Thoughts

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

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

Brilliantly said. Vibe coding is legacy code. It’s code that we forget exists. Code that no one touches, you replace it. If you touch it you are more likely to break it.

The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt.

As you can imagine, the first phase is ecstatic. I can wave this little piece of plastic in stores and take whatever I want! …

Read more in the full post

I saw this post from Simon and I had to give it a go and got some pretty good results. His script is a small cli wrapper around Darren Burns’s Rich Pixels. It works well even through tmux, since there is no terminal magic, just unicode blocks.

Some not so good, and needed the terminal font size cranked up.

Forgejo supports repository mirrors, I think this is how I am going to handle migrating all of my github repos into forgejo. over time I’ll probably go through and delete a bunch of unnecessary one from github, ones that might have a user or two I might keep on github. I have such small scale projects with almost no users I am not sure that It really matters for me or not.

This commit to my keymap gets rid of vertical combos, those were a bad idea to me. Maybe I didnt give it a shot, but hitting two keys at once on purpose with the same finger is a skill, one that I don’t have. This change maps those symbols so that they work as a combo or layer switch, so getting the layer key in first does it by layer, but pressing them at the same time gives me the combo, kinda feels genius. We will see how it goes.

I’m playing through peak right now with Wyatt and it is a great game, a small wholesome indiegame that is legit hard, but fun with the simplest concept. You are a scout who has crashlanded on an island, your goal is to get to the peak with your friends. You must manage hunger, stamina, weight, health and energy. You have limited resources and must help everyone to the top, if someone is low on stamina, they are going to need a helping hand or a stonger climber to go up and set pitons and ropes. Its a fantastic collaborative play game

a short clip of me playing with wyatt, I did not have anything great to add, but this is just a random clip

It was insta-ripped off by roblox with microtransactions pay to win garbage. It looks one for one the same damn models and interface, they spared nothing at making it look exactly like the original. They let you buy a golden apple assuming it gives you crazy stamina to climb with ease, and it costs goddam robux. As Big A says here theres nothing they can really do, the roblox platform just lets this happen, and if they didn’t they would loose huge revenue because this is so prevelant. Legal fees would crush this small team that made it.

This man feels sad, he never had a chance to bloom. He was stuck behind the drudgery of jira tickets. This is what the consultant driven agile has got us. Its ripped out all the thinking and creativity, its left us with moving tickets across the board, not allowed time to run on an idea when we have one. Not allowed to do extra work or refactoring in a module that we are already in. pushed to move faster for less.

I feel like this mans experience has been quite different from my own and I’m grateful to have some leeway to be creative and do some meaningful work outside the jira board. I’m grateful to be able to provide a good income for my family without taking on all the risk myself.

Crazy that we wrote such similar posts on the same day independantly, I just wrote I'm Out On Agents sitting offline in a doctor office. The two pull out’s are very good,

“AI is not magic, it’s a headache”.

By definition AI is magic to the vast majority of people, but funny how true this is.

“When I finish tasks, I’m not fulfilled… if anything I’m relieved.”

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# The Death of the User Interface > **TL;DR:** We're witnessing the end of graphical user interfaces. AI agents like Claude Code are eliminating the need for windows, menus, and clicks, replacing them with natural language. The computer is finally learning to speak human, not the other way around. --- ## 🔮 A Personal Revelation Last week, I realized something profound: **I haven't opened Finder in months.** Not once. Where I once clicked through nested folders, dragged and dropped files, and navigated hierarchical menus, I now simply tell Claude Code exactly what I need: - _"Find all the test files modified in the last week"_ - _"Move the old backups to archive"_ The commands execute instantly, precisely, without me ever seeing a window, icon, or folder. > This isn't just about convenience. It's a fundamental shift in how humans interact with computers, and it signals the beginning of the end for user interfaces as we know them. --- ## 🚴 → 🚀 The Bicycle That Became a Teleporter In 1990, Steve Jobs famously described computers as "bicycles for the mind," drawing from a Scientific American study showing that humans on bicycles were the most efficient locomotors on Earth. The metaphor was perfect for its time: computers amplified human cognitive abilities just as bicycles amplified our physical capabilities. But bicycles still require you to: - **Pedal** the mechanism - **Steer** the direction - **Navigate** the terrain - **Learn** the balance Traditional user interfaces work the same way. They're tools that amplify our abilities, but only after we learn their language, their layouts, their logic. > **What we have now with AI agents isn't a bicycle anymore. It's a teleporter.** You simply state your destination, and you arrive. --- ## 📜 From Xerox PARC to Natural Language: A 50-Year Arc ### The Timeline of Interface Evolution **1964** → Douglas Engelbart invents the computer mouse at Stanford Research Institute **1973** → Xerox PARC develops the Alto, the first computer with a GUI **1979** → Steve Jobs sees the Alto, immediately grasps its revolutionary potential **1984** → Macintosh launches, bringing GUI to the masses **2024** → AI agents begin replacing graphical interfaces entirely That language dominated for five decades. Windows, Mac OS, and even modern web applications all speak variations of it: _point, click, drag, drop, menu, submenu, dialog box, button._ We became so fluent in this language that we forgot it was a language at all. ### The Abstraction Layer Pattern Every abstraction layer in computing eventually gets replaced by a higher-level one: | **Era** | **From** | **To** | | ------- | ------------------- | ---------------------------------- | | 1950s | Machine code | → Assembly language | | 1960s | Assembly | → High-level programming languages | | 1980s | Command line | → Graphical user interfaces | | 2000s | Native apps | → Web applications | | 2020s | **User interfaces** | **→ Conversational AI agents** | > Each transition follows the same pattern: what once required specialized knowledge becomes accessible through more natural, intuitive interaction. --- ## 👻 The Invisible Operating System Traditional operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, are abstractions over hardware. Web applications are abstractions over REST APIs. Both require user interfaces because they need to translate between human intent and machine execution. **AI agents represent something fundamentally different:** they're abstractions that understand human intent directly. No translation required. ### Consider the Mental Journey of a Simple Task 🖱️ Traditional UI Approach 1. Open Finder/Explorer _(remember where it is)_ 2. Navigate to directory _(remember the path)_ 3. Scan through files _(parse visual information)_ 4. Select multiple files _(remember shortcuts)_ 5. Right-click for menu _(know this exists)_ 6. Choose "Move to..." _(understand terminology)_ 7. Navigate to destination _(remember another path)_ 8. Confirm operation _(hope you got it right)_ 🗣️ AI Agent Approach 1. "Move all PDF files from Downloads to Documents/Reports" **Done.** > The difference isn't just efficiency, it's cognitive load. With traditional interfaces, you're translating your intent into the computer's language. With AI agents, the computer learns your language instead. --- ## 🧠 The Mental Load Revolution Every interface element, every button, menu, icon, and widget, is a **tiny cognitive tax**. Even the most intuitive interface requires you to: - ✓ Understand its visual language - ✓ Remember its organizational structure - ✓ Learn its interaction patterns - ✓ Maintain mental models of its state This is what UX designers call **"extraneous cognitive load"**. Mental effort spent on using the tool rather than accomplishing the task. > When you tell Claude Code to "set up a new Python project with pytest and black pre-configured," you're expressing pure intent. The mental energy you would have spent on navigation can be redirected to actual problem-solving. --- ## ⚡ The Present: Early Adopters and Edge Cases We're living through the transition right now. ### What's Happening in 2024 - **AIOS** → Embedding LLMs directly into operating systems - **Claude Code** → Replacing entire categories of developer tools - **Cursor & Copilot** → Making IDEs conversational - **Warp Agent Mode** → LLMs in the terminal for multi-step workflows ### What I No Longer Do I see it in my own work every day. I no longer: ❌ Browse through file explorers ❌ Click through git GUIs ❌ Navigate package manager interfaces ❌ Hunt through documentation sites ❌ Configure tools through preference panes Instead, I describe what I want, and it happens. **The interface hasn't been simplified, it's been eliminated.** --- ## 🍎 The Future Steve Jobs Glimpsed > "Ultimately computers are going to be a tool for communication. Not computation, not productivity. Communication." > > — Steve Jobs, 1983 International Design Conference At that conference in Aspen, a 28-year-old Jobs made predictions that seemed like science fiction: - Portable computers with wireless connections - Instant access to remote databases - Devices as primary means of communication He was right about all of it, but even his vision was constrained by the paradigm of his time. He imagined better interfaces, more intuitive interactions, simpler designs. **He couldn't imagine no interface at all.** Yet in that quote above, Jobs understood something fundamental: the real revolution would come when computers could understand us as naturally as we understand each other. > That future is arriving. The question isn't whether AI will replace user interfaces, but how quickly and how completely. --- ## 🔄 The Last Interface There's an irony in writing about the death of user interfaces, or rather, there **was**. This article itself is proof of the transition: generated through conversation with Claude Code, shaped by human intent rather than human interface manipulation. I provided the ideas and direction; the AI handled the execution. **The future isn't coming, it's already here, manifesting through the very words you're reading.** Soon, articles like this won't be "written" in the traditional sense. They'll be conversed into existence, with AI agents handling not just the typing but the research, fact-checking, formatting, and publishing. The tool will disappear into the task. ### The Holdouts and the Inevitable Some will mourn this loss. There's something satisfying about direct manipulation, about seeing and controlling every step. Just as some still prefer command lines to GUIs, some will always prefer clicking to conversing. But for most of us, the appeal of **zero cognitive load** will be irresistible. > Why learn an interface when you can just say what you want? > Why navigate when you can simply arrive? --- ## 🎯 Conclusion: After the Interface We stand at an inflection point. For fifty years, ever since Xerox PARC invented the GUI, we've been refining the same basic paradigm: **humans learning to speak computer**. Now, **computers are learning to speak human**. The death of the user interface doesn't mean the death of design or user experience. If anything, it makes them more important. When the interface disappears, what remains is pure interaction design: understanding human intent, anticipating needs, handling edge cases gracefully. The challenge shifts from: - ❌ _"How do we make this button more obvious?"_ - ✅ **"How do we understand what the user really wants?"** > Steve Jobs gave us bicycles for the mind. > AI agents are giving us something else entirely: **minds that understand our minds.** > No pedaling required. **The user interface is dying, and that's the most user-friendly thing that could possibly happen.** --- _What do you think? Are we witnessing the end of user interfaces, or just another evolution? How has AI changed your own relationship with traditional software interfaces?_

This is an insane level of agentic llm use, the author claims to not even use his filesystem anymore, its too cumbersome to find where downloads and documents are and way too easy to ask an agent to move all pdf’s from downloads to documents.

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Damn, social media is at an all time low. I’ve felt all of these issues and when I got a new phone I started fresh, I didn’t install one social media app. Luckily Youtube has remained solid for me. Yes shorts are a bit less what I came for and more addicting content they had to do in order to keep up. There are some legit good commedians, a bit of good knowledge and a bunch of trash that is hard to look away from on shorts. I still find myself able to find content I enjoy and signed up for on YouTube. I feel like I get a one way relationship with someone similar to a TV show or news anchor of old media.

Social Media has morphed from follows likes and similar, to viral posts by creators I don’t recognize. posting and immediately getting like by two hot women with accounts created this week. The rest of the real creators left on there are stuck trying to keep up, echo viral trends, trying to keep up the content treadmill. A few come through, but most feel somewhat forced. A lot of it is ai generated, and whats not mostly doesn’t feel that human anyways.

The people on here seem to really tie the internet to social media and are ready to quit the...

Not algorithmic recommendations. Not SEO-optimized listicles.

I mean real, surprising, meaningful discovery.

Search is brok…

The hype bro influencer culture is over, we are fucking burnt the fuck out. I’m done scrolling through ai slop on social media, I like in a few times a week with hopes to see some friends at the top of my feed and jump out. The Doom and Gloom of politics, everyone has a side that will bring glory and the other side will start an apocalypse did me in, ai generated bs is just driving those platforms further into the ground, I’m tired and done.

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"Business in the front, party in the back" isn't just some throwback style. It's the whole point.

In ou…

We need more mullets (as sam describes them). Not so serious, but serious when it counts. Ready to back you up, get some shit shipped, roll up their sleeves and do the work, stand up in front of people and pitch ideas. We have too many hustle bros pitching shit they cant do, ai doomers who have been here 10 minutes think they can replace everything they don’t understand with a word calculator, framework Andys afraid to ship till its perfect. Grow a Mullet.

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Damn this VAnessa is hitting my feed with hard topics, I’m not sure whether to subscribe or to block. These top websites only feel worse every day, when I post on twitter and I get 4 likes by accounts that were created 5 minutes ago with racy profile pics it feels obvious. I wonder how larger accounts deal with it. Now that llms have made making these bots mimic humans easy It really makes you want out. I’ve really become a curmudgeon and leaning on rss over the past year, I dont like it, but idk what to do.

This is a crazy theory I did not realize was out there, but damn power just keeps costing more and more. She does not mention it here, but there are many sources of power for the grid that cost vastly different amounts to produce, generally “clean energy” solutions are harder and more expensive to bring online and don’t just turn on and off at the flick of a switch. Anyways, how are the power companies divying this power out to users, do some get preferred rates or supply? My rates just went up for the summer period “temporarily”. Our infrastructure is aging hard to upgrade and needs something done to it. Who’s really going to pay for it, these AI companies are throwing big numbers but do they have any real money? Do they have any real revenue after building out massive data centers filling them with the most expensive hardware? These guys are burning cash like crazy.

Today I learned that its spelled “Rite of Passage”, and is short for ritual. Mac has so many of these things that are just different, but do not let you reconfigure them and you are stuck with it. copy / paste I don’t get, the 3 times I’ve touched a mac since I was a kid its frustrated me. Is it lock in? or is it them actually thinking this is the right way and you all shall do as we say.

Interesting longhorn storage performance test, author does highlight right away that this is a simulation and not a REAL test. I did not fully understand the storage semantics before reading through this.

This is an important distinction for applications that use sqlite or a tool on top of sqlite such as diskcache. With sqlite it is not recomended to run over nfs due to missing required file locking mechanisms.

Longhorn storage still provides a lot of benefits to these applications as the storage is automatically replicated, if the node that your application is running on goes offline a new pod will start on an existing node. If you have planned downtime, you can cordon and drain a node. Since the data is available in another location you will be able to start a new pod on anther node. barring your PodDisruptionBudget settings, taints, and affinity, this may happen automatically.

David’s got me looking at Forgejo. I’ve seen a lot of GitHub jumpers just this week, and I’ve been tempted for a long time to self host one anyways, so it might be time. I don’t have hard issues with anything, I just like self hosting my own personal stuff.

On the flipside, I hope this does not turn yet another thing to shit. I lived through the download software from sourceforge and hope you get the right download now button and not the one from the virus ad. I’m not putting my really public/useful projects on a self hosted platform… well not as the only source, I see how that comes off edgy. I like having some trust in the platform. Currently theres a lot of issues with M$ and GitHub using you for your data, but I don’t think injecting virus, malware, bitcoin miners is a worry I have coming from a GitHub release, unless it was put there by the author.

Justin has such great feeds on his site, I love how the main feeds are so prominant just to the left of the article you are reading. slops in particular feels like a great category. Saving this chat for later, or found it particularly interesting, but don’t really want to make a post about it.

20 years is a long time to work on something, congrats Blake! So many great links to small web creators, why, and how to build your own site.

As algos turn to shit the small web remains a space that cannot be ruined. There will always be rss feeds from real humans writing for other humans.

there is literally no universe that this is true 10k lines and its not bug filled crap? ok Lex Luthor, its time to step away from the keys

Is this 10k real production code? Dry in the sense that it hasn’t re-implemented the same s3 api dozens of time? What language are we talking something dense like python? something very verbose like html? Maybe a language where you implement everything from scratch like lua. This matters a lot. Playing with little POC applications that dont mean anything I can quickly come up with 500-1k likes of code that I may never look at again. I’m sure I can come up wtih 10k decent lines of code a day.

But for the same application without duplicating everything over and over? For something that moves the needle and really matters?? every single day?? Consistently +10k, not 10k changes, not 10k deletes of yesterdays code. nah thats wack.

Discovered the Brutalist Report from CJ on syntax.fm on their rss-is-not-dead episode. The way he described it, I was like gnaw thats whack, not into it, but I had to check it out. It’s actually great! Except the political shit, I go to rss to get away from political finger pointing. The Hacker News list is great, maybe I need to pay more attention to hacker news??

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.

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.

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.

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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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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If you want to use it for the purpose of learning it, please do use it.

Kubernetes as usual is a tool like others, you can’t use one tool everywhere. Where bash scripts work, they just work, where they don’t they fall apart too, kubernetes works like a charm.

Use your grug brains a little and choose wisely! In the end, who the hell cares if you use kubernetes or bash scripts to scale if your users are happy?

Well Said!

This post feels like it was written by someone who has never tried kubernetes, someone who reads twitter, listens to t3.gg and thePrimeagen (who cant even container let alone kubernetes). If you cant run linux, use bash, build your own docker images, run docker comfortably. If infra is not your thing kubernetes is probably not for you.

Kubernetes Was Built for Google

Just like how react was built for facebook to solve facebook problems with many teams contributing effectively to the same interactive interfaces. Turns out that react is actually a pretty good product if you have a highly interactive page, and if this is your bread and butter, you can make overly heavy static sites with too much build very effectively. It works and runs much of the internet now.

We are getting serious. We need serious tools. Big companies use Kubernetes. We should too. It feels more professional. It sounds like we know what we are doing.

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Great guide to setting up a samba server right in kubernetes. I tried it out after too long of playing with trying to get connected to a samba share on ucore, no idea what was wrong, but this just works, and will live in my homelab no matter what distro I’m on, no playbook required to set it up, just good ol k8s manifest. TBH I cheated and haven’t set up the secrets yet, so its not quite in argocd or in my github repo, but POC is there and it works as advertised without issue.

The message so many of us need to hear, stop scrolling and start creating. I’m not sure that I have a heavy issue with this, I barely scroll the socials anymore, I have my own rss reader curated with people that I enjoy consuming from. YT is often done as a family activity (with my wife) or listening while doing something like dishes. But I think I’ve been on the other side of this for awhile. There’s something that ticks my brain by twiddling with linux nonsensically or pip install thing-i-heard-about-today and try it. I’m not imune though, I often fill gaps in the day with nonsense short content, but try to avoid the short trap.

How many times in one video can Prime say dude just use arch, dude arch would be way easier, dude you know how hard you are making this on yourself.

I do not envy those who desire full size configurability but stuck with the opinions of GatesJobs. Windows and Mac are so rigid, that it makes it impossible to do any level of customizability that I would want to do for productivity.

Unless you Must work on win/mack for some reason of work, you make something for one of them, you use Adobe, or you play competitive online multiplayer with easy anticheat there is a distro for you. The number of things that you need a win/mack for is greatly shrinking, you don’t have to submit yourself to the pain of Gates that this guy has done.