Today I Learned

Short TIL posts

1852 posts latest post 2026-05-13
Publishing rhythm
Apr 2026 | 23 posts
- 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. Note This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: /thoughts/
- 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. Note This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: /thoughts/
When using two GitHub accounts the gh cli gives very easy gh auth switch workflow from the cli. from the docs 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. # list accounts gh auth status # switch accounds (interactive if more than 2, i've never seen this personally) gh auth switch
Check out basecamp [1] and their project fizzy [2]. Kanban as it should be. Not as it has been. References: [1]: https://github.com/basecamp [2]: https://github.com/basecamp/fizzy
- 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. Note This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: /thoughts/
- 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. Note This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: /thoughts/
- Linus is Techbrophobic [1] 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 dream of having, worth a listen. Note This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: /techbrophobic/ [2]: /thoughts/
gpus are awesome [1] 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. distrobox create --name bambu-studio --image archlinux:latest --nvidia distrobox enter bambu-studio sudo pacman -S nvidia-utils lib32-nvidia-utils vulkan-icd-loader nvidia-smi glxinfo | gprep OpenGL sudo pacman -Syu --needed base-devel git git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru-bin.git cd paru-bin makepkg -si paru -S bambustudio-bin bambu-studio distrobox-export --app bambu-studio References: [1]: /gpus-are-awesome/
Check out garbage-day.nvim [1] by Zeioth [2]. It’s a well-crafted project with great potential. Garbage collector that stops inactive LSP clients to free RAM References: [1]: https://github.com/Zeioth/garbage-day.nvim [2]: https://github.com/Zeioth
snow-fall Web Component—zachleat.com A post by Zach Leatherman (zachleat) Zach Leatherman Ā· zachleat.com [1] This is a very fun way to add some whimsy to your site, added it to mine immediately when I saw it. This is what digital gardens are for, Fun, entertainment, and self-exxpression. Note This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: https://www.zachleat.com/web/snow-fall/ [2]: /thoughts/
- This ball vise Idea is incredible and I want one. Its a heavy workholding unit that can accept a variety of tools and manipulate things to a lot of angles while working on them. This looks really good for painting miniatures soldering or generally working on small 3d printed parts that I do. Note This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: /thoughts/
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: age...
Deleting Code for Performance The one where I clean up an asynchronous mess dbushell.com Ā· dbushell.com [1] 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 [2]. 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. Note This post is a thought [3]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: https://dbushell.com/2025/12/04/deleting-code-for-performance/ [2]: /markata/ [3]: /thoughts/
I recently discovered posse_party [1] by searlsco [2], and it’s truly impressive. Quit social media by posting more References: [1]: https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party [2]: https://github.com/searlsco
- 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 [1]. 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. It will be interesting to see play out. [2] Note This post is a thought [3]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: /self-host/ [2]: https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/95ae2a95-308b-4d1d-bff8-8ce6194db132.webp [3]: /thoughts/
I’m impressed by awesome-nanobanana-pro [1] from ZeroLu [2]. šŸš€ An awesome list of curated Nano Banana pro prompts and examples. Your go-to resource for mastering prompt engineering and exploring the creative potential of the Nano banana pro(Nano banana 2) AI image model. References: [1]: https://github.com/ZeroLu/awesome-nanobanana-pro [2]: https://github.com/ZeroLu
Malicious Traffic and Static Sites Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web. blog.jim-nielsen.com [1] These look like fun endpoints to add anti-maliciously, give good stuff for the sleezy things to read. Note This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/malicious-traffic-on-static-sites/ [2]: /thoughts/
A ChatGPT prompt equals about 5.1 seconds of Netflix In June 2025 Sam Altman claimed about ChatGPT that "the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours". In March 2020 George Kamiya of the International Energy Agency estimated that "streaming a … Simon Willison’s Weblog Ā· simonwillison.net [1] 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. Note This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/29/chatgpt-netflix [2]: /thoughts/
A pretty good email scam How I helped family recover from a clever email scam that hid behind sneaky account settings cassidoo.co [1] scams suck. This is a good story, sorry to hear that it happened to a real person. If you or anyone in your family has a compromised email, add these to your checklist to fix. - automatic forwards - 2-factor email Note This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: https://cassidoo.co/post/email-settings-scam/ [2]: /thoughts/
2025-11-27 Notes | Nic Payne yesterday: [[2025-11-26-notes]] Big Changes Got my workspaces script in working order It's not quite configurable yet This will allow an easy way to setup pype.dev [1] 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! Note This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts References: [1]: https://pype.dev/2025-11-27-notes/ [2]: /thoughts/