Day 2: curve
#mbjune
Day 1: tree
#mbjune
If I had a dollar for every time I mix up brew update and brew upgrade, I’d probably be able to quit my job.
🔗 Simon Willison: No build frontend is so much more fun
If you’ve found web development frustrating over the past 5-10 years, here’s something that has worked worked great for me: give yourself permission to avoid any form of frontend build system. […] The joy came flooding back to me! It turns out browser APIs are really good now.
None of my frontend projects are used for “real” things, so I’m not speaking from authority here. But I don’t care: I still think the worst part of frontend development are all the crummy build tools. Remove them all and web development can be really fun.
Rubberducking: Of Brass and Browsers
🦆: Did you hear about The Browser Company?
L: Oh yeah, I heard the CEO wrote a letter about Arc.
🦆: Yeah, did you ever use Arc?
L: Nah. Probably won’t now that it seems like they’ve stopped work on it. Heard it was pretty nice thought.
🦆: Yeah, I heard Scott Forstall had an early look at it.
L: Oh yeah, and how he compared it to a saxophone and recommended making it more like a piano.
🦆: Yeah.
L: Yeah. Not sure I agree with him.
🦆: Oh really?
L: Yeah. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with pianos. Absolutely love them. But everyone seems to be making those, and no-one’s making saxophones, violins, etc. And we need those instruments too.
🦆: Yeah, I suppose an orchestra with 30 pianos would sound pretty bland.
L: Yeah, we need all the instruments: the one’s that are approachable, and the ones for those with the technical skills to get the best sound.
And no-one's a beginner for ever. I'm sure there are piano players out there who would like to try something else eventually, like a saxophone.
🦆: Would you say Vivaldi is like a saxophone?
L: I'd probably say Vivaldi is like a synthesiser. The basics are approachable for the beginners, yet it's super customisable for those that want to go beyond the basics.
And just like a synthesiser, it can be easy to get it sounding either really interesting, or really bizarre. You can get in a state where you can't back out and you'll have to start from scratch.
🦆: Oh, I can't imagine that being for everyone.
L: No, indeed. Probably for those piano players that would want to try something else.
I hear Apple executives have decline John Gruber’s invitation to his live Talk Show. This may end up being a good thing. The executives were always so guarded, it felt like an interview with a politician. Having someone outside that bubbles will probably make for a much better show.
TIL that Vivaldi has a dashboard of sorts. I discovered it by accident: I created a new tab, and while moving my mouse to the URL bar, I clicked too early and revealed it. Could make a nice canvas for those little web tools I use for work.
So Apple wants to get serious about gaming, eh? Here’s a suggestion for them: instead of spending dev resources on new, dedicated gaming apps, see if you can get a game from 2010 running at more than 10 FPS with all the visual settings set to low.
Enjoyed the interview with Kagi’s founder Vladimir Prelovac on Manton’s Timetable podcast. Motivated me to sign up and give Kagi a try. Let’s see this thing the cool kids online are raving about.
Getting pinged on all sides at the moment. So tempting to reply with something like:
Thank you for messaging Leon. You are currently number
2in the queue.
But no, I won’t. I’ll be good. 😀
“Get out more” goal for May failed. ❌
Oh, I’m still slipping on this goal. 😩
I find it amusing that vandals are tagging this wall with chalk. Their graffiti stays up for a few days before the cleaners come with what I assume are industrial-strength erasers. 😄
Dear MacOS devs,
Since you already know the email address I’m trying to invite — you included it as an auto-complete suggestion after all — may I suggest that you show a New Contact form pre-filled with said address when I click “Open Contacts” here? Saves me a click and a copy-paste.
Cheers.
Be careful when asking someone to do something. They may just go ahead and do it.
🔗 Birchtree: Apple copies Samsung 😉
It has been fundamentally strange that Apple currently has OS’s with the same features that rarely share a number, so numbering them by year makes sense.
Wait, I was under the impression that Apple’s practice of trying to jam the same features into their OSes at the same time had a detrimental effect on quality. And they’re going to synchronise all their OS version numbers? Wouldn’t that just solidify user’s expectation on what’s in those OSes? Why not avoid that by keeping individual version numbers, and just ship features when they’re ready?
Not sure I’m willing to spend 9 minutes and 21 seconds watching that “Sam and Jony” IO1 video, but after hearing that it featured music from the Martian soundtrack, it got me wanting to listen to it again. It’s been about 9 years since I played it last, and I’ve forgotten how good it is. Not sure I’ll add it to my rotation — there are a few less-than-pleasent memories associated with it — but there’s no denying that it’s a pretty decent soundtrack.
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Use lowercase? Sorry, no. Style guide. ↩︎
Shout out to Daman, who helped me with my recent podcast dramas.
Might be a bit early in the week but I’m calling it now: this week’s earworm is very likely to be songs from Eurovision Song Contest 2025, in Basel. 🎵
And I make no apologies for this. Well, maybe some apologies to Kev Quirk. 😁
It annoys me to no end when people and systems display durations of operations, and do not include units. Are we talking milliseconds? Seconds? Minutes? Millenia? Don’t just give me a number like 300. I need to know if that’s a blink of an eye, or if I should go grab a coffee while I wait.
Somehow, the access token for managing my account for a private podcast feed found it’s way into Google’s search index. A complete stranger emailed me about it, which I very much appreciated. Turns out they were searching for one of the query parameters involved in an OAuth 2 exchange: not something super common, yet common enough to be a problem.
The issue is resolved now but I’m wondering how it leaked. I’m usually pretty good at trying to keep links to private feeds private. The only thing I can think of is that I tried making a clip of that show using Pocketcasts. And since Pocketcasts now generates hosted clip pages rather than rendering a video, the tokenised link would’ve appeared there, along with the rest of the show notes. I didn’t post the clip, but maybe it made it’s way to Google’s index via that feature in some other manner. Some discovery thing, perhaps?
Anyway, I have alternative means of making my clips now, but for anyone else using Pocketcasts, just keep this in mind when making clips of private shows.