Today I Learned

POG: Play Of the Game - used to express shock or excitement after a noteworthy moment.

In all of the documentaries I’ve seen on how hard it is to recycle plastic, how hard it is to separate all the small pieces from each other, how expensive it is, dirty it is, how just plain ineffective we are at doing it I’ve never seen this angle. In a nutshell the other side of the equation is that as we pull natural gas out of shale is that we pull ethylene out as a byproduct. We don’t even ask for it, it just comes with the methane gas that we are going for. So as we drill, Frack, and mine this out to heat our homes and create electricity we are stuck with all of this ethylene. It’s terrible for the environment, just like methane it’s a rough greenhouse gas. Companies are allowed to flare off a certain amount, they can push some down the pipe, but are still left with tons leftover that they practically give away. Turns out that this stuff is very cheap and very much wants to be turned into plastic. Very clean food grade plastic, very easily and cheaply compared to recycling. Excess is a big problem that needs solutions, but it has hard problems at both ends of the situation that don’t make it easy for anyone trying to take care of it.

Extract text from MDX files, removing J…

Damn this one is getting some reach, I’ve seen it from Simon Willison and Justin Searls and t3.gg. I feel for Adam, He has built a fantastic product that the world is running with, something we all needed. Something that everyone laughs at turns their nose up “ppft I don’t need that” the first time they see it, but once they try people get it, and a lot of them like it...

...

!!! Rune

ᚨᛚᛚᚨᛁ ᛗᚨᚾᚾᚨ ᚠᚱᛖᛁ

!!! Rune

While the non deterministic nature of llms scare the heck out of me in the sense of just cutting it loose on my writing. letting it go through all of my files and just edit them. I do like the idea of mundane tools like “desaturate”, “Gaussian blur”, evolving out of it for text. I don’t yet see this with the tools we have now, but it will be interesting to see them evolve.

file over app is a fantastic philosophy laid out well and concisely documented very well in this post. The idea is that tools will change, we will want to use different tools, different editors, different computers over time. What’s likely to outlast everything is plain text files that we can interact with a wide variety of tools. Not encrypted in dedicated formats that die with our tools, but in plain text where a computer from 2160 is likey as capable of reading the file as one from 1960 would be.

I recently discovered vim-speeddating by tpope, and it’s truly impressive.

speeddating.vim: use CTRL-A/CTRL-X to increment dates, times, and more

Check out JaKooLit and their project Wallpaper-Bank.

Additional wallpapers which will be offered to users for my hyprland scripts

Today I discovered vim-speeddating by tpope. I’m sure I’ve seen years ago but it did not click for my workflow until today. I often go through pictures from my phone for the past few days and make Posts tagged: shots posts, but I want to date them to about when the image was taken most of the time. This allows me to quickly bump days up and down using c-a and c-x even around the new year.

Sound on, listen to those new switches.

Congrats Simon! Well deserved metric for the level of content that he produces, Its remarkable the amount of high quality posts that come out of Simon Willison. Also this looks like a really great resource to find other high quality blogs that I have not read before.

I’m really excited about gastown, an amazing project by steveyegge. It’s worth exploring!

Gas Town - multi-agent workspace manager

Yesterday I wrote about a way to do light mode screen recording 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>

Check out 99 by ThePrimeagen. It’s a well-crafted project with great potential.

Neovim AI agent done right

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.

I saw this tip from Cassidoo 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

Dark Mode

Light Mode

There are a few unsettling things about it, but overall I feel like it was a...

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.

This sounds great…. I’m sick AF right now and dont want to do anything but watch YouTube, and let opencode do my work.

The work on usage by jdx.

A specification for CLIs

I’m impressed by pitchfork from jdx.

Daemons with DX

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.