I am deeply uncomfortable with the continued control that CloudFlare is exercising over the internet in the name of security.

Now: Precursor. Spyware by any other name that you can force upon your website visitors, so that (in theory) CF can train their systems to recognize human client devices.

I’m sympathetic to the challenges of sites being overrun by botnets, but the solution is to find and disable those botnets, not to inflict further privacy-and-battery-eroding javascript crimes on the innocent. Nor is the solution to give a single entity the ability to block anyone from 20% of the internet.

I need to get my sites off CloudFlare, too.

I extracted a gem from a personal project: Detergent, an HTML-scrubbing library. Same idea as Readability; take some HTML and rip out the ads, the navigation, the distractions, etc.

If you stepped into the dwarven capital of Ironforge on September 13, 2005, you would find only bones. Lots of bones. The city, along with every other major population center in World of Warcraft, had been ravaged by a plague that slaughtered players by the thousands, their bleached bones covering every street.

Fantastic story about an unintentional WoW plague back in the day. Somehow, I hadn’t heard about this before.

I’m going to make a little zine!

I wanted a way to showcase some of my photography, and a bit of writing. I like the idea of doing an in-the-real-world, offline project. And, I’ve never really done a print project of any kind!

Just a little hobby-grade, home-printer kind of thing; probably distribute to a few friends (sounds pretentious already).

In the age of AI, this dream of certainty has taken a new and more persuasive form. Artificial intelligence can process vast datasets, identify patterns invisible to human perception, and generate explanations with remarkable coherence. Faced with such capabilities, it is tempting to believe that uncertainty can finally be overcome—that the future can be rendered legible in advance.

But the deeper effect of AI lies in its ability to reorganize the past. Given sufficient data, AI systems can produce narratives that make outcomes appear coherent, even inevitable. They can identify correlations, reconstruct causal chains, and highlight what they regard as signs foreshadowing what followed. The result is not necessarily false, but it is selective.

In this way, AI functions less as a predictor than as a powerful engine of narrative compression, reducing the apparent space of possibilities by presenting a single path as the path. What was once understood as a field of possible alternatives becomes retrospectively legible as an inevitable sequence, reducing many “futuribles” to one. The danger here lies in premature coherence, the sense that complexity has been resolved when it has only been reorganized into a persuasive form.

Gary Saul Morson and Julio M. Ottino in The Hedgehog Review

Every significant deployment of mythos shares the same features. It operates in a domain where evidence is unavailable or inconvenient. It names things so the answer is already inside the word. Manifest. Divine. Destiny. Mythos. It requires an inside and an outside, the trusted and the untrusted, the believers and the skeptics. That is not a security policy. That is a priesthood.

https://om.co/2026/06/07/the-myth-the-mythos-and-the-man/

TIL quasars are used to determine the position of the base stations that determine the position of GPS satellites.

Crank GPT

Posting from the middle of the ocean because it’s amazing that’s even possible.

Lat: 51.5 Lon: -129.6

Accents are an opportunity, not a burden.

Software still struggles beyond ASCII. But this is why we need to keep pushing. Diacritical characters are to be found everywhere in the world. They’re detailed, and varied, and filled with histories. Umlaut is not diaeresis. Kreska is not the acute. A háček is not a breve. They’re rarely optional decoration, and often not even decoration at all; learning about Turkish dotless i might completely upend your understanding of what’s an accent and what is not.

https://fitsonafloppy.com

Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline. The floppy disk is the measuring stick: 1.44 MB. If the software that ran entire businesses could fit in that space, then a modern, focused, single-purpose tool certainly can.

Watching this video about The Eighty Six, steakhouse in NYC.

What struck me was how constrained the space is. They have 10 tables. Can seat 35 at a time. The tour of the kitchens was kind of mind blowing: tiny spaces tucked in wherever possible.

I wonder how those constraints show up in the decisions that are made each day in how The Eighty Six operates. What do they prioritize, what do they say No to? A few are mentioned in the video, but I imagine it permeates their work.

In software, especially these days, it feels like we’re trying to remove constraints wherever possible. Every last one must go, it feels like (let alone the idea of leaning into those constraints).

I wonder what we’re giving up along the way?

I think maybe Abundance isn’t so abundant, in the end.