Philip Mateescu

some-function () { { local -; set -x; } 2>/dev/null some-command "$@" } { local -; set -x; } 2>/dev/null enables set -x (command tracing/xtrace) for just this function, without leaking that setting to the caller.

The problem: On Linux Mint 22.3 with a Radeon RX 5700 XT (Navi 10) connected via DisplayPort, YouTube videos (and video playback generally) in both Firefox and Chrome would hang indefinitely with a spinning loading cursor — no frame ever rendered, no audi…

Good rules from Vinicius Brasil on When [to] reject AI code even if it works: More and more, I reject AI code for the same reasons: I reject AI code when I can’t explain the approach in my own words.

This is useful in having both a limited footprint from a repo, while also the ability to update.

I learned of this term from a thoughtful essay from No One’s Happy that examines the flood of AI in the workplace from within, and also without.

Speaking of the output-competence decoupling, this is a signal that can be used in reverse to figure out what you can improve: Planktonne: A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at.

There have been multiple reports of similar … “enthusiasm”, and this this Techcrunch article nails it: CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value…

Thoughtful post from Derek Sivers arguing that time is a component of a place: When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, “When?”

An excellent quote from Quinn Keast’s What, then, are we paying for?

fnm is a fantastically fast node manager, which make it a pleasure to use over nvm. fnm handles its own node versions and it observes .node-version files in folder, automatically installing/loading the proper node version.

When creating a git worktree, files ignored by .gitignore are (rightfully) not copied.

Wonderful essay by Paul Graham: The Brand Age.

A nice, notarized program, that makes adding a wallpaper folder as easy as /usr/local/bin/wallpaper-folder add ~/Pictures/Wallpapers AI Summary The article explains how macOS wallpaper folder handling changed in macOS 26 and how that broke simple scripted…

Kyle Daigle, COO of Github, responding to an tweet with some data about the insane amount of code GH sees as the result of AI: There were 1 billion commits in 2025.

I learned, in the light of the axios compromise that a good deal of package managers support setting a minimum release age for packages: ~/.npmrc min-release-age=7 # days ignore-scripts=true ~/Library/Preferences/pnpm/rc minimum-release-age=10080 # minut…

Claude has documentation on this, but I find the Azure Foundry’s documentation more useful because the instructions are more up-to-date with their UI (currently changing once more).

The first step of Visual Studio Code install is deceptively simple: download the .deb file, double-click to open.

It’s a bit of a long essay by David Abram in which he argues that LLMs shifted where problems are solved, much the way we shifted to high-level languages or compiler.

The Bluetooth Manager in Linux Mint 22.3 detects the Logitech K380 keyboard, but doesn’t display the pairing code, or doesn’t display it for long enough (supposedly 10 seconds, but I didn’t see it at all).

Saw this advice from multiple sources, most pointing to @stroughtonsmith: defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO followed by a computer restart results in the menu icons being hidden, except for when apps specifically overwrite this settings.

Summary The article explains the difference between Claude Code’s built-in slash commands and its prompt-based skills: slash commands are fixed, non-AI operations (like /clear or /model), while skills load instruction files into Claude’s context and can s…

Both Agent Safehouse and Nono (get it, no-no?)

A TUI for log files.

Summary llamafile is a single-file executable format that packages an open LLM’s runtime and weights so the model can run locally with no installation.

The post has a really strong opener: […] the first week isn’t about reading the code.

LLM Pricing Calculator allows you to compare models and there it includes nice explanations like “1.33x input vs Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite, 1.33x output”.

**Key points** * SSDs wear out differently from hard disks. * Expect modern Mac internal SSDs to wear out after at least 3,000 erase-write cycles. * To monitor wear, measure the total data written to the SSD. * Expect an internal SSD to wear out when that…

Simon Willison on PR (anti-) patterns in the world of agentic AI There are some behaviors that are anti-patterns in our weird new world of agentic engineering.

A good security approach when working with Azure-hosted databases is to connect through a VPN tunnel.

Summary VCR.py is a Python library inspired by Ruby’s VCR, which simplifies and accelerates testing that involves HTTP requests.

Summary Today I learned about a new feature on GitHub that allows you to create a profile README by setting up a repository with the same name as your GitHub account.

I read a lot of things on the internet and rarely write about them.

It’s a shame that clusters created in Azure DataBricks don’t have the pyodbc drivers for Microsoft SQL Server installed by default.

In Loading Claims when Using Windows Authentication in ASP.NET Core we examined an approach for injecting Claims into the ClaimsPrincipal in order to enable policy usage – [Authorization(Policy = "SomePolicy")] – on controller actions.

Is say, macOS has a wonderful command line utility which I found to be useful to use in conjuction with long-running processes or even debugging to help draw attention, more so that typical beeping would do.

ASP.NET Core controllers have a series of file method that deal with returning files to the browser.

I’m sure there are more than two ways to perform searches against Active Directory, however I wanted to highlight two approaches: DirectorySearcher and PrincipalSearcher.

NOTE 1: the post below applies to ASP.NET Core 2.x.

By noticing them missing in a good deal of projects and the friction and occasional frustration that came with it, I have came up with a list of things I would like to have in place before I start writing even a single line of code.

There are a variety of ways to send a file to Web end-point and encode it in the the process.

Requirements Given an application, I want to be able to trace its binaries back to the source code “version” it was built from; As such, I want this identification ability to be automatically employed during the build process; I want to have easy ways of…

The two simplest use cases for the touch command are to: Create one or more files, if they don’t exist; Update the access date or modification date of files without changing their content.

I don’t aim for Inbox Zero, but I aim to read all the emails I receive, however, with default setting the iOS Mail app does not make it easy.

In trying to send data from an HTML form to an ExpressJS backend I soon discovered two things: FORM elements only support GET and POST, not PUT, nor DELETE; ExpressJS does not have a built-in way to address this but fortunately there’s a middleware plugin,

I bet you’re here because you’ve run into the puzzling Django error CSRF verification failed.

A solution that uses only make and curl: # c/o: http://wonko.com/post/simple-makefile-to-minify-css-and-js # Patterns matching CSS files that should be minified.

I’m going to assume you’re reading this post because you’d like to find out how to use a regular HTML SELECT as an editor in a Kendo grid, and that you already know why you want to do that - you just had a hard time figuring out how to.

Recently I’ve been testing a few apps for taking notes and I have settled on GoodNotes.

I am creating some sparkbars, sparkline’s poorer cousin, for a project I’ll talk about soon, and I wanted to represent in a single chart both additions and subtractions.

After spending some irritating hours with Microsoft’s JavaScriptSerializer, I’ve switched over to Json.NET and I’ve been happier.