“Stop naming things after people, living or dead. No schools. No streets. No courthouses. No fountains. Just quit it.”
Last month I added a feature I call beats to this blog, pulling in some of my other content from external sources and including it on the homepage, search and various archive pages on the site.
On any given day these frequently outnumber my regular posts. They were looking a little bit thin and were lacking any form of explanation beyond a link, so I've added the ability to annotate them with a "note" which now shows up as part of their display.
Here's what that looks like for the content I published yesterday:
I've also updated the /atom/everything/ Atom feed to include any beats that I've attached notes to.
Tags: atom, blogging, site-upgrades
Research: Starlette 1.0 skill
See Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills.
Tags: starlette
Research: PCGamer Article Performance Audit
Stuart Breckenridge pointed out that PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading, highlighting a truly horrifying example of web bloat that added up to 100s more MBs thanks to auto-playing video ads. I decided to have Claude Code for web use Rodney to investigate the page - prompt here.
Tags: web-performance, rodney
Research: JavaScript Sandboxing Research
Aaron Harper wrote about Node.js worker threads, which inspired me to run a research task to see if they might help with running JavaScript in a sandbox. Claude Code went way beyond my initial question and produced a comparison of isolated-vm, vm2, quickjs-emscripten, QuickJS-NG, ShadowRealm, and Deno Workers.
Tags: sandboxing, javascript, nodejs, claude-code
Tool: DNS Lookup
TIL that Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service (and 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3, which block malware and malware + adult content respectively) has a CORS-enabled JSON API, so I had Claude Code build me a UI for running DNS queries against all three of those resolvers.
Tags: dns, cors, cloudflare
Tool: Merge State Visualizer
Bram Cohen wrote about his coherent vision for the future of version control using CRDTs, illustrated by 470 lines of Python.
I fed that Python (minus comments) into Claude and asked for an explanation, then had it use Pyodide to build me an interactive UI for seeing how the algorithms work.
Tags: vcs, pyodide, bram-cohen, crdt
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
The sitting president of the United States, on his blog:
Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP
As the elderly descend further into dementia, they lose their sense of propriety and simply speak their mind. (They also get confused and think they need to “sign” their text messages and social media posts.) Say what you want about Trump’s truthfulness generally, but here, he’s just being brutally honest. Let’s keep his “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” post bookmarked for when Trump himself finally keels over — after he chokes on a hamburger or whatever it’ll be that finally does him in — and the good people of the world rejoice and celebrate.
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
stuartbreckenridge.net/2026-03-19-pc-gamer-recommends-rss-readers-in-a-37mb-article/
Stuart Breckenridge, examining a web page at PC Gamer:
Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.
This is so irresponsible and unprofessional it beggars belief. Web browsers ought to defend against this. Why not cap page loads by default at, I don’t know, 5 MB? And require explicit consent to download any additional content?
Link: stuartbreckenridge.net/2026-03-19-pc-gamer-recommends-rss…
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
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Honestly, this was very entertaining. I was pretty tired, but this kept me awake, no problem. It's just so bizarre and funny. The daughter and her father are absolute comedy gold. And that policeman! The costumes are so good, too. I don't know, I had a great time and would most definitely watch it again.
👍 Recommended!
Plot is all over the place and there's quite a few scenes that make little sense. But yeah, for a trash-movie night, certainly not the worst flick. "Wait, how did they lift those enormous logs and … ?" "WHO CARES, ACTION, AHHHH…!". The finale is like Home Alone but in the woods and pretty entertaining.
