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🔗 Blain Smith: Just Fucking Use Go
There are not enough “this"es in the English language I can add in support for this post.
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🔗 The Homebound Symphony: Predictable (emphasis added):
Every university function that is on the internet is a security vulnerability. (Just look at how many online systems we have!) But every university function outsourced to a giant company whose tools are used by many universities is a far greater vulnerability, because there is so much money to be made from exploiting all that data. Locally owned and managed data is a smaller and less appealing target for hackers.
It’s kind of ironic that the move away from home-spun and locally managed data stores, usually done in the name of “security”, has not left us more secure at all. All it’s done is made larger, more valuable, targets.
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🔗 Manton Reece: Inkwell app review history
Get it together, Apple! This is an app I’m interested in using, and your review process is getting in the way. What the heck is the problem?!
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🔗 Pixel Envy: ‘Knowledge Fight’ Is Over:
Sometimes, periodical media is created with an elaborate plan or story arc. Often, though, there is no predetermined structure and, especially in the case of reactive or commentary media, the next entry feels almost inevitable. Until it stops. Then we get to feel what our world is like without it and, if it leaves a void, it is a sign it was valued.
Knowledge Fight has been a guilty pleasure of mine. The subject matter is awful, yet Dan or Jordan approached it with the attitude it deserves, namely mockery. I still have the back catalogue to enjoy, but I will miss this.
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🔗 Forking Mad: Disparaging Nouns
I might use the word walloper to refer to someone. I think it is quite common parlance. “He’s a walloper” - an unkind reference to his annoying character. […] Apparently in Australia it means Policeman! In Ireland it’s a cudgel (short heavy implement, used as a weapon). I guess that one could be phallic … but Policeman‽
How about Twat. I love this word. Again, derogatory towards someone who is a fool. It can also mean to hit or slap! (new to me). Our cousins down-under seem to think a Twat is a vulgar term for [censored].
Speaking as someone who grew up in Australia, I’ve never heard “walloper” or “twat” used in that way. Probably just the circles I travel in, or just the amount of British TV I watch, but I tend to associated them with the Irish and British meanings respectively.
Now, vulgarity out of the way, this is a useful frame of reference for me to explain that I’m not really one to alter my language to make it understandable for an international audience. The subheading makes it clear that I’m someone from Melbourne, Australia, and I tend to be a little precious about the importation of words from other English speaking nations squashing those I grew up with (a futile activity, I agree, but that doesn’t change my feelings). So take this as a general reminder to anyone reading just to keep this context in mind.
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🔗 Forking Mad: Who knows that you blog?
Question for the audience: Do you tell people you blog?
I found this post via Kev Quirk who posted his own answer to this question. Mine are quite similar: I don’t really make a point of telling people I have a blog. It’s not like I keep it a complete secret: if someone talks about writing or keeping a blog of their own, I do mention that I also have one. And I may say a few words on what I tend to write about. But I rarely mention the URL or send links to people.
That said, I know of a few people that are aware of it. I have a link to it on my LinkedIn profile and one or two people I work closely with stumbled upon it that way (hi, K.K. 👋). And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It keeps me honest, and resident of the fact that whatever is written here is public. That’s always been true, but it becomes quite tangible if you know the people who can read it.
But no, I generally don’t make it a point that I keep a blog.
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🔗 Interconnected: We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps
It’s amusing imagining a world where custom apps are just as abundant as posts on a blog, but it kind of feels like we’re heading towards that future. I do like this idea, though.
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🔗 The Verge: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe
Lot of links to high quality creative tools that are free and cheap. Cavalry looks really interesting.
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🔗 Platformer News: The scientific case for being nice to your chatbot:
Being polite to a large language model can feel strange or even silly — roughly equivalent to thanking a toaster. And yet a recent paper from Anthropic lends scientific weight to the theory that chatbots work better when you’re nice to them.
Looks like in this brave new world, we’ll all be saying thank-you to our doors. 😀
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🔗 Birchtree: Where did the MP3s come from?
Not to make everything a comparison to what we’re living through now, but I do think that it’s notable that one of the most nostalgic, good-vibes products of many of our youths was fundamentally built on stealing from artists.
Seems to me that the nostalgia comes from having media that you “own.” Maybe not in a purely legal sense, but certainly from a technical one. To be able to manipulate media as plain files on a file system, that you can move and play anywhere, is something that’s been lost with the move to streaming.
The good news is that it’s still possible to get music as MP3 files, legally even. Bandcamp and Qobuz are two I tend to visit, and both are quite good. And yes, it may not have everything you’re looking for, but it has more than you think. Enough for me to go there to look for something before resorting to the streaming services.
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🔗 Simon Willison: Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS
Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS today, a new text-to-speech model that can be directed using prompts.
Oof! This looks like a pretty good TTS system. The example Simon gave was quite convincing. I had a play myself using Simon’s online tools, giving the model this prompt:
Say dynamically: “[surprised]Wow, impressive! [neutral] Although I do wonder if this is worth the two cents I paid. Would be nice if I chose the right word to say. [mocking] Impression? [laugh] So cute!”
(Some context, I wrote “impression” instead of “impressive” in my first test).
Here’s the result (it’s a download link download to avoid the post showing up on the podcast feed): gemini-speech.wav
Pretty decent.
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🔗 Robert Birming: How to kill a blog
What can you do to prolong [your blog’s] life?
It’s very simple. Don’t go niche.
Blog about whatever you feel like. Some posts get more attention than others. It’s not important.
Love it! And so true.
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🔗 Kaptur: Sora - A Solution Without a Problem
A fascinating exploration on the failures of Sora, why the engagement of AI-generated video wasn’t there, and what real video and photography has that the AI-generated counterpart just doesn’t.
Via: Om Malik
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🔗 The Axios supply chain attack used individually targeted social engineering
they scheduled a meeting with me to connect. the meeting was on ms teams. […] the meeting said something on my system was out of date. i installed the missing item as i presumed it was something to do with teams, and this was the RAT.
Ah, an interesting way to get someone to install something: throwing up an install prompt minutes before needing to join a meeting. Exploiting probably the most annoying aspect of video conferencing software.
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🔗 Google’s New Sideloading Restrictions for Android Include a 24-Hour Waiting Period
Ugh! Google is just dead set on ruining Android, aren’t they. If I wanted a locked-down mobile OS, I would’ve bought an iPhone. At least that way I would’ve had access to better apps. 😒
Via: Daring Fireball
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🔗 Pixel Envy: On Software Quality
I am somewhat impressed by the breadth of Apple’s current offerings as I consider all the ways they are failing me, and I cannot help but wonder if it is that breadth that is contributing to the unreliability of this software. Or perhaps it is the company’s annual treadmill.
I’m almost certain that the devs at Apple are not happy with shipping software that doesn’t match this quality threshold. They’d fix all this issues with Tahoe and iOS 26 if they could (well, the one’s that are not just bad designs). They just don’t have the time to do so.
Hardware takes months to setup, and once the lines are ready, it’s expensive to change them. So there’s huge resistance to change it near the end of the release cycle. Software’s malleability, in this respect, is a blessing and a curse. So easy to change, meaning that those making the decisions don’t see a cost in making these changes in the 11th hour. After all, it’s “just” software. But established software products are also resistant to change, and adding more cruft on the top just makes the change harder. Rather than fix things, devs spend all their time trying to get the bodged code working in concert while trying to meet the deadlines set from those that need features to sell. The result is lower quality software.
There’s no escaping the “scope, quality, time: pick two” maxim.
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🔗 Steve Yegge: You Should Write Blogs
An oldie but a goodie.
The last big problem I grapple with is biting off too much for a single blog. I find that if I can write a blog in a single sitting, it’ll usually seem worth publishing, at least at the time. […] If I can’t write it in one sitting, I feel like I don’t have something concrete enough to say. […] I can only do that with coding, not writing.
Yeah, I suffer from this too. I need to hit publish soon after writing the first draft, otherwise the resistance to finishing it gets too great.
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🔗 Six Colors: Apple’s Creator Studio has a rough App Store roll-out
But if you’ll forgive me, I find it hard to get too worked up about icon designs when Apple is putting ads for a professional creative suite in its free productivity apps. Which is the greater offense [sic] to the user experience?
I was a little worried that Apple would put ads in the version of Logic Pro I bought and paid for a few years ago. Fortunately that isn’t the case (points for restraint, I guess). But it sucks they’ve decided to do this in software that’s bundled with the OS. Getting ideas from Microsoft, maybe.
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🔗 LMNT: Interface Sound Effects
Playing Nintendo games […] makes me wish macOS was flooded with lots of interface sound effects. For clicking down, up, resizing windows, minimizing windows, zooming windows, dragging windows, clicking buttons and checkboxes and radio buttons, dragging sliders, etc.
The most notable interface sound I can remember was Windows 98, which made a mouse click sound when double clicking a folder in the explorer. This was when tapping on trackpads to simulate a mouse click were becoming a thing, so this was probably meant to be more utilitarian than whimsical.
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🔗 Steve Yegge: Software Survival 3.0
Interesting post from Steve Yegge about the qualities of software that could survive in a world of agents. Seems more geared towards their fitness for agent use, but there were some notes about human use too. Food for thought.
(Oh, and Steve, I’m glad you’ve settled on a blogging platform but did it have to be Medium?)
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Live penguin camera stream set-up on Antipodes Island (for now). For anyone who likes penguins, which I think is everyone.
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🔗 Greg Morris: Envy: The Only Sin That Never Feels Good
Someone’s life looks better than yours on Instagram and suddenly you’re either tearing yourself down or posting something designed to make them feel worse about theirs. You see someone’s project launch and instead of starting your own, you either convince yourself you’re not good enough or you start picking holes in what they’ve built. Both responses come from the same uncomfortable place. Neither helps you.
Yep, envy sucks. It comes unbidden and leaves you feeling crappy. This resonated with me.
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🔗 Wikipedia: Rubber-tyred tram
Some follow-up on my speculation of how this one-rail tram vehicle that I saw in Italy works. Turns out that the single rail is used for guiding the vehicle, and the one pantograph variant does use the rail for the return current. But there is a two trolly-poll variant that only uses the rail for guidance, and can disconnect from it to form a bog standard trolleybus. Bit weird to consider the rail at all at that point, but still quite intriguing.
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🔗 Steven P. Wickstrom: Over 300 words to use instead of SAID
Filing this for later when I want to write some fiction (it could happen).