I’m really excited about gastown [1], an amazing project by steveyegge [2]. It’s worth exploring!
Gas Town - multi-agent workspace manager
References:
[1]: https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown
[2]: https://github.com/steveyegge
Archive
All published posts
2469 posts
latest post 2026-05-08
Publishing rhythm
Yesterday I wrote about a way to do light mode screen recording [1] to
convert to light mode from dark mode with ffmpeg. I was wondering if it could
be done entirely on the front end for web applications. Turns out you can.
I’m sure there are limited wikis and site builders that don’t allow adding
style like this, but it works if you can.
<video
src="https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/1c53dbcb-4b84-4e94-9f04-a42986ab3fa1.mp4?width=800"
controls
style="filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg) contrast(1.2) saturate(1.1);"
>
</video>
0 deg hue rotate
90 deg hue rotate
180 deg hue rotate
270 deg hue rotate
References:
[1]: /light-mode-screen-recording/
Check out 99 [1] by ThePrimeagen [2]. It’s a well-crafted project with great potential.
Neovim AI agent done right
References:
[1]: https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/99
[2]: https://github.com/ThePrimeagen
Convert a video from dark mode to light mode with FFmpeg!
Here
cassidoo.co [1]
Converting video from dark mode to light mode after the fact is a pretty great idea, I’m surprised at how well it does. Its definitely not perfect, but looks really good.
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://cassidoo.co/post/ffmpeg-dark-light/
[2]: /thoughts/
I saw this tip from
Cassidoo [1]
and had to try it out for myself. I kicked on a
screen recording right from where my terminal
was, converted it, and it actually looks pretty
good.
ffmpeg \
-i screenrecording-2026-01-01_10-10-49.mp4 \
-vf "negate,hue=h=180,eq=contrast=1.2:saturation=1.1" \
screenrecording-2026-01-01_10-10-49-light.mp4
Your browser does not support the video tag. [2]
Dark Mode
Your browser does not support the video tag. [3]
Light Mode
There are a few unsettling things about it, but
overall I feel like it was a success.
References:
[1]: https://cassidoo.co/post/ffmpeg-dark-light/
[2]: https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/1c53dbcb-4b84-4e94-9f04-a42986ab3fa1.mp4
[3]: https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/de4e3378-6df2-45b1-84d5-0cc773ceb3c5.mp4
-
I actually like linus’s take here. My parents dropped $4k (~$8k in todays money) on a computer when I was a kid, (which turned into something too $$ to let me touch at that point). I played some educational games that no one else has heard of and I’ve long forgotten along with an early ciivilization game. It was e-waste in 2 years we maybe kept it 5, and it was barely working. Contrast this to my PC now I spent $2k on 3 years ago refurb from 2017, and it has no signs of age from me, does everything I need it to. Ram crisis sucks, the outright reason behind it sucks. But on the bright side you can still get a baller build for less than you could late 90s without inflation. The industry is not there for consumers right now, we had better times, but its still not bad times. Keep the hope alive that good times will come.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
Smartphones are black holes
They can bend spacetime without you even realizing it. People often get offended when I tell them that I don't have a phone, thinking that I'm lying and I just
Sylvain Kerkour · kerkour.com [1]
This sounds great…. I’m sick AF right now and dont want to do anything but watch YouTube, and let opencode do my work.
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://kerkour.com/smartphones-blackhole
[2]: /thoughts/
The work on usage [1] by jdx [2].
A specification for CLIs
References:
[1]: https://github.com/jdx/usage
[2]: https://github.com/jdx
I’m impressed by pitchfork [1] from jdx [2].
Daemons with DX
References:
[1]: https://github.com/jdx/pitchfork
[2]: https://github.com/jdx
-
Yeah there’s some basics, you know things you might expect like using standard error and standard out correctly. One thing I’ll say on that because I think this is commonly misunderstood, standard error is not for errors, it’s for any information that isn’t part of the normal output. So you know often times that’s warnings and errors, but it might just be progress information. You know anytime that you just need to have something go to the user that’s what it’s there for." (6:15 - 6:42)
I’ve definitely done this sin in my own tooling before, and it does make things harder to use. I think I still take err/out at face value. I really like the translation Jeff gave here, one is for normal output, i.e. what the user asked for and the other is extra information. So if I wanted to list something and pipe it into something else, stdout only captures the list, thats it. if you have a bunch of information about config warnings, showing environment, are you sure questions, none of that is captured.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
I’ve found Gemini to be very useful lately, especially for finding information
within long form content.
When writing thought-896 [1], I
wanted to use a direct quote from Jeff Dickey, Gemini popped it out very
quickly.
give me a quote from jeff just before the timestamp I'm at the interviewer
asked what makes a good cli and he started talking about stdout/stderr
In another case, my wife and I are huge Good Eats fans. Alton Brown taught us
how to cook during college and on. We watched every single good eats episode
nearly 10 years after they aired. He is back with some updates to those those
shows on his Youtube. Gemini gives very good detailed responses with
timestamps.
Alton Brown had a recent YouTube video for cooking turkey. Can you get the
instructions from the video?
References:
[1]: https://thoughts.waylonwalker.com/post/896
Ping 15
[mise](https://mise.jdx.dev/getting-started.html) looks like what I wanted nix to be for me.
The work on mise [1] by jdx [2].
dev tools, env vars, task runner
References:
[1]: https://github.com/jdx/mise
[2]: https://github.com/jdx
Mise looks promising
I've been all in on just for a while now, but mise looks so good it might
be my next move.
Maxteabag [1] has done a fantastic job with sqlit [2]. Highly recommend taking a look.
A user friendly TUI for SQL databases. Written in python. Supports SQL server, Mysql, PostreSQL and SQLite, Turso and more.
References:
[1]: https://github.com/Maxteabag
[2]: https://github.com/Maxteabag/sqlit
webi-installers [1] by webinstall [2] is a game-changer in its space. Excited to see how it evolves.
Primary and community-submitted packages for webinstall.dev
References:
[1]: https://github.com/webinstall/webi-installers
[2]: https://github.com/webinstall
You Might Also Like: My Notes Blog
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
blog.jim-nielsen.com [1]
I really like a good link blog, it’s the old timers version of a reaction video. It gives me new posts to discover from other writers, and gives additional perspectives from ones I trust enough to add to my RSS.
It’s nice to have a place where I can jot down a few notes, fire off my reaction, and nobody can respond to it lol. At least, not in any easy, friction-less way. You’d have to go out of your way to read my commentary, find my contact info, and fire off a message (critiquing or praising). That’s how I like it. Cuts through the noise.
Ditto Jim. I’ve oddly found mine more useful to search than blog posts, zettlekaten, notes, whatever you want to call them. For me writing something down makes it more concrete in my brain that I’m less likely to need to go reference, but I often need to re read or references posts from others, this is where Thoughts [2] comes in handy for me
Like Jim I have a bunch of feeds [3] you can subscribe to if you want some or all of my stuff, but I aggregate everything to the same root site.
Note
This...
Gross phone
Is there a world that giving my phone to my kids does not result in it being
covered in peanut butter and snot?
Developer Vs Artist Ai
The other day I was watching [thePrimeTimeagen]https://youtube.com/@theprimetimeagen?si=jVcp23FbfQSFZfDc) and he talked about devs loving ai and artists revolting. There was some discussion in chat about art being more creative and prime quickly squashed that. He ended with being oddly confused why developers are jumping on board and artists are not. Both had their art stolen to build out the models.
[1]
my own vibes
I'm writing this from my phone without further research, all vibes, personal experience, and thoughts, no research.
Good Tools # [2]
First I want to argue that artists have had some form of ai in their tools for years. Idk, probably not ai as we know it today but functionally similar. Content aware fill. This is a Photoshop feature from Adobe, as far as I know it’s one of the special things you get from Adobe that you don’t get from the FOSS alternatives easily.
This is an example of a good took that is well loves by the community and widely used, if you put ai i...
“You should never build a CMS” | Sanity
Lee Robinson migrated cursor.com off Sanity. He made good points. Here's what he missed.
Sanity.io · sanity.io [1]
Such a good breakdown of the leerob article, that is hitting everywhere right now. Feels like sanity was just a bit late to getting things right and it would have just worked for them how leerob was trying to use it, but MCP sucked so he jumped.
Reading their loose descriptions of a CMS, its an interesting realization to realize I’m rolling my own cms. I kinda feel like theres a few inspiration features to take from here, but I have no regrets. As a developer I like being able to build my own tools, I like being able to search and edit from nvim, and not have to write GROQ queries, and transforms. There were some really good points here that as I get more and more content on my personal site, I do kinda feel it. I’m surprised there is not more tooling that does some of these things for piles of markdown.
pinning this to re-read later, feels like a lot of good tidbits here.
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://www.sanity.io/...
-
It really feels like M$ is coming down hard on GH lately to make some unfavorable decisions for users. Maybe there is good reason for all of these changes from a business perspective, I can’t judge that. But right now there are some really great alternatives out there. I’m so grateful for what forgejo and gittea offer, and at the same time seeing the community get split up from GH is sad.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
Ping 12
Is `bet` new teen lingo? My kid is starting to say _bet_ in every sentence.
> So he explained it as "I'm down", "You bet", "Yes", "I like that", "You betcha"
Ping 11
Naming things is hard, pings will now be numbered.
-
Silksong DLC announcement already, we waited 8 years for the game, and are getting DLC’s months after launch. Dudes I haven’t even finished the game get, maybe not even half way. It’s amazing. Its amazing that these three make such a kick ass game with great art, story, voice, gameplay, and now drop a free dlc in 2026.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
I'm being gaslit by the ai
I'm being gaslit by the ai. It just did a big hard change, now cant do a seemingly basic change, and assures me that that its fixed my issue on every iteration.
I’ve been using this one for awhile now, I have a post type that I only edit
from my phone, but I have all the post numbered. I set up a template in
obsidian for using templater, the template goes right in the static site repo,
I point templater to the templates directory and this has been working pretty
seamlessly for awhile.
---
date: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss") %>
templateKey: myposttype
published: true
tags:
- myposttype
<%*
const folder = "pages/myposttype";
// get all files in the vault, keep only those inside the folder
const files = app.vault.getFiles().filter(f => f.path.startsWith(folder + "/"));
// extract numeric suffixes from filenames like myposttype-123.md
const nums = files.map(f => {
const m = f.basename.match(/^myposttype-(\d+)$/);
return m ? parseInt(m[1], 10) : null;
}).filter(n => n !== null);
// next number (start at 1 if none exist)
const next = (nums.length ? Math.max(...nums) : 0) + 1;
// include the .md extension when moving
const newPath = `${folder}/myposttype-${next}`;
await tp.file.move(newPath);
%>
---
-
Kelsey has a really good lightbulb moment here about platform engineering.
“if you had to do all the deployments for the entire company what questions would you ask of the development team?”
That’s your api, your platform, this is your product as a platform engineer. It’s not images, docker, terraform, hcl, yaml, kubernetes, It’s building out the right api for your company to deploy its products effectively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdUbTyvrfKo&t=429s [1]
timestamped
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdUbTyvrfKo&t=429s
[2]: /thoughts/
Check out andrii-kryvoviaz [1] and their project slink [2].
Self-hosted [3] image sharing service
References:
[1]: https://github.com/andrii-kryvoviaz
[2]: https://github.com/andrii-kryvoviaz/slink
[3]: /self-host/
notifications for static site builds
This morning I set up notifications for changes to my static site builds
leveraging git name status [1] and ntfy.
References:
[1]: /git-name-status/
--name-status is a great way to see what files have changed in a git [1] diff
alongside the status code. I recently used this in a script to create a report
of new and modified files during a build.
git diff --name-status
git diff --name-status origin/main
git diff --name-status --staged
git diff --name-status 'HEAD@{3 days ago}'
References:
[1]: /glossary/git/
