keep noticing, and why LLMs may be the greatest anti-meme generators we've built.
Ableton Live and Designing for Authenticity — THU Sound & Music 2026
Slides and speaker notes from my THU: Sound & Music 2026 talk on the design of Ableton Live — exploring its foundational ideas, the Drift synthesizer, and the role of authenticity in the design of lasting creative tools.
Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development - Quesma Blog
Qwen 3.6 27B is finally a smart model we can use for coding on Macbook or Nvidia RTX - with llama.cpp and OpenCode.
Building a Self-Hosted Cloud #0
I did something kinda silly when I ran for president of my ACM chapter. I promised free web hosting for all members. Why is this silly? We are quite budget constrained due to university spending policy. So how am I going get myself out of this pickle? I’m goin…
Projection: A jj Workflow for splitting public and private files
How to track private files together with public code with Jujutsu filesets, revsets, and git private commits setting.
Migrating from TrueNAS to NixOS without losing data after the build-system rug pull | Bas Nijholt
TrueNAS was the last appliance OS in my homelab. The build-system change was the last straw, but the itch had been building for a while: too much UI state, unclear defaults, and virtualization churn around Incus. This is the story of how I gave an AI agent roo…
Because it Speaks in Words
Grappling with the true power of words.
The Dead Internet is Real
The measurable version of dead-internet theory is already here: bots are 53% of web traffic, AI writes most new pages, and under a third of Google searches still send a click. The open web got disintermediated — hollowed from both ends.
A Command Palette for Sway - Nilcoast
Erik Benoist - Software engineer building platforms for 20+ years. Chicago-based. Focusing on product and DevOps.
Extracting sound effects from a Switch game - Vox Silva
How I took apart Switch Sports to isolate the golf audio.
Asteroid Threat
Pollen tried to remove my article about CEO Callum Negus-Fancey and CTO Bradley Wright, and Google is assisting with it
In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it: Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid soft…
HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74/100. No — 88/100. Actually 83/100.
How hiring is becoming a luck filter.
Memory Prices
Historical and current prices for DRAM, HBM, and NAND flash.
Zanagrams - free daily word puzzle
A free daily word puzzle. Drag across the letters to find the hidden words and watch the grid shrink as you solve it.
Age verification is just a precursor to attribution of speech
Lots of US states, European countries, and Australia have introduced "age verification" regulations. They present it as the classic "save the children" talking ...
My favorite keyboards
June 28th, 2025
Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
It's likelier than you think! ...maybe.
The Extra Gear | Fabio Scagliola
Architecting software and servantly leading people. Making music as Nothence. Writing weird stories.
Microsoft Bought a Nuke Plant. You Should Be Worried.
Let's cut through the Green Energy PR noise. Microsoft bought their own physics. They have nuclear reactors. You have rolling blackouts.
A hash proves the bytes, not the source
A package and dependency manager for Meson projects.
My coworker Iris isn't a person — Vinicius Brasil
We put an AI agent in Slack. The surprise wasn't what she automated — it was that I started leaving the thread less, even for code.
The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online
Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters contin…
Slop, trust, and a three-line patch
A real bug, a three-line fix, and a one-line rejection: what reaching for ‘AI slop’ as a reflex gets wrong about verification, scale, and trust in open source.
Customer service as a mirror of modern life – Connor Gurney
As my Now page will tell you, my day job is handling complaints for a major UK-based telecommunications company. My role sits in our executive complaints team, where we deal with the most serious of complaints—those sent to our senior bosses, to MPs, to the pa…
Why the Metaverse Failed — josh.earth
I recently read the excellent long form article The Metaverse Fever Dream by Pixel Envy (Nick Heer). It gets the general vibe right and I encourage you to read it, but I also think it doesn’t capture what the metaverse — meaning Mark Zuckerberg’s vision strong…
POSIX Is Not A Shell
Alexandre Gomes Gaigalas – June 28, 2026
Life lessons and hot takes from my 30s | Shreyas
I recently read Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Life Advice for Living. And immediately after that, on Substack, I also came across Nabeel Qureshi’s Substack post which is in this similar genre of being a listicle. I felt a genuine urge to articulate my own life lesso…
The Internet needs more You
The most scarce thing on the internet isn't traffic. It's a genuine human perspective. Here's why I'm going back to blogging.
My First Encounter With a Political Spambot | Tom Bedor's Blog
I had my first encounter with a political spambot this week: a polite robot named Emma texted me wanting to talk about Israel.
Why is there smoke coming from the boiler room? | Willem Vooijs
Willem Vooijs - builder and tinkerer sharing insights on electronics, home automation, open source software, and sustainable energy
Run Obsidian as a self-hosted web app
Obsidian has been my primary personal knowledge management solution for years. Since Obsidian Bases was added, my Obsidian Vault has become my source of truth for media tracking and project planning,
From Transformer to ChatGPT: The Part That Isn't the Architecture
A stack of transformer layers is not yet ChatGPT or Claude. This is the rest of the path: how text becomes tokens, how a raw next-word predictor turns into an assistant across three training phases, how LoRA customizes a model on a budget, and why everyone is …
I build a 10 inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions
I built a 10-inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions and I had a lot of fun doing it. I want to share my build in this post.
Single point of failure apps
Two years ago, I bought a secondary phone. It’s a cheap Android phone that always travels with me outside of town. I’ve for the case that my main phone breaks from a fall, fails to boot after an update, gets lost or runs out of battery. The secondary phone has…
I turned my prologue into a short video
A video depicting the prologue of my book "Just Fired". This is my story growing up in Saudi Arabia, and ending up in Los Angeles with failed dreams.
Connections in Math: deriving the SVD from scratch
Most books state the Singular Value Decomposition as a finished theorem. Here we arrive at it naturally, without even aiming for it — letting the structure of any linear map hand us the factorization for free.
Strong Relationships, Loosely Held
The best relationships in my life are seldom the longest ones. One of my best friends Carolina entered my life by storm, a whirlwind of entrepreneurship and road trips in France during the summer of ‘16, topped off with some trauma bonding during the attack i…
The Waffle Shop Downstairs - Gibberish and Stuff
There's a waffle shop near my house that's been there for as long as I can remember. I used to go all the time. At $2 a waffle, it was slightly more expensive than your average bakery waffle, but...
The Curious Case of aa.ns.charter.com
I run Pi-hole on my home network. Most days I don’t think about it. But one stray entry in the query log caught my eye, and what I thought would be a five-minute mystery turned into a seven-y…
My Linux Odyssey: How I Ended Up on NixOS
A personal account of distro-hopping, window managers, and eventually finding NixOS. Part 1: How It All Started I started using Linux about four years ago. My very first distribution was Fedora, followed by Ubuntu, which I used for about a month before switchi…
There Is No Reward Function for Meaning
We Only Celebrate Progress Once A century ago, sending word to another continent meant waiting weeks for a ship to cross the ocean. Today, we complain when a video call lags for half a second. For some reason, we celebrate a breakthrough once, then it quietly …
GitHub - librepods-org/librepods: AirPods liberated from Apple's ecosystem.
AirPods liberated from Apple's ecosystem. Contribute to librepods-org/librepods development by creating an account on GitHub.
On cigarettes – Blog Fiasco
There’s something to be said for cigarettes. Most of it, of course, is bad. Cigarettes smell awful. The stench lingers and invades long after the cigarette is gone. Cigarettes, of course, also kill people. Lung cancer from a lifetime of … Continue reading →