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• Post #3033892

  My daughter and I have very different opinions on whether one should use shuffle when listening to an auto-generated playlist.

• Post #3033891

  I've been rethinking my testing strategy for agentically coded projects (i.e., vibecoded; where I'm not touching the code directly). It's easy to just have it go and make tests, and sometimes poke it or add instructions to make more tests. I haven't seen much value from the result. In part I'm not reading the tests any more than I'm reading the code. But also the tests are _much worse_ to read than the code, tedious and obtuse. Agents (at least...

• Post #3033890

  Reading @simon's description of the AI chardet clean room relicensed implementation: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/5/chardet/ One of the arguments against this being a valid reimplementation is that the person who guided the implementation (Dan Blanchard) has also been maintaining chardet for over a decade, and thus has too much knowledge of the code for it to qualify as a clean room implementation. This claim frankly offends me. Of course Dan knows all about the code, and more im...

• Post #3033889

  Someone asked if anyone needed a hug, and in fact at that moment I did need a hug but every default in me said that I did not. I think this is a widespread masculine response. But I did take a moment (oddly, before the hug) to reflect on what makes denial so automatic. For me I felt a need to both actively query myself in response to the question ("_do_ I need a hug?") and then to navigate myself to an answer of "no". What I felt wasn't a need to pe...

• Post #3033888

  Files have types/extensions, but directories do not, and I think that's unfortunate, it would help if they could be typed. Or maybe I just wish a file could also be a directory. (Is this what Mac Resource Forks were about?)

• Post #3033887

  Someone was talking about making an app for a local tool share, making it purely as a public good, not a business. In the past this would be a Good Idea That Won't Happen (because despite good intentions it was too big a job for a hobby). Now it feels much more feasible. But _running_ the software is still much harder. Obviously people do cooperative hosting operations (hachyderm.io providing this for me as I write this!) but I'm not aware of clear processes and patterns for do...

• Post #3033886

  I was doing some research on archival photo storage, and I've totally missed the existence of the AVIF format. It's fairly new but well supported, as much as 40-55% smaller than JPEG, and doesn't have the same edge artifacts (so it's appropriate for things like documents). Webp felt like a disappointment. I guess it's 25-35% smaller, but never felt like it to me. Or maybe it never felt worth it to re-encode for those savings. Though apparently lossless...

• Post #3033885

  I feel like a significant part of the popularity of developer terminal/tui tools is that developers do a lot of environment related customization (directly or indirectly) and gui dev tools are hard to configure in the same way and often half broken. Editors often have shims like vs code’s `code` which asks the gui editor to open the file. But it could also just copy the environmental variables to some profile in the editor so anything it launches comes from the same environment. I don’t think...

• Post #3033884

  Sitting in the audience at conferences creates an asymmetric intellectual stimulation that leads me to silly places #OSSummit