Rob Fahrni

Sitting at Grit — my favorite coffee shop — sipping my mocha trying to decide what to work on.

Stream for Mac, Stream for iOS, or Thunder Chicken?

It should be Stream for Mac. I haven’t worked on it in a while because I’ve been working on Thunder Chicken.

I’ve thought about doing a German localization for Stream.

Adding a right mouse action menu to the Mac version of Stream, and whatever else I can complete.

What about having Claude create an NSCellView for me that sizes properly when the column it’s in resizes. I could never get this working properly but did it in SwiftUI rather quickly.

How about completing the first full implementation of a network client for Thunder Chicken? Get posts, create posts, update post, delete posts, etc. I have an abstraction so I can support multiple blogging platforms.

Oh, I forgot about Arrgly. It’s my link shortener that uses YOURLS for its backend. I have a new SwiftUI version of it I need to finish off, just because.

Decisions, decisions.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Nothing much to say.

Please, enjoy the links.

Jay Peters • The Verge

Jack Dorsey’s Block, the financial tech company that runs Square and the Cash app, is cutting its workforce by “nearly half” and axing more than 4,000 jobs. The company will shrink from more than 10,000 people to less than 6,000, Dorsey says in a post on X. And the reason why? AI.

Emphasis is mine. I’d imagine we’ll see this become a trend as companies learn how to use LLM’s.

I had an Engineering Lead say to me “I had a designer build a full application that worked. They didn’t know how to code.”

My heart sunk. I’m on an AI first team, but it’s four software developers.

As a side note, I cut Claude loose on a one page specification for an application. That spec shared the URL for fetching data and the data structure the app should operate on.

The Swift / SwiftUI code it output was really good. It left me a bit speechless to be honest.

It had a couple errors that needed correcting but they were tiny in the overall scheme and I understood every hunk of code it output. It took somewhere between five and 10 minutes to complete the code.

By contrast it took me an hour to write the code that defined the data types, fetch the data, and display it. And my version was just the basics. It was not a complete solution.

The more advanced requirements would’ve taken me most of the day to complete, if at all.

The folks who survive going forward will embrace these tools as a part of their daily practice.

A friend of mine from California, who works in the Bay Area, said 70% of their engineering teams were let go. 😔

Oh, one more thing. If you read his posting on X 🤮 you’d notice he wrote the entire thing without a single capitalized word. What’s up with that? Y’all too wealthy to even care about capital letters? 😳

Philippe Dubois • SchwadLabs

In 2008, why the lucky stiff released Shoes—a toolkit for writing tiny graphical programs in Ruby. The pitch was simple: GUI programming didn’t have to be painful.

I remember reading _why’s work years back, very superficially. I had no idea he’d created a framework for creating UI. That’s incredible!

I liked _why’s approach. He was using native code on each platform. The new attempt is relying on the browser. I don’t like that. Native frameworks are so much better than relying on a browser to create your UI.

Scharon Harding • Ars Technica

Netflix backed out of its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD’s) streaming and movie studios businesses on Thursday night. After increasing its bid for all of WBD by $1 per share on Tuesday, Paramount Skydance is poised to become the new owner of WBD, including Game of Thrones, DC Comics, and other IP, as well as the HBO Max streaming service and cable channels CNN and TBS.

Netflix is ultimately the big winner here. They get to save billions of dollars for content creation and lure Paramount into a huge amount of debt.

The big bummer of the deal is having a right wing nutter buying it. What will the do to CNN? Will it become another Fox News or CBS? Probably.

What happens to HBO? Do they gut it and stop making the best content in the streaming business?

Who could fill the gap left by HBO and CNN if they’re run into the ground? It could become a huge opening for Netflix, Apple TV+, and others to fill.

Jason Snell • Six Colors

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

It seems like the punditry is mostly unhappy with Apple about two things; Liquid Glass and Apple’s lack of backbone to stand up against the Trump mob syndication.

I don’t have a real problem with Liquid Glass. Sure, it has some problems, but I think Apple will eventually straighten it out or change it outright.

As for how spineless Tim Cook has been with Trump, well, I agree with that. Sure, sure, shareholder value… blah, blah, blah.

What about American greatness and bravery? What about democracy? What about decency?

You’re afraid of a dictator but not the loss of our democratic way of life. Shameful.

Chris Person • Aftermath

RAM, flash memory, and HDDs are unaffordable because of a bunch of greedy idiots that do not love the computer.

Thank you AI companies for making computers even more expensive. I can’t imagine what Apple is going to do to their prices. 😳

I can see it now: “The new 14in. MacBook Pro is available today with a starting price of $5,999.00 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.”

A 32GB system with 1TB of storage would be like $15,000.00. 🤣

I certainly hope not.

G German • Ruby Stack News

Ruby 4 doesn’t arrive with a flashy headline feature. Instead, it delivers a dense package of under-the-hood engineering improvements: reduced allocations, refinements in the VM, better JIT behavior, and internal API polish. The result is not dramatic in isolation, but cumulative in effect — applications feel smoother, more predictable, and more efficient under load. It’s the kind of progress that shows up in production dashboards rather than conference demos.

It’s really nice to see a team work so hard on the little things under the hood. Looking for performance and memory wins is always appreciated by developers using your tools.

It’s also really interesting to see Rust integrated into Ruby Core.

Matt Birchler

How’s this for a hot take to start the weekend: I think Apple is going to discontinue iPadOS. I know, I know, it’s a big swing, but put the pitchforks away and hear me out. iPadOS, as it exists now, is being stretched too thin. The idea of having one operating system, with the same features, that spans from a small, 8" tablet up through a 13" laptop-style slab that also connects to a 32" monitor is fundamentally problematic.

🔥 Hot take indeed! 😃

Witney Seibold • Slashfilm

Alan Parker’s 1987 film “Angel Heart” is simultaneously gorgeous and salacious. Michael Seresin’s steady, professorial photography is some of the best you’ll ever see in a horror movie, and the film is further classed up by the presence of Robert De Niro as a mysterious benefactor named Lou Cyphre.

DeNiro’s Lucifer is definitely one of the best ever. Especially at the end when his eyes glow red. It really creeped me out. 😈

It’s one of those films I’d like to own.

David Bryant Copeland

My visceral reaction to these tools has been a combination of disgust and boredom. Here are the things I have told myself about why this technology can or should be ignored:

Like I said earlier. If you want to survive the LLM revolution you’d better embrace it with open arms.

Got my Pixel Portrait today!

I owe a big thank you to my friends at The Iconfactory! You’re the best! ❤️

This would be a welcome UI change in macOS. I keep thinking about older operating system UIs and I miss that more chiseled look. I’ve also always loved the color versions of Mac icons and the angle they’re drawn.

I think I’m just feeling nostalgic but I’d love to see a modern take on this older MacOS look.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Nothing much to say this week! Hope you enjoy the links.

Whakkee

I’m fed up with every other website telling me “we value your privacy”, and then showing me an opt-out list of hundreds of vendors they’d like to share my information with. If it’s free, you’re the product. Even when it’s not free, that seems to be the case.

I think a lot of us are in the same boat as Whakkee, but they’re doing something about it.

Cabel Sasser

This post is about a found mural, a lost artist, and a conference talk. It’s the full story of Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural. Grab a beverage, sit back, relax, and thank you for joining me.

Read the post and make sure you go watch Cabel’s XOXO presentation. It is a beautiful story and Cabel is an excellent story teller. He’s also so full of joy and laughter. It’s such a good watch!

Witney Seibold • Slashfilm

“Mimic” hit theaters late in the summer of 1997. It was Guillermo del Toro’s second feature-length directorial effort after his debut on the acclaimed 1992 vampire flick “Cronos,” as well as his first movie fully in English. Based on “Mimic,” the world wouldn’t have been able to predict that its director would go on to become a beloved cult icon and legit Hollywood darling in subsequent decades.

I like this movie and so does my wife. We saw it in theaters together and I think I need to go purchase it for our collection. 😁

NetNewsWire Blog

NetNewsWire 1.0 for Mac shipped 23 years ago today! 🎸🎩🕶️

Happy Birthday NetNewsWire! You’re buying the beer! 🍻

Congratulations Brent Simmons and the NNW team. It really is a beautiful piece of work and the granddaddy of Mac feed readers.

Fred Lambert • Electrek

Ferrari has officially named its first all-electric vehicle: the Ferrari Luce. The Italian automaker unveiled parts of the interior design today in San Francisco, showcasing a cabin co-designed with Jony Ive’s creative collective LoveFrom that prioritizes physical controls over touchscreens.

The work by LoveFrom is incredible. It’s a very nice mix of digital and analog cockpit. 😘

Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi • The Athletic

Anthony Alfredo said he’d only cried tears of joy like this twice in his life: when his daughter, Everleigh, was born in November and when he made the Daytona 500 on Thursday night. Except less than an hour after one of his most triumphant moments, Alfredo received crushing news. His finish in Thursday’s qualifying race was disallowed because of a technical violation on his No. 62 car, and Alfredo was sent home for Sunday’s Great American Race instead.

The Daytona 500 is the biggest race of the NASCAR season and it just happens to be the first race of the season. Weird right?

Anywho, after qualifying there are two mini races on Thursday called Duels that allow racers to improve their position and let what are called Open Cars race their way into the show on Sunday. There were six open cars trying to get in and two spots to fill. Anthony Alfredo filled one of those spots. It’s a shame a small technicality eliminated them. 😔

Nolan Lawson

You could abstain out of moral principle. And that’s fine, especially if you’re at the tail end of your career. And if you’re at the beginning of your career, you don’t need me to explain any of this to you, because you already use Warp and Cursor and Claude, with ChatGPT as your therapist and pair programmer and maybe even your lover. This post is for the 40-somethings in my audience who don’t realize this fact yet.

Lean into LLMs in your day job if you’re employed by a company like mine. It’s a place where we do client work for big name brands and our company encourages its use.

I’ve been on a very lean team, four developers, a Product Manager, and a part time Lead, and the team is cranking out high quality code faster than I’ve seen it done in a career of almost 40 years.

It’s not perfect out of the gate and can take coaxing to make changes you’d like but the first pass is usually extremely good. Yes, I’ve tweaked stuff by hand but it’s mostly what I want right away.

I may even use it on my personal projects a bit. Maybe.🙂

Todd Vaziri via Mastodon

Framestore’s very good visual effects breakdown of their work on “F1” (2025).

Framestore did incredible work for F1 the movie. The video Todd links to is short and well worth a few minutes of your life.🏎️

Darko Mesaroš

Here’s a crazy idea, can I expose and host a website on a 2001 Sun MicroSystems Netra X1 SPARC Server? Yes, yes I can. Let’s get into how I set this up.

I love the idea of using old hardware like this. I’ve often wished operating systems could freeze in a way and only be modified to fix bugs, enhance security, and improve performance. I really only want this for servers. Don’t keep piling on features that bloat it.

Could you imagine something like an Intel 286, 386, or 486 running a static site like a blog or simple small business site? I can and it sounds amazing to me.

Robert Reich

This is what a rigged economy looks like.

America. Land of the free, home of the Oligarchs.

Geraldine McKelvie • The Guardian

The global publishing platform Substackis generating revenue from newsletters that promote virulent Nazi ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism, a Guardian investigation has found.

It is the proverbial Nazi bar. I’m glad more publications are talking about this. There are a number of us nobodies out here talking about it and it’s not making a dent in the business or convincing extremely great writers to leave the platform. Even Jewish writers like Robert Reich and Jennifer Rubin remain on the platform. I just don’t get it. It makes me wonder if they’re still using Space Karen’s X platform as well. I wouldn’t know, I’m not there.

Before all the Nazi kerfuffle I read there all the time. They support RSS so it was easy to point Stream at a writer and get their feed. I even subscribed to Michael Beschloss and considered others.

So why is it publications and writers love this platform so much they’ll go against everything they believe? Most of the folks I followed are for decency and democracy and rail against the Trump administration almost every day, but they turn a blind eye to the Nazis sitting at the bar next to them. In the end I’d bet it’s all about the money.

Encourage them to leave if you happen to stumble across this post.

Here are some of the amazing writers I’d love to see abandon the platform.

• The Contrarian - many writers
• The Bulwark - many writers
• Robert Reich
• Steve Beschloss
• Paul Krugman
• Heather Cox Richardson
• Michael McFaul
• Timothy Snyder
• Andrew Weissman
• Michael Moore
• Malcom Nance
• W. Kamau Bell

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I hope you enjoy the links. 🙂

Freddie Harrison • Sketch Blog

Here are five ways we’ve been using the MCP server internally at Sketch. We’ve included prompts we’ve tried for you to copy and adapt for your own use cases.

We’re Claude Code fans here — so that’s what our examples use and what we’ve tested with — but you can use any MCP-compatible client.

I have a couple friends who used to work on Sketch and I hope they’re proud of everything they dumped into this incredible design product.

This piece talks about the design side of using the MPC but I’d love to see it in use to generate UI.

I’ve been doing that with Figma and Claude code recently and it does a decent job. Not perfect, but decent.

I believe setting up your design project properly will go a long way toward making code generation much better.

Benj Edwards • Ars Technica

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking the idea of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic’s campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after the ChatGPT maker began testing ads in a lower-cost tier of its chatbot.

The commercial is really well done and made me laugh and shake my head because I could see a company doing something just like this. 🤣

Maybe OpenAI isn’t going to do it like this, but it’s still gross.

Tasha Robinson • Polygon

Mark Fischbach’s unlikely box-office hit Iron Lung caught the conventional film world by surprise. An adaptation and expansion of David Szymanski’s short, vibes-driven indie game of the same name, the sci-fi horror movie was self-financed, self-distributed, and marketed largely through Fischbach’s YouTube channel

Sign me up. I want to see this.

Charlotte Rene Woods • Virginia Mercury

A bill by outgoing Sen. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, that would remove Confederate monuments from Virginia’s Capitol Square advanced in the state legislature Wednesday. 

Every Confederate monument reminds us of another dark time in our democracy. A time when the nation went to war over keeping people as pets.

The Union won. The Confederacy lost. Quit celebrating that. Celebrate the end of slavery.

Remove every last monument and melt them down.

Cody Hammon • Jo Blo

Nina Kiri played the character Alma on 28 episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale, and now she has the lead role in a horror film called Undertone, which is stirring up a lot of buzz.

I’m looking forward to this film. It looks great!

Omar Elsayed

Ever wondered why some SwiftUI views feel buttery smooth while others… don’t? I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately.

I love simple, concise, examples like this that provide instant performance boosts. 💪🏼

Joseph Cox • 404 Media

Lockdown Mode is a sometimes overlooked feature of Apple devices that broadly make them harder to hack. A court record indicates the feature might be effective at stopping third parties unlocking someone’s device. At least for now.

When you go to a protest make sure you get this setup beforehand. And, if you can, setup an old phone with its own phone number and Apple ID and take that instead. It’s what I did for the DC No Kings rally in case things went sideways and I was arrested.

Wil Wheaton

Having a gun and being able to carry it wherever you want is a core and fundamental right of every U.S. citizen, or anyway that is what I have been told all my life by the same people who now use the mere existence of Pretti’s alleged gun as proof his murder was justified

I had this very argument with someone yesterday. It’s sickening that some the Second Amendment crowd are victim blaming.

Why would Alex Pretti not have his legally concealed weapon with him? I bet her carried it everyday. Why would that day be any different?

Second Amendment freaks, you can’t have it both ways.

Matt Gemmell

I recently wrote about the decline in my opinion of Apple. This presents me with an ethical problem, because we’re heavily invested in the company. We don’t own any of its stock, but we’re very much entangled in its products and services ecosystem.

I’m seeing a number of folks starting the process of switching to Linux. Perhaps now Linux will get more folks working on the UI and really make it something special.

Ryan Cooper • The American Prospect

One year ago this month, I predicted that Tesla was cooked. Now the verdict is in, and there is a distinctly charred odor coming from the Austin area. Sales are down, yearly revenue is down for the first time ever, and quarterly profits fell by a whopping 61 percent, to just $840 million. That gives it a price-to-earnings ratio of 297—a ludicrous figure, historically speaking. According to a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the company has paid precisely zero federal taxes on its earnings in both 2025 and 2024, so the company is certainly being helped along by federal forbearance. But things are getting dire.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. 🤣

Seeing this right after a friend died is a real gut punch. So many folks just don’t know they’re gone. 😔

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Well the day of sleet we got on Sunday really left us in a mess. We had somewhere between 8-10in of sleet on the ground, which turned into a crust of ice overnight. Temperatures have been frigid so that ice continues to thicken. Breaking it out is a pain so I hired someone with a skid steer and he did a great job clearing off our driveway. The gentleman who did the work is just a random dude helping out his neighbors. Absolutely worth the $50. Our youngest daughter is terrified I’m gonna drop dead while shoveling snow, like a man down the street did last week. 😔

Work is fine. I’m on the second week of a new project on a very focused, small, team. We are using LLMs to great effect. No, we are not vibe coding. We’re all processional software developers who know how to build product. We all check our work and will instruct the LLM when it needs to be corrected. It’s working better than I expected and our code matches the work, in terms of style and architecture, as the work done previously. It’s also accelerated our delivery. 😀

Hope you enjoy the links.

Andrew Dalton and Jocelyn Noveck • AP

Catherine O’Hara, a gifted Canadian-born comic actor and “SCTV” alum who starred as Macaulay Culkin’s harried mother in two “Home Alone” movies and won an Emmy as the dramatically ditzy wealthy matriarch Moira Rose in “Schitt’s Creek,” died Friday. She was 71.

This one hit me because I’ve always had a bit of a crush on her. She’s so funny and seems to be a genuinely kind person. I also find her to be very beautiful.

The last thing I saw her in was The Last of Us in season two. It was a great role for her. A little different role but she was so perfect for it.

RIP. 💔

Nilay Patel • The Verge

On today’s episode of Decoder, I’m talking about the bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery, which is the biggest story in the entertainment industry right now, and for good reason. It has pretty much everything you could want in a buzzy Hollywood saga — big names, big money, and big drama.

I really hope Netflix is able to win this battle because Paramount would be such a crummy deal for WB. Just look at how they’ve ruined CBS, once a trusted news source is now a running joke.

Can you imagine what they’d do to the likes of CNN and HBO? They’d become dumpster fires, full of extreme right wing talking points and entertainment. No thanks.

Kevin Chan • AP

Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass layoffs for the ecommerce company in three months.

The tech massacre continues. As an older gentleman I’ve mentioned how much this terrifies me. Not only does it terrify me, it terrifies young folks as well.

I’m very grateful for my gig.

Sebastian de With • via Threads

Some big personal news: I’ve joined the Design Team at Apple.So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products. ✌️

I’m more than a little surprised Sebastian returned to Apple. He cofounded Lux Optics with Benjamin Sandofsky and they managed to create a most beloved camera app named Halide.

My hope is the Apple Design Team reached out to Sebastian because of his piece describing what he hoped the new iOS 26 design would look like. The post predates WWDC 2025 when Apple announced the extremely controversial Liquid Glass and I think Sebastian’s design is so much better than Liquid Glass.

If he’s not there to work in his design to the various OS’es, then why hire him? 🤞🏼

Om Malik

Power. Comfort. A seat at the table. Or, in this case, the crushing weight of a trillion-dollar valuation that demands constant appeasement. MG Siegler puts it plainly: Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is captured. And so is the rest of the technology community. This is what happens when valuations trump values.

I would hate to be a CEO in the era of Marmalade Messiah. I don’t know Tim Cook, or any “important” people for that matter, but I had hoped he would push back against this horrible administration.

He’s taken a stand when it was easy but taking a stand when it’s difficult is what leaders do.

If he didn’t feel he could uphold the standards expected of an Apple employee then he should’ve retired. Heck, he should retire.

Maybe he believes in Trump and the horrible things they’re doing? It’s hard to believe he’s boot licking just to serve shareholders?

It makes me wish macOS and iOS weren’t Apple products.

Max Tani • Semafor

In recent weeks, rumors have flown around the newsroom about the size of the cuts and when they would be implemented, but the conversation reached a fever pitch late last week, aided by unverified reports about section-wide eliminations. The Post has largely remained silent, leaving staff to read the tea leaves in conversations between individual editors and reporters: Some editors have quietly been suggesting to staff across various verticals, including sports, that it may not be a bad idea to begin looking for other jobs, Semafor has learned, and one Post source said editors would not answer questions about whether there would be a sports section after the cuts at all.

Here’s another boot licking oligarch ruining an American gem.

At one point I know Kara Swisher was interested in putting together a group to buy the Washington Post. What happened to that?

The Post needs an owner who can guide it through this dark time in American history and tell the difficult stories that need telling.

Doug Gregor • Swift.org

There are many interesting, useful, and fun C libraries in the software ecosystem. While one could go and rewrite these libraries in Swift, usually there is no need, because Swift provides direct interoperability with C. With a little setup, you can directly use existing C libraries from your Swift code.

I need to sit down and read and understand how this works but to be perfectly honest creating a tiny Objective-C class that calls the C code is super easy and the resulting code is easy to use from Swift.

Your mileage may vary. 😃

Another cold morning. This is the lowest I’ve seen the temperature since we move to Virginia in 2019.

Earlier in the week we were expecting negative temperatures. This is a bit better.

Of course Gracie loves it outside and it’s hard to get her back in the house. 🥶

President Biden, thank you for being the President America needs at this very dark time. 🙏🏼

I’ll probably be sharing these over the next few days because it’s cold. 🥶🤣

This is pure murder. Zero doubt.

These “agents” need to be brought up on murder charges, especially the first one to fire. What a coward. They cannot be trusted to serve the public much less carry a firearm.

Shut this mess down. Disband ICE and put someone in charge of Border Patrol who will conduct themselves with honor and integrity.

These “agents” are going to start being killed if they keep murdering peaceful protesters trying to help their fellow citizens.

Our democracy is lost. How do we take it back?

War.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

🚨 BREAKING NEWS: It’s Sunday 🚨

We had our grandkids yesterday so it gets very busy in the Fahrni household. That’s why I’m publishing this on Sunday.

I started a new project this week and can’t really say more than that. It’s another React Native project with a very short timeframe so it’s time to knuckle down and go to work. 👷‍♂️

We’re getting ready for a real cold spell leading into next week accompanied by possibly 18-24” of snow. 🥶

Folks at work have labeled it snowmageddon. 😂

Some call it Southern Winter. 🤣

My biggest worry is loss of power. It’s not just snow. We’re expected to get an ice storm as well. That leads to complete chaos. Here’s hoping the power stays on. 🙏🏼

I hope you enjoy the links.

Ashur Cabrera

I’ll cover some specifics like which tools I’m using, but won’t dive into implementation details or code snippets. Instead, my hope is that a high-level overview might plant a seed for someone else to try a new idea, or to finally fix that thing that’s been bugging them about their blog.

Ashur is someone I have a great deal of respect for and he’s a talented person, especially when it comes to the web. He creates beautiful, creative, websites you can’t label as boring.

I really love it when folks share how they produce their weblogs. No two workflows and tooling are the same. It’s a wonderful thing. 🧰

Varun Santhanam

Working with JSON in Swift can feel like fighting gravity. Swift is modern, powerful, expressive, and has perhaps the best type system of any programming language. But when it comes to working with JSON, especially unstructured or semi-structured payloads, you’re left with tools that are either clumsy, slow, or both. It barely feels like Swift. I wanted something better. When I couldn’t find it, I built it myself.

I’ve never found the JSON support offered by Codable to be slow but there are definitely software developers with the low level talent and who are speed demons who won’t put up with what they notice is slow.

This library might be for you. 🐦‍🔥

Henry Desroches

We were given this vast, holy realm of self-discovery and joy and philosophy and community; a thousand thousand acres of digital landscape, on which to grow our forests and grasslands of imagination, plant our gardens of learning, explore the caves of our making. We were given the chance to know anything about anything, to be our own Prometheus, to make wishes and to grant them.

But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.

More and more folks are discovering the power and freedom of the blog and RSS. Some of us never left but may have faltered a bit during the very dominant Twitter years. I’m guilty of that but I love my blog now more than ever. ❤️

Dave Rogers

I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose most of my 11 readers if I start writing about Nazis and fascists exclusively, but there’s only so many places I can direct this rage and incomprehension at the absence of rage all around me.

Write about the state of America and our failed democracy all you want, Dave. I’m still reading and agree with you more than ever. I’ve always loved your voice and how you share it through your writing. ❤️

Yosh • Unix Dog

C doesn’t have an official documentation channel, nor does it have syntax or standard library constructs that encourage one particular way of doing things. from this, there’s a bunch of inconsistencies in how people do things, and–especially in the early days of the language and standard library–the landscape and general practice is quite error prone.

It’s true. C is for folks who want to do it all. At least that was mostly my experience as I learned C and later C++. Platform vendors supplied us with frameworks and SDKs that gave us the building blocks we needed to do our jobs. No package managers.

⚠️ POLITICS BELOW HERE ⚠️

The Nobel Peace Prize

The medal and the diploma are the physical symbols confirming that an individual or organisation has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize itself – the honour and recognition – remains inseparably linked to the person or organisation designated as the laureate by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Yeah, what more can we say? Marmalade Messiah is a sociopathic narcissist. It’s all about him but he’s fake as hell and a hollow shell of a man.

Not to mention bully, rapist, pedophile, failed businessman, convicted felon, and now party to murder in Minnesota.

Just a garbage human who’d already be dead or in prison if he hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his lying mouth. 🤬

⚠️ Before reading any further I’m posting links from writers I really respect who have chosen to use a service that supports and publishes Nazi content. I won’t mention the name here but if you’ve followed me on this blog or on Mastodon you’ve heard me mention it.

I’ve encouraged both of them to leave and find better places to write but I’m a nobody so my begging goes unanswered (by unanswered they don’t interact with their audience much.)

I’ve made a rule not to link to these writers and others as long as they’re using this despicable service but with the murder of Alex Pretti I felt it necessary to ignore my own rule for the moment.

Paul Krugman

It has been clear for a long time, to anyone willing to see, that the people running the federal government — Trump, Miller, Noem, Bovino and more — are monsters.

Robert Reich

He’s coming after all of us who oppose his tyranny and brutality. All of us who defy his dictatorship. All of us who challenge his out-of-control, murderous goons.

Murder. Alex Pretti was murdered in cold blood for what? Filming ICE agents and trying to pick a woman up off the ground.

The man was shot 10 times. If that’s not an intentional act meant to kill him, I don’t know what is.

Our democracy is collapsing. When future generations of Americans and other countrymen write about the Second American Civil War they will name Minneapolis the event that catalyzed Americans to act. To use violence against violence.

Donald J. Trump, you are a thug, racist, pedophile, and rapist. You can now add murderer to that list.

It’s a dark time in the world and to have a once great nation fall this quickly is gut wrenching.

Link to eyewitness statement.

It’s pretty darned cold this morning and the wind definitely doesn’t help.

12F with a feels like of 4F and you can feel every bit of it. 🥶

Coffee with Bug.

Hey baby it’s cold outside!

We’re getting ready for snowmageddon here in Charlottesville, or what folks in Toronto call Tuesday. 🥶

Bills over Broncos

Bears over Rams

Seahawks over 49’ers

Texans over Patriots

I really question my Bears pick. My brain says Rams win but my heart is with the Bears.

The Bills and Texans look so good I had to pick them. Just had to.

New England does look really good as well!

I do wonder if the Seahawks having an extra week off helped or hurt them in the long run?

The NFC West has put three teams in the final four that remain. All of them look really good.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Last week was my final week on a two plus year project to integrate React Native into native iOS and Android code bases and ultimately migrate to a 100% React Native application. That goal was accomplished at the end of 2025, now we hand it over to our client so they can develop everything in pure React Native. It was a very enjoyable ride but our involvement with the project is scaled way back now. Some folks are still working on it but most of us will be moving on. To what? I have no idea at the moment. We’ll see!

Enjoy the links!

James Hibberd • The Hollywood Reporter

Martin wanted to build an empire — and did. Yet “productive” is the last word any Thrones fan would use to describe him. The author’s worry that he wouldn’t be able to finish Winter has borne out to a staggering degree. His tortured inability to “finish the book, George!” — as online hordes regularly chide — is almost as impressive, in its way, as his success at doing everything else.

It’s hard to believe he’s still working on the final book. I’m not a big follower of Mr. Martin but he’s obviously a prolific writer, just a bit slow, that’s all.

I hope he’s able to complete his book and feel really great about it.

Jack McKessy and Michael Middlehurst-Schwartz • USA Today

The New York Giants have offered Harbaugh a five-year deal to become their next head coach, NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport reported Thursday morning. Harbaugh has already accepted the offer, which will make him one of the NFL’s highest-paid coaches, Rapoport reports.

I’m really happy for John Harbaugh. I think everyone knew he’d have his choice of teams given how consistent his teams have been over the years.

I hope he’s able to develop Jaxson Dart into an A-tier quarterback.

Stevie Bonifield • The Verge

One year on Linux, two distros, a few tears, four desktop environments, and zero regrets about leaving Windows.

I’ve seen more people moving to Linux than ever before. Microsoft seems to be doing its best to make Windows an Enterprise only operating system. It’s really very sad.

I started my Windows development journey with Windows 2.1 and it really took off with Windows 3.0.

I worked at Microsoft on Windows for Workgroups version 3.11 in the International Group as a Test Engineer.

I left there for Visio and was a Tester for Visio 1.0.

I owe a lot to Windows professionally. Microsoft always had a great developer story with great SDK support. Now it’s a pretty strange company that doesn’t have a unified developer story and doesn’t even use its own tools for development of its own products. 😔

I think I can get the core bits of Stream ported to Linux, then I’d need to build a UI. 🤣

Dave Winer

I’ve been watching Jake Savin for the last couple of months using Claude.ai and ChatGPT to create a headless version of Frontier that will run on Linux and current versions of MacOS.

This is extremely interesting. There are projects that come along once in a while that I’d like to contribute to, this is one, but I already have enough on my plate with Stream and [Secret Project].

Will Graves • AP News

Mike Tomlin was an unknown when the Pittsburgh Steelers plucked him from obscurity in 2007 and handed the young and charismatic Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator one of the most stable jobs in sports.

Mike Tomlin has been such a constant at Pittsburgh it’s hard to see him leave but I’m happy for him.

I hope he has an amazing retirement.

Dan Moren • Six Colors

Pixelmator Pro is perhaps the biggest part of this announcement, as many have wondered what was in store for the graphics app after its parent company’s acquisition by Apple in late 2024. The Mac app comes to the iPad for the first time with Apple Pencil support, and there’s a new Warp tool across all versions.

This bundle seems a bit strange to me.😃 I can see having the high end creative tools in one bundle but the iWorks apps seem strange in the same group. They seem like should be two separate offerings to me.

Oh, it’s also kind of strange they’re keeping the old versions around and you can still do a one time purchase of them.

AJ Dellinger • Gizmodo

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has seen his net worth skyrocket by nearly $100 billion since the AI boom started a couple of years ago, would really appreciate it if you would stop talking about the potential harms of the technology that’s supercharged his fortune. It’s really harshing his vibe.

I figure he’ll get over it somehow. 🤣

Luke Smith • The Athletic

At the end of his gruelling, podium-less first season with Ferrari in 2025, Hamilton needed that break and reset more than ever. Because 2026 will be the year that defines the late stages of his storied career, and the unification between the most successful driver in F1 history and the sport’s most successful, iconic team.

Mr. Hamilton is toward the end of his career. This may be the natural drop off in talent that comes with age.

I like F1 but I pay more attention to NASCAR and I’m witnessing that with Kyle Busch as well. The man is seven wins from 70 and I’d love to see him make it, but I feel like he won’t, which is a real bummer.

I’d be really happy to see Lewis Hamilton win another championship and walk away on top. Of course these folks are the best in the world and can’t walk away. 😁

Annie Snider • Politico

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs on Monday called for curtailing her state’s lucrative tax incentives for data centers and imposing new water use fees on the growing industry.

This is good. Water is a very precious resource and needs to be treated accordingly. In fact, water poor areas like California, Arizona, Nevada, etc shouldn’t have big AI data centers. Put them in Alaska or northern states that have cold winters. As if I’m some expert on cooling data centers. 🤣

Daring Fireball

Emphasizing that leaving X and Grok available in the App Store and Play Store is directly contradictory to Apple and Google’s stated reasons for maintaining control over software distribution is a good pressure point. Do they selectively enforce content moderation based on whims and/or shifting political winds, or rigorously enforce the plain language of their own content guidelines? Which is it? It can’t be both.

Apple and Google are disappointing their fans. I know I’m disappointed as are many geeky developer and pundit types.

Space Karen needs to be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.

Johnathan M. Gitlin • Ars Technica

The outcry from Bolt fans was loud and vociferous, and in July 2025 GM CEO Mary Barra announced that it would be coming back, with a new Ultium-based battery pack. But only in the Bolt EUV body style—if you prefer the original hatchback, you’re out of luck.

I really like this little car and think it’s absolutely perfect as a commuter car but it’s waaaaay too expensive. How can Chevrolet bring the price down to under $20k for the base model?

That would be incredible. Cars are way too costly. Especially EV’s. I’d imagine that’s part of the reason people still drive gas powered vehicles.

Dave Winer

If I were making a Bluesky client, I would get together with the other independent developers who are creating those clients and agree on adding features that Bluesky itself doesn’t support and be compatible with each other.

I like the idea of this it’s just too bad all of these platforms don’t have a way for third parties to add their own RSS elements. E.G. Dave has introduced a new RSS element named ‘source:markdown’ that is the same as ‘description’ except it’s formatted as Markdown. Pretty cool, aye?

My wife brought these home for me a couple weeks back. Boy oh boy are they dangerous! 🤣 Eating one leads to two leads to… You get the picture.

Today’s NFL Playoff Picks

Buffalo over Jacksonville

San Francisco over Philadelphia

Los Angeles over New England

Monday Night Pick

Pittsburgh over Houston

I typically pick the wrong team. These picks are picks from the heart, not the head. 😁

Alexander Willis • Raw Story

“Would you have gone to watch the Olympics in Nazi Germany in 1936?” asked Pekka Kallioniemi, a Finnish social media analyst with a focus on propaganda and disinformation, in a social media post on X Friday. “If the answer is no, it’s time to cancel your US World Cup tickets.”

It’s a shame FIFA is a highly corrupt organization. I know these events take years and years to put together but if FIFA had good leadership they’d have pulled the World Cup from the States. Move it to Canada or Mexico, or both?

I love my country but I’m so embarrassed to be an American at the moment.

Mike Pearl • Gizmodo

Elon Musk says that in a week, the new X algorithm—meaning all the code that determines what you see in your X feed—will be made open source. 

We all know this man is a liar, right? He’s almost as bad as Marmalade Messiah.

He said we’d have self driving cars in three years. The problem is he said that in 2013. So if I’m capable of doing addition we should’ve had self driving vehicles in 2016. That’s 10 years ago.

The man may be smart but genius he is not. He’s a sociopathic narcissist and a bully.

Go to Mars and leave us alone.

By Glen Owen and Dan Hodges • Daily Mail

Donald Trump has ordered his special forces commanders to draw up a plan for the invasion of Greenland - but is being resisted by senior military figures, The Mail on Sunday has learned

All you Republican lickspittle toadies need to grow a pair and push back against this. We cannot just start taking over countries. I don’t care what your justification is. This is as un-American as anything I’ve seen from any administration in my lifetime.

NATO needs to get involved now and American soldiers need to refuse to carry out these orders.