I've been building a simple web solitaire game for fun and one of the things I've spent hours on, perhaps to my joy more than any player's, is browsing through public domain art to crop as inane or beautiful unlockable cardbacks.

There's such a depth of odd and unusual art out there.

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :)
www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap...

I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

This is accurate: martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/a...

I suspect many companies are working on programming languages with formal verification tailored to today's AI. Even with LLMs as they are such a thing could be an unnervingly dramatic step forward.

'Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey.'
Photograph by Daniel Ibanez

Valve's new VR headset looks cool: store.steampowered.com/sale/steamfr...

I was heavily invested in VR and worked on it a lot, but I never got over comfort issues due to weight and poor software.

I'm happy to see this headset is lighter than recent headsets, in line with the DK2.

love a november

Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.

Speaking of which this is a fascinating Rust library for rapidly exploring all permutations of rewrites according to a set of rules: github.com/egraphs-good...

In addition to more conventional use I can see its potential for use with toy programming languages, or even procedural generation.

Turns out @zed.dev has an irreversible Delete option in the context menu that skips the trash, and they have yet to implement Ctrl+Z.

I just lost about a day of work to this design.

Over the last few years I've noticed Google getting weirdly worse and worse at simple queries, but the most egregious example I noticed recently is this one.

When asked "How many days are between Halloween and Christmas" Google confidently "420 days".

An opportunity for Canada is to try to poach US tech companies and talent in light of unpredictable and harmful US regulations.

When I was at Microsoft they already had a location in Vancouver to locate employees until a US visa was secured.

Perhaps such locations will be substantially expanded.

I've been experimenting more with using AI to write Rust code from specs.

Previously it would take a junior engineer a few days to write an unusably buggy implementation.

Now with AI it takes only minutes to write an unusably buggy version.

A very irregularly updated thread of cool web toys with a creative bent (1/n)

With the rise of AI art I think it's more important than ever to focus on the social value people get from art.

Often what makes someone care about a work of art is the human behind it, and their personality / lived experience you can sense through the work.

Lately I've felt grateful I am insignificant enough that I can stay honest.

What's the point of incredible power if you can't defend your own principles?

AI bots and bad info are clearly big issues.

One of the only ways to defend against it will be some sort of "credibility graph" that looks at your trusted network to help you evaluate people.

BlueSky's openness situates it well to prepare for that future.