Hey #UK friends. Do you get annoyed by fireworks? Do your pets find them distressing? Do you think anyone should be able to buy them? The UK Government is running a consultation and want your views. www.gov.uk/government/c...

Finally got around to taking handy.computer for a spin this weekend. Superb software. My new recommendation for local dictation, I think.

Weekend? Week. I meant this week.

You know when you learn something and realise you’ve been wrong your whole life? “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” I saw this and thought “plain” was spelled wrong, because it’s “plane.” Because it’s a joke that it doesn’t rain in Spain, just on the plane you travel there on. Right??

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think why I think this, I was so convinced! My whole life I’ve always said it thinking that and heard it thinking that and it always felt in context. But it’s been wrong, and I’m an idiot! I need to call my mum and ask.

Me taking my youngest to bed: - Mouth welds shut the moment a toothbrush is visible. - PJs feel like dressing a runaway Roomba. - As likely to sit down for story time as a giraffe putting on its own necktie. My wife: - Brushes his own teeth. - Helps her get his PJs on. - Turns the pages himself.

I’m so excited to be going to this. Can’t wait to meet so many Internet friends in person 😁

My eldest is obsessed with Luxo Jr, the Pixar lamp. Keeps watching the short films and giggling the whole time. My wife found a 3D model of it, we printed it, and my eldest hasn’t stopped playing with it all day 🥲 I promise I thought I selected white filament. My eldest doesn’t seem to care.

Amen brother. I get this a lot, too. “How do you make your animations?” HTML, CSS, JS. The web already has everything you need to make the most beautiful and engaging content in the world. No batteries needed.

In the last month or so, my eldest (7yo, autistic) has come on a lot in his language skills, enough for us to have coherent back and forth conversations. He answers yes/no to questions and we can be confident he understood us, first time ever. It’s a different universe.

So many things we couldn’t do before: - Ask him where he hurt himself. - Ask him if he wants a specific food or not. - Ask him about his school day. - Ask him if he’s feeling unwell. He even ate a new food yesterday for the first time in what must be years. Maybe we’re turning a corner 🥲

My eldest recently learned the words “piggyback” and “squat.” I’m in hell but my ass is going to look great.

I can’t describe the feeling I get when I watch someone interact with something I’ve built and it makes them smile. Outweighs 1000 mean comments from sweaty nerds on the internet.

About to become the favourite uncle.

shoutout to for consistently making scary concepts super friendly and understandable <3 had to read up on bloom filters for a project and of course sam has written about them!

I’m not well versed or interested in politics. I know this upsets some people but sadly between work and caring for 2 special needs kids I simply don’t have much energy. However, every time I see Zack Polanski being interviewed on TV I am deeply impressed by him.

He’s calm, he lets people speak, he doesn’t get flustered, he actually answers the questions he’s asked, I’ve never seen him pause to think. He must spend huge amounts of time preparing. I also like the things I’m hearing from him.

I also get the impression he benefits from having an internally consistent set of views. He doesn’t seem to have to worry about creating a palatable answer for a hard question without contradicting himself. I know the road to PM is very different to actually ruling, but I like Zack a lot.

You should really talk to nolen about this. Coolest shit I’ve seen in ages.

If you’re thinking “programming competition? sounds like scary leetcode stuff I won’t enjoy” It’s not. You will.

Sharing a little bit of behind-the-scenes from the post I'm working on. Because I have lots of webernetes clusters running in the tab, I wanted a way to debug their state so I've given them all this on-hover debugging UI that's only active during development. Lets me do anything to the cluster!

In two weeks, and I are running a workshop called "Putting Yourself Out There" for women and underrepresented genders in tech, here in Portland! It comes with a free ticket to Chain React. YOU SHOULD COME. ti.to/chainreact/c...

I really wish GitHub would email me or something when I have pending comments on a PR for more than a few hours. Just found a whole trove of comments I left 3 weeks ago and didn’t realise I’d not submitted the review.

The Full Stack premieres this Thursday at 12pm PT on ’s YouTube channel — join to watch these teams of builders compete to create real products over the course of 6 episodes hosted by and presented by

Chatting with an AI in the back of a Hot Topic in 2008: “That’s the subtle distinction that a lot of people miss, but it’s key. This isn’t a scene—it’s an arms race.”

Started playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 after Baldur’s Gate 3 became my favourite game of all time by a wide margin. How do Larian create the most beautiful soundtracks for their game? The music in this game is fantastic from the very start.

A Kubernetes control plane but all of the controllers are replaced by prompts describing what the controller should do.

This pricing change should particularly impact smaller deployments like homelabs, making it a lot cheaper to use custom domains and ngrok Traffic Policy actions on endpoints that only get trickles of traffic throughout the day. Any questions, reach out! Will do my best to get you an answer.

i want to do a little ✨ ama about atproto ✨ in this thread. no question is too simple if you’ve been curious about atproto but don’t know much (anything?) about it, ask any question and i’ll try to explain it in my own words. (+ would love to hear from friends who aren’t very active on bsky)

My all-time favourite tennis stat is that 50% of Roger Federer is 'er'. Respect to whoever first came up with that.

Had another one today. Probably the most stressful hour of my life in years. Story time. We’d booked to take our youngest to an autism-friendly screening of Toy Story 5. As my wife was leaving the house with him, our eldest said he wanted to go. We know this is about bad idea but you can’t say no.

I didn’t accept the refund in the end, partly because our eldest had thrown popcorn everywhere and we couldn’t really offer to clean it up. I’ve no doubt to the average onlooker we looked like bad parents with no control over our kids. Then we left without cleaning up their mess.

But there really isn’t anything else we can do, I don’t think. The staff were very understanding and that helped tremendously. Of course, as soon as we start driving home our eldest demands to go back to the cinema, which starts another whole thing. There’s no winning. Just gotta get through.

Never seen a rainbow inside of a cloud before.

Hey , it’s still there! content.api.nebula.tv/simon/

I can’t believe I have been taken in by the YouTube thumbnail game. I need a shower.

Been using CalDigit USB-C hubs for years and the power supply on my TS4 has died. Customer service was patronising and won’t replace it. You’d think paying £350 a go they wouldn’t cheap out on stuff like this but there you go. Any recommendations for alternatives?

Some choice passages from the Count Binface Wikipedia page.

The app our kids’ school use to give us updates doesn’t do push notifications, so in my week off I sniffed the app traffic and figured out the API (surprisingly nice for how shite the app is) and made myself a lil’ cron job that checks for updates and uses pushover.net to send us updates. It works 😁

I remember when USB-C was first being introduced in consumer devices, one of the big new selling points was the ability to charge devices from other devices. Do you ever actually do this?

Aight so I was a bit loose with phrasing here. I was interested to know if folks were doing stuff like charging their AirPods from their phone, or charging someone else’s phone from theirs. Sorry, not very clear, I’d just woken up and was curious. Pretty cool to hear lots of you are!

A bit less cool to get called a thin-skinned engagement farming loser but that’s the price of posting on social media I suppose 😅

Kaze Emanuar is one of my favourite creators on YouTube at the moment. Every video they post is an instant watch. Deep dives into how the N64 works and ways old games could have been improved. This one covers why cartridges don’t deserve the bad rep they got. youtu.be/kBTfo5xXH1c?...

Listened to the episode of Designer Notes with Zach Barth (Zachtronics games: TIS-100, Shenzen I/O) on the recommendation of and it’s so lovely and refreshing to hear someone be honest that they didn’t know what they were doing, they were just trying stuff that seemed fun.

Not trying to be a thought leader or sell a course, just making the game they’d want to play and hoping there are other people out there. I get asked occasionally what my process is for making my posts, how do I plan it out, how do I design stuff, what software I use, etc.

I just noodle with code until it feels right! Maybe I should have a process but I kinda don’t? I think about how I picture some process then I try and make that happen on the screen. Then it’s slow and I have to fix it, then it doesn’t work on mobile and I have to fix it, etc.

One of my favourite uses for LLMs is a daily cron job that scours news sites I care about and surfaces only good news. Scientific progress, people doing good to each other, public sector wins, stuff like that. Another is a weekly job that looks for autism-friendly weekend activities for the kids 🥰

In general, people are very understanding and helpful when we’re out with our kids. Today stands out as particularly good, though. We took our kids to this science exploration center they enjoy, and while we were walking in we walked past some tradesmen installing AC on a building…

They were drilling into the wall and the moment they saw one of our kids wearing ear defenders they stopped and waited for us to go past. Smiled and apologised as we walked past, which wasn’t necessary but was appreciated. Then on the way out of the science place a member of staff called to us…

Said she noticed the ear defenders (universal signal of autism, it seems) and gave us a leaflet with all of the upcoming dates they have for events that are inclusive for special needs kids. She was also wearing a trans flag badge. It’s not all bleak out there.

I have a very niche request for you all: I am looking to find someone with knowledge of the Soviet space program who is also a Russian speaker to consult on Able Artemis to make sure that the Soviets are as well researched as the US. It will be paid, email cj.shearwood@epigram.games if interested.

A “copy as image” button in the share menu on Bluesky posts would go so hard.

Let’s see how it goes. github.com/bluesky-soci...

If I get the free time someday I might actually take a swing at this. Seems pretty neatly scoped and straightforward. Been wanting a nice excuse to have a play in the bluesky codebase 😊

This is so freaking cool (video isn’t members only anymore)

Today’s NYT “mini” crossword was utterly bizarre.

Seeing this month's "who is hiring" post on HN, I had a fun idea to visualize the data points over the years as I expected them to be a nice visualization of the current market in tech. Earlier this year was the first month ever in which less people posted jobs than wanted to be hired 🫠

Spent today playing with circuits! I cannot stress to you how little I know about this stuff, but it was so much fun to set up a dead simple circuit (power source, 1k resistor, LED) and poke at it. Spent most of my time doing different multimeter readings. Findings were…

Then I created a proper spot to measure the amps from and got a reading of about 7mA as expected. Really good fun. I’m finding “The Secret Life of Circuits” to be way too theory heavy for me. The sort of book I think will be great when I know the basics. Open to other recs from people.

Here’s the thread of me talking to Claude about my circuit problems: claude.ai/share/a25b7e...

“House Of Flying Daggers: The Director’s Cut” Well that’s hardly surprising, is it? Accident waiting to happen, mate.

Braved the HN comment section for the post I released today and it was… really positive?

Wordle 1,837 X/6* ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩 🟩🟩⬛⬛🟩 🟩🟩⬛⬛🟩 🟩🟩⬛⬛🟩 🟩🟩⬛⬛🟩 🟩🟩⬛⬛🟩 Fuck off.

I promise this is my last post this week sharing work stuff but we’ve condensed a bunch of new stuff can do into a 6 and a half minute video! This is for the folks that know how to run `ngrok http 8080` but haven’t ventured further into the product than that. 🫶 youtu.be/trXqyNXJa1k?...

Inviting controversy with this take, which is outside of my comfort zone, but I do stand by it. You can generate good quality code with LLMs, it “just” requires a tonne of human oversight and automated guard rails. Got a week off then I’ll be building my first proper post with webernetes. Stoked.

I still can’t believe that this widget sits on top of 100,00 lines of etcd, kubelet, cluster networking, probing, pod lifecycle, deployment controller, namespace controller, GC controller, and more. And all of the perf issues I had with it were React and the SVG filters in the bloody blog theme.

My office wall now shows live traffic from the edge network. I wrote about how I built this. 🔗 eduardoboucas.com/posts/2026-0...

Got an issue where a custom emoji from a font file isn't working in Firefox on MacOS, but we're not even seeing the normal OS emoji as fallback. Any ideas?

Nice example of one of the many reasons we wanted to send our kids to a special school: My eldest is in a phase of refusing to wear his school uniform. My wife and I have both been kicked in the face trying to push on it a bit. He wants to wear football kits instead. His school are fine with this.

I suspect mainstream schools would be less understanding of this, and it would become an escalating problem. I’d much rather my child access education, and if this is what it takes then fine.

Learning about electricity like: > Charge is measured in Coulomb’s (C) Okay sounds like someone’s name, fine. > Capacitance is measured in Farads (F) Weird. *looks it up* oh it’s Faraday, okay. > Inductance is measured in henries (H) Alright now you’re just fucking with me.

> *drags on a cigarette* tell him we measure globulance in Steves, and floobicity in Jeffs. Though typing that out I now realise we use the “jiffy” as a real unit of time in computing. *looks it up* Oh fuck off.

I’ve said a bunch of negative stuff about the difficulty of parenting recently so here’s a positive one. My eldest has gotten really good at identifying animals, and at bed time what he likes to do is take my phone, then my wife sends him animal emojis and he finds them by searching their name. 🥰

So he associates the emoji image he sees with the animal name, then spells out that name himself so that the iPhone keyboard suggests the emoji. We’re so impressed! Also he hates ending a message with whitespace. Gives me tingles that he might enjoy programming in Python. 😏

My message history is just this now. The duck was particularly funny because years ago I added an autocorrect to my iPhone keyboard that changes duck to fuck, and it’s quite fiddly to work around that it turns out.

This looks cool as heck. makerspet.com/blog/buildin...

Spent the weekend losing my mind over a massive performance problem in my next post, only happened on Safari and only happened if I scrolled more than 743 pixels down the page (binary searched it with the profiler). Turns out we have an SVG with a bunch of complex filter at the top of the page. 🫠

No idea if it’s just a known thing that filters are slow in SVGs in Safari or if it was something specific about the filters we were using. Replaced the effect with a bunch of radial gradients that look similar and it feels like a whole new website.

Annoyingly due to ways the bedtime routine has organically evolved over the last year or so, I now take my youngest up at 7:30pm and I’m not back downstairs after our eldest is down until gone 10pm. Finish work, eat, put the kids down, bed, repeat. Soul crushing shit, man.

Of course, I regularly sacrifice time I should be sleeping in order to stay up late, drink whisky, and scroll my phone.

“Why don’t you do something fun or productive instead of scrolling your phone?” Intergalactic levels of tiredness.

If your voice is out there on the internet (YouTube, podcasts, etc.) probably a good idea to make family and friends aware that scammers may clone your voice and attempt to scam them over the phone. Tell folks to hang up and call you back on the number they have saved for you to be sure it’s you.

There really cannot be anyone inside Google that uses the Apple TV YouTube app. It is far and away the buggiest piece of software I interact with regularly. The latest version has a bug where the video is squished into the top left quarter of the screen and you need to force quit to fix it.

I sincerely apologise for tempting fate with this post.

Excited to see what Carrot weather will say when we break 40C in the UK this week.

> Bad ideas are fertilizer. You need them. They are not a detour on the way to the good version. They are the ground it grows from. Really enjoying this completely free book from Wouter de Bres. productdesignpsychology.com

Gah, I must have spelled it wrong because I could have sworn I didn’t find you at first, .

Is there an accepted best resource to gain a practical understanding of electricity? What is an amp, a volt, a watt, why do plugs need earth, what is earth leakage, what’s an RCD, what is AC and DC, how to safely experiment with this stuff and see its effects with my own eyes?

Ideally I’d buy one book that took me from start to finish and gave me practical things I can do with my own hands to gain an intuition for this stuff. I know absolutely fuck all about it and it sadly has cost me recently so I want to change that.

Broadcasting negative opinions about something is an easy way to get a lot of people to agree with you, because it resonates with them. They've been thinking the same thing, and they were too afraid to say it out loud. And it feels good to have someone else say it. And it becomes self-sustaining...

Preview of the next "How The Heck" piece, where we'll be diving into how synths work! (tl;dr it's sine waves all the way down)

Happy Father’s Day, chaps. 🫡

This cool animated maps shows how the London Tube map evolved over the past 163 years, using real geography rather than the stylised Tube map that you are familiar with. Source: buff.ly/aEXNFHF

I didn’t have high expectations for generating much buzz when open sourcing webernetes. It’s a hard-to-understand library for a niche use-case and hasn’t been proved out yet. But I’m wicked happy to see 6 people have forked it. Really excited to see if they submit some PRs! 😁

🥲

Picked a good time to get AC installed, the forecast next week looks absurd.

I've made a Kubernetes that runs in the browser, and today we're open sourcing it. The hope here is to make super interactive and visual web content about Kubernetes much easier to write, and we have a whole bunch planned this year. Repo: github.com/ngrok/webern... Demo: webernetes-demo.ngrok.app

We've also been recording lil chats about this project as it's been happening, the first two episode are on YouTube here: - www.youtube.com/watch?v=xckI... - www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRSy... And a third one that we recorded yesterday will be out soon.

Been called a bunch of things since posting this. Lots of “unhinged”, “nuts”, “insane” etc. and on the surface I get it. But I think the most insane thing here is that I genuinely believe Kubernetes is easier than you think, and I wanna prove it. That’s what this project is all about.

Got this from an electrician who came to my house to diagnose a problem recently. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. (My “this is my day job” reply was in response to this guy saying to me “this is my day job” after I’d asked a bunch of questions about his diagnosis.)

I get it, he’s a professional and he’s likely read the chat and confirmed all of the details and this was just an easy way for him to share them with me. Still, it felt pretty grim to see that link pop up.

Showed a colleague my typical talonvoice.com working style today and his face was a picture. “I’m… quite sure you can do most stuff faster with your voice and eyes than I can with a keyboard and mouse.” Keep wanting to make some videos about this magical piece of software but time is so scarce. 🥲

Made the demo app for my Kubernetes-in-the-browser library more fun. All runs in the browser, no server-side stuff (you have to create images using a JS API I’ve made, they’re not real Docker images). Requests you see travelling between pods are actual traffic. Whole cluster can be paused.