Today I Learned

Short TIL posts

1834 posts latest post 2026-04-18
Publishing rhythm
Apr 2026 | 20 posts

I found snow-fall component from zachleat, and its beautiful… to me. I like the way it looks, its simple and whimsical.

There is an npm package @zachleat/snow-fall if that’s your thing. I like vendoring in small things like this.

curl -o static/snow-fall.js https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zachleat/snow-fall/refs/heads/main/snow-fall.js

I generally save it in my justfile so that I remember how I got it and how to update…. yaya I could use npm, but I don’t for no build sites.

get-snowfall: curl -o static/snow-fall.js https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zachleat/snow-fall/refs/heads/main/snow-fall.js

Usage #

Now add the component to your page.

Today I learned an important lesson that you should periodically check on your kubeconfigs expiration date. It’s easy to do. You can ask for the client-certificate-data from your kubeconfig, decode it, and use openssl to get the expiration date.

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.

When using two GitHub accounts the gh cli gives very easy gh auth switch workflow from the cli.

gh auth switch –help Switch the active account for a GitHub host.

This command changes the authentication configuration that will be used when running commands targeting the specified GitHub host.

If the specified host has two accounts, the active account will be switched automatically. If there are more than two accounts, disambiguation will be required either through the --user flag or an interactive prompt.

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 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...

gpus are awesome and I need one for Bambu Studio to be usable in a distrobox. Adding the --nvidia flag to distrobox create bind mounts the nvidia /dev/ devices and sets up the necessary environment variables. Once we are in there are a couple of packages to install to make it work.

The k3s system-upgrade controller is a fantastic tool for upgrading k3s automatically. It has done a fantastic job for me every time I’ve used it. Today I ran it on a cluster that needed to upgrade several minors and I learned that the controller does not pick up on changes to the channel url if you change from minor to minor.

The solution I came up with was to name the plan with the version it supports. Then on each patch upgrade, change both the plan name and the channel. I use gitops with argocd, it automcatically cleaned up old plans, created new plans, and the system-upgrade-controller picked up the plan and started applying immediately.

# Server plan apiVersion: upgrade.cattle.io/v1 kind: Plan metadata: name: server-plan-v1.33 # <- This is important if you want to change the channel name namespace: system-upgrade spec: concurrency: 1 cordon: true nodeSelector: matchExpressions: - key: node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane operator: In values: - "true" serviceAccountName: system-upgrade upgrade: image: rancher/k3s-upgrade channel: https://update.k3s.io/v1-release/channels/v1.33 --- # Agent plan apiVersion: upgrade.cattle.io/v1 kind: Plan metadata: name:...

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.

...

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.