wouter bolsterlee
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee
@wbolster.nl
430 followers 650 following 1.2K posts
software dev by day 🧑🏼‍💻, musician by night 🎶🎹🎷, human being throughout 🙃 music, tech, society, urbanism, future of the planet, ally 👗🏳️‍🌈✊🏿🇺🇦 🏠 the hague, netherlands 🇳🇱🇪🇺🌍 🗣️ english, dutch 🤓 https://github.com/wbolster
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · Jul 31
new song! 🎹🎶 listen to my arrangement (and performance + production) of the beautiful tune ‘sant esteve’, for piano, cello, double bass, sax. (original is piano & ud) 🎧 soundcloud.com/wbolster/san...

quite proud b/c i'm an amateur musician and never did anything like this before 🎉 #music #musicsky
sant esteve (arr. wbolster)
Arrangement for piano, double bass, cello, and alto sax. Credits - Original song written by Michael League, Bill Laurance - Arranged, performed, and produced by wbolster
soundcloud.com
2 4 12
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 7h
painstakingly using (self-hosted) @gitlab.com's dependency proxy everywhere didn't help either. quite disappointing actually since it's supposed to work apparently? 🤷🏼 😠 see pic & gitlab.com/gitlab-org/g...
me complaining about gitlab's dependency proxy being broken during an aws outage
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 7h
if your effin doorbell doesn't work because some company at the other side of an ocean broke their computer #aws

well, sow, reap 🤷🏼
wbolster.nl wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 12h
half the internet is broken b/c an american cloud provider seems to be having technical issues

this was not how the internet was supposed to work, y'all
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 12h
half the internet is broken b/c an american cloud provider seems to be having technical issues

this was not how the internet was supposed to work, y'all
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 22h
meestal luister ik zondagavond rustige muziek, maar na met groeiend afgrijzen toch maar wel afkijken van het verkiezings-‘debat… had ik om onverklaarbare redenen ineens sterke behoefte aan rage against the machine ✊🏼🎸🎙️
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 1d
yeah, same feelings here (no kids though 😌), and though i am a cynical person, i also consider optimism a moral imperative. bsky.app/profile/wbol...
wbolster.nl wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · Jul 25
sad and relieved to be a reasonable person 😔

‘Finally, there’s the doomerism that comes from political frustration, from believing that people who have power are just happy to burn the world down. [That's] the most reasonable kind of doomerism.’ – Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social #climate
‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield
Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther
www.theguardian.com
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 1d
it's painful to read and i really hope it doesn't pan out like that, but tbh i fear the worst
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 1d
you may find this @tante.cc article interesting: tante.cc/2025/04/15/t...

> The AI crash won’t leave us with infrastructures that are useful to democratic and humane societies, with useful tools to do something productive with, but with infrastructures tailor-made to suppress it.
These are not the same
After sharing Ed Zitron’s latest piece called “OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry” I got a few responses arguing in a similar way: People agree that “AI” and especially “generative AI” is ...
tante.cc
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 2d
but the good thing is that it forced you to write your code in a way that would also scale to multiple processes on multiple machines in multiple datacenters on multiple continents. better be prepared b/c every project will of course become the new amzn/goog/msft 😜
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wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 2d
ok boomer 🙄
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 5d
#🎶 looks like there's a collab coming up: fabia mantwill orchestra with the great german wdr big band! 💖 (getting hopes up – they also played with bill laurance years ago and i reaaaally like that album) www.fabiamantwill.com/dates
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 6d
ah yes, of course, that's a device to ehm, well, a contraption that, eh, …? 🤷🏼
dark room with a weird looking device consisting of metal stands, frames, metal grids, lights. confusing work of art on display in studio pulchri, den haag, nl
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 6d
i just used a bullet point list in an email, then deliberately left a very obvious typo, as a subtle hint that this text was actually written by a real human and not by some stupid language model.

ai slop ruined em dashes, bullet points, sounding friendly, etc. so annoying 😠
Reposted by wouter bolsterlee
firefoxdevtools.bsky.social
firefoxdevtools.bsky.social @firefoxdevtools.bsky.social · 11d
As an experiment, we (the Firefox team) wanted to try a new way to get feedback on which Interop proposals matter most.

So, here's a web app where you can rank the proposals you care about, giving us data we can use when reviewing which ones to champion.

interop-rank.jakearchibald.com
Interop Feature Ranking
Rank the web platform features you care most about
interop-rank.jakearchibald.com
19 120 250
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 10d
asking for a friend… has someone, by any chance, already built a cloud-to-butt browser extension, 2025 edition? #ai

LLM → LyingLM
AI → AI 🤡
artificial intelligence → aRtiFiCiaL iNtEgiLeNcE!!
agentic → agentic 🧟‍♂️🤖
ChatGPT → ChadGTP 😫
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 12d
yeah it's annoying. my coping strategy:

- brew install coreutils
- add the dir with the unprefixed commands (date, not gdate) to $PATH
- profit
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 12d
yOu'Re JuSt UsiNG iT WrONgNgNg! 😜
The Programmer Identity Crisis ❈ Simon Højberg ❈ Principal Frontend Engineer
On AI, Creativity, and Craft
hojberg.xyz
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 13d
my foray from (mostly) backend development towards full stack is getting a bit out of hand. 😅 today i ended up writing a postcss plugin to programmatically massage a bunch of #css 🤓
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wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 16d
scope creep alert, but some random ideas:

{
"jit": True, # eager compilation
"isolated": True, # multiple instances with own globals
"version": "1.2.3", # multi version
"strict": True, # only allow access to things in __all__
}

not necessarily good ideas, but it gives an impression 🙃
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 16d
in #music with a circle of fifth progression… the notes keep tumbling over like… (brief pause for suspense)… dominotes! 🥁🙃
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 16d
this doesn't look too radically different to me:

import mod with {"lazy": True}

but yeah, i do see many rabbit hole opportunities with this (too?) flexible approach to syntax
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 16d
this would be really nice to have! re syntax, instead of adding dedicated keywords, have you considered a more generic approach, e.g. like ‘import attributes’ in javascript? (other syntax alternatives are mentioned, but it's only about the position of ‘lazy’) developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...
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wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 23d
also new grandbrothers. yesterday was a good release day
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 24d
🤔 for personal note keeping/ wiki / knowledge, is obsidian.md a reasonable choice or should i look into the gazillion alternatives? i care about text-based formats, cross-platform, and privacy. (cloud not required; i can sync using syncthing)
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wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 24d
jep. gelukkig legt niet iedereen zich daarbij neer
bsky.app/profile/wbol...
wbolster.nl
wouter bolsterlee @wbolster.nl · 26d
self-fulfilling #python code

def test_that_passes():
pass

def test_that_fails():
fail