matdevdug

One of the perks of working at LEGO is sometimes you take a break to just make a flower.

Someone posts something I wrote to Hacker News. It reaches the front page. And I feel that pull. That specific, stupid hunger to open the comments.

I don’t. Because I’ve been around long enough to know exactly what’s in there. But it’s like standing outside a door while people talk shit about you. Some part of your brain, the same one that will randomly ask “what if this time we touched the stove?”, says “don’t you want to read the mean comments?”

Dear podcast hosts. I have been a loyal #podcast listener since the iPod was a rectangle with a click wheel and ambitions. I sit through the ads. I use the promo codes. I have purchased mattresses and downloaded VPNs. I am doing my part.

So when I say this, know it comes from love. Ad revenue is down and you desperately need more monthly subscribers in order to keep this your full time thing.

You got paid a full time wage to talk into a microphone in your spare bedroom for two hours a week. That’s not a career. That’s a miracle. A beautiful, ridiculous miracle that the universe briefly permitted.

I’m not joining the Patreon. I’m not joining the supporter tier. I follow thirty of you. At $7 a month that’s $210. I’m now getting asked multiple times a week by different shows for somewhere between $5-10 a month.

If the golden age is over, it’s over. I’m sorry. But I’m also tapped out.

The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism https://matduggan.com/the-intolerable-hypocrisy-of-cyberlibertarianism/

Downside of working at LEGO is you end up just giving your salary back to them when you visit the store. These are gonna be my weekend project.

RE: @hn50@social.lansky.name

Replace “nonprofit hospitals” with “every business ever” and you’ll have a good summary of how I feel about consultants.

This is the funniest thing I have ever read. https://theonion.com/at-long-last-infowars-is-ours/

Imagine a roaring arena packed to the rafters with pathological liars. High above you in the nosebleeds are podcasters, screaming that you'll die if you don't buy their skincare products. Below, on the floor, imagine demonic battalions of super-influencers physically forcing people into home fitness devices designed to dismantle their bodies bone by bone and reassemble them into a grotesque statue of yourself. Out of the throngs, an extremely sick looking man approaches you. He puts his hands on your shoulders. He explains that he is your life coach and that you owe him $800.

The forge I would like to make if I was Very Wealthy.

If I Could Make My Own GitHub https://matduggan.com/if-i-could-make-my-own-github/

RE: @hn50@social.lansky.name

Like Oracle, I’ve never met someone who works at Meta that seems to love it. Best case they seem to like the paycheck.

This morning I was asked “what does magnesium do to you” and I realized I have no idea. So I googled it. Somehow between the AI overview and another snippet overview the page has become completely unresponsive. I can’t scroll or tap anything on this view.

So the design that Google has settled on for their crown jewel product is: first you see an AI summery that is so often wrong that I have to now ask people “did you click on a link or just read the summery” when they tell me they looked something up. Then they kept the old summary answer panel from before. Then you get the ad responses. Then finally actual websites.

Someone called John new-CEO-of-Apple “John Apple” and I was like oh no I have immediately forgotten his actual last name. So congratulations to John Apple which is how my brain will forever remember him.

Firefox added split tab views and absolutely killed it. I didn't even know I needed this feature and now I cannot live without it. Awesome work. Right click on a tab and select "Add Split View" to try it out. #mozilla #firefox

RE: @404mediaco@mastodon.social

The absolute failure of the entire concept of the Metaverse is such a perfect encapsulation of why Meta is a bad company.

The CEO had a terrible idea and none of his sycophants could say no. So $80 billion was wasted for no reason. Nobody was punished for this massive fuck up except normal employees who had nothing to do with it.

There’s a new younger woman in our #warhammer40k group. She has now smoked all of us middle aged dads. Bullgryns were was better at holding objectives than I thought. She ran the board effectively the entire game. Still a great matchup. Super excited for 11th edition.

RE: @hn50@social.lansky.name

RE: @sethmlarson@mastodon.social

This is a super good point I had never considered.

RE: @DreamStationcc@mastodon.social

Dislike is not a strong enough word for the emotion this frog evokes in me. I am unnerved by it.

I like how short the AI coding revolution was.
3 months ago: “Everyone! Claude Code is great and can do anything you need for $200 a month!”

A week ago: “Looks like they massively increased how many tokens you use. The $200 a month plan is now completely useless and your sessions will get depleted in less than an hour.”

Like wow that subsided price disappeared quickly.

The code isn’t working, which has raised a broader question I wasn’t prepared to examine today: have I ever actually been good at anything, or have I simply been moving the confusion around?

Every time I see my Apple Vision Pro I purchased used I feel insanely guilty. “Next week I’ll figure out a use for you. I promise. You definitely weren’t a giant waste of money.” #AVP

RE: @outofprintarchive@retro.pizza

Absolutely amazing even if you don't read any Japanese. I loved looking at all the ads.

So he’s….exactly like an LLM. A people pleaser who doesn’t care that he lies.

I watch true crime to relax, which is its own problem. But nothing pulls me out of the moment like a detective gravely announcing that the evidence has been “coowaborated.” Sir. There’s a wabbit.

Regardless of where the crime takes place, the detective will gravely announce a murder and then insert a goofy pronounciation of what you’d think is a commonly said word.

You can absolutely have an RSS dependent website in 2026 https://matduggan.com/you-can-absolutely-have-an-rss-dependent-website-in-2026/

This is a Very Good website. https://gitperf.com/

At some point all my Macs stopped being able to receive iMessages. They could just send. I tried signing out, nothing. I tried signing out and restarting, nothing. They continued to work on iOS devices, just not the Mac.

Then I removed the email addresses from iMessage and that.....sorta fixed it? Now I get the messages but I get them hours later. Console shows "MessageProtection failed to decrypt with ngm identities - fail to unseal message {error: Error Domain=com.apple.messageprotection Code=5 "(null)", encryptingIdentity: , signingIdentity: }" but the problem is that Apple logging is the worst in the entire world.

Seriously. This is from less than 60 seconds of MacOS logging in Console. What is the point of such a bad logging system? How am I supposed to figure out anything if you push 10,000 logs a minute of just errors?

RE: @ChrisShort@hachyderm.io

To say I’m excited about this is the understatement of the year.

RE: @hn50@social.lansky.name

Pedometer++ is such a crazy good app for iOS and watchOS. It’s one of those apps where the thing you want to see is somehow magically always there.

RE: @arsfeedbot@c.im

Bold move considering how bad their shows are. Just a supporting character turning to camera every 5 minutes being like “because we don’t think you were paying attention, here’s another summary of the plot thus far”.

Like Emily in Paris is a beautifully shot show with many episodes. It says nothing, the show is mostly pretty people in nice clothes moving through streets. You don’t even need the dialogue.

The first rule of German game shows is zero smiling.

RE: @macrumors@mastodon.social

Buy this book. It’s an absolute gem. Really well written.

@rlaimondas I am angry bug.