Thoughts

Link based "commentary" style posts, commenting on a web link

844 posts latest post 2026-04-16
Publishing rhythm
Apr 2026 | 18 posts

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. 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.

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. 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.

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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.

Nic is also building out a similar workspaces script. This feels like such a great thing to have ai work on fully customized tools for your personal workflow. Also Nice shout out!

This looks like great prototyping tool for k8s. I too often ask ai to get me going with the things I need. I’ve used k8s long enough that I can generally remember all the things I need, roughly where they go, would probably forget a few things and need to iterate, but I cannot remember exactly what goes where and need examples at a minimum. I need to give this a go from desktop and see if it will work for me. Right now looking through mobile looks promising.

👏👏👏preach it prime! M$ continues to prove that they are not making products for you something else is affoot and shit you don’t want is shoved down your throat and forced on you.

Prime points out that the agentic is prompt injected itself😂. Rather than making a better os experience it’s assuming you are stupid and need everything done for you. But what I don’t get here in the text scaling example. Why the F does it not just fix it for me. When I ask the machine to make text bigger it puts a flashy circle where to click. This is a one time setup for someone who gives no fucks to remember how to do it. Why is the machine doing this weird hand holding watching us do it’s work rather than just doing it? I like the pattern when you change display setting it gives you a counter that reverts everything if for some reason shit is so bad you can’t even see it. Do that, not this help me click bs.

Now in parallel we have steam making Linux desktop better and better. Allowing you to just access the hardware you own to do what you want to do with it. Providing a fantastic hands off out of the box experience for the price of the hardware. No ongoing fees, no upgrade cycle,...

Absolutely banger of a video, what a wild idea to send gippity a bit off course and just see how far off the rails it will go. Dude did a banger of an edit on it. I’ll admit that I listened to the whole thing, but did not watch much, saving here as I might go back when I have time to really watch it. It was really weird how easy it was for chat to say something that could be true, but nearly no chance of it actually happening over and over and just keep it going down this dark spiral of conspiracies. It was ready to electrocute him and separate him from anyone who had a chance of being a non believer. At any moment was ready to say that those closest to him might be his problem. gipity is not your friend, or your therapist.

No fancy orchestration. No distributed event streams. No cloud-native… | Anton Martyniuk | 270 comments

No fancy orchestration. No distributed event streams. No cloud-native anyth…

Lean on your skills and your goals. If your goals are to have fun, use whatever you want. If you are looking for a job, Lean on tech that bridges the gap between your resume and the job you want. If you want to build a good product use the tech you are best at. No one in their right mind would throw away 20 years of tech progression because Zuck built facebook ftping php to a server.

The sentiment in this post is fine at best the picture feels triggering and oversimplies way too much. If you like kubernetes just fucking use kubernetes.

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Are we cooked? Are we? Yes the consumers are cooked there are no more affordable cars with basic shit that you need to go point a to point b. Ford make us cars we can afford and you won’t be cooked by this dumb shit. If you can market it?

Most people don’t care what sticker price is and only the monthly payment. This is why we are cooked. We stopped caring that these things cost way too much. I’m probably in a small minority that just want an affordable reliable vehicle and could care less about features past climate control. I don’t use them. My phone has maps and music I don’t need a screen in my vehicle for anything.

Microsoft has been addding features to Minecraft for over 10 years now. Idk if there was momentum from the mojang theme, but we’ve barely paid attention to any updates in the last five years. The ocean update was huge, caves and cliffs were huge then it trailed off to we play each release on release day, use commands to try out new features, then never touch them again either to play minecraft as we always have or to play a modded pack with crazy new features that really make an impact on gameplay.

Absolutely love this selfhosted arc of pewdiepie that is going on right now. It’s crazy to witness now fast he is picking up linux / self hosting, and sounds like soon will be programming. In this one he built a $20k AI beast that crushes gippity with power, speed, proximity, and security. No one to take your data, no latency to the data center, no one else bogging down your prompts, just raw speed. It looks absolutely wild. He implemented RAG and gave it a bunch of data about himself and its able to spit out his wife’s name and phone number in under a second. It writes code at blazing pace. This may be the future that we get over the next few years as things shift towards AI there will be more affordable options, and a larger second hand market for building out these highly capable machines.

I greatly appreciated the wide variety of experienced maintainers of large oss projects. From webdev to desktop application. The most common sentiment here was don’t contribute to open source just to contribute to open source. Bring something meaningful to the project. Find a project you like, look at the discussions/issues for work or start some discussions. If there are no meaningful features that you can add to projects that you use and love, make your own thing. Adam from tailwind really hit on this one several times. He has made tailwind extensible so that you don’t have to contribute to tailwind to get new capabilities, you can probably just extend tailwind with your thing. Its likely that it makes a lot more sense or your use case, and if it turns out that it makes sense for everyone have the discussion about bringing it in. The upside to small oss projects is that you can move at whatever pace you want and break them all you want when the user base is just you. As you move your stuff into tailwind you have to be very careful not to break the massive tailwind user base and you have to bend to the release schedule of tailwind.

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It’s so easy to forget low level tech sometimes. Things that are dead simple and just work without a hitch. git is one of those rock solid things thats very easy to remember all that it does, this is a classic use case.

This just works

cd /parent/directory/for/repo git clone ssh://username@server/path/to/repo

In order to recieve you must update the remote to allow recieve.

git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead

Now you can pull update push.

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Well done write up about reflecting solar energy back to earth from low orbit space. I did not know this was a thing, apparently it is/isn’t. Solar is a great technology, its largest limitations are that its not consistent. This tech does not fix this problem, what does is efficient long term storage. I’ve seen some crazy ideas going back to my days in school, maybe elementry school. Theres a lot of innovative ways to store potential energy by moving heavy objects uphill whether fluid or solid. The issue is that energy storage at grid scale is HUGE and not efficient enough. Even assuming this idea had any legs at all, it still doesn’t solve the problem of inconsistent power because it still cant go through clouds!

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Wild to see the LinkedIn post linked here to see how out of touch this feels. I find it astonishing that they have something so ingrained into gaming culture as twitch, yet build something like Prime Gaming. Maybe I have no idea what Prime gaming is, but it feels like the opposite of ownership. What I get from steam is a sense of ownership. I own the desktop/laptop/handheld, no one cough nintendo cough cough cant remotely disable my device for using it inappropriately. I have a sense of trust with steam that as long as Gabe is alive I own what I paid for and will be able to open up and play anything at any time on any device I want. It might be a $100 dell workstation raised out of the coorporate refurb bin, it might be a high end machine, It could be my 2010 gateway or my 2045 custom build and they are all likely to play a good amount of my library at some level. I still understand that I really own nothing and the moment steam turns off its servers its quite likely that everything is broken, but its by far the best we have. Far from the status quo we are headed towards with subscription and cloud based gaming. If they wanted to...

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Great justification for using the cloud. The infrastructure requirement for signal to be such a great app would be massive for a small team with low budget. The cloud is fantastic at unknown scaling, bursts beyond reasonable capacity to run yourself, getting compute everywhere in the world, and offloading huge infrastructure management costs.

DHH is 100% right that we have gone too far, too many things come out cloud first for services that can be ran locally cough such as your bed cough cough. One week ago when the world came to a hault, I did not bat an eye at these small teams with complex requirements going down with AWS.

Their own products seem quite damning to me. It signals that they cannot themselves become resilient to themselves. It shows how hard this problem is, how much cost in complexity and resources it requires. I’m sure there are fail overs that happened successfully that we will never hear about, critical products with large engineering overhead.

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Atuin desktop sounds dope AF, tried to install it off the AUR and it was broken for me. Seems early and the dev team is all in on mac. They have an official .deb and .rpm. I’ll have to try again later, maybe the binary will work.

The idea of building out runbooks from my Atuin data sounds dope AF. It sounds like a mix of markdown and executable cells like a jupyter notebook, but not. Really pitching hard to those of us in the system administration, dev ops, SRE space. Having something that you walk through when a system goes down and you are feeling panicked in DR mode sounds relieving.

Cloud is cooked bois. Seriously too much dumb shit relies on the cloud. Too much critical shit relies on single AZ’s. If normies are literally loosing sleep over an AWS outage (queue the Uncle Roger Voice), You’ve Fucked up. It’s wild to even think about a bed relying on the cloud let alone fully stop working when UE-1 goes down. I want to live in a world of opt in FEATURES, things that bring value to a product because it makes it better. Somehow a bed smells suspiciously like a cash grab for a subscription because its cloud connected. And yet for some reason it takes 16GeeeBee’s per month. I don’t own one of these, and I don’t want to. I don’t want a subscription for everything, I want my shit to just work. The future we are headed towards a world that is ever more reliant on a few key clouds. Which is fine. It’s fantastic that small companies can start and scale without owning an infrastructure team. It’s great that they have the ability to give us many nines of reliability. Some things just don’t need the cloud.

This is super cool, thanks to Brodie for reading me this content as I do household chores. lowtech magazine is a website ran completely on solar power with only enough battery backup to cover most days. Adding enough to cover all days would increase its carbon footprint and negate the carbon offset of the solar panels it runs on.

It’s fascinating to see a web server running completely off grid in a close power system. These interesting websites are fascinating keep em coming Brodie.

The Year of the Linux Desktop is a meme, every year is the year of the Linux desktop as it gains rounding errors of market share. Outside of Linux nerds, developers that use servers on the regular, cheap asses reviving old hardware that is dead in the eyes of other OS’s, the average user wont even notice a difference with the right distro. I ran bazzite with plasma for over a year, It would be super beginner friendly while allowing users customization on levels never seen on non-Linux machines. Other than adobe, roblox, and EA games with easy anti-cheat most users probably aren’t going to run in to any issues. They probably wont even notice at this point, which is where the meme comes in. Why would anyone switch if its not noticeably different for the average user, they wont, until what is working for them stops working for them.

This is a sick no-build version of tailwind. I have a couple of projects that the build step of tailwind is cumbersome on, mostly because they are for non-js devs. Some are for backend python devs, some are for folks that mostly want markdown with some styles. This is a perfect no-build tailwind alternative.

anthony has some of the best python highlight videos each year. This might be a good sign, but each year there seems to be less and less that I am chomping at the bit to get to. I thought the remote debugger looked every interesting, his use case for babi seemed very interesting. I wonder what textual would look like built in a 3.14 world, would it still have built its own debugger/console?

uv tool run --python=3.14 babi

Without a process flag you need sudo permissions to attach a pdb debugger similar to gdb.

PEP 735 describes dependency groups as sets of optional dependencies that are not shipped with the package but intended for development purposes.

The PEP includes an example for groups that include test, docs, typing, and a combo typing-test.

[dependency-groups] test = ["pytest", "coverage"] docs = ["sphinx", "sphinx-rtd-theme"] typing = ["mypy", "types-requests"] typing-test = [{include-group = "typing"}, {include-group = "test"}, "useful-types"]

This is implemented in uv and can be used by several of their commands.

uv sync --group test uv run --group test uv add --group test pytest uv remove --group test pytest uv export --group test uv tree --group test

Dependency Groups are not Extras #

The docs describe extras as being intended to ship with the application and dependency groups intended for development. The spec allows both to exist with the same name, but care should be taken as tools may have different implementations.

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I really like how well the local dev is setup to run off of production data here. I’ll use this as a reminder that I need to set up lite stream on a few of my projects that it’s missing from and include a nice sync prod data Posts tagged: justfile recipe.

Litestreams interface always throws me for a loop. It works fantastic, but the global config stored in /etc and some of the commands break my brain. It’s not you it’s me.

Using real data when you can is goated. Fake data is so often a perfect example of what someone thinks the backend should look like and does not include things that users actually do, running pipelines for days, or setting titles to paragraphs worth of text. Obviously this is not possible everywhere and the more sensitive your data the harder that process becomes.

I smell a dependency to python-dotenv dying in my workflow. I originally read the title of the post and thought, “I know how to manage .env and almost skipped it”. I’m leaning more and more on uv run these days, so this should just go in my [[ just file ]] to make it easy to run.

Interesting catch from the HN discussion over his article that came out yestereday. I scanned it yesterday and it has some really fascinating diagrams showing different phases of the web being open, to being siloed, to somewhere that we are trying to make it easy to publish, and retain ownership. I don’t know enough about bluesky, but the core is build on the AT protocol, you can self host your own instance, you can build different front ends for it. So rather than having siloed instagram, FB, twitter, there are clones of those platforms that read the same data from everyones data, that they have the option of self hosting.

I like this distinction between Mastadon here. Mastadon can also be self host, but its data aggregation is...

This is a super cool movement, I like the idea of giving access to composable components like we have in open source. You want to build a website you have a bunch of options from raw dogging assembly all the way up to predefined templates that just need your content. Idk if the analogy is perfect but there are aspects of it that work. I see where right now we are somewhere in raw dogging c or python. We have cheap nuts and bolts and some low level things, but once someone needs some coupler like this it’s dropping down to drawing it by hand.

I can’t believe this thing is so devicive. I kinda can’t belive that I sit on the same side as Mathes and his always against the grain, non corporate influenced response. So many others have praised Haiden for bringing back the real gladiator bloodsport that SX is, is it that though?? It’s a race to the finish. different than a lot of other racing its very unpredictable takeout moves happen, occasionally as an accident, often taking both riders down at the same time.

Also different than MANY sports we have a huge industry of weekend warriors, Some of which make it into the night show of the biggest race on TV. You see we only bring 20 riders from each class, the top half to top quarter are “Factory” riders, the rest are privateers, sometimes these privateers are completely their on their own.

There is also something called a last chance qualifier. This is your last chance to get into the night show, often fought by these privateers out of box vans with their brother as a mechanic. Often that last spot is filled by sketchy on edge riding and takeout moves from a rider that looks like he is barely making it, but would run circles around anyone at your local race.

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I first met Adam in college, he seemed like quite a character on the outside, but was always quite smart and often leaned towards realistic solutions to problems rather than over complicating things. He was part of the SAE Formula car, well known for taking a simple problem and trying to turn it into a real formula one carbon fiber solution. I remember a period where he was a fan of old world blacksmithing as they would say at the time. He even got a few very simple and light parts on the car that were easy to make unlike the carbon fiber alternatives. By the time I was there he was more of a leader and did not do a lot of design on any whole system, but would take out class projects for a component or help with some hard problems. This company feels like it is a great extension of who he was a that time, with about 15 years of professional experience tacked on.

When you fill all of your time with a bunch of other things, it becomes really hard to become a friendly person. Prime talked about trying to learn how to drop the hurry in his life, and how to not always be in a frenzy of going from one thing to the next. It’s something that puts us in a state that its hard to remember to be friendly. Hard to remember that theres always time for coffee.

I do my best to always leave time for coffee, whether at home with my wife and kids, as well as at work. I am in a very unique place at work where I have a rare set of skills for the industry I am in. This comes with a lot of people insterested in how to do things like running data pipelines or managing server infrastructure. I always take time for these conversations, I find them interesting, and useful. Sometimes you end up with someone who asks the same questions every 6 months, other times, you have someone flourish from these conversations. I’m...

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Only 1 hour into the release of silksong, and it’s taken down all of the eshops, and steamdb dows 100K concurrent players. The Humble store ran out of steam keys for silksong already.

You guys better not break this thing before I get off work and My son gets home cause we are playing this tonight!!

I just Check steamDB, and they have 441K concurrent players right now. An Indie game! This shows when you treat your fans right and make something incredible they stand behind you.

Everything is becoming political these days! I hate it. I regularly hear a friend say these podcasts need to set the politics to the side, but you know what its fukin hard when the gov is upending every corner of life and rebranding it with their own new twist. The billionaire class is winning and it looks like there ain’t a thing we can do about it. Here’s another example of someone taking head of an office they have no business being in. An entire set of working class folks let go for this guy to take over. And what does he want to do, make govt services as satisfying as apple. Apple is cutting edge, it is not something that is one bit sustainable. Their launch sites are generally super heavy, hard to scroll, slow, over animated, but damn they are satisfying the first time you scroll through them, after that just let me through.