Europe is the weirdest continent. I mean, Australia? Sure. Africa, North America, South America, definitely. But why does this awkward little spiky corner of Asia get to be its own whole thing, geographically? Weird.
Human beings are both novelty seeking and change averse. We want everything to be both new and familiar, at the same time. It’s the worst. 😆
single entendre
  (noun, humorous)
A phrase that has a single, often bawdy, meaning and is lacking in subtlety or cleverness.
Reading the Urbit whitepaper and this gem stopped me cold:
Nock is permanently frozen and will never need updating.
I guess you have to admire the chutzpah, if nothing else?
Logs as end user UI
A long time ago, I decided to show Bridgy‘s end users its raw logs. Like, raw logs. HTTP requests, database reads and writes, JSON objects, stack traces, etc. It’s an unusual UI feature, but it’s been an unqualified success, enough that when I built Bridgy Fed, I immediately included it and never looked back.
Whenever Bridgy does something nontrivial – poll a social network account, send a webmention, publish a post – I generally include a link to the server logs for that operation. Here’s an example, a series of timestamped plain text log messages from a poll of my Twitter account. They include initial config and parameters, account status, each individual Twitter API request, the results of those requests, how Bridgy interpreted them, HTTP requests to my web site, the subsequent actions Bridgy took and why, how the account’s status changed, and when the next poll is scheduled for. Continue reading
A blog post on the results of the 2022 Emacs user survey. The first half explains that it took an extra year because they didn’t like any of the existing FOSS survey tools, so they wrote their own. In Julia.