LLMs are expensive 2025-11-20 I just burned through $5 of OpenRouter credits to solve one programming task (editing existing code inside Zed), and it is not done yet. I used Claude Sonnet 3.7-thinking and Claude Haiku 4.5, and yeah, it just blew through everything super fast.

I got a NuPhy keyboard 2025-11-19 I also got a NuPhy Air75 v2 for my birthday! I really like the low-profile switches and the wireless-ness, and also the not-a-gajillion-dollars-ness. I went with the “Wisteria” tactile switches; after one day of use I feel like I might appreciate the even heavier “Moss” ones, but I...

I got an Arduino kit 2025-11-18 I got an Arduino kit for my birthday! I hope to become more knowledgeable with electronics and low-level programming.

How to save matplotlib figures deterministically 2025-11-17 I have been working on plots at work, and I would really like our test suite to use snapshot testing: [W]riting tests where you compare the output of some function to a previously saved version, and can re-generate that version from scratch any time...

TIL: Links in RSS feeds should be absolute 2025-11-16 So I recently got this site added to PowRSS, an RSS feed aggregator for Indie Web sites. Nice! Except, no. None of the links to my posts work currently: they all point to something like https://powrss.com/posts/my-post which is wrong. The reason for this is that...

TIW: How do I get Nix to cache tarballs? 2025-11-15 Today I wondered: every new code project I create has a file called shell.nix starting with something like: let nixpkgs = fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tarball/nixos-25.05"; pkgs = import nixpkgs {}; in ... Then I use direnv to ensure that this...

My ideal browser 2025-11-14 I love Qutebrowser. It’s a very cool, minimal, get-out-of-my-way kind of tool. Most importantly, it is designed to be used exclusively with the keyboard. But I am missing a few things, mostly things that you can get with add-ons in the classic browsers: Bitwarden integration, tree-style...

Use unique email addresses 2025-11-13 It would be nice to be able to quickly create a unique email address for each new service I sign up to. That way, I could easily avoid spam (just delete the address) and tell which credentials to change in the event of a data breach. I already use Bitwarden to generate a unique...

Meta will read your DMs. Use Signal! 2025-11-12 In a turn of events, Meta will now openly scan DMs on Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. This is a blatant invasion of your privacy and will further allow Meta to police what users can share on their platforms and most importantly, to sell their user’s personal...

Google wants XSLT dead 2025-11-11 Yesterday I talked about RSS. RSS feeds tend to be powered by XML, a language sort of like HTML, but not exactly. That is why, when you click on a “RSS” link on a website, your browser either downloads a file, or shows you a wall of text: the browser does not know how to display the...

Google wants RSS dead 2025-11-10 I really like RSS. It’s a piece of technology that really embodies the beauty of the web: small, simple, but powerful and ubiquitous as a result. I use RSS every day to find new things to read, by way of Miniflux and NetNewsWire. Here is what I do to subscribe to a website: I go to...

On the Works in Progress magazine 2025-11-09 So since I published TIR: Magical systems thinking, I thought “Hey I only learned about this Works in Progress magazine yesterday, like 3 hours before publishing the post. Where does it come from?” It turns out that the magazine is owned by Stripe, a payments engine...