Aneurin's pages

A collection of links, documentation, philosophy, and writing.

Not all opinions on this page are necessarily representative of my own. I value critical dialogue and alternative ways of thinking.

Another Magic Show On becoming one with the AI.

Berkshire Hathaway Not everyone needs a fancy website.

Blunt instruments of critique You have to tend to your mind. You have to nourish it. Tech toys in most cases do the opposite. They make you passive, acquiescent, controllable. This is what the rich elites want. Don’t become an accessory to your own ruin. Train your brain, not your LLM.

The Coastline Paradox of Software Development: Specs All the Way Down (...) If you measure from space, you get a rough estimate. Zoom in to measure with a kilometer ruler, and the coastline appears longer as you account for more curves and inlets. Use a meter stick, and it grows further. In theory, if you kept measuring down to the level of individual grains of sand, the coastline would be infinitely long.

Codepoints Codepoints.net is dedicated to all the characters, that are defined in the Unicode Standard. Theoretically, these should be all characters ever used.

Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Technopolitics (...) there’s nothing intrinsic in the idea of a tool for harvesting a tomato that is bad for workers – or tomatoes. It’s because we let bosses choose which tomato harvester was suitable for use that we ended up in this place. Put the pickers in charge of that decision and we’d have very different harvesting technology – and far more delicious tomatoes.

Delete Social Media A joke that I don't think anyone gets. Originally posted to deletesocialmedia.org.

DNS Propagation Tester - Global DNS Testing Tool Handy for checking if you've actually gone live yet.

The Four Fs of Free Software Ask too much and you shan't receive.

The Grug Brained Developer A layman's guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained

Hack A very good, open source font for coding.

I Am An AI Hater This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.

IEEE Software - The Pragmatic Designer: Testing Numbs Us to Our Loss of Intellectual Control (...) Software teams need a healthy balance of both intellectual control, which comes from reasoning, and statistical control, which comes from testing.

Iosevka A great open source font for coding - tight yet legible. My current favourite, and it'll take some beating.

Let's stop copying C Ah, C. The best lingua franca we have… because we have no other lingua francas. Linguae franca. Surgeons general?

McMaster-Carr An enduring masterpiece of e-commerce design.

Mermaid (...) the open-source diagramming library and, the collaborative platform built on top of it.

Mesher CSS mesh gradients generator: Mesher Tool by CSS Hero

Meshtastic An open source, off-grid, decentralized mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices. No cell towers. No internet. Just pure peer-to-peer connectivity.

A Modern CSS Reset You don't need more these days.

Motherfucking websites Some examples of motherfucking websites.

No Maintenance Intended Open Source is rewarding- but it can also be exhausting. The linking project’s code is provided as-is, and is not actively maintained.

No, you're not entitled to your opinion I'm sure you've heard the expression 'everyone is entitled to their opinion.' Perhaps you've even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it's no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.

Node-RED Extensible visual coding interface. I wish I had more use for it, because it's neat.

Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic (...) this isn't what I want my culture to be. And then I asked myself, given that I grew up with the idea of the hacker ethic being all-important, what assumptions and attitudes have I been carrying with myself because of my implicit acceptance of those values?

Slop AI slop changes with the era and the model. Impeccable keeps up, so you don’t have to spot every new tell yourself.

Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity (...) increasing velocity doesn't stop you from working on the right thing. If anything, each of these is a force multiplier for the other. Having strong execution skills becomes more impactful if you're good at picking the right problem and vice versa.

The Twelve-Factor App In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called web apps, or software-as-a-service. The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps (...)

The Tyranny of Structurelessness Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion.

Web Crap Has Taken Control It’s no secret that web development has been problematic for a long time. Year after year, more tools are created with the pretense of being the ultimate solution to fix all web crapware once and for all. But are they accomplishing anything?