Swimming in the Earth

Had a great first day at RBQ Conf (a local Austin Ruby conference)

On to day two…

I’ve been doing a lot more AI Agent coding lately. My pair programming experience comes in quite handy, especially around proactively monitoring what the agent is doing and knowing when to step in and retake control.

But another thing that I appreciate is the ability to flip the usual roles and have the AI Agent “navigate” what we are doing, while I actually perform the tasks. If I’m typing/copying/pasting the code, shell commands, etc., then I am able to give them my full attention and code review. And the AI Agent is won’t be able to trick me into doing something very stupid or dangerous (most of the time!).

Scripting News: The new blog discourse system, post 0:

The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don’t have to “go” to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.

A comment is not in any way guaranteed space on the other person’s blog. Thus the spam incentive that all other comment systems have is not here. I think that’s a huge part of the problem, and it’s neatly solved.

I love where this idea is headed. In a lot of ways, it’s already here, but only the few of us that are actively trying to do it.

If the user experience continues to improve for regular people, maybe we can get back an open version of the blogger web.

Hanging out at the XO Ruby Austin conference today. I’ve run into a lot of old faces and some new ones as well. It’s great to see the Ruby community and how welcoming it has always been.

Kitty Cohen’s happy hour all day Monday-Wednesday this summer

Downtown Austin

Checking out the new browser landscape

After years of using Safari as my personal daily driver web browser, and Firefox Developer Edition for my software development work, I have started experimenting with other browsers.

Orion is the most interesting to me. It’s a WebKit-based browser by the Kagi team. I have recently from DuckDuckGo to Kagi as my search engine (per Daring Fireball’s suggestion), because I can pay them a small amount of money and be confident that they will can sustain themselves without having to try to show me ads and otherwise sell me as a product to others. Orion is ambitious in that the team is supporting Firefox/Chrome-style web extensions on top of WebKit. With the complicated way I set things up, it’s been a small bit crashy, so I hope that they are able to continue development and improve it.

Zen is an interesting open source alternative to Firefox (which has recently been adding a lot of AI cruft). I’m still quite happy with Firefox but I’m open to some new thinking around the browser user experience.

I have also been having quite a hard time with Google Meet video calls and Google Sheets spreadsheets. It seems that unfortunately they perform the best only on Blink (Chrome’s engine), but I don’t particularly want to have Chrome installed on any of my devices. So I have been trying out Brave which is an alternative privacy-focused browser based on Blink/Chromium. I’m happy with it so far although it has a lot of AI, VPN, cryptocurrency, and advertising upsells which aren’t a good fit for me, so I have been turning them off.

And way down the list is Ladybird, which I’m excited about but haven’t tried yet. It’s in a very early phase, but is taking the ambitious route of implementing a new browser engine. The web needs to have diverse engines to stay sustainable and independent of a small number of large corporations.

I’m now using Orion as my default, with Zen and Brave getting more and more of my daily use. Trying to cover the major browser engines while balancing privacy, performance, and good UX. I also want something with relatively-good iOS support.

I like a coffee shop that plays classic rave music.

At Civil Goat Coffee in Austin, TX.

🎵 LFO - “To the Limit (Peel Session)"

This silly game is more fun than I expected. I’m a big Picross/nonogram fan.

🌮

Downloading the new Season 2 games for my Playdate and experiencing an unexpected color coincidence.

Wow, jj is an impressive tool for going beyond Git for version control. I’m going to try to incorporate it into my daily workflow right away.

I’m enjoying listening to a conversation between two of my old colleagues from my New York days about building projects in today’s world.

Listen to the first episode of the new More Makers podcast by Steve Berry at Thought Merchants, interviewing Sam Coward about his Traffi project monitoring a dangerous New York City intersection with AI.

Just went to my first EFF-Austin meetup. @manton spoke about micro.blog and we all had a lot of great conversations about social networks past, present, and future.

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing.

I grew up in Oklahoma City, and felt the blast that day from 15 miles away at my middle school.

On the 10th anniversary, in 2005, I wrote a short article about my personal experience.

Yndling at International Nights at Rivian Park / SXSW 2025

The great Cory Doctorow speaking truth here at the Fediverse House at SXSW.

“When life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla”

Great to see new ideas for user experience for the social web coming together here at the Fediverse House at SXSW. This is a demo of the new upcoming Surf browser.

Hanging out at the Fediverse House at SXSW. Listening to panels about new social platforms and generally hanging out for the day. You can get in without a badge!