Robert Brandin
@tumes.bsky.social
I build websites for a living and do a lot of other stuff for fun, including building websites.
Finally to unbury the lead, it just turns anything into a spotlight shortcut. It does a lot more than that but that’s the gist, almost any thing, workflow, tool, whatever, like 3 or 4 keystrokes away without memorization. But if you use computer professionally in any capacity it is incredible.
January 22, 2026 at 6:03 PM
Finally to unbury the lead, it just turns anything into a spotlight shortcut. It does a lot more than that but that’s the gist, almost any thing, workflow, tool, whatever, like 3 or 4 keystrokes away without memorization. But if you use computer professionally in any capacity it is incredible.
Like I use it literally non stop all day and it has completely changed how I use computers. Which sounds identical to ai hype hyperbole (it does include some ai stuff for its paid version but that is not necessary and not what makes it special), but it’s not.
January 22, 2026 at 6:01 PM
Like I use it literally non stop all day and it has completely changed how I use computers. Which sounds identical to ai hype hyperbole (it does include some ai stuff for its paid version but that is not necessary and not what makes it special), but it’s not.
Tahoe is still an absolute mess. The other suggestion about narrowing what spotlight indexes is great but, since you’re stuck with it, allow me to give an unsolicited encouragement to try Raycast. It uses the same index but replaces spotlight and is genuinely transformative.
January 22, 2026 at 5:57 PM
Tahoe is still an absolute mess. The other suggestion about narrowing what spotlight indexes is great but, since you’re stuck with it, allow me to give an unsolicited encouragement to try Raycast. It uses the same index but replaces spotlight and is genuinely transformative.
That’s what big league chew will do to; for you.
January 6, 2026 at 7:03 AM
That’s what big league chew will do to; for you.
Which is just another case of magic things being magic but it has definitely stuck in my head (doubly so since they hit the title in No Other Choice early and often lol)
December 5, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Which is just another case of magic things being magic but it has definitely stuck in my head (doubly so since they hit the title in No Other Choice early and often lol)
So last week I was rewatching Decision to Leave in prep for No Other Choice and one of the many remarkable things in Decision to Leave is that the eponymous line being spoken in the movie is one of the most heart rending things I have ever seen in a movie. Just unbearably tragic and weighty.
December 5, 2025 at 6:21 PM
So last week I was rewatching Decision to Leave in prep for No Other Choice and one of the many remarkable things in Decision to Leave is that the eponymous line being spoken in the movie is one of the most heart rending things I have ever seen in a movie. Just unbearably tragic and weighty.
Abso-lutely. Like many geriatric millennials I grew up on a healthy diet of mst3k, and have had many of the senses of why things don’t work sharpened to a fine point. To whit: I have a strong preconception about using the title of the movie in the movie, like, it feels like a signifier of cheapness.
December 5, 2025 at 6:20 PM
Abso-lutely. Like many geriatric millennials I grew up on a healthy diet of mst3k, and have had many of the senses of why things don’t work sharpened to a fine point. To whit: I have a strong preconception about using the title of the movie in the movie, like, it feels like a signifier of cheapness.
Also, just to be clear, this was ultra condensed, there are lots of extremely messy upsetting details to this whole thing, it is genuinely quite a bummer and very in line with the ongoing trend of fragility and fascist thinking being manifested.
December 4, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Also, just to be clear, this was ultra condensed, there are lots of extremely messy upsetting details to this whole thing, it is genuinely quite a bummer and very in line with the ongoing trend of fragility and fascist thinking being manifested.
Yeah. It’d be a charmingly old fashioned bit of internet drama if the stakeholders weren’t a massive megacorp vs. a group of long suffering, kind hearted volunteers.
December 4, 2025 at 8:26 PM
Yeah. It’d be a charmingly old fashioned bit of internet drama if the stakeholders weren’t a massive megacorp vs. a group of long suffering, kind hearted volunteers.
Sorry, *not a good year in ruby. Def sort of screwed with my professional sense of identity since I had been doing it for so long, just not a thing I want to hitch my wagon to. But ruby folks themselves are great. It’s the bastards higher up that grind you down.
December 4, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Sorry, *not a good year in ruby. Def sort of screwed with my professional sense of identity since I had been doing it for so long, just not a thing I want to hitch my wagon to. But ruby folks themselves are great. It’s the bastards higher up that grind you down.
This is enmeshed with a bunch of other messiness involving Rails, the biggest web dev platform built with ruby, and the creator going full throatedly into far right wing sentiment and xenophobia. He was always a dick but, like, there’s no pretense left. So yeah. But a good year in ruby.
December 4, 2025 at 7:42 PM
This is enmeshed with a bunch of other messiness involving Rails, the biggest web dev platform built with ruby, and the creator going full throatedly into far right wing sentiment and xenophobia. He was always a dick but, like, there’s no pretense left. So yeah. But a good year in ruby.
Someone high enough in the admins of rubygems, over the course of a few days earlier this year, stripped all the other admins of access so that Shopify could step in and install their own governance “for security reasons.” They are the biggest company using ruby now and wanted to do a colonialism.
December 4, 2025 at 7:40 PM
Someone high enough in the admins of rubygems, over the course of a few days earlier this year, stripped all the other admins of access so that Shopify could step in and install their own governance “for security reasons.” They are the biggest company using ruby now and wanted to do a colonialism.
The ruby open source software community. Very condensed version: ruby programming libraries are called gems. Gems are distributed via rubygems (like npm for node, pip for python, etc. it the trusted source that distributes packaged dependencies). Contd in what is hopefully not too long a thread.
December 4, 2025 at 7:38 PM
The ruby open source software community. Very condensed version: ruby programming libraries are called gems. Gems are distributed via rubygems (like npm for node, pip for python, etc. it the trusted source that distributes packaged dependencies). Contd in what is hopefully not too long a thread.
It is like pulling teeth just configuring the platform not to lead max every single second that someone is on your site. Tangential fun fact: Shopify recently did a hostile takeover of the governance surrounding the ruby OSS community. Just kind of shameless and awful on all fronts.
December 4, 2025 at 7:32 PM
It is like pulling teeth just configuring the platform not to lead max every single second that someone is on your site. Tangential fun fact: Shopify recently did a hostile takeover of the governance surrounding the ruby OSS community. Just kind of shameless and awful on all fronts.
I think a lot of it is Shopify’s reach. So many vendors use them that they can leverage fingerprinting to start bugging you before you even abandon a cart in terms of proactively spamming you. And the defaults are very aggressive to push marketing that hammers you with bulllshit.
December 4, 2025 at 7:29 PM
I think a lot of it is Shopify’s reach. So many vendors use them that they can leverage fingerprinting to start bugging you before you even abandon a cart in terms of proactively spamming you. And the defaults are very aggressive to push marketing that hammers you with bulllshit.
And for the final fun peek behind the curtain: TikTok does this but for their merchants. I regularly get 10-15 emails from them a day nagging me about how to use their platform to sell more like… we’re already bought in what more do you want?
September 8, 2025 at 10:21 PM
And for the final fun peek behind the curtain: TikTok does this but for their merchants. I regularly get 10-15 emails from them a day nagging me about how to use their platform to sell more like… we’re already bought in what more do you want?
And because they’re defaults, Joe Shirtseller never turns them down and anyone savvy enough to want to turn something mundane into a subscription is delighted and wants even more aggression.
September 8, 2025 at 10:12 PM
And because they’re defaults, Joe Shirtseller never turns them down and anyone savvy enough to want to turn something mundane into a subscription is delighted and wants even more aggression.
My job building involves sites that use stripe or Shopify to turn microstores around quickly and every time it’s like pulling teeth dialing back all the aggressive defaults on every platform that want to extract and track as much data as possible at all times.
September 8, 2025 at 10:11 PM
My job building involves sites that use stripe or Shopify to turn microstores around quickly and every time it’s like pulling teeth dialing back all the aggressive defaults on every platform that want to extract and track as much data as possible at all times.
I think the last 5-10 year surge of enshittification of e-commerce specifically is basically Shopify’s galaxy brain lead generation techniques of aggressive, unsolicited emailing, with everyone else adopting those tactics. It _sucks_.
September 8, 2025 at 10:07 PM
I think the last 5-10 year surge of enshittification of e-commerce specifically is basically Shopify’s galaxy brain lead generation techniques of aggressive, unsolicited emailing, with everyone else adopting those tactics. It _sucks_.