New casual gaming platform, using on-device AI. Hope to have something to share and get feedback in a few weeks.

• Putting out the app I’ve been working on for the last year.
• More hugging the family (and general appreciation).
• Catching up with friends more often.
• Ignoring the news.
• Not having my back go out and ending up in ER, like last year.

• Practice triage: start with small, achievable projects that can be done on a weekend. Don’t get overwhelmed. Be kind to yourself. Not every problem is immediate or needs fixing.

• If you have access to a local tools library, avail yourself of it fully. The staff are a treasure-trove of wisdom and knowledge. If not, talk to the oldest, crotchiest person at your local bardware store.

• There are so many single-use tools out there (favorite one is so you can unscrew the faucet bolt under a sink). If not, see if there’s a community online board and post a request.

• Vintage appliances, windows, doors, etc are cool. A little elbow grease and they’re in good shape. Junkyards and recycling centers are a treasure trove.

• If it involves anything hazardous or too heavy (gas, electricity, foundation), bite the bullet and seek professional help.

• Ants and cracks are small-fry. Baits and fillers are easy fixes. Focus on big ticket items. And remember, some things are best left alone (see triage, above).

Ran a hairdryer all night, propped against my Mac laptop keyboard after a friend knocked over a full pint of beer onto it.

The next morning the whole bathroom reeked of stale beer, the power bill was astronomical, and the left quarter of the keyboard never worked again.

Took it in for repairs and was grateful AppleCare swapped it out without a peep. This was a while back, before the embedded moisture strips that void the warranty.

The first one was tall and skinny and toppled over after a landing leg malfunctioned. So they sent a second tall skinny probe, loaded with expensive equipment. Aaaand it fell over.

Maybe somebody should tell them about center of gravity and redundant systems.

https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/

I love reading about indie devs getting a hit. Hopefully, he’ll post an update about what it was like day-to-day over the next year.

It’s like an author who writes a surprise bestseller. It’s always illuminating reading about them continuing on the reading circuit, then coming up with a sequel.

I have a couple of those old Airports gathering dust somewhere. They were replaced by mesh routers that worked infinitely better.

If they want to head back into the router game, they’ll also want to throw in some BLE, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, and Matter support (with mesh repeaters) to act as universal bridges to home automation.

Traditionally, there have been a few classes of companies in the U.S: C Corp, S Corp, LLC (Limited Liability Company) aka partnerships, and Closed. Most companies in the U.S. are organized as one of these, with their responsibility toward shareholders, who want to see their money grow.

If you wanted to work for a company that didn’t necessarily have infinite growth as its mission, the only option was to find a Non-Profit, but they may not have the kind of funding to spend on legal visas.

In the last few years, two other types of companies have emerged. They’re similar, but legally different: B-corp (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)), and PBC or Public Benefit Corporation (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation).

These can be for-profit, but have to have a stated mission in their charter to provide a benefit of some sort to the public.

The links above point at some examples, but you may want to do your own research. Those companies may have the resources to pick up your visa, and may better align with the values you’re looking for.

Ideally, and when able, your best bet would be to start your own business and set it up just the way you want.

Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.

Richard Scarry/Busytown fans. Wife got a cat during COVID and named her Sally Cat.

Can’t someone come up with a browser that just randomly lies when asked about the characteristics that could be used for fingerprinting?

Except for trusted, whitelisted sites.

That seems like it would be a pretty good privacy enhancer.

I saw the security article, but that sounds like it needs to be tackled by MSFT, the way Google has to handle Chrome extensions.

Have been a paid Jetbrains user for years, especially PyCharm. But recently, I had to do some front-end web development with ionic/Capacitor and Vue, and ionic only had a VsCode plugin. A few weeks later, came across Cursor which is a fork of VsCode with LLM support, and all the same plugins worked.

Still keeping my PyCharm subscription, but am wobbly on whether I’ll re-up next year.

You all realize pretty soon no human is going to update an existing code-base?

Who wants to spend their time understanding 10 year old legacy code? They’ll just feed it into an AI and tell it to add or fix a feature, then generate tests, and file a PR.

If it ends up having an airplane do a loop on take-off or sending your paycheck to Antarctica 🤷🏻‍♂️

Whatever happened to https://kivy.org/?

It looked like they would be the way to build cross-platform pythonic UIs.

The cat suddenly parked itself on the stairs. Some day, she’ll cause serious harm. Until then, pet, pet you cute assassin.

Working on a new online gaming platform. There’s internal debate as to whether to allow players to message each other and post in public spaces. It would make it a lot more fun for playere, but the risk of losing Section 230 ‘safe harbor’ protections is a big concern. Also, the cost of moderation.

72 hours to finish a design project for a client. Hard deadline to make it to the printers in time for a trade show. By the end, I couldn’t see straight. Slept for 18 hours after handing it in.

Saw the end product at the trade show. Horrified to pick out so many small errors. Customer was happy, though. Got two more projects.

Never did it again, but it was good to know I could.

That is one possible outcome. The other is they put so many loopholes and exceptions in it to appease a particular point of view and it becomes meaningless.

Either way, investments will likely be impacted.

Section 230 was foundational to shifting the risk of running social networks. This, good or bad, brought us to where we are.

Once they knock it down, the unintended consequences will be… interesting. 🍿