TL; DR: I'm using LLMs to generate short "teasers" for blog posts and essays, which I embed in images and then post to feeds that I follow on BlueSky and Mastodon. A bit pathetically, I devote much of my energy to the challenge of how can we resurrect the high-quality "commonwealth of letters" we briefly enjoyed in the pre-social-media blogosphere? Implicit in the question is that something about "social media" undermined the environment in which the fast-paced, promiscuous, long-form, and...

TL; DR: You can try feedletter dockerified here. One thing you can say about software or "tech" is it's always changing. A relatively small fraction of the change, in my view, counts as progress, but there is so much change that even a small percentage accumulates pretty fast. One of many, many trends in software that I never much mastered or paid attention to is "containerization". I am very accustomed to setting up old-school UNIX services (or kind of new school, since I tend to manage them...

A significant update of Feedletter tutorial was made on 2026-06-11 @ 12:30 PM EDT. → Modify the tutorial to encourage use of new './feedletter generate-starter-untemplates', and document by default in terms of those. The post was originally published 2024-01-29 @ 10:30 AM EST. This is an automatically generated post. by Update-o-Bot on 2026-06-11 @ 12:30 PM...

TL; DR: Me and Claude code collaborated on some documentation for my Scala sysadmin library. Is it any good? Maybe other people would use the library? *** I don't like to do anything very complicated in a shell script. It feels loosey-goosey. I don't quite know what's going to happen, how things will behave if anything goes wrong. I love doing just about anything in Scala, a programming language as tight and neurotic as I am. When I write Scala, I feel like I have pretty complete command over...

TL; DR: My two static sites (this site, drafts.interfluidity.com) can now be downloaded in full as zip files, for offline reading or archiving. Zip download links: tech, drafts *** Last week (during "office hours"), I was asked why I was so fond of static sites and static-site generators for publishing writing. Aren't dynamic content management systems like WordPress or Drupal superior? I really should have an answer to this! I now devote a large share of my time to an attempt to make...

A couple of years ago, I wrote fossilphant, a utility for converting archives exported from Mastodon accounts into readable, self-hostable static sites. You can see what those look like here or here or here. (I've wandered across three “instances” on Mastodon!) Now you can turn your Bluesky repo.car file into a static site as well. It supports embedded images, links, and quote-tweets too! Install scala-cli. It's very easy! Download two scripts, download-bluesky-images and fossilphant-bluesky....

A significant update of The 'iffy' XML namespace was made on 2025-08-30 @ 06:50 PM EDT. → Revise definition of curation, so it has only three types: all, selection, and single. iffy:recent becomes a query under selection. The post was originally published 2024-05-13 @ 04:10 AM EDT. This is an automatically generated post. by Update-o-Bot on 2025-08-30 @ 06:50 PM...

I'm traveling, and found that some sites I needed to access forbid traffic from my location. In order to, like, pay a utility bill and renew some insurance, I needed my requests to appear to be coming from the United States. Obviously, the easy thing would be just be to install one of a zillion VPNs that would let one do this. But they usually involve some subscription fee, this is a rare issue for me and I'm cheap, and I've been curious about Tailscale, which has a free personal-use tier....

The JVM has a lot of logging libraries. There's the built-in java.util.logging package, the venerable log4j project (now log4j2), logback, Scala-specific libraries like scribe, etc. As a library author, I've long been partial to logging facades, where you write to one API, and can choose which among the multiple "backends" will log the messages. The idea was pioneered by Apache Commons Logging. slf4j is I think the most popular logging facade these days. I long ago wrote my own facade, mlog,...

I've been playing around with Scala 3's souped up inline construct, which is a very cool, relatively approachable, bit of metaprogramming. (See "Rock the JVM" for a quick explainer.) A thing that confused me, though, is the ordering of inlining vs implicit resolution. Consider... object InlineImplicitOrdering: given Int = 10 inline def printIt(using i : Int) : Unit = println(summon[Int]) object LocalContext: given Int = 22 def printItLocally : Unit = printIt @main def...