miniblog.

Dec 6, 2025
12
Claude asked me a question today: was I looking for an Emacs plugin (because I was talking about elisp) or a Rust program (because I have configured Rust preferences)? I'm really impressed, it's rare to see LLMs ask follow-up questions. (I wanted Emacs in this case.)
Dec 4, 2025
71
Delighted to see that Typescript 7 is moving to conventional LSP for its IDE services!
Progress on TypeScript 7 - December 2025 - TypeScript
Progress on TypeScript 7 - December 2025 - TypeScript
Earlier this year, the TypeScript team announced that we’ve been porting the compiler and language service to native code to take advantage of better raw performance, memory usage, and parallelism. This effort (codenamed “Project Corsa”, and soon “TypeScript 7.0”) has been a significant undertaking, but we’ve made big strides in the past few months. We’re […]
Dec 3, 2025
12
I've been using "Expected Int, but got String" for my type error messages, but I've been wondering if I could do better. "Expected Int here, but this value has type String" or "This expression requires Int, but the value is String". Do you have a favourite?
Nov 30, 2025
41
IPv6 adoption is approaching half! https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html shows 46% as of today.
IPv6 – Google
Nov 16, 2025
16
Difftastic 0.67 is released! * Added support for protobuf, improved bash and YAML. * Updated 16 parsers to the latest upstream version (thanks Antonin Delpeuch!) * A ton of display polish for word highlighting, alignment, and binary files.
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Release 0.67.0 · Wilfred/difftastic
Release 0.67.0 · Wilfred/difftastic
Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes. Parsing Added support for protocol buffer files. Updated Ada, ...
Nov 14, 2025
4
If you created a large, successful OSS project, would you want to be BDFL or move on after a period? I see tradeoffs on both sides, although it's not a decision I've needed to make myself.
Nov 14, 2025
33
A cute systemd feature to get the system clock roughly correct: if the system time is before the compilation time of the systemd binary, it moves the clock forward to that time!
A rift in the NTP world [LWN.net]
Nov 8, 2025
174
I've not seen this before: a captcha to distinguish adults from children! The in-app purchases were behind this screen. The primary user is a 3 year old who can only count to 20 😊
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Nov 7, 2025
4
I've been learning some Common Lisp by writing some simple JSON munging programs. I'm sure it's not best practice — I should probably deserialise to CLOS automatically — but it's a nice way to get comfortable with the basics. It feels weird deliberately ignoring helpers though.
Nov 7, 2025
71
"After I linked difftastic, one of my friends immediately used difftastic to find a stealthy bug, five stars!"
Shae Erisson's blog - Tools built on tree-sitter's concrete syntax trees
Nov 5, 2025
6
Shower thought: using a tool like cargo-semver, could you build a package registry where the uploader never chooses the version number? E.g. your last release was 5.2025-09-13 and you've just changed a type, so today's release is 6.2025-11-05.
Oct 30, 2025
61
One advantage I've come to appreciate about Dash/Zeal docsets: it's really nice having focused search. The text search is constrained to the languages I care about enough to download the docset, substantially increasing the relevance. In Google I'd need to specify the language.
Oct 26, 2025
23
I'm playing with Zeal/Dash so I can view stdlib docs offline. (I've been coding on public transport recently, without a reliable data connection.) Anyone have tips for making the most of this setup? AFAICT docsets are basically HTML underneath.
Oct 26, 2025
8
GIMP is huge tool that I certainly haven't mastered, but it's so useful to have around. I used it this week to convert images from obscure formats to common ones. It's a great swiss army knife and runs everywhere.
Oct 21, 2025
6
It is *really* hard to find a good screenshot for a CLI tool when users are on a mobile browser. This is the best I've come up with so far. I'm showing the terminal GUI to show where you'd use the tool. I'm also trying several standalone screenshots to make it more comprehensible.
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Showing 16-30 of 120 posts