Posts tagged: thought

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. References...

“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. References: [1]: https://www.sanity.io/blog/you-should-never-build-a-cms

- 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.

- 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.

- 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 References: [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdUbTyvrfKo&t=429s

- I did not realize all the places to be considered as AI water usage. Hank goes deep highlighting all of the sources he is aware of, most reports leave off a lot of these sources, some reports go maybe too far adding sources that may not make sense depending on the question you are asking. As someone that runs computers with gpus in their house, and watching LTT make AIO installs on GPUs I’ve wondered what would AI use water for, now I understand that its a lot. No where near agriculture, but a lot. Unlike running a gpu in your house, potentially with a closed loop AIO, data centers are filled with hardware making heat and it all must go somewhere. Current technology has this done with evaporative cooling, i.e. its not a closed loop, the water goes into the sky. He goes on to point out that its not just the data center, using water, but also chip fab and power plants. Something I hadn’t put a lot of thought into is the type of water. While a lot of agriculture and power applications do not use municipal water, a lot of data centers do, putting excess strain on water treatment. Something I find interesting is that Altman is doing the same thing here that he does on his fin...

Notes – 05:09 Tue 9 Dec 2025 Notes – 05:09 Tue 9 Dec 2025 dbushell.com · dbushell.com [1] Age verification hitting bluesky?? At least its not yet requiring your govt issued id or anything, but stepping that direction. I don’t know how I feel about age checks, does it actually protect kids when parents aren’t involved? I can’t say anything there, but it really does feel like its about ready to hurt the rest of us, requiring us to whip out ids and personal data for anything done online. This is a real problem that is hard to solve, and reasons why it has not been solved yet. References: [1]: https://dbushell.com/notes/2025-12-09T05:09Z/

Deprecations via warnings don’t work for Python libraries Seth Larson reports that urllib3 2.6.0 released on the 5th of December and finally removed the HTTPResponse.getheaders() and HTTPResponse.getheader(name, default) methods, which have been marked as... Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net [1] Deprecation warnings are so easy to miss, ignore, become numb to. Creating tools and processes to catch and address these issues is important. I’m surprised such big projects let deprecations just hang around for years. References: [1]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/9/deprecations-via-warnings/#atom-everything

A quote from Claude I found the problem and it's really bad. Looking at your log, here's the catastrophic command that was run: rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/ See that ~/ at the … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net [1] damn this is a rough one. A users entire home directory removed by claude code from an rm command. rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/ Reading the first half of that command it LGTM. If you had approved rm, you are hosed. If this is inside a larger script its running, you really gotta read close. This one still feels pretty obvious, but I can imagine some bash doing some nasty things I miss if I read it and understand it let alone glance at it. I’ll take this as a reminder that I really need to be paying full-ass attention to agents, and moving towards a better sandbox for them, something in docker, maybe something like distrobox that is a magic wrapper over podman that just gives you the things you need for what it does. Something that starts up with access to start web servers, run agentic cli of choice, see project, git [2] commit. It feels like the right thing has a lot of what distrobox does, but distrobox has too much and would be prone to this us...

- This looks like a really good low cost option for some workholding. There is never a shortage of workholding in the shop and everything has a place. Having something low cost that you can have a bunch of makes a lot of sense. Maybe you still need a super scucum unit for really clamping the shit out of something, but this easily covers most use cases in a garage workshop. I want to build it.

- Moore’s Law is Dead pitches a pretty ingenious sku for the new gabecube aka steam machine. I fully support repairability and ewaste reduction. most of these components have not had MAJOR improvements in years, hence his channel name. There is a possibility here that Valve could ship with their unique hardware, (apu, psu, case, ports, networking) and let you bring your own ssd and ram from an old device that you might not use anymore. I love this idea. At the same time it feels like entering the star wars universe where there are no more new manufacturing and everything is cobbled together from old hardware made long ago.

- What a heart breaking video to listen to. I’m trying to do a better job of being positive right now. I’m trying to look at the world in what I have control over (not much more than my attitude about it). AI is killing so much right now I’m trying to look at it as the good tools the engineers made it to be. Ownership is dying around every goddamn corner. Hats off to Edison, this guy gets it. We need more companies like this taking a stand for the average person who wants to make it out there.

- What a great campfire story Casey stumbled into. Whether any of this is true few will ever know, but its very reasonable that a race condition and a stalled job to apply configuration caused by someone who left the company 10 years ago caused an outage. I find it hilarious that they call this guy he answers, yup I still know the password, but how do I know you’re legit, I’m not just handing out the password. Casey did a stand up job telling this story.

- Linus is Techbrophobic [1] like the rest of us. This is such an unexpectedly mild take from him. I expected some threat to the mother of the vibe coder, but he gave a pretty great middle of the road take. The industry sucks, it smells off, we know a lot wrong with it, it feels like theres a lot more wrong than we know. But the tools that its making are really good when used in the right ways. They are not a replacement for anything, they are assistive. They can lift someone from not knowing how to code to making a small webapp for their use. Someone who wants to write backend and give them a decent front end, someone who whats to write front end and give them a decent backend. Great take from someone with more experience than most can ever dream of having, worth a listen. References: [1]: /techbrophobic/

snow-fall Web Component—zachleat.com A post by Zach Leatherman (zachleat) Zach Leatherman · zachleat.com [1] This is a very fun way to add some whimsy to your site, added it to mine immediately when I saw it. This is what digital gardens are for, Fun, entertainment, and self-exxpression. References: [1]: https://www.zachleat.com/web/snow-fall/

- This ball vise Idea is incredible and I want one. Its a heavy workholding unit that can accept a variety of tools and manipulate things to a lot of angles while working on them. This looks really good for painting miniatures soldering or generally working on small 3d printed parts that I do.

Deleting Code for Performance The one where I clean up an asynchronous mess. dbushell.com · dbushell.com [1] I did not realize that David’s site was built on a homegrown Static Site Generator. As someone who also does this myself I appreciate the effort. I build my site on markata [2]. It started as a project to learn a set of tools and has become a project that I depend on everywhere and cant put down. It’s a great tool, but you probably shouldn’t use it. Anyways, I feel this really shows on David’s site. His site is filled with custom features that make it very unique, one off, and always a pleasure to read. References: [1]: https://dbushell.com/2025/12/04/deleting-code-for-performance/ [2]: /markata/

- Niche companies will rise from the ashes. Companies that want to build good products for customers. Companies that will get hundreds of users. They will treat them right and make enough money to support themselves, maybe. Alongside them we will self host [1]. We will run our own services out of our basement. There will be downtime, but its ok. We will enjoy ourselves. We will tell everyone how much better it is BTW Next to that is a firehose of shit piling back into the circular snakes mouth as all of your data flows freely between any company that can get their hands on it. These companies will spend and make money hand over fist. Most people will continue to use these services until enough is enough and unplug from everything. In this world I don’t see how we sustain the amount of engineers we have created. Small companies run lean, small, and allow slow organic growth happen. It will be interesting to see play out. [2] References: [1]: /self-host/ [2]: https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/95ae2a95-308b-4d1d-bff8-8ce6194db132.webp

Malicious Traffic and Static Sites Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web. blog.jim-nielsen.com [1] These look like fun endpoints to add anti-maliciously, give good stuff for the sleezy things to read. References: [1]: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/malicious-traffic-on-static-sites/

A ChatGPT prompt equals about 5.1 seconds of Netflix In June 2025 Sam Altman claimed about ChatGPT that "the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours". In March 2020 George Kamiya of the International Energy Agency estimated that "streaming a … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net [1] This feels very promising for the future as we enter a world that is more and more dependent on AI that inference is so cheap. I did not understand the scale to how much cheaper inference is compared to training. As we get better with training I imagine this gets significantly better as well. I know they all claim to be profitable on inference, but scrolling through Simon’s feed here you see several articles on the stark difference. References: [1]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/29/chatgpt-netflix