Recently updated blogs

America Hates You, America

Life in America has long felt like a game played between adults and children; a game where one side knows the rules and is dedicated to keeping them, and the other is merely making up ad-hoc rules from moment to moment, for no reason but to help them win.

I learned on Monday that my friend Duke Parrish died from catching up on his wife's My­Insta­Tik­Face­Linked­Me­Pin­Book­Space­Tok­In­Gram­We­Trest feed. He died on October 31st. Hallowe'en. He was five days younger than I. It wasn't a sudden accident or the result of a horrible crime. No. He had a genetic disorder diagnosed way too late and it caught up to him. I am still processing this. Outside of family, he was the …

for we must know in advance, if we are prepared for that conflict, that the combat may have truces but never a peace. If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface …

The next democracy we build will have to be better than this one.

This is a fantastic idea: integrating tactile maps on pedestrian crossing buttons to help sight-impaired people get a lay of the land. These exact signal boxes are used here, but I don't think I've ever seen the map module on them. That's a shame. [View video on Youtube] [View video on Invidious (tracking-free)]

What is the opposite of Cory Doctorow’s neologism “enshittification“, the seemingly purposeful making worse of a product or situation? It’s Cory Doctorow’s embettering of his recent cancer diagnosis. Cory assures his readers that it’s very, very likely to turn out to be completely treatable in minimally invasive ways. In fact, he has already gone through […]

I really like Cog (previously) as a tool for automating aspects of my Python project documentation - things like the SQL schemas shown on the LLM logging page. When using cog in this way it's important to remember to run cog -r to update those generated files before pushing a commit. I've previously been enforcing this using GitHub Actions - as part of my tests I run cog --check *.md …

Despite what society suggests, you're not obligated to stay up-to-date on daily news.Being in the loop won’t solve your perceived lack of control.Just because news is available doesn’t mean you must consume it.Your real responsibility to you and those around you is keeping a clear head and a healthy mind. Don’t let the endless stream of information wear you down.Society often equates news awareness with caring about issues, but you’re …

❚ The cross-cultural pioneer Quincy Jones died this week aged 91 in Los Angeles. In tribute, we republish Andy Polaris’s appreciation of his genius when he brought a huge orchestra to London’s O2 arena on 25 Jun 2019… Excerpt from … Continue reading →

As of October 31, there have been at least 43 homicides in Barbados between January 1 and October 31, marking a 7.5% increase over the previous January-to-September period in 2024. For the same period last year (January to October 2023), there were 16 homicides, showing an increase of 27 cases, or 168%. My count and…

I’m sorry I didn’t upload this before, if there are some amongst you who want to discuss the, er, situation. I have been obsessing about this election for months now and I think that now we’re here I find I’m too anxious to watch the returns coming in as a Trump victory would be the biggest disaster for this country since, I dunno, the civil war? I took a peek …

Developer experience, or shortly DX, seems to be the number one thing that people pay attention to in their chosen tools/frameworks.

Support Harris for Palestine

I find this very cool that the Gov.uk / GDS have released their platform tooling (in particular forms) to the public sector. I can imagine it's a jump to go from project in the public sector to being able to implement all the nuts and bolts it requires, and this platform looks to cut right through the hard work. Specifically: You can create accessible, low cost online services without needing …