Today I Learned

I suffer hard from NIH, I’m cheap, I like building things, I hate reading the docs, the perfect recipe for some bad NIH. I really like DHH’s take here. If no one builds anything new we get stuck with the same old shit. I think theres a lot of things that as far as my use case is concerned feature complete and needs no more. I would just build with it or on it, but not re-invent. It’s a slippery slope.

Jim Nielsen fetches his hacker news ranked articles for his home page.

this post by Jim Nielsen, lead me to this commit where I found that he was including posts of his that wound up on hackernews. I really like this idea and might take it, even though i have very few HN linked posts.

I really like the idea of Jim’s Eternal Links, and really want to take it for myself. To expand here I want to be able to look for common places for rss feeds, and be able to scrape out rss feeds for sites that I tend to link to often. Also if they have something like a /blogroll it might be a good place to find new great people to follow.

Maybe we need a little more friction in the world. More things that merit our time. Less things that don’t.

I can resonate with this post, less friction feels like it leads me to thinking less, having less skin in the game, understanding less, feeling less fulfilled. Vibe coding is a new trend of 2025, it feels like the future, but it does not quite feel like the present yet. It’s riddled with errors and I only get frustrated when it doesn’t work. I like having some friction that leads me to think and pay attention. There might be a future where this is not required for some things like coding up crud apps, but that does not feel like today.

Some of the best things from the old internet are still preserved with RSS. Content is shared via simple files, which means the slow-loading, ad-stuffed and tracker-filled clutter of the modern internet are mostly absent.

There aren’t any algorithms. RSS readers are wonderfully dumb. There’s no AI sifting through content to find whatever will outrage you the most. You just get new posts and mark them as read. It’s a calmer world.

With RSS I follow lots of people writing about normal people things. People blog about getting back into playing the drums, a fun book they just read, a tough problem they’re working through and the other day to day things of life. This type of content tends to get buried on social media — it doesn’t get the clicks and sell ads like fear and outrage do.

I feel like a curmudgeon, but i feel all of these things. I dont think that the new web is completely terrible, what is terrible is that the options of an algorithm ran by companies with differing goals is seemingly the only option. RSS still works, its fantastic, I personally love it, but theres only a small fraction of the internet that it reaches both ways. Few people have a reader, even...

This is a very interesting cli, its so simple. I stumbled accross the gi command awhile back and was like pfft, I dont want to install something for that. Didn’t even realize that you don’t install it, its just http. Their install instructions lead you to putting a curl funtion in your bashrc.

function gi() { curl -sLw \"\\\n\" https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/api/\$@ ;}

This now has me wondering “What else can build like this?”

linkarzu has a way to navigate his entire mac using a hyper key. Everything looks so tight and polished, also a lot to remember! Lucky he has a system of mnemonics that make it easy to remember. His setup is very Mac focused using mac only apps, so this would not work for me, though I’m sure I could get something similar on linux. He did mention Kanata which is cross platform.

I use a far different system that is fast loose and easy. On every system I run I have 9 workspaces that let me put 9 applications, I can easily move apps to different workspaces and have a side by side if I need. The core of what I do is terminal, web browser, and chat. Those go on workspaces 4,5,6, whch are home-row keys. If I’m running obs, that is on 8, steam goes on 1. but I have some freedom to move. Sometimes 2 will be an image editor or a video editor, sometimes something else all together, but I can quickly go to each app.

I do like his layered approach. I run a 42 key keyboard so things can get a bit cramped quickly. And when thinking in mnemonics you only get 26 letters in the alphabet, but prefixing these with another layer this number goes up exponentially. Sublayers sound sick to be honest.

Oh, I feel this. I go through the effort of removing dum ai comments so the ai looks less ai.

you’re not allowed to write comments in your code anymore, because if you do everyone will just think it’s ai generated.

This has me wondering if I need to really learn more patterns, data structures, and algorithms. This looks particularly useful when trying to combine several objects that you dont have full control over and make them behave similarly.

If you need to target a specific k8s node in the cluster, you can use labels. You want to treat your nodes as much like cattle as you can, but sometimes budgets get in the way. You might be like me and just run any free hardware you can get in your cluster, or you might have some large storage or gpu needs that you can’t afford to put on every node in the cluster.

kubectl get nodes --show-labels # add the bigpool label kubectl label node k8s-1 bigpool=true kubectl get nodes --show-labels # remove the bigpool label kubectl label node k8s-1 bigpool-

To use the label in a pod set spec.nodeSelector to the label that you applied.

wow looking at how this is done kinda draws me towards jekyll a little bit, I did not realize some of the similarities that it has with markata.

css if() just landed, I’m struggling to understand what I an do with this that I can’t do with something as old as classes. I can get it if I don’t have control over html creation or js to add classes. The example that Una shows includes data that could directly be a classname with a set of styles in css rather than this crazy css variable unpacking out of a data attribute and an if statement.

Allen Carr1 on quitting smoking: [Carr] recommends working to really notice and internalise that disconnect [between what we want and what we enjoy]. He tells smokers to pay attention to their next cigarette. It’s like mindfulness but for noticing the unpleasantness.

I can appreciate the restraint here, theres something about the mindfulness behind it all.

I rolled out the blogroll today, nothing pretty, but is one single page of the rss feeds I follow.

Markata got a shout out part way through the latest episode of LNL, I will go back, re-listen and take some of the feedback. His thoughts on Markata were interesting. On one hand it really is a thing for me that works for me, and as a person with too many side projects I don’t have the focus to really give it polish. On the other hand it really confirms why listen to podcasts, news, finger on the pulse, opinions and how often these guys are wrong, they are not the expert they probably look at 6 things like this a week. He said that it was some sort of javascript thing, that maybe he could fix or customize with javascript if he wanted, kinda shocking, I thought maybe I accidentally added node modules or something dumb, nope, I have a whopping 1.4% js. So most of the comments were plain wrong. I get it he probably peeked at it for 30s and realized it wasn’t the thing for his problem. At the same time I should probably do a better job at marketing what it really is, cleaning up the docs and demo.

Such a great message right now. I feel like everywhere I turn is negativity, especially social media. It feels like so many things are trying to divide and create hate. “This” is what we should be doing with social media. There are a lot of elements of “there are two ways to have the biggest building in town, tear down all the bigger buildings, or just build the biggest fucking building”, If you want to be successful in X then surround yourself with others successful in X. This is a catalytic skill that everyone needs to have in their belt.

I’m currently [[replacing-google-search-apps-with-self-hosted-web-apps]] and decided to create a simple b64 encoder/decoder, just start typing to enter text, escape to deselect, then e/d to encode/decode.

I’m trying to make these apps super simple, self hosted out of minio, static html, and javascript. It’s been fun to get back to some simple interactive web development like this. No build just a website that does something. No broken builds, no containers to deploy, just push to minio.

encoded = btoa(content); decoded = atob(encoded);

Here is the result.

May 25, 2025

f2 by ayoisaiah is a game-changer in its space. Excited to see how it evolves.

F2 is a cross-platform command-line tool for batch renaming files and directories quickly and safely. Written in Go!

Great conversation with Billy Basso the creator of Animal Well on the code architecture of Animal well. It’s all hand crafted C++. He talks about early games he tried to build being heavy in oop, and really got lost in oop. Animal well is very flat, there is no inheritance, just lists of entities that all implement similar methods in their own way. Layering and order of entities becomes very important. Its crazy how much he had to think about hardware and MS build being very helpful with this, but needing to know all of the console apis.