One of the most bizarre and frustrating things about life in Florida is that the state government has decided to eschew official .gov domains in favor of a random smattering of .com domains, for seemingly no other reason than appearing pro-business. Or maybe anti-government? Regardless, it definitely doesn't make it easier to help constituents avoid scams.

Here's what I had to do to figure out whether this text was legitimate::

1. Go to fl.gov which redirects to www.myflorida.com
2. Click to see the list of state agencies, which takes you back to dos.fl.gov and lists the Department of Financial Services' homepage as www.myfloridacfo.com
3. That homepage indicates Florida really has a "Chief Financial Officer" role (are Florida politicians just LARPing at this point?) and that it matches this guy's name and lists a phone number matching the one in the text message
4. Browse around for storm-related pages and find this page which references (but does not hyperlink to) PrepareFL.com
5. Visit PrepareFL.com only to realize it redirects back to the previous page

I really wish this was an isolated incident but there are so many public-private partnerships and privatized services in the state, that it's really hard to tell when you're dealing with local and state government and when you're being scammed or phished.

Want to file a new LLC? You'll want to do that at efile.sunbiz.org. Receive a tollbooth fine from the Department of Transportation? Just punch in your credit card over at www.sunpass.com. Need to amend your Beneficial Ownership Information to comply with FinCEN? Just respond to an e-mail from MyFloridaCorporateFilings.com and oh wait nevermind that one's a scam.

For fuck's sake. Why can't y'all be normal?

Aaron's reaction to my reading and ranking of his pun submission for the latest version of the Breaking Change podcast

New brand of T-shirt (Bella Canvas) for the uniform. Fresh colors to mark the start of what's next.

Maybe I'll start posting more photos.

X marks the spot on this SEO.

This is some real snake-eating-its-own-tail shit by Apple Photos. What the hell am I supposed to click in order to not screw up its training of Aaron's face?

I've hated the culture of asynchronous code review for years, especially as the popularity of GitHub and its pull request workflow lent itself to slow, uninformed, low-empathy, bureaucratic workflows to address problems that would be better solved by higher-bandwidth collaboration between team members.

That said, as someone who's spent the last 9 months building an app by myself, I've really enjoyed having GPT 4o as my "pair". It's still too slow: I get bored and tab away to check Mail or Messages. But instead of waiting hours for feedback I'm waiting for literal seconds. There's also zero ego, politics, or posturing. And while it does hallucinate bullshit, there's far less of it than one can expect from bleary-eyed developers squinting at the GitHub web UI looking for a way to score points. And yes, I have to correct its corrections sometimes, but it almost always catches minor oversights that I (and my linter) would have missed.

TIRED: Spicy autocomplete in your IDE
WIRED: This shortcut that pipes git diff to the ChatGPT Mac app and asks it to critique the code like Justin Searls would

Give it a try. It's another reason that I, for one, welcome our LLM underlords.

I guarantee a non-zero number of people have put their iPhone PIN on their AirPods case.

Starting from scratch with my RSS subscriptions.

Only rules for each feed:

1. Is interesting
2. Is published by an individual

Anything you'd recommend? Let me have it: justin@searls.co

Extremely proud of… how much my posture has apparently improved since I started speaking.

It was a real journey.

If you're experiencing persistent issues caused by the People & Pets metadata in iCloud Photos, there is a hidden way to reset it across all devices associated with your account.

The most common reasons you might want to do this:

• You accidentally merged multiple people and can't train your way out of detangling them
• You accidentally removed people and can't get iCloud Photos to recognize them as people again
• The People Collection in the iOS Photo Shuffle lock screen and the updated watchOS 11 Photos watch face configurators is missing someone important, and you hope that by resetting everything, your spouse or kid or whoever will start appearing (this is the issue I've had for a couple years now)

The reset function is not currently available from any settings screen, and is only triggered by selecting and removing all people and pets in a single remove operation. I only tested this on a Mac (under macOS 15.0 Sequoia), but it may also work on iPhone and iPad. Since it will trigger a full re-scan of your photo library, it made the most sense to trigger the reset on a Mac that has the full library downloaded locally.

Steps, in a nutshell:

1. Select all the people (not the groups) in the "People & Pets" tab of the Photos app (you can do this by selecting one and pressing Command-A or by clicking the first and then shift-clicking the last)
2. Press the delete key
3. If absolutely every item is selected a special dialog will appear prompting you to "Reset People & Pets Album". Click it, if you dare
4. Don't touch anything. Over the next several days while Photos is "finding people", anyone you name or any people you attempt to merge may (will?) disappear entirely

Subsequently, an indeterminate progress bar was displayed for five minutes or so in my case (I have about 160,000 photos and 50,000 videos). Following that, you should see the "Finding People…" status view appear on the People & Pets tab of each of your devices.

Hopefully this fixes whatever ails you! 💜

Why should you come to my Rails World talk about building an app? Look no further than my latest credential. Hotwire user of THE WHOLE MONTH.*

*Apparently there are actually two of us.

Looks like I'm partly responsible for Rails 7.2's only…

😎

…Breaking Change 🫳🎤

In general, it's great that you can call array and enumerable methods on relations in Active Record, but the way that's implemented (cleverly querying on the relation instead of considering if to_a and doing the operation in memory would be more performant) is maddening at times.

Sure, you've tried essential oils, but once you go quintessential you won't go back.

I've got nothing but respect for this rando Amazon vendor's alpha-sort-hacking game.