May 2026

The anti-AI backlash and the ongoing atomization of culture are absolutely headwinds against any openly AI-heavy production achieving broad cultural legitimacy right now. Maybe you see that as a good thing, but the backlash also distorts our ability to measure what is actually happening. We don't know what we don't know.

The goal of the project was to turn on a light in the living room any time a cat is detected in the drop ceiling alcove.

The following frontmatter values have special meanings and requirements for GitHub Docs. There's also a schema that's used by the test suite to validate every page's frontmatter. For more information, see lib/frontmatter.ts.

The open-source repo for docs.github.com. Contribute to github/docs development by creating an account on GitHub.

I don't know how they're going to correct for the market crash they've seen in the past couple of years. The bourbon bubble seems like it has completely burst and it will be interesting to watch the effects on Kentucky's economy in the years to come as millions of barrels of bourbon no one wants can't be sold to make up for all the energy and capital that went into them.

Look at this again with fresh eyes. The phrase "fresh eyes" is kind of magic. You'll usually get startlingly good results with just that one sentence.

AI didn’t kill the senior engineer. We did, by not hiring the junior who would’ve become one. Compound interest works in both directions. The per-developer cost I wrote about a month ago is one side of the meter. The unhired junior is the other, and that meter has been running since 2024 whether the dashboards report it or not.

Document Checklist: Application for a Citizenship Certificate (Proof of Citizenship) (CIT 0014)

An archive of monoline vector fonts, and p5.js code to render them.

On May 4, 1984, Milton Bradley, a leading producer of board games for 124 years, agreed to sell itself to Hasbro. Changes in the way people played games in the 80s, especially kids, put pressure on the company. In this blog post, I’ll explain how changing times led Milton Bradley to make a transformational bet at the worst possible time that ultimately sunk the maker of the game Battleship, and what happened to what was left of Milton Bradley.

asm.js was Mozilla’s response to the question posed by NaCl and PNaCl: how can the web run code at native speeds? The idea was clever: pick a strict, statically-typed subset of JavaScript that an engine could recognize on the fly and compile down to native code. We could get performance similar to NaCl/PNaCl and still have code live inside web content and use web API’s (no separate sandbox, IPC, or alternative API’s). asm.js shipped in Firefox 22 back in 2013 and was a success. It let projects like Unity and Unreal ship C/C++ codebases to the web for the first time, using just standard web technologies. The Epic Citadel demo was ported to the web in just four days. It was a landmark achievement, and a fond memory for the original asm.js team.

But it also lets you see the game running as you play. Every time you type a command, you’ll see the source code of the functions that executed it. You can also browse the game’s variables and the state of every object. Track your progress on an interactive map. So you can see exactly what the game does and how it does it.

If I had to choose, I’d definitely choose to return to the job market of the 2010s, so I can be paid more to work less and have more job security. I’m not an idiot. But the silver lining to actually having to ship is that you’re no longer living in a dream. If you’re realistic about how things work, the job of software engineering becomes much easier to understand: Providing value to the company gets you rewarded Not providing value to the company gets you punished “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives

Some senior and staff engineers operate as gatekeepers, slowing down development and saying no to most things This was a critical role during ZIRP, because: Tech companies had thousands of engineers who were empowered to do basically whatever they wanted, so without gatekeeping the systems would have fallen apart Tech companies didn’t care that much if they got anything done When ZIRP ended, the environment for this kind of engineer became much worse, since tech companies were now actually focused on accomplishing things and the “do whatever you want” era was over Like with layoffs, this shift is often blamed on AI, but it would have happened even if powerful LLMs had not emerged at all. It’s an end-of-ZIRP phenomenon

If you’re a nerd comfortable with the idea of rolling your own software, everything is now programmable, not merely in a technical sense but a practical one. And that gets to a feeling I think a lot of people have when creating software with agents: what does it mean to say you’re “building” it? “Building” implies more effort than you’re expending. What you’re doing feels a lot more like configuring, on a platform that has suddenly become vastly more configurable. A platform that feels a lot more like Emacs.

For context, Save For Web was a popular export function in Photoshop at the peak of its use for web design, but assigned a rather unpleasant ⌘⌥⇧S shortcut. Using it often turned your hand into a… claw of sorts.

See scenes from Secret Handshake's games depicting FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the pope and others.

As I continue to try to unbundle my hobbies from the iphone, these ESP32 devices have played a really big role. An open product like this promises a tinkerer like me much more than a useful gadget - it can become MY gadget, something modified and tuned to my specific needs and aesthetic quirks. There is no corpo telemetry tracker sneaking onto my gadget, only the stupid shit I put there!! And when I get tired of that thing, I can always flash it with something else. I can't say that about my phone.

Some things need to become enormous to survive. Other things survive because they never needed to become enormous.

An incomplete chronicle of Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure, the "fons et origo of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed artifacts" of computer gaming history.

This machinery of niceness reaches points of fracture, but only occasionally. The most infamous was back in September 2016, when Fallon hosted Donald Trump. He sat with the then-candidate, not to interrogate or even lampoon him, but to perform a brief, cozy skit culminating in Fallon mussing Trump’s hair. The moment was not just a lapse in judgment; it was the ultimate, logical end point of the show’s ideological structure.

If AI does turn out to make you dumber, why can’t we just keep writing code by hand? You can! You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so, for the same reason that there aren’t many jobs out there for carpenters who refuse to use power tools. If the models are good enough, you will simply get outcompeted by engineers willing to trade their long-term cognitive ability for a short-term lucrative career3.

Wrappers exist because routing AI calls is annoying. It is also the highest leverage thing you can own in your own code. The 200 lines above are not a moat. They are a Tuesday afternoon. The reason to write them is that you cannot improve a bill you cannot see.

Today, we’re releasing a brand new, open-source mouse design: the Bean, which is a pointing stick mouse (also called a nub mouse). Nub mice are commonly found in laptops in the center of the keyboard. The Bean takes that concept and pushes it farther than anybody’s ever pushed it.

During the 1850s and 1860s, engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the grade of central Chicago to lift the city out of its low-lying swampy ground. Buildings and sidewalks were raised on jackscrews. The work was funded by both private property owners and public funds.

Stripe Projects lets you or your agents provision multiple services, generate and store credentials, and manage usage and billing from the CLI. Set up hosting, databases, auth, AI, analytics, and more in a few commands.

There are lots of us out there who care. Even more if you count the ones currently pretending they don't, just to get through the day. We don't know how to tell you where to find the ones close to you, but if you already know a few, you've gotta spend more time with them. The weirdest thing about work right now is the way it seems like everyone sees this enshittification as inevitable. It isn't, and they don't. And part of how you find the energy — to care about your work, or find new work you can care about, or start a new org full of people who care — part of where that energy will come from is by fixing your inputs. The people who care are sometimes quieter than the hypebeasts, but there are lots of us and we should all hang out more.

We serve the cats and cat allies of Southeast Portland, providing local, timely, and mostly true stories collected from our neighbors. Our world is small, and you're invited in!

Open-source, self-hosted note-taking tool built for quick capture. Markdown-native, lightweight, and fully yours. - usememos/memos

Somewhere in your infrastructure is a cron job. It runs at 3am. It has been running since 2016. It does something critical. You couldn't tell me exactly what, but you know the one person who could, and they left in 2019. The comment at the top says # DO NOT CHANGE!!! Ask Ben. Ben is not reachable. Every roadmap planning session for the last four years has included "modernize legacy cron" as a candidate initiative. It has never made the cut. You have personally removed it from the list twice. Someone keeps it running. Her name is Sara. You don't know this.

HyperFrames lets AI agents compose videos by writing HTML, CSS & JS.

The AI gets the what. My notes capture the why and the weird. Now I run both systems in parallel. The AI recording gives me a searchable archive I can query across weeks of meetings. I use it for things like “what did we agree about the roadmap for X?” or “who raised the concern about Y?” That is genuinely useful. I can pull up a decision from three weeks ago in seconds instead of scrolling through my own messy handwriting. But my handwritten notes are where the real PM work lives. They are a mess. Half sentences, arrows connecting ideas, question marks next to things I need to follow up on. They would make no sense to anyone else. That is the point. They are my thinking, not a record. The combination works because each tool does what the other cannot. AI is perfect for recall and search. It is terrible at judgment. My notes are terrible for recall. I regularly cannot read my own handwriting. But they force me to process what I am hearing in real time, to decide what matters while it is happening.

about 25% of my traffic comes from people who have chosen to subscribe.

STARRING MATT BERRY JEMAINE CLEMENT

A command-line tool that converts Anthropic Claude conversation exports to Markdown files.

LinuxOnTab boots a real x86 Linux kernel and Alpine userland inside your browser using WebAssembly and the v86 emulator. A zero-install, local-first, in-browser Linux terminal — a lightweight Docker alternative for instant sandboxes, teaching, demos, and disposable shells.

This Arcade Hack & Slash answers the age old question: "What if the games you never play could attack you?" Fight back your backlog! The more you paid, the more damage they will do to you! (just like in real life).

High-tech shuffleboard, espresso martinis, spicy margs, epic events, boozy brunches, immaculate vibes...need we say more?

I also think getting a bunch of humans in alignment is just a thing that takes time. It should be a bottleneck. I’ll forever think of Dave’s “Slow, like brisket.” Some things becomes good because they are done slowly, and it’s OK if software is one of them.

We removed our coding and algorithms interviews and replaced them with an AI-native onsite: Plan: A working session with the candidate to define a product to build. The candidate drives ideation, while interviewers ask questions to strengthen it. We focus on an idea in the candidate’s domain so we see their product thinking in action. Build: The interviewer steps out and the candidate brings the idea to life over 2 hours, using the AI tooling and frameworks of their choice. They have complete freedom to pivot or adjust scope as they go. Review: The candidate demos what they’ve built. We debate the key product flows and choices they made; review the code to understand their technical judgment (data model, abstractions, extensibility, etc.); and discuss the path to production. We also dig into how they used AI along the way.

Fix-it fic, or "fix fic", is fanfiction that changes something about canon that the fan writing the fic wasn't happy with. This can be anything from explaining plot holes or inconsistent characterization to bringing a favorite character back from the dead. In some cases, fix-it fic is written to "fix" fanfiction rather than canon. This is most effective when the piece of fanfiction being "fixed" is sufficiently well-known that readers of the fix-it story will recognize the new story as being in conversation with the previous fanwork. This type of fic is also called Responsefic.

Did I mention GitHub is dead to me? I’m moving my code to a self-hosted Forgejo instance at git.dbushell.com. Today I added Actions. Forgejo Actions are a thing like GitHub Actions for “continuous integration”. Love a bit of CI! Forgejo Actions don’t work out of the box. You need to provide a “runner” which is a machine where all the action happens inside a containerised environment.

GitHub is racing towards the mythical zero nines of uptime. Users are starting to notice that GitHub is now a Microsoft product. Eww! Official uptime paints a concerning chart. The missing status page tell a far worse story. Whatever the truth, it’s impossible to miss the delightful experience that is Microsoft GitHub if you use it semi-regularly.

When life gives you switches... (Conway's game of life on a big grid of illuminated momentary switches)

Using vertical doors in refrigeration devices is an act against the Nature of Cold Air. Understanding and cooperating with Nature rather than acting against it leads to much better efficiency.

The NetHack Challenge is a competition at NeurIPS 2021 in which teams will compete to build the best agents to play the game of NetHack, using the NetHack Learning Environment (NLE).

NetHack 5.0 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack, which is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.6. ... A list of over 3100 fixes and changes can be found in the game's sources in the file doc/fixes5-0-0.txt. The text in there was written for the development team's own use and is provided "as is". Some entries might be considered "spoilers", particularly in the "new features" section.

Chapters 00:00:00 - Cold Open 00:02:06 - Introduction 00:05:11 - Part 1: Back End Harms 00:22:19 - Part 2: Front End Harms 00:34:52 - Patreon Ad 00:36:11 - Part 3: Shame, Reactance, and Harm Reduction 01:00:30 - Part 4: How to Act Collectively Against AI Harm 01:11:58 - Final Thoughts 01:20:33 - Credits + Responding to Comments

Some writing wants to be a website. Some wants to be a newsletter. Some wants to be a feed. Sourcefeed is for the third kind. RSS-only. No website, no inbox, no algorithm. Subscribers read it where they choose, in whatever reader they already trust.

I would love an RSS web feed for all those various tools and apps pages, each item with an “Install” button. (But install to where?) The lesson here is that when vibe-coding accelerates app development, apps become more personal, more situated, and more frequent. Shipping a tool or a micro-app is less like launching a website and more like posting on a blog.

So far, the "killer app" aspects of AI is helping me create/iterate/finish things I've wanted for many years, but couldn't find time or energy enough to do completely on my own.

When all the places I might socialize and share in are dominated by people who spend all day posting about how much they hate a technology and anyone who uses it, it's not really a place I want to be. Why would I want to be around people who are relentlessly and confidently wrong about things I've taken the time to understand?

Making constant architectural, big-picture decisions while overseeing the work of a cracked junior dev is fundamentally harder than executing standard programming tasks yourself.

Club Med eventually moved upmarket and away from experiments like this one. Atari eventually became something else entirely. But for thirteen weeks in the summer of 1983, on a beach in the Dominican Republic, you could sit down at an Atari 800 between windsurfing sessions and learn to program in BASIC, compose a piece of music, or weave a headband from a design you made yourself on a computer with 256 colors to choose from. Nobody made you. It was just there if you wanted it, which is very Club Med.

Well, I had this idea. A new bot that would post one bookmark per day to a Mastodon account.

The bias against human-written resumes is particularly substantial, with self-preference bias ranging from 67% to 82% across major commercial and open-source models. To assess labor market impact, we simulate realistic hiring pipelines across 24 occupations. These simulations show that candidates using the same LLM as the evaluator are 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted than equally qualified applicants submitting human-written resumes, with the largest disadvantages observed in business-related fields such as sales and accounting. We further demonstrate that this bias can be reduced by more than 50% through simple interventions targeting LLMs' self-recognition capabilities. These findings highlight an emerging but previously overlooked risk in AI-assisted decision making and call for expanded frameworks of AI fairness that address not only demographic-based disparities, but also biases in AI-AI interactions.

A minimalist, self-hosted diary and journaling web app.

There are strange little pockets of temporary compute all over the internet. Ghostbox makes them feel like one small machine.

Elena is a simple, tiny library for building Progressive Web Components. Unlike most web component libraries, Elena doesn’t force JavaScript for everything. You can load HTML and CSS first, then use JavaScript to progressively add interactivity.

A Progressive Web Component is a native Custom Element designed in two layers: a base layer of HTML and CSS that renders immediately, without JavaScript, and an enhancement layer of JavaScript that adds reactivity, event handling, and more advanced templating.

Podnet is a public file storage service that can be used to share pods (and other files) with other Picotron users. Any address on podnet can be read by any other user even when not logged in:

A Lexaloffle Online Pass ("LXO") is included with every Lexaloffle Fantasy Console, and provides access to highscore tables and Picotron Podnet file publishing, either inside the binary versions of consoles or via web.

I took my favorite video loop of Max, and extracted the frames. Then I converted each frame to ascii, and wrote the whole thing to a big array. The script just iterates through the array and prints each frame. There are no external dependencies - it is all just one big file with the data in-line.

For three summers, Atari gave kids a chance to spend real time with computers right at the moment those machines were starting to move from curiosity to necessity. Then the company collapsed, the camps ended, and what remains is mostly what people held onto, brochures, clippings, a little film, and the memories that still surface online from people who were lucky enough to go.

An LLM-as-a-judge HTTP proxy to secure agents in production