I joined Twitter in 2007 and my brain slowly morphed over the next 15 years from hopelessly verbose to nihilistically pithy. I've kicked the Twitter habit, but the takes keep flowing. That's why I post them here and format them as a social network of one. They're also cross-posted to my Mastodon account. You're welcome to bookmark any of these takes, though I'm not sure why you would.
By the way, the hearts and like counts are fake. They're just there to make you feel safe.
I find myself frequently wondering how much better LLMs would be at coding if they were trained to be humble and full of self-doubt instead of overconfident know-it-alls.
Super Switch. There’s a lot to unpack here (plan to record an episode of Breaking Change this weekend to discuss), but the biggest “surprise” is that this is the least surprising console Nintendo has ever designed. youtube.com/watch?v=itpcsQQvgAQ
Test Double is running a survey to better understand YOUR HOTTEST TAKES about software development. Please fill this out as accurately and spicily as possible 🌶️ forms.gle/UcnjShcTUxPVJmTm6
Just wasted 30 minutes trying to validate the following XML file:
AFAICT, 90% of XML validators don’t look up referenced XSD URLs and literally zero will validate against all of them if a default namespace is used at all. Prove me wrong!
$ rails new syndicate --database=postgresql --css=tailwind --skip-devcontainer --skip-docker --skip-kamal --skip-rubocop --skip-thruster --skip-action-mailbox
Have an old app that I don’t use and which generates Bugsnag notifications almost daily, and I’ve been stressing about a few todos to fix these long-known problems once and for all.
But then I realized I could just unsubscribe from Bugsnag email notifications and that will take way less time than debugging Postgres deadlocks. Problem solved!
Sitting on hold with a doctor and every 30 seconds it says "Due to unusually long hold times, you can press 1 to leave a voicemail and we will return your call within 24 business hours."
24 business hours? So if it’s 1 PM Monday, that means they’ll get back to me on 10 AM Thursday?
The catastrophic failure of Peloton as a business is very funny in its own right, but the fact that they’ll either go bankrupt or be merged into oblivion without ever once owning peloton dot com is sort of hilarious.
In case you’re wondering how wide the new Ultra Wide (32:9 @ 5120x1440px) setting is for Mac Virtual Display on Vision Pro, it amounts to:
It’s wide.
This month's issue of Searls of Wisdom is out and includes the eulogy I recently gave for my father. If you sign up now, you'll receive it.
Already heard back from a young father who read it from a totally different perspective than I had anticipated. It's easy to assume that something that feels so personal can only apply to you, but never underestimate the impact of sharing your authentic self with others. justin.searls.co/newsletter/
After dad’s passing, I wanted to export all of our iMessages into a portable format. There’s a much easier than extracting from an iPhone via paid proprietary software:
That’s it. They’ll all be in your home directory in a folder called imessage_export. github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter
Back home after 10 days spending Christmas in the Hamptons (Inn) and I gotta say, I much prefer my house to living in a hotel.
Would love to be proven wrong here, but it sure seems like Apple has finally made it impossible to take a disk image of a Mac (not even bootable, just a compressed DMG file), given two ARM Macs and a cable.
Well, this is a terrible workflow that Apple steers people through when replacing a damaged phone:
Seems bad.
Playing with some local AI stuff this afternoon, and let me just comment on how unfortunate it is that the modern language with the worst packaging and dependency experience happens to be the one everyone uses for AI/ML.
TIL that in recent versions of macOS, most stock apps can’t be deleted by the user. Want to delete News? LaunchPad won’t let you. Command-Delete ain’t it. It’ll bounce right off the trash.
What gives? It’s because they’re not really in /Applications anymore. They’re installed in /System/Applications and that’s a read-only APFS partition. Neat.
This month's essay may be the single truest thing I've ever written about myself. If you're interested in understanding me or what the heck I plan to do with the rest of my life, sign up and you'll receive it. justin.searls.co/newsletter/
Evidence I've changed as a person: someone just stopped me on the street to say, "I'm sorry I just wanted to say you have an incredible energy and I wanted to hand you my card. Your chi is beautiful." And she clearly meant what she was saying. And seemed to be of sound mind.
First time for everything.