Umm, this was a gift from your son, right? That or you put so much time and love into this loaf that you feel a paternal bond with it, right?
2026 has been off to a hell of a start, enough that you have to be clear about these kinds of things or the imagination runs wild.
Occasionally, people ask me who I think will win in a given election. The best indicator I've found is whichever group is having the most fun usually wins.
A related thought occurred to me today. If that same rule applies to programming, I think AI-assisted programming is definitely winning.
Also, we're looking for one or two more participants. Do you use AI to program regularly? We'd love to have you join us!
Save the date! I'm working on a collaboration between Mad AI and Civic Hacking Madison. On January 20th at 6pm, several participants will demonstrate building a simple website using AI. It should be an ideal way to compare different AI programming approaches.
www.meetup.com/madison-ai/e...
Congratulations to the Rust community! Rust is now out of its experimental support by the Linux kernel. I think this goes a long ways toward positioning Rust as the low level language of the 21st century. lwn.net/Articles/104...
I’m working on some new material for a class that has a lot of international students and I have a question.
People whose primary language isn’t English, does saying “that” help you understand the sentence?
“Jack ran so he could catch the bus.”
vs
“Jack ran so that he could catch the bus.”
lol, using the marquee element to tee up the winner is *cheff’s kiss
Looks like JavaScript is joining Python as a first tier language in the AI space.
monkeys.com.co/blog/anthrop...
Vaguely related to springtime and blue skies. Happened organically with early users putting them in their handle to communicate the change and new life of moving to a new platform.
bsky.social/about/blog/1...
::view-transition-group(*) { animation-duration: 3000ms; } ::view-transition-group(*) { outline: 1px solid blue } ::view-transition-image-pair(*) { outline: 1px solid yellow } ::view-transition-old(*) { outline: 1px solid red } ::view-transition-new(*) { outline: 1px solid green }
This little snippet made debugging view transitions a lot easier
Oh, sure. That’s not my fight. I’ll let others sort that out. More, when you remove the partisan labeling, Americans are pretty liberal in their expectations of govt on things like economic policy and opportunity. I think it’s important to keep that in mind.
I think this overlooks the questions that ask about policy, often in those same surveys. Even conservatives want things like taxing the wealthy more and programs to help those who are struggling. Dems fall out of favor as the GOP media machine turns its eye on them. Perception is beating reality
“All you need to do is upgrade” is my favorite way to improve performance.
When c++11 came out, the language added move semantics. Simply upgrading the compiler was a ~10% perf increase in most codebases.
Being able to make big perf improvements without breaking APIs signals good API design.
OK Internet, what are the best Spotify alternatives? I’m currently looking at Apple Music and Tidal. What pays musicians the best? Has the best apps?
I showed up to class all prepared for a review day to help students prepare for their midterm this week. Nothing worked. The projector controls were unresponsive. The Socrative practice exam site wouldn't load. I wound up just riffing from a PDF review sheet I will share when Slack accepts uploads.
AWS outages are the modern snowday
Open Source friends, do you work on or have close ties to an open source project that would like help? Get it here! @uwmadison.bsky.social's Open Source Programming Office will provide paid interns to help you triage issues, verify bugs, and submit pull requests.
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
This isn’t going to end well.
Big news in the @react.dev community this week. I think this is a great thing, and addresses some of the tension and fracturing we’ve seen in the community over the past few years.
react.dev/blog/2025/10...
This new translation feature with AirPods Pro is a good example of how Apple can turn an existing technology into a must-have feature by improving the UX
I think I will buy some champagne today, just to have on hand
📙 📗 📘 📕 The History of Themeable User Interfaces: bradfrost.com/blog/post/th...
It was an incredible experience to write this piece. It blurs together the history of computers, video games, the web, design systems, and my own existence on this planet.
This makes a lot more sense to me than MCP servers to help an AI interact with third party data. Rather than create a new proxy that sits between an AI and your API, just create a universal way to describe your API to an AI, and let it interact with the API directly.
github.com/universal-to...
TIL: you can copy and paste a table from Notion into a markdown file and it will have the correct formatting. Well done! It’s the little things.
Mini disk was the peak of early 2000’s data storage mediums.
A settings.json file, in a .vscode folder, containing rules that prevent AI code completion, but still allow Agentic chats
Programming instructors, want students to be able to use GitHub Copilot as an agent to ask questions but not let students have Copilot write the code for them? You can do so with this:
Anyone know of a way to allow @github.com Copilot’s chat functionality, but disable code generation? This is for a class assignment. I want students to be able to ask the AI questions as a sort of tutor, but not write the code for them. At least, not in the intro course.
Huge improvement. The first beta was far from the level of design quality I expect from Apple.
9to5mac.com/2025/07/07/l...
My main thought when reading Project Hail Mary was “I hope they make this into a movie.” When they announced the movie my main thought was “I hope they don’t screw this up.” So far, it doesn’t disappoint. youtu.be/m08TxIsFTRI
A new alert about a historical duck farm rebuilding after a bird-flu related culling
A series of news alerts about serious events in the Middle East, hurricanes, and global warming-related weather events
I love @apnews.com, but every once and a while, I get a new alert that really doesn’t fit in with the rest
