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2717 posts latest post 2026-11-11
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Oct 2026 | 30 posts
Omarchy is on the move Omarchy has been improving at a furious pace. Since it was first released on June 26, I've pushed out 18(!) new releases together with a rapidly growing community of collaborators, users, and new-t... world.hey.com It’s facinating how many people are making the jump from mac/windows, not just to linux, not just to archlinux, but to a full on tiling window manager. DHH has omakub and omarchy. Omakub is advertised as easy and for beginners, but many are skipping right over that to go straight for the hard stuff. DHH mentions hyprland here, one thing I think he is missing is that this is the first real mainstream tiling window manager that is a competitor to i3, awesomewm, qtile that runs Wayland. I think they were able to pull a bunch of great benefits such as lack of screen tearing and animations from this.
YouTube has earned its crown I often give Google a lot of shit for shutting down services whenever they're bored, hire a new executive, or face a three-day weekend. The company seems institutionally incapable of standing behin... world.hey.com I wonder how much of killed-by-google is due to is 20 percent time. Allowing engineers to follow a passion project turns into a real product that doesn’t have full backing and support of the company. similar to DHH as much as I am hurt by reader and all of their privacy BS that comes from ad based revenue I appreciate YouTube and them supporting all of the creators on it. Giving a platform for small creators the ability to sustain themselves and reach a larch audience without big coorporate rules.
20 Percent Time Google is famous among engineers for “20 percent time.” It was a policy created early on that allowed employees to spend one fifth of their time on projects of their own choosing. Gmail was one... Ted Merz · ted-merz.com Googles 20 percent time is fascinating to me. It seems like a great way for engineers to fill up their tank with new skills, passion projects, and the need to scratch an itch. To me these days it feels like something that would incentivize good talent to join. I can remember back earlier in my career December and January were slow months for big companies. Riddled with vacation and annual planning cycle. I would use this time to create tools and libraries that would help me move quicker throughout the year. I clearly remember having a conversation with a colleague several salary grades ahead of me come mid February asking what I was up to. I was furiously pecking away at some of these projects while he let me know that he had been waiting for this years plan for months and had no tasks from the boss. That said, I don’t think any major tech company is going to adopt 20% time these days. It’s too chaotic, too hard to manage and impossible to measure.…
Blog tonsky.me · tonsky.me Niki has one of the coolest yet simple personal sites that I have seen in a long time. We need more of this on the internet! hover over his face, try dark mode, submit personal data, there are so many really cool Easter eggs to discover!
We shouldn’t have needed lockfiles Lockfiles are an absolutely unnecessary concept that complicates things without a good reason. Dependency managers can and are working without it just the same. tonsky.me · tonsky.me I wholeheartedly agree that packaging is broken, semver is broken, expecting much better from a system of oss that is built on top of volunteers, passion projects, nights and weekends is a fools errand. With that I disagree that we we dont need lockfiles. Maybe its Nikki’s experience in java and my lack that puts us on this opposite spectrum, but without lockfiles the world changes underneath us as we release. One small change to your source can introduce a whole set of new features/bugs that you did not plan on without a good locking system. It can also cause you to need to do dependency resolution at application build time and not ahead of time.
External Link ludic.mataroa.blog Fantastic write up on their experience in ai, opinions on ai being a hoax with a veil of reasonable usefulness. Arguing that most people do not understand enough to see the difference, and thought leaders see where it is now, see where it was yesterday, it must be going to general intelligence tomorrow and you all will loose your jobs without this. I appreciate the satirical language here.
Letting Ai drive code feels like giving up so much control. It feels like its leaving so many brain cycles open for other things, yet its not quite good enough to do production level things on its own, so we must watch it, we must review it, yet its code can be some of the worst to review left unattended. I’m feeling this right now as I’m avoiding writing a bit of js that I could probably do myself. Some day this is likely to flip, and it will get better and we will spend our brain cycles thinking about architecture, security, marketing, big picture ideas about the problem we are trying to solve, but we are not yet there and as long as we still need to review I find it a much more pleasant workflow to have in a separate window than have it change the whole fucking project for a simple change.
A quote from greyduet on r/teachers I teach HS Science in the south. I can only speak for my district, but a few teacher work days in the wave of enthusiasm I'm seeing for AI tools … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net Woof, ai is sucking the soul from everything, being forced onto teachers who don’t want or care about it and are simply sharing ai-slop to their kids without giving it much thought. remember that it is rude to share ai-slop with others that you have not vetted, It’s next level to turn this into teaching material for children who are forced into your classroom and have no choice about the matter, you should be ashamed.

Self Host

Self hosting is the act of hosting your own applications and services without using a SAS provider. This is typically done with your own hardware, but there...

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Vibe Coding

A coding style popularized in 2025. It is the act of using LLMs to generate code for an application, but the author never looks at the output. The author...

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Ai Slop

AI slop is unwanted AI content, generally shared by someone who did not review the output and is considered highly offensive and rude.

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2025-08-05 Notes

Yesterday I started building out some qrcode tooling for myself starting with qrcode.waylonwalker.com. This is part of my tinyapps project.

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I have a couple of use cases for simple qr codes in python coming up. One is for blog posts, the other is for auth into a new server application logged to a terminal. I tried the qrcode library and it does not look as nice to me and I found pyqrcode to be quite nice.

import pyqrcode
url = pyqrcode.create('https://waylonwalker.com/qr-codes-in-python')
url.svg('qr-codes-in-python.svg', scale=8)
print(url.terminal(quiet_zone=1))
url.svg('qr-codes-in-python.svg', scale=12)
url.svg('qr-codes-in-python.svg', omithw=True) # width is controlled by the container

url.svg('qr-codes-in-python.svg', omithw=True, module_color='#ffd119')
url.svg('qr-codes-in-python.svg', omithw=True, module_color='#ff69b4', background='#2b034c')

result #

Here is the final svg result.

Here is what it looks like in the terminal.

screenshot-2025-08-05T13-53-17-368Z.png

If you want fancier qrcodes check out https://mydigitalharbor.com/

Colors • Pico CSS Pico comes with 380 manually crafted colors to help you personalize your brand design system. Pico CSS · picocss.com A great alternative to tailwind colors that has everything defined in one colors file for only 0.3kb. it feels well worth the weight if you are trying to skip a build step or avoid npm/node. It has even more colors than tailwind. I appreciate that there is a grey palette that is fully desaturated.
GitHub - rushter/selectolax: Python binding to Modest and Lexbor engines. Fast HTML5 parser with CSS selectors for Python. Python binding to Modest and Lexbor engines. Fast HTML5 parser with CSS selectors for Python. - rushter/selectolax GitHub · github.com Selectolax you have my attention! I will be giving this a try for markata which often suffers from slow beautifulsoup. It appears to have everything I need for my simple use cases.
If you’re into interesting projects, don’t miss out on selectolax, created by rushter. Python binding to Modest and Lexbor engines (fast HTML5 parser with CSS selectors).
I like rqlite’s project rqlite. The lightweight, user-friendly, distributed relational database built on SQLite.
How To Build The Tallest Building - Gary Vaynerchuk There are two ways you can build the tallest building in town. Once you understand this, things get really good. Gary Vaynerchuk · garyvaynerchuk.com Have some positivity! “Just Build the Tallest Fucking Building” is one of my favorite Gary Vee quotes. Build good community, bring others up, and stop tearing everyone down, listen to the vid.
External Link meetgor.com Yes, I can review the code and make changes, but who in the world loves reviewing code? Do you love reviewing peers’ PRs? really? I’m with MeetGor here 100%. reviewing the nuance, not being as involved with the process of creating the architecture design, not solving the problems that arise in development make it hard to effectively review and not turn into LGTM man.
External Link meetgor.com Sometimes, all you need is a mindset shift, a blocker in your mind that holds you back from doing certain things. And for me, I have consumed enough tutorials and posts about Kubernetes, that I need to put to use and create. I have been stuck in the learning cycle, lets push to prod with kubernetes. This hurts. I know others with this learning style that need to see the full picture before actually doing something with new tech. The way I first got into kubernetes I was looking for the easy route and somehow k8s came up several times as a suggested route Looking for a Heroku replacement, What I found was shocking!, So I dove in head first with k3s and kompose. What I found was that it was not all that hard once you start to see how the pieces fit together, no amount of reading tutorials would have gotten me there. Does anyone care if you use simple yet fragile bash scripts or heavy weight Kubernetes cluster for just clicking buttons and creating and updating rows in a database? No! You know what, let’s fucking use Kubernetes. Let’s Gooo. Use what is right for you and stop parroting kubernets is hard, heavy, for big companies, maybe actually try it first.