Notes

Macro-microblogging, as it were. Things too long for (or extracted from threads on) traditional “micro-blog” social media. Subscribe via Atom or JSON feed (what’s a feed?).

2025
- Oct
  - 11
    - Robin Sloan’s “Aspire” Zine
      
      …is sold out, but I’m writing about it anyway.
  - 04
    - Reversion to the Mean
      
      A problem with using LLMs as editors.
- Sep
  - 25
    - Write Good Commit Messages
      
      It doesn’t take long and you never know when it will pay massive dividends.
  - 21
    - Writing and Revision Time
      
      More than you think, probably, for most writing worth reading!
    - Naming Policy: ‘Large Language Models’, Not ‘Artificial Intelligence’
      
      Because I am pretty well persuaded at this point that “AI” obscures far more than it illuminates.
  - 05
    - Software, change, stability, imperfect markets…
      
      Some reflections on 1Password.
- Aug
  - 02
    - Who Wants an Oxide Rack?
      
      This guy! And at least one other guy!
  - 01
    - isolatedDeclarations and Zod
      
      One strategy for using TypeScript’s isolatedDeclarations flag with inference-driven libraries like Zod.
- Jul
  - 27
    - jj workshop↩︎—❈
      
      A tutorial you can follow to build your skills.
  - 22
    - CleanShotX: Another Example of a Good ‘Subscription’ Model
      
      I will celebrate every piece of software I use that gets this right.
    - Kobo and Instapaper Integration
      
      Exactly what I have been hoping for since Mozilla announced the Pocket shutdown.
  - 11
    - the way we use language
      
      Quoting Ben Makuh on how we talk about LLMs and the language of slavery,
  - 10
    - jj tip: cool revsets and per-repo aliases
  - 06
    - Five is the Floor
      
      And other hilarities about Garmin’s Body Battery feature.
    - No Really, That Lens Is Huge
      
      I mentioned this in my last photo post, and had to share.
  - 05
    - Subscriptions That Respect Users
      
      A decade on, no one has done better than JetBrains on this.
- Jun
  - 29
    - Torn
      
      Two excellent choices is sometimes worse than just one. As here.
  - 23
    - Using light-dark() Instead of a Sass Mixin for Color Schemes
      
      One fewer reason to use anything besides native CSS
    - Platform Reality↩︎—❈
      
      Riffing on Robin Sloan on Substack and the open web.
  - 11
    - Telling
  - 06
    - git commit headers (not log headers)
      
      Something I learned because of a neat new jj feature!
    - History and Disposition
      
      I have spent my career on large, legacy systems, and that informs an awful lot about me—including my views on LLMs.
- May
  - 03
    - Tip: Apple Music Hides Deleted Albums
      
      Here’s how to get them back.
- Apr
  - 28
    - The Git “Invalid username or password” error
      
      Spoilers: If you’re me, it’s probably your personal access token.
  - 27
    - Using mise-en-place for dotfiles
      
      Lots of ways to do this; this is mine for now.
  - 17
    - Your Real Assumed Audience
      
      There’s who you think it is, and who it actually is.
  - 16
    - Quoting Dan Moren on Apple’s Software
    - Claude as a Better Grammarly?
      
      Results are mixed. Perhaps unsurprisingly.
  - 14
    - Miyazaki Cyberpunk↩︎—❈
      
      Read Robin Sloan on Hayao Miyazaki—not Studio Ghibli, just Miyazaki.
  - 04
    - Userscripts for macOS and iOS
      
      A handy little app for customizing JavaScript and CSS.
    - NodeWalker in JavaScript
      
      For tasks like “transform every text node”.
- Mar
  - 27
    - Downie + Overcast
      
      Turning video into podcasts.
  - 15
    - Show Up!
      
      A lesson I have been more thoroughly internalizing recently.
  - 11
    - Quoting Jane Scharl on Poetry Magazine↩︎—❈
      
      Art is not a mere tool for other things.
    - TypeScript Native Port: Some Questions
      
      Faster is good! The rest of this announcement is… strange.
  - 05
    - The First Day of Lent, Commonly Called Ash Wednesday
  - 04
    - Yes, Hallucinations are the “Least Dangerous”—Exactly
      
      A rejoinder to Simon Willison’s rant last week.
- Feb
  - 28
    - Cloudflare Worker Responses Require Manual Caching
      
      This was not intuitive or obvious, but at least it isn’t hard, either.
  - 25
    - Why Hover for Domain Registration?
      
      Because unlike most other registrars, they genuinely don’t suck.
  - 24
    - Separation of Concerns
      
      …for web domain management.
  - 20
    - fish tip: Launching $EDITOR to Edit the Current Terminal Command
      
      Something I end up doing surprisingnly often!
  - 17
    - Axum Handler Errors Need to Implement IntoResponse
      
      This has some interesting implications for Result.
  - 14
    - Indurate
      
      A lovely, too-little-used word.
  - 13
    - Prototyping/Sketching in Code
  - 11
    - Robin Sloan—“Is It Okay?”↩︎—❈
      
      (Betteridge cannot cheat on this one.)
  - 10
    - Options for libc with Rust
      
      Summarizing a bunch of good social media responses in one place.
  - 09
    - Authoring This Site in Obsidian etc.?
      
      Why I don’t, and what I do instead (at least at present).
  - 05
    - Today I Learned: Redirect Emails
      
      Available in Mac Mail.app and a few other clients.
  - 04
    - Big Packages or Many Dependencies
      
      Pick which you prefer, but you cannot be mad about both!
  - 03
    - The twitter:label and twitter:data meta tags
      
      I have never seen these documented, but they are useful!
- Jan
  - 30
    - minijinja tip: Template Values Must Round Trip
      
      A general lesson about de/serialization applied in this specific context.
  - 29
    - minijinja tip: What That Custom Function’s Type Error Means
      
      If the error message involves Function, the problem is really ViaDeserialize.
    - TypeScript 5.8 Checks Runtime Code for Conditional Types!
      
      One of those “if you know, you know” releases.
    - Re-packaging Existing Content, Transformation, or Both?
      
      Some technical notes for thinking about the legal and ethical questions around “generative” AI systems.
  - 28
    - One Reason Job Hunting is Exhausting
      
      The mismatch between time and effort put in and results out.
    - Snuggle Your Kids
      
      Especially (but of course not only!) on hard days.
  - 27
    - How I Use Freedom to Focus
      
      Some work is boring, and blocking distractions helps.
  - 25
    - The Curse of Knowledge and True Myth’s Documentation
      
      Writing good introductory documentation and teaching materials is hard.
    - Recovery Time as an Indicator of Fitness
      
      An experience report “from the field” as it were.
  - 24
    - A Reasonable Error Printing Utility in TypeScript
      
      Something I want all the time in JS/TS now that I am used to it in Rust—thanks to anyhow!
  - 22
    - mdBook tip: Redirects and the SUMMARY.md file
      
      The “helpful” creation of files named in SUMMARY.md might trip you up.
    - jj tip: describe multiple revisions at once
      
      Revsets and filesets remain mind-blowing.
  - 20
    - Two Quotes and a Question on Software Engineering and AI
      
      What should we make of generative AI systems in software engineering?
  - 18
    - Improving jj-gcp with JSON Schema and schemars
      
      I don’t use this tool that often, but it’s good for it to work correctly when I do!
  - 17
    - A Little Soulver Coffee Calculator
      
      One of the many ways I use a great app in day-to-day life!
  - 16
    - What Distinguishes Newsletters from Blogs?
      
      Genre, medium, content… delivery mechanism?
  - 15
    - JavaScript’s Promise.race and Promise.all Are Not “Fair”
      
      Just like life! And just like life, you just have to deal with it.
  - 14
    - Resilience, Robustness, and Competence Envelopes
      
      Some great additions to my systems thinking vocabulary, courtesy of Lorin Hochstein.
  - 13
    - Against Hard-Wrapping Text Documents
      
      Let your text editor do the work for you instead. Please.
  - 11
    - Momentum
      
      On the potential positive power of inertia.
  - 08
    - jj tip: Squash Changes From Across a Revset
      
      Another quick and easy way to split up changes “after the fact”.
  - 06
    - Big Picture Planning Makes Little Picture Planning Easier
      
      Year, month, week, day, hour—and probably not further.
  - 04
    - Inspiration and the Subconscious
      
      A little musical experience report from earlier today.
  - 02
    - A Year of Shipping
      
      …details to be determined as I go.
    - “Working Effectively” Instead of “Productivity”
      
      A subtle distinction that has come to mean a great deal to me.
  - 01
    - A Structure for Personal Reviews
      
      Part of a habit I have been working on building for the past year.
2024
- Dec
  - 27
    - TrainingPeaks Virtual and Garmin TacX NEO Bike
      
      This combo works but it’s easy to set it up wrong today.
  - 25
    - Why the Jujutsu posts are all about differences from Git
      
      After all, it can do all the normal Git workflows, too…
  - 24
    - macOS tip: Spell Check with ⌘: and ⌘;
      
      The built-in functionality is great, actually.
  - 21
    - Mental State and Perceived Exertion
      
      Taking a run when stressed was fascinating.
  - 20
    - rust-analyzer version via rust-toolchain.toml
      
      If you use an older toolchain, this will make for a better developer (and contributor!) experience.
    - fish shell v4 beta 1
      
      A bunch of small nice improvements… and a rewrite in Rust!
  - 19
    - Noteblogging
      
      We needed a word for this thing that various folks are doing.
    - Publishing to GitHub Pages via GitHub Actions
      
      Including two tips for bits that were very much not obvious about the project settings!
    - Byword
      
      Still a really great Markdown editor after all these years.
    - Shellcheck
      
      Your best friend if you have to write shell scripts.
  - 18
    - Configure Zed to Use the Project’s rust-analyzer
      
      Because it is not nice for your editor tooling to stop working!
  - 17
    - Corrections: Using Drop Safely, Not For Safety
      
      My note about using Drop in Rust last week had a serious error!
  - 16
    - Fast Forward “Merges” on GitHub
      
      This should be built in, but it isn’t, so this is of limited use. But not none!
    - To Throw or Not to Throw in TypeScript?
      
      Taking a bit of inspiration from Rust and ending up with much more reliable TypeScript.
    - jj tip: ignore gh-pages by default
      
      I want my log to show me only useful information. Revsets let me do that!
  - 14
    - Buttondown’s Alternatives Page
      
      Would that all software companies acted this way.
    - Runtime or Types?
      
      A false dichotomy! They always go together.
  - 13
    - Mozi↩︎—❈
      
      A great idea for a social app that is not social media—and which fills a gap I have felt for years.
  - 12
    - Mac App of the Year is… Lightroom?
      
      Okay, Apple.
  - 11
    - jj Tip: Rebase All Branches Matching a Revset
    - cargo-semver-checks v0.38.0↩︎—❈
      
      More lints for the sake of fewer SemVer issues in Rust libraries!
  - 09
    - Ghost (Instead of Substack)
      
      Own your turf! Including, if you have one, a newsletter!
    - Implications of Plateauing LLMs
      
      They may not be what you think.
    - Is Organic Social Media Dead?
      
      If you know Betteridge’s Law, you know.
  - 06
    - 2024 State of Rust Survey↩︎—❈
      
      An opportunity to provide real and actionable information to the Rust project leadership. Take it!
    - The Blue Oak Model License
      
      If you’re looking for a permissive license, this is a good one!
  - 05
    - jj v0.24
      
      My daily-driver version control tool keeps getting better.
  - 04
    - On cargo install Not Defaulting to --locked
      
      A few details, as I best I know them, because a friend asked after reading my last post!
    - PSA: Default to cargo install --locked
      
      There are reasons this is not the default, but you can make it your default.
  - 03
    - No AI on This Site
      
      A statement and a pledge.
    - dprint
      
      A very fast auto-formatter!
  - 02
    - The DefinitelyTyped dprint Setup
      
      Much, much simpler than I expected!
    - brew services uses launchctl or systemctl
- Nov
  - 30
    - Apple Photos Shared Albums and JPEG XL
    - React Hooks Are Indeed Not “Functional”
      
      That is not a value judgment (I’ll save that for another time), but a statement of how they work.
  - 27
    - Rust test binary help output

2025

Oct

11

04

Sep

25

21

05

Aug

02

01

Jul

27

jj workshop↩︎—❈

22

11

10

06

05

Jun

29

23

Platform Reality↩︎—❈

11

06

May

03

Apr

28

27

17

16

14

Miyazaki Cyberpunk↩︎—❈

04

Mar

27

15

11

Quoting Jane Scharl on Poetry Magazine↩︎—❈

05

04

Feb

28

25

24

20

17

14

13

11

Robin Sloan—“Is It Okay?”↩︎—❈

10

09

05

04

03

Jan

30

29

28

27

25

24

22

20

18

17

16

15

14

13

11

08

06

04

02