Wed Feb 11
(Image generated using ChatGPT) I have spent years doing the boring, unsexy work of keeping systems safe: least privilege, logging, MFA, segmentation, the whole “trust nothing” routine that MSP and security folks live in. So when Ring used the Super Bowl LX stage on February 8, 2026 to pitch its AI-powered Search...
I’ve had a few days where I’ve been super productive. I’ve gotten up earlier, gone to bed earlier, and accomplished a lot of stuff. I even finally cleaned my desk and computer, something I’ve been meaning to do for ages. But today, I have a list of things to do, and no interest in doing any of them. One of them was...
There's no King in No Kings When did we get so fucking polite? Today, I find myself reading Letter From a Birmingham Jail in the hope of finding some familiarity. The essay by Dr. Martin Luther King doesn't deal much in metaphor, unlike his speeches. Instead, I get a grounded look into the practice and purpose of...
Most folks in my social circles have known about Informed Delivery for years. I recently discovered that USPS added a feature, apparently with little fanfare, where they will send a follow-up email after your mail actually gets delivered each day. This is a huge help for me in colder months. No more "hope it's been...
I thought that 2025 was weird and didn't think it could get much weirder. 2026 is really delivering in the weirdness department. An AI agent opened a PR to matplotlib with a trivial performance optimization, a maintainer closed it for being made by an autonomous AI agent, so the AI agent made a callout blogpost...
Life is way to short to focus on playing a single game from start to finish, or at least that’s how I often act, from time to time. 1 Last year, I shared a list of ongoing games that I started and did’t finish in 2025, and guess what? That list just keeps growing and growing after less than two months have gone by,...
end case is over. it's been like 5 days? i can't remember. i couldn't bear to look at my blog with that enabled oh god. that was like my worst creation, good riddance.
In “Build a search index in Python”, I walked through how to create a search index using the “inverted index” structure. This structure is commonly used in document search.This week I was thinking about “inverting” data is more broadly applicable in software engineering than in search. I wanted to write the concept...
February 11, 2026 I recently made a small change to this 11ty site: I moved from external CSS to inlining my stylesheet directly in the HTML. The result? Faster page loads and a simpler deployment process. I replaced this in my base.njk template: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/style.css" /> With...
The sanmon (entrance gate) of this Buddhist temple in Okazaki, with its elegant tiled roof and traditional wooden plaque. Through the gateway, the temple grounds and buildings are visible beyond. 岡崎にある仏教寺院の山門。美しい瓦屋根と伝統的な扁額が特徴。
Let no one say I lack in culinary capabilities, For I can cook, and so you see here. .bear-gallery { display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(150px, 1fr)); gap: 4px; } .bear-gallery > p { margin: 0; display: contents; } .bear-gallery img { width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 1; object-fit: cover;...
“I had not always bleared eyes and red eyelids; neither did my nose always touch my chin; nor was I always a servant. I am the daughter of Pope Urban X and of the Princess of Palestrina. Until the age of fourteen I was brought up in a palace, to which all the castles of your German barons would scarcely have served...
This is a fun "challenge" from Alex on Wry Writer, who got it from David over at Forking Mad who got it from Zachary Kai (at which point we stop with the Tom Lehrer nonsense!) How many sandwiches do you eat a week? I eat a heck of a lot of sandwiches. I will preface this entire questionnaire by saying sandwiches are...
Siguiendo al hilo de la actualidad en España, aunque siempre con el tiempo de por medio, llega el capítulo de las infraestructuras. No voy a retomar la falta de mantenimiento (y responsabilidad) que pudo verse durante la DANA de Valencia. Las infraestructuras españolas llevan décadas dejadas de la mano de Dios (y...
1 If you descend onto the Marunouchi Line platform in Ikebukuro Station on any weekday morning, you will witness an unusual train-boarding ritual. Like in any other Japanese station, people wait in line at the two sides of where each train's door will open. This is called seiretsu jousha (整列乗車, orderly boarding),...
A “quick” update that took a while It's been a while since the last iteration of my website, thamara.xyz. It was mostly text-based. I bought the thamara.co.uk and thamara.uk domains last year, and thought I should give this space a new look. I've refreshed everything. The homepage, the blog (which has now been moved...
ReutersIn China, censorship relates to red lines. You cannot cross some red lines. It’s about state policy and discussions (about) state power. It’s also related to what they would call minority or religious issues, which can be very sensitive, so people would not touch those topics. If touched, it could cause you...
A self is a story of why you are you — a selective retelling of the myriad chance events between the birth of the universe and this moment: atoms bonding one way and not another, parents bonding with one partner and not another, values binding you to one culture and not another. Against this utter choicelessness in...
It’s already been over 2 years since you have left us. You still leave an incredible hole in our home and our hearts. Only toward the end of last year, I finally got rid of your old medication and your food. I haven’t taken down the sign at my door with your face on it. Every year, we use the reusable photo calendar...
Eu estou escrevendo esse post depois de 24h sem ter acesso ao meu celular. Foi um experimento que eu resolvi fazer de última hora e eu admito que foi uma das experiências mais assustadoras possíveis. Não tenho base nenhuma pra tentar isso, apenas pensei que eu já vivi em um mundo sem celular, então eu seria...
I love a good and simple bandwagon to jump on now and then. After seeing Manu and Kev do this, I’m game. Summer (and by definition, climate change).Because sweating from every orifice in your body is stupid. Wealth inequality.No human being on this Earth, regardless what they do, how well they do it, and how much...
I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in daily posts. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive. Apple Releases macOS Tahoe 26.3, MacRumors. I’ve heard those silly misaligned anchors to resize windows are fixed. All other Apple’s OSs were updated as well. Information...
Lin is a stylistic enhancement for Emacs’ built-in hl-line-mode. It remaps the hl-line face (or equivalent) buffer-locally to a style that is optimal for major modes where line selection is the primary mode of interaction. The idea is that hl-line-mode cannot work equally well for contexts with competing priorities:...
Bleary eyes, but well rested, my slumber comes to an end. The Lexon Flip next to my bed sings its merry melody. A gentle caress from yours truly cuts its song short. Fingers fumble to find spectacles; what good they'll do in the dark, I know not, but they give a (false) sense of clarity.Upright, I cautiously paw...
"Mascara" (Mask) from the Gli abiti de veneziani (1754) by Giovanni Grevembroch, translated by René Seindal.
One of the greatest strengths of the Perl ecosystem is Plack. It provides a super-flexible interface between web servers and Perl web applications. Because of its middleware architecture, it is incredibly easy to compose complex behaviors by snapping together small, focused modules. Recently, I wanted to create a...
February 2026. Genoa. Last Genoa post, I promise, but I know many of you share my evangelical zeal to see hand pumps in developing nations, so I welcome the cask in Scurerria Beer & Bagel. I love a trad pub name, me. If Public House, the other real ale outlet I found in Genoa was a simple affair, this one is a more...
In the seventies Frappé popularized an idea that vegetarians should combine protein sources, i.e. eating grains with beans, just like traditional food cultures have done for longer than recorded history, is a complete amino acid profile as opposed to just eating grains with more grains or eating beans with more...
The power structure in America has a deep investment in keeping people afraid and begging for protection. We accept that roughly half our federal budget disappears into military-related spending or the interest on debts from previous wars. It’s branded as “defense” spending, as if we live in a constant state of...
This is your sign to delete that post that, for one reason or another, makes you uncomfortable just knowing it exists. Even if it’s old and the chances of anyone ever seeing it are extremely low. Delete it. I know something in you says it’s better to ignore its existence and move on. That’s true. But you could also...
The title is a quote from a Calvin and Hobbes strip. I read it as a kid, and I've found many, many situations in which it applies. Today, for instance. I'm skimming through books on basic computer programming for teens, trying to find some suitable additions for the school library. In one of them, I run across the...
For some days my laptop's keyboard is been acting weird, suddenly some keys won't work or the letter I press would appear twice in a row. Every time I'd pray to the keyboard gods to let me finish a sentence in peace. The problem escalated quickly and in a week these keys stopped working completely. I'll take it to a...
Once in a while I wonder about the artists on bear blog. They have a dedicated art page like me, but I never end up opening that page most times unless they make a post. So I'm putting my doodles out whenever I end up collecting enough. I encourage you to do the same if you already don't, fill my RSS feed with your...
I recently picked up two Pixel C tablets from a seller on eBay, along with the magnetic keyboard. One tablet had a cracked screen but worked fine and wasn’t locked. The other was cosmetically perfect but the display was completely black. I figured between the two I could end up with at least one working tablet. The...
Estos últimos días he tenido algo descuidado mi blog, una disculpa 😓, pero intentemos corregir esto. Hoy quiero unirme a este cotorreo que he visto ya algunas personas hacer… Una lista de cosas random que no me gustan. Esto es lo primero que se me viene a la mente: Que falle mi carro (justo esta semana la batería de...
What Kind of System Produces Better Decisions by Preserving Disagreement? A command-line coding agent runs a diagnostic on a constraint classification engine and flags an anomaly: a mathematical theorem receives a suppression score of 0.99 — nearly the maximum. The agent traces the computation, identifies the...
The other day, I asked Cher, my OpenClaw instance if it could read my email and notify me if something important came in. It said it would be easy; then I mentioned I used ProtonMail (which is end-to-end encrypted and, as a result, does not use standard protocols). Cher paused, did a search, then found the Proton...
Logging in to a VPN shouldn’t cause DNS to stop working, right? Well, you’d like to think that, wouldn’t ya? And the problem wasn’t PEBKAC this time, either. Finding the right setting to fix the problem did take some time, but I got there in the end. There’s no way it’s DNS (earliest image reference I could find). A...
More and more I’m aware of people who talk to AI chat bots like they would with friends – about this and that, their life, just chatting. And while I begrudgingly while completely ignoring the environmental and moral issues see why (some) people actually get usable results for specific use cases, this is actually...
Niecały rok temu nieco bardziej niż wcześniej zabolało mnie to, że moje podstawowe konto poczty elektronicznej znajduje się na serwerach firmy Google - chodzi o Gmail. Właśnie miałem wypisać wszystkie powody tego bólu, ale dosłownie boli mnie myślenie o tych powodach. Jeśli wiesz, to wiesz, a jeśli nie wiesz, to...
TitleBig Ship, Lots of Guns CreatorJohn Wilker Year2018 Kindbook Read2026-02-12
Been awhile since I've done a t-shirt post, and trust, it was the more interesting option. All other snapshots today were of a thick layer of ice that formed on our back steps. ⊕Currently Listening: Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter “Winter's Empty Pages”Reply via email
I’ve been using claude code on and off since it launched a year ago. Since the Christmas holiday, it seems a ton of folks outside the software industry have discovered it as well. Despite its popularity, I’ve seen almost no discussion of Claude Code SDK. It’s essentially a typescript or python wrapper to the agent...
The square; four straight lines of equal length and four equal angles. What sounds like the most boring of the quadrilaterals has an almost magical aura. Think about the sides of a dice, the chessboard, or the floor area of the Egyptian pyramids. And in creative coding, too, the square makes for a formidable...
The UI for filing bugs is inscrutable and has too many hoops to jump through. No one does anything unless every field has been filed meticulously and there is a clear repro. The designer is ridiculed if the thing isn’t actually a bug, is a duplicate, or if it was filed in the wrong place. Front-end bugs are...
Adding email links to the bottom of each blog post is paying off. Someone emailed me with information about a problem with my indoor cycling trainer. With permission, I’ve updated the post so that anyone searching for the same issue can benefit.
I am used to seeing road salt in New York City before and after it snows. A couple of years ago (definitely during the Eric Adams administration), I recall having noted remarkable amounts of road salt in the street near Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. We are in the midst of what I would describe as a...
I was today years old when I learned, that my approach to dropping blocks is super naive. Hell, there is even an official Tetris guide on how blocks have to behave under certain conditions. They call it the Super Rotation System!😅 It even seems to be some kind of common sense among Tetris conoceurs. Guess I will...
Album#33 Patch 图1 《Patch》专辑封面 专辑信息 专辑名称：Patch 歌手：Fayzz 年份：2025-08-5 风格：数字摇滚 时长：46:17 一张还不错的数字摇滚(Math Rock)专辑，喜欢专辑里的鼓点，比较喜欢其中的「隐藏」、「Hollow」、「Forlorn Hope」、「浪人歌谣」、「Distance」、「美梦成空」、「Outro」。 专辑封面部分元素是 AI 生成的1，有三双动物的眼睛在注视着，右上角还有一个摄像头，有种被监视的感觉。封面有很多线条，旋转起来后还会产生 摩尔纹。 专辑简介...
AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot {{HistoricalArchive |message=This was accidentally posted publicly and then archived since |source_url=https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611/ }} == Stevey's Google Platforms Rant == I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at...
What’s the latest data about philosophy graduate programs? In the following guest post, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, professor of philosophy at UC Merced and co-director of Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis (APDA), shares results from the latest APDA survey, completed at the end of 2025. It includes information about...
Days without turning off site blockers: 1 Slow day today. Moving work spots helped but wow, it was hard. Didn't feel much of a desire for 'fun tech time', other than listening to music on my MP3 player. Just holding out until reading week for a reset, lol
“Yesterday’s Enterprise” is an alternate-timeline episode of ST:TNG, and if someone had told me that before I watched it, I might have skipped to the next episode. I don’t have an absolute objection to stories that deal in time-travel or other forms of timeplay, but such tactics are very easy to do badly. They’re...
The most popular link last time was this one to Sabrina Bockler's paintings, with the minute cryptic game second. The "looking back on myself in 2016" trend of recent weeks has convinced me that the confessional online personal essay is back (if it ever really went away). Here's a great example of the form.Someone...