This summer has been very sporting; in the course of a couple of weeks I attended a World Cup match and a minor-league baseball game. Took pictures and thought about enjoying this stuff

Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s going downhill. Where by “downhill” I mean any combination of less useful, less safe, or less fun. It’s time for something better, and by “something better” I mean Mastodon. Which, I’m here to say, offers a better social-media experience than the alternatives. Furthermore, the alternatives are fatally flawed

It’s been a while. February was the last entry in this Quamina Diary; I never stopped working on it but there hasn’t been much blogworthy. This piece offers a progress update for those who’ve been entertained by Quamina, and also a pleasing (well, to me anyhow) dip into finite-automata theory and practice. With numbers and graphs and a bluesman!

The piece you’re now looking at exists because my latest “Long Links” curation of interesting not-lightweight material included quite a few focused on our dominant malaise, namely you-know-what, I mean it’s in the title. Plenty of people have had more than enough of this discourse and I thought I’d spare them by moving these bits over here

Hey everyone, I know you’re overloaded because everything has become overly efficient. Long-form reading or writing or art or music, who’s got time for that? Fortunately there are those who still do and here’s some if it. I hope one or two of the link targets can chisel their way into your jammed schedule and bring with them joy or rage or another appropriate feeling. Today’s curation has a lot of books and music and way more humor than usual. Also, a good electric wok

The best thing about long-lived incumbent technologies like JSON and XML is that nobody really has to think about them much any more. Except for, I do occasionally, because while I’m not the inventor of either, my name’s on the front of both official specifications. Hey, it’s JSON’s 25th birthday, what a run! And what ever happened to XML? Let’s shake off the dust and have a look

A person watching over my shoulder asked “How are you switching around so fast?” and I realized that while most readers here know this trick, some may not, and it’s awfully useful

Recently I got an invitation from an organization I respect, to a gathering of senior people, unconference format. Yes, it’s mostly about AI. No, it doesn’t reek of boosterism. My guess is that the discussions would be relatively intelligent and unbeliever contributions would be welcome. I declined, because it’s in the USA

War is bad. Don’t start one. But we’re already in a class war and we’re losing. Where by “we” I mean most people; the winning side comprises, roughly, the richest 0.1% of the population, who are morphing into a hereditary aristocracy. [I mean that, see below.] So, what to do in a war one didn’t choose?

That’s James S.A. Corey, which is to say Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and their new series The Captive’s War, an in-progress work comprising 2¼ or so novels. The Coreys are of course best-known for their deservedly wildly popular The Expanse series and the subsequent success of the streaming-video version. The new series is… different. If you’re wondering whether or not you should wade in, the following is for you

On impulse, Lauren and I went out for a short walk — around just a few blocks — as the grey Spring afternoon shaded to dusk. On a second impulse, I grabbed the camera on the way out the door

Our family has used 1Password for many years. Most recently 1Password 7, now at least three years out of date. We didn’t want to upgrade to the latest version, went looking for alternatives, and have been exploring Bitwarden. The best choice isn’t obvious; here’s the story thus far

This will be the 30th Long-Links outing. I’m 100% sure that there does not live a human being who has looked at all those Links, but my logfiles say that quite a few of you, Dear Readers, at least take the time to open one occasionally. All aboard!

What happened was, soon after New Year’s, friends and colleagues in the UK and Germany started letting us know that their emails to us were bouncing. Our “textuality.com” family domain is a Google Workspace (or whatever they call it this year) for email and docs and so on. Its Web presence, including DNS, has for many years been handled by a local outfit I’ll call “CWH” for some absurdly low monthly price, and has been trouble-free

This last weekend we attended a concert entitled Lenten Reflection at Vancouver’s Catholic Holy Rosary Cathedral featuring the Belle Voci vocal group and the Cantare Super Orchestram early-music band. The music was fine and it was the most beautiful sound I’ve heard in a long time. Twenty-two months, to be precise (see below). And so I get to report on good music and yell at production people

Recently I read Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch and Algospeak by Adam Aleksic. The language we speak (and text) to each other is at the core of who and what we are, and the Internet is the strongest among the forces that channel and fertilize its growth. So there’s scope for plenty of books on the subject. Both books educated and entertained, one made me angry

Block announced that it’s cutting 40% of its workforce. It didn’t say it was replacing those people with GenAI. Not out loud. Jack Dorsey did say “I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.” Wall Street loved it, bidding up the share price by 24%. Which reminded me of Kansas in 2010

I’ve run early-spring pictures of these little purple guys almost every year since this blog’s birth in early 2003. Except for last year. Because we moved and the new place didn’t have any. Only now it does, and they’re (just barely) up. [Update: Up and open, too.]

I’ve been puttering away on my Quamina project since 2023. In the last few weeks GenAI has intervened. Quamina + Claude, Case 1 describes a series of Claude-generated human-curated PRs, most of which I’ve now approved and merged. Quamina + Claude, Case 2 considers quamina-rs, a largely-Claude-driven port from Go to Rust. Both of these stories seem to have happy endings and negligible downsides. So empirically, I can apply LLM technology usefully to software development. But should I?

Last time out I described a bunch of incremental-improvement Quamina PRs from a colleague working with Claude Opus. Today I want to talk about Rishi Baldawa’s quamina-rs, a Claude-based port of Quamina from Go to Rust. The next post is about where I stand on GenAI and code

With 47 years of coding under my belt, and still a fascination for the new shiny, obviously I’m interested what role (if any) GenAI is going to play in the future of software. But not interested enough to actually acquire the necessary skills and try it out myself. Someday, someday. Didn’t matter; two other people went ahead without asking and applied Claude to my current code playground, Quamina. Here’s the first story. I’m going to go ahead and share it even though it will make people mad at me

Welcome to the first Long Links of this so-far-pretty-lousy 2026. I can’t imagine that anyone will have time to take in all of these, but there’s a good chance one or two might brighten your day

There’ve been a few bugfixes and optimizations since 1.5, but the headline is: Quamina now knows regular expressions. This is roughly the fourth anniversary of the first check-in and the third of v1.0.0. (But I’ve been distracted by family health issues and other tech enthusiasms.) Open-source software, it’s a damn fine hobby

Confession: My title is clickbait-y, this is really about building on the Unicode Character Database to support character-property regexp features in Quamina. Just halfway there, I’d already got to 775K lines of generated code so I abandoned that particular approach. Thus, this is about (among other things) avoiding those 1½M lines. And really only of interest to people whose pedantry includes some combination of Unicode, Go programming, and automaton wrangling. Oh, and GenAI, which (*gasp*) I think I should maybe have used

I’m just landing a chonky PR in Quamina whose effect is to enable the + and * regexp features. As in my last chapter, this is a disorderly war story not an essay, and probably not of general interest. But as I said then, the people who care about coercing finite automata into doing useful things at scale are My People (there are dozens of us)

What happened was, a faucet started dripping. And then I managed to route around the malignant machineries of late-stage capitalism. These days, that’s almost always a story worth telling

The GenAI bubble is going to pop. Everyone knows that. To me, the urgent and interesting questions are how widespread the damage will be and what the hangover will feel like. On that basis, I was going to post a link on Mastodon to Paul Krugman’s Talking With Paul Kedrosky. It’s great, but while I was reading it I thought “This is going to be Greek to people who haven’t been watching the bubble details.” So consider this a preface to the Krugman-Kedrosky piece. If you already know about the GPU-fragility and SPV-voodoo issues, just skip this and go read that

Here’s a story about African rhythms and cancer and combinatorics. It starts a few years ago when I was taking a class in Afro-Cuban rhythms from Russell Shumsky, with whom I’ve studied West-African drumming for many years. Among the basics of Afro-Cuban are the Bell Patterns, which come straight out of Africa. The most basic is the “Standard Pattern”, commonly accompanying 12/8music. “12/8” means there are four clusters of three notes and you can count it “one-two-three two-two-three three-two-three four-two-three”. It feels like it’s in four, particularly when played fast

Last Saturday I had one of my peak 2025 experiences, at the MLS semifinal between the Vancouver Whitecaps FC (hereinafter “Caps”) and Los Angeles FC (“LAFC”). Both those FC’s stand for “Fútbol Club”. 53,095 other fans were there with my son and I; we came home smiling. I’d like to share a bit of the joy and an unexpected side-effect: I’ve gone off most other TV sports

As usual, offering more long-form stuff here than any one person should be expected to read all of, hoping that a few of the choices will improve your day. This time out it’s almost all politics, but that’s the way the world is. And some of the politics aren’t American!