Dispatches

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve recently come down with a case of the mind-virus that is Obsidian. I was infected by the dastardly Daniel Rodriguez, whose dark exploits are well known.

Another week of work in the Netherlands is wrapping up. I’m publishing today’s weeknotes a bit early as I’m about to board a flight on my way back the US, and I strongly doubt I’ll have the energy to write this up after two flights and a long layover at LHR.

This week I’ve been in the Netherlands for work, so between jet lag and meetings I’ve been pretty wiped out. Still, I’ve managed to get a few non-work related things done as well.

This is one of those silly little things that I always feel like I’m the last to learn. Admittedly, when I’m working with hidden files, I’m usually on the command line or in a text editor that already shows them.

I try to post cool new arrivals from Kickstarters and pre-orders when they arrive, usually to my Mastodon account,1 but with the business at work and with the podcast it slipped past me.

Back in the saddle, baby.

The new version of the license is “over 9,000 words long”, and, well, it sounds pretty bad.

This is a great profile from the Washington Post on Devon Henry, the contractor who took on the city of Richmond’s contract to remove their confederate statues, and the challenges he faced along the way.

I feel like “migrating to a different static site generator” is the new “installing a new Linux distro.” It’s something nerds do for almost no reason besides curiosity, boredom, and perhaps no small amount of masochism.

Some great advice from Chuck Wendig to start your new year. As a writer, everyone wants a piece of you. They treat the act of writing as an unserious endeavor, failing to see it as the result of the three corners of art, craft and work.

Writing for Wired, Vijith Assar raises some excellent points on how bad actors with capital are the most dangerous threat to any system. Capital can kill code. Capital can kill anything.

I am a firm believer that no system is ever “designed” for the consequences of high adoption. This is especially true with regard to Mastodon, as most of our team has never operated a production Mastodon instance before.

I realize it’s actually Tuesday, but it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these weeknotes, so here we go! Over the course of the last week: Finished watching Brand New Cherry Flavor on Netflix, which was an outstanding horror miniseries.

The whole article is 🔥 and well worth a read, but this part of the conclusion hits the crux of Musk’s new dillema. The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.

A few months ago, I came across this post by Simone Silvestroni explaining how they implemented a styled and human-readable RSS feed for their Jekyll-powered blog. I really liked the idea and wanted to implement it on my own site for browsers that don’t automatically offer to subscribe to a given feed.

Draw me your map of utopia and I’ll tell you your tragic flaw. — Laurie Penny, Ship of Fools This is the opening line from Laurie Penny’s piece on a cryptocurrency-centered cruise.

I’m over fifty. Being over fifty is miraculous. You get just a broader view on your previous iterations of yourself, and they all look like miserable failures. But I’m told that the next errand is to have pity on them.

If you haven’t been following the ongoing saga of incredible grift in the so-called web3 space, I highly recommend checking out the work being done by Molly White, whose site Web3 is going just great is a shocking timeline of the various scams and hacks occurring constantly within the broader “crypto” market.

This week has been both incredibly busy, but also frustrating vague on things I can share. It doesn’t help that I’ve had a cold kicking my ass for the last few days.

This week in the world of Daniel: Released two new versions of django-quotes. Those are focused around making the app more flexible for lots of users, and some developer help with typing annotations.