notes: posts

Nix is phenomenal.

Everyone says they want a pure chronological feed but the dream breaks as soon as one of your feeds posts 20x more often as the rest.

Since the recent explosion of bespoke software in my life since I set up the fleet, there are a few patterns I've discovered work much better for my brain.

Email is infuriating until you realise it's just paper that can teleport, each reply and thread is also just paper, and it has all the same strengths and weaknesses of paper letters.

The set up is a NixOS server with two user accounts, ~zach and ~agents.

Anonymous Group Chats Group chats cannot be named, they are only listed by the members in the group chat listed alphabetically and comma separated.

After a team member summoned Copilot to correct a typo in a PR of mine, Copilot edited my PR description to include and ad for itself and Raycast.

It(')s has an interesting history.

"Full-stack" now includes a lot more pancakes.

A script that will attempt to stash changes on your current branch when you switch(blade), and will restore those changes when you switch(blade) back. #!

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

A Wikipedia article that makes me sad is the one on Feed URI scheme.

The lightspeed ram in The Last Jedi is incredible but it does break the world.

And vice versa.

Continued from Imposter Syndrome Day 632.

Grep can be used as a timer, and can be blocking.

When Poetry lists the dependencies for a package it doesn't show the Python versions that those ranges are valid for.

An interesting type error arises if you use the standard advice for installing tRPC on an existing Next.js project that already has a layout applied.

This is a list of problems with the Kinde interface.

Update 2026-02-04: There is now native support for infinite scrolling-style loading patterns.

Nextcloud is excellent, and its Android app is great.

A script I like to drop into my projects folders to see what I was working on for a given day. day=$1 repo_folder=~/projects for dir in "$repo_folder"/*/; do # Check if the directory is a git repository if [ -d "$dir/.git" ]; then cd $dir

Minecraftle blew up!

I have had the job title "Software Engineer" for 632 days now and it still feels like a lie most of the time.

The XZ exploit is a clever supply chain attack, placing a RCE in sshd using a vulnerability in XZ, a compression library that many Linux distributions call when running OpenSSH (sshd -> libsystemd (for systemd notifications) -> liblzma (for logging)).

(This was written as to tell people to move from my old RSS feed to my new RSS feed on notes.zachmanson.com.

snakeware is an experimental Linux-based OS with developed in 2020.

Spite Driven Development (SDD) is my preferred development methodology.

This page is a list of Design decisions made by Spotify that I consider shitty.

Also known as shadow libraries, are potentially the best thing humans have ever created and are illegal in most places.

There is just so much more.

In web development, you sometimes come across a segment of a URL called a "slug", which is human readable string of text appended to a URL to make easier to determine the content the URL points to.

Yea as long as you do all the work and watch all the lectures you’ll be chilling seph I did my Computer Science degree from 2020 to 2023, coming out with a BSc.

Meta's rumoured Twitter competitor Threads has caused a stir in the Fediverse.

I received a strange bug report on Penultimate Guitar where the Next.js rendering would fail completely on certain songs.

Why does LinkedIn do this?

There is a wonderful browser extension with an awful name made by Third Iron called LibKey Nomad.

The Fault in Our Stars describes the phenomenon of the Last Good Day, a concept that has been echoing in my head ever since I read the book in high school.

Minecraftle is a simple game written for my introductory web development unit (CITS3403 with Tim French, would recommend) in 2022 Semester 1.

TLDR: If you are using Vercel and display a lot of images hosted on someone else's server, you probably want to turn off Image Optimisation.

I recently received access to DALL-E and played around with it for a while.

Pandoc is a Swiss Army knife that I exclusively use to cut cheese.

As of Minecraft version 1.18.1, there are 739 crafting recipes in the game...depending on how you count.

hEP 001 Title Mathematical 𝐡 in the Standard Implementation Author Zach Manson Status Proposed Type Feature hlang-version 1.0 Abstract This hEP proposes a framework for adding first-class support for additional forms of h used in mathematical contexts, and

I spend an inordinate amount of time reading arguments on the internet.