danott.website

HTML endures.

I wanna be An NPC To loop while ends Of others meet Select 2P Or not 2P That is the quest For me or we In open worlds The main roams free With half a time Refuse to flee There’s four square feet Prepared for me To live and move And have being

AI is inherently political technology.

It’s like reviewing a restaurant by talking about how many cooks were in the kitchen, how long the shift lasted, how many orders they fired, or how late they stayed cleaning up.

We’re still in the dorks-only phase of model-assisted programming, but I can imagine soon-to-arrive interfaces where you just drag and drop components while narrating your desires with your voice, the models able to perform the “brainstorming,” “planning,”

When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, “When?”

TIL some insights from working on electrical.

Semantic observability, not raw telemetry.

I would rather be wrong about what we’re capable of than right about why we shouldn’t bother trying Pessimism sounds wise, but doesn’t deliver on it’s promises.

TIL how to launch Apple Shortcuts from plaintext links across platforms.

I’ve tried all the read later apps, and I don’t read the words later.

I’d rather be bored and present than excited and perpetually somewhere else.

Unix-friendly CLI wrapper for Apple’s Foundation Models (macOS 26+).

I hate my Things backlog.

A bite-sized burger blog from Louie Mantia, with a super-simple rating system.

TIL that Martin Short and Steve Martin show up as a voice acting duo in the 1998 animated picture The Prince of Egypt.

When your friend asks you for a ride to the airport, you can just add it to your calendar as “LARPing as a Lyft driver.”

I keep being reminded that nobody wants to use computers.

TIL that smaller Apple Watches have no tap-to-type keyboard.

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas.

TIL about R values for insulating a home in central Kentucky.

My cell phone charger Comfort and security Forever draining Would you consider Wrapping me with dollar signs Be my shell escape Generative prompts And context millionaires Got nothing on me Because I have thoughts And dreams of being at rest Not HTTP

TIL how to convert an m4a to mp3 on macOS. ffmpeg handles this in one line: ffmpeg -i input.m4a output.mp3 There are, of course, more options.

I sat with that for a while, and what I felt was wonder mixed with a profound sadness.

Maybe we finally have a compelling enough excuse to fix the 20 years of problems hidden by code review culture, and replace it with a real culture of quality.

TIL there’s not really a way to sort files by modification time using plain old ls. macOS had ls -ltU, but that’s non-standard.

I’m building a command line tool called yap.

TIL I could reverse engineer the Google Reader API by pointing NetNewsWire at a fresh rails new --minimal --api application running at http://localhost:3000 as a FreshRSS source.

I’m experimenting with all the RSS readers, and got tired of exporting and importing OPML files into each’s bespoke iCloud syncing.

TIL that Hammerspoon is excellent.

I’ve been advising startups to stay single-developer for as long as possible and telling larger organizations to start moving to one-repo-per-human wherever they can—even if it means re-architecting their systems to align with this.

More often than not, the branch spun up by Conductor never even makes it to GitHub, let alone the main branch.

I have been grieving for 18 months.

My kids have been watching the ZOMBIES movies on Disney.

I’m trying my hand at building a macOS application.

The people who will thrive aren’t “agent managers.”

These engineers aren’t worse for skipping the ceremony.

Alone is good entertainment.

The still small voice of RSS feeds emitting from personal websites is my favorite part of the web.

So, similar to how functional core was Gary’s answer to testability in a world full of side effects, my assertion is that state machines are the answer to determinism in the era of AI agents.

I started archiving my twitter status updates in 2017.