Nice moment in iOS: when you reduce the volume to zero, subtitles come up automatically – and they go away the moment you increase the volume again. This is from YouTube on the iPad, but it appears to be system-wide: (Feels extra meaningful in the face of so many people playing their media on speaker in public these days.)
Ladies and gentlemen, we are in a glorious, splendiferous, outrageous era of crap! Some call it “high-yield,” some call it “speculative-grade,” but to those of us living in the real world, we know them as junk bonds, the formerly-sleepy world of below-investment grade debt that’s exploded in the last six years. Since the beginning of 2011, junk bond issuance has increased by seventy-five times , from a mere $3 billion issued against $60.8 billion in investment-grade bonds in the first half of 2011 (around 5%) to an astonishing $229 billion of junk against the $805.9 billion in the first half of 2026 — making the high-yield market about 28.4% the size of the investment-grade market. The high-yield market has ballooned over the last few years thanks to the vagaries of the global economy and, in recent years, the arrival of an entirely new category of crap. And “junk,” in the case of today’s newsletter, is going to extend so much further than simply “high-yield,” and into the murky world of leveraged loans that have been used to fund dodgy software deals and an increasing amount of data center debt deals. So why should you give a shit about junk? As I covered in this week’s free newsletter , Anthropic and OpenAI are two of the single-worst businesses in the history of capitalism, with negative EBITDA cashflows and massive customer concentrations, making them likely to be rated toward the lowest tiers of junk — CCC, or the equivalent rating in Moody’s system, Caa: While you probably know this, “default” refers to when a company has missed a payment on its debt and the credit agencies don’t believe that it will ever make that payment. The AI labs will require $50 billion to $100 billion of annual issuance across the worlds of high-yield, private credit, leveraged loans (high-interest loans with floating rates issued to companies with a ton of existing debt), and revolving credit lines that, according to a source in fixed-income, are the kind of thing you only use as a last resort. They’d also be the first parts of the AI industry to truly touch the world of junk other than the disgraceful AI neoclouds, companies that raise oodles of debt with the vague promise of building AI data centers some time in an indeterminate future, but serve the more immediate benefit of pumping NVIDIA’s revenue numbers by buying GPUs years before they’ll ever dance with the power grid. Regardless of how shitty it is, this industry needs hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the theoretical buildout of these potentially-possible data centers — CoreWeave alone, per UBS, needs to raise $102 billion in debt through 2030 — at a rate with no historical comparison. Even the railroad bubble of the 1800s had, based on rough calculations of inflation, only around $250 billion in total investment compared to the $400 billion in issuance expected from hyperscalers alone in 2027 . Yet the vast majority of companies building AI data centers range from low credit to no credit, with whatever creditworthiness they may have based near-entirely on their proximity to either NVIDIA or one of the hyperscalers that is invariably going to be their customer. The problem, you see, isn’t really the AI of it all, but the uniquely stinky business of being in AI. Even under the best possible circumstances, an AI data center will need billions of dollars up front, years in advance of any potential return on investment, buoyed only by the hype around the potential payoff at the other end. All of this exists in a time in history when more and more companies are demanding more and more debt from the markets — including the large, wet son of Larry Ellison and his $52 billion bond/loan sale to fund their takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery , $12.4 billion of which was funded with junk due to the sheer scale of the buyout, with Paramount/Skydance/Whatever paying as much as 9.1% on the 10-year end of the deal. And as I’ve discussed in the past , Larry Ellison’s Oracle now sits on the very last rung of investment-grade debt , with any further downgrades dropping it into the junk markets and leading to investment and pension funds legally having to dump its debt en masse, which would be a big problem considering the $30 billion or more of personal loans Ellison has collateralized using Oracle stock will face brutal margin calls in the event the stock dumps…which it will absolutely do in the event of a downgrade. Its last downgrade came from the most obvious of places, per S&P Global: Today’s exploration of junk is a culmination of multiple different threads of premium research, ranging from the AI data center bubble to the SaaSpocalypse , with massive amounts of leverage powering some of the worst deals in history, creating a setup for private credit and other investors to lose billions of dollars as a result. Welcome to the Hater’s Guide To Junk, or Enter The Crapverse.
I shipped a new feature for my blog today: the Newsletters page, which offers an index of all of the newsletters I've sent out, both my free weekly Substack and my monthly sponsors-only updates. I built the feature almost entirely using my voice, chatting away to my laptop while I cooked dinner. I used the ChatGPT desktop app for this, in the Codex tab, using the voice conversation mode, running against a local development environment. Here's what that looks like: I started the session against my local simonwillisonblog checkout by typing: This gave me a preview of the site that it would be working on, and meant that I could later ask it to show me the new pages so I could visually track its progress. Then I clicked the "Start new voice chat" button - that's not the microphone button, it's the one to the right of it - and set my laptop up in the kitchen so I could talk to it while I cooked. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to build, and it's a simple enough Django feature that I was certain the model (in this case GPT-6 Astra High) would be able to do it. A new model, a migration, some view code, templates, and a couple of import functions to populate the database from external sources. Here's an extract of my voice transcript that was captured by Codex: Um, they do not. Um, this is going to be a new type of content. Um, it's not going to show up... Oh, hold on. Yeah, no- I do not want this to show up in my, um, tag pages and date archive pages and... Actually, no, I think... I don't want it on the tag pages. I don't want it on the, um, blog index page. But I think I do want it to show up on the date-based pages. You know, if you navigate to September the 19th, and I sent a newsletter on that page, I think I want that to show up. So... this is- so I think we probably need a new model. The other thing is that I want them searchable, uh the Substack ones are not searchable, because those are actually just copies of other s- on content on my blog. These monthly ones do contain unique content, and spe- and once they're... published, like once they're made public a month after they've gone out, I want them to show up on my search results. Apparently this was clear enough that the model knew what I wanted to build! You can read the full transcript, disfluencies and all, in this Gist . We went on like this for about half an hour (the time it took to cook dinner). The model would reply and occasionally ask clarifying questions, then get to work modifying the code. We got a surprisingly long way entirely by voice: It was almost ready to ship. The catch was the imports: Astra offered to export data from my local copy so I could import that into production, but I wanted it to work like my other import scripts. Since some of the data lived in a private GitHub repository, this would involve creating a new API key, and for that I knew I'd have to sit at the keyboard for a while. Once I had finished cooking and judged it mostly feature-complete, I had Codex create a branch and open a pull request. I reviewed the code in the GitHub PR interface. It was nearly what I needed, except it had chosen to use Git in a subprocess for one of the import scripts. I needed one of the imports to pull from a private Git repository, so I figured the API would be a better bet. I switched to typing and had Codex swap that out for an API-based import instead. You can see the changes I made during the review in the extra commits on the PR . I fixed the import mechanism and made a few tweaks to the display of those public pages. It took an additional half hour of typing-based prompting to get to the point where I was happy to deploy it to production by landing the PR. You can see the end result at the new newsletters index page , or view the page for a previous monthly newsletter . The index page shows my most recent Substack weekly newsletters and GitHub sponsors monthly newsletters mixed together in reverse chronological order. Further down the page are links to my by-year archive pages. GPT-6 Astra designed the page, and then tweaked that design based on my vocal feedback from glancing at the local preview across the kitchen. OpenAI love using voice-driven demos like this one for things like DevDay - and they do work well in that environment. I don't think this is going to be a daily driver for me though. I've written before about how much "work" I get done using ChatGPT voice mode on my phone while walking the dog - mostly research and brainstorming, but occasionally actual development work by having ChatGPT write and test out snippets of code. This feels different. The addition of the visual preview, plus being able to type or paste things in via the keyboard when I need to communicate something that doesn't work vocally, makes this a much more powerful way of interacting with a coding agent. I still switch back to typing once I get down to the details of things though. Being able to paste in examples and error messages, or directly highlight the code or feature that needs changing, remains more efficient than trying to describe it in words. I mainly work from home, which is good because there's no way I'd want to talk to my computer like this in a shared workspace! The killer feature for me is the ability to multi-task. I usually cook with a podcast or TikTok running; now I can actually build stuff instead. You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options . A new model and migration to represent imported newsletters in Django, plus Django Admin configuration for that Four working imports: The most recent Substack items via RSS Every other Substack item via their undocumented API, which GPT-6 Astra knew about (it tried directly) and then ran a search to figure out how to paginate it and found this article by Karen Spinner All of my published monthly newsletters from my simonw/monthly-newsletter-archive GitHub repository My most recent private sponsors-only newsletter from a private repository The /newsletters/ and /newsletters/2026/ public archive pages Newsletters showing up on day and month archive pages too, but not on tag pages or my homepage Weekly Substack newsletters link to Substack; archived monthly newsletters have their own pages Integration with my site search engine
Over the years, I learned about many gotchas and strange differences between keyboard handling on Mac and Windows – pertinent especially to web apps, which use the same codebase to cater to both. I thought it might be helpful to someone if I compile them all in one place. This post is meant to be a reference, and there aren’t any cute or riveting stories hiding inside – if this seems boring to you, feel free to skip to the next one! What Windows calls Backspace, Mac calls Delete. What Windows calls Delete, Macs call Forward Delete. (This means saying “Delete” without specifying the platform might actually be confusing.) What Windows calls ⏎ Enter, Mac calls ⏎ Return. However, Macs also have an ⌤ Enter, although only on a numeric keypad (previously, it was even there on laptops !). On keyboards without the physical Enter key, you can simulate it via Fn+Return. In most Mac software, Enter and Return do the same thing. There are a few exceptions – for example, Photoshop enters a new line on Return but commits on Enter, and some classic pro apps like Cubase or Pro Tools do different things, too – but it seems to be a dying tradition. (If you are curious about the history of Return and Enter, I wrote about it once .) Windows customarily calls the secondary key Numpad Enter. I don’t believe Fn+Enter works to simulate it. Generally, third-party keyboards use Windows verbiage – so, Backspace and Enter. If a keyboard offers Mac conventions at all, they usually only extend to modifier keys. ⌃ Control on Windows is the equivalent to ⌘ Command on a Mac. (Paste, for example, is ⌃V on Windows and ⌘V on a Mac.) But, confusingly, Apple devices still have a Control key, too. This was originally meant for terminal applications, but these days many GUI apps use it as an extra modifier key. This means that for apps, Windows devices offer Ctrl, Alt, and Shift – and Macs offer ⌘ Command, ⌥ Option, ⌃ Control, and ⇧ Shift. That’s one more modifier key, and thus more space to breathe. (We’re not counting the Windows key or the 🌐 Globe/Fn key since those are technically reserved by the operating system.) Some keyboards offer extra key caps you can swap to match the platform, for example: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Others cover all the bases on fixed key caps, in an awkward way: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Many stick with Windows-only legends. Apple devices rely more on symbols on their keys and in their menus, although they don’t do so consistently. Here are all of them: Actually, I lied about the last four. On modern Apple keyboards, they are: Reusing the regular arrows for Page Up and Down is one of a few perplexing decisions from Apple’s keyboard designers. The arrow key symbols look like this – ◀▶▲▼ – but only on Apple keyboards. Here is an older and a newer Apple keyboard showing what happened: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/5.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/5.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/6.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/6.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> (Luckily, the confusing dual arrow key situation only happens on less popular, full-size keyboards.) Historically, Apple keyboards used symbols more on non-US keyboards, but starting with the 2026 models, they unified when they show symbols and when they show symbols and legends, across all keyboards. (The only key with just a text legend is Esc, making the appearance of ⎋ in menus extra puzzling.) Windows keyboards typically use words – this is why in tight quarters you sometimes see shortenings like Ctrl, Bkspc, PrtSc, Del, PgUp, Win, and so on. (I don’t think Apple ever abbreviates their legends with the exception of Esc for Escape.) In some countries, the legends are translated – as an example, in Germany, Ctrl sometimes appears as Strg. The symbols that crossed over to Windows side are: I have not seen any other popular symbols on the Windows side of the aisle, and I am not even sure if the above would be widely understood. But here’s an example: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/7.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/7.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> ( I wrote a bit more about Mac symbols before , and also about the rare Canadian symbols .) In menus and other places, Windows joins the key combinations/shortcuts with a plus, but Apple just glues them together: Here is the same Chrome menu on Windows and on macOS: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/8.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/8.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/9.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/9.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> (In other words, you’d never say “⌃V is Paste on Windows” like I did above.) Both Windows and Macs have function keys. On Windows, traditionally those were claimed by the operating system or the apps as shortcuts. Here are some examples of well-known function key assignments: On Macs, traditionally the apps didn’t reach for function keys, as those were reserved solely for the users to do stuff with. (However, some combination of ⌃ and function keys are used by the operating system for accessibility options, and I occasionally see apps use function keys these days.) Windows keyboards top off at F12, but some Mac keyboards reuse the three special PC keys, and even take over the unnecessary Num Lock/Caps Lock/Scroll Lock island, and end up going up to F19: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/10.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/10.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Access to extra characters In text fields, Apple has a system where pressing ⌥ with printing keys outputs more characters, for example ⌥Q outputs œ, and ⌥7 outputs a ¶ pilcrow. Additionally, ⇧ works in this context, so for example ⌥⇧Q outputs Œ, and ⌥⇧7 outputs a ‡ double dagger. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/11.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/11.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Note that not only letters, but basically all printing keys have secret ⌥ and ⌥⇧ assignments. Also, ⌥ assignments vary per location! The above was U.S. English, here’s Polish with a lot of differences: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/12.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/12.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> This means it’s best to avoid ⌥-based shortcuts in text fields, since they might conflict with some important character. By the way, while the above two are just mock-ups, on some physical keyboards (here: British English), some of the important ⌥ invocations are actually printed on keys: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/13.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/13.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Windows doesn’t have the above feature. However, Windows has an alternative feature where typing Alt+numpad keys allows to enter any character by its code. (For example, Alt+0128 outputs €. Num Lock has to be enabled. I don’t think it’s possible to do it without a numeric keypad present.) Mac has a version of this feature, but it requires adding Unicode Hex Input keyboard and switching to it beforehand. Then, pressing ⌥20AC outputs €. While Mac modifier keys are completely symmetrical, Windows makes an exception for Alt. On many non-US keyboards, right Alt is also known as AltGr , and does something similar to ⌥ on a Mac: it outputs letters when pressed in combination with printing keys. For example, on Polish keyboards AltGr+A = ą, AltGr+C = ć, AltGr+Shift+A = Ą, and so on with 15 more combinations. Many other keyboards do similar things. The way it differs from ⌥ on a Mac is that these are usually reserved for core letters and punctuation necessary for each language, rather than the typographical smorgasbord that Apple provides. For legacy reasons, and also for keyboards that do not have a physical AltGr key, you can also invoke all these using Ctrl+Alt combinations instead (so, Ctrl+Alt+A = ą). This means that just as you have to be careful about ⌥-based shortcuts in text fields on a Mac, so you should be of Ctrl+Alt-based shortcuts on Windows . Just like on Macs, on some keyboards, selected AltGr options will be printed in the corners or fronts of keys: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/14.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/14.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Text fields Text fields in Mac OS apps and web browsers/websites use some of the standard Unix/Linux shortcuts based on the ⌃ Control key: You can combine many of the above with holding ⇧ to extend the selection. A small group of vocal users love these. Windows still supports Ctrl+Insert for copy and Shift+Insert for paste. I am not sure if those are being used. On a Mac, in simple input fields, ↑ and ↓ jumps to the beginning and end (same as ⌘←→). This often conflicts with command line history, autocomplete pop-ups, and so on. Windows doesn’t have this convention, and Home and End serve this purpose instead. Macs support the iPhone-inspired convention of holding a key to show related accented characters, instead of triggering auto-repeat. Windows doesn’t have this feature. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/15.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/15.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Differing shortcut conventions worth knowing about On a Mac, redo is typically ⌘⇧Z. On Windows, it’s typically Ctrl+Y. On a Mac, refresh (in browsers, etc.) is typically ⌘R. On Windows, it’s typically F5, although some browsers now support Ctrl+R, too, presumably since function keys are harder to access than they used to be. Windows’s eponymous ⊞ Windows key is reserved solely for the use of the operating system, and so is Mac’s 🌐 Fn/Globe key. (Although I am not 100% sure of that as I found one place you can create 🌐 shortcuts as a user – I’m just not certain if it’s intentional.) However, each platform also has a lot of shortcut combinations that are effectively unavailable, for example ⌘⇥ and ⌘M on a Mac, or Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Escape on Windows. These official lists can help: If you’re a web app, you will compete for shortcuts with the operating system (like any app would), but also with the browser itself. You can typically take over shortcuts like ⌘S or ⌘P, but depending on the browser or the platform, some might be sacred and unavailable. No Mac browser will allow a website to claim ⌘Q, ⌘W, or ⌘T. Safari won’t allow a web app to override ⌘R. Arc browser won’t allow to override ⌘⇧C. (This is not a complete list.) Tabbing and Shift tabbing is customarily used to jump between UI elements, but it behaves slightly differently in native apps. On Windows, tabbing jumps through all elements: On Mac, Tab jumps only to elements that require keyboard to operate (such as input fields). You can toggle a System Settings preference and ask macOS to mimic Windows behaviour – see the last toggle below – but it’s not supported well everywhere. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/18.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/18.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> PgUp and PgDn work differently: Similarly, Home and End work differently: On both platforms, Fn+↑↓ does PgUp/PgDn, and Fn+←→ does Home/End. (Do you see how confusing it is to say that given that ↑↓ already mean PgUp/Dn on a Mac?) Windows has a tradition of enabling access to menus and visible controls by pressing Alt and letter keys. This has evolved over time and is not as consistent as it used to be, but it might be worth knowing about. On a 100-plus-key keyboard, Windows might have: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/19.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/19.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Macs have: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/20.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/20.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Macs never had arrow keys on a numeric keypad nor a Num Lock key to enable it. (I’m breaking my promise! Here’s a fun bug story about Num Lock .) In a strange twist of fate, it’s not only third-party keyboards that favor Windows legends. Some of Apple’s keyboards in between 1980s and 2000s showed PC legends, too! (This was to court PC compatibility of then-beleaguered Macs.) Here’s the classic Apple Extended Keyboard, showing legends for Insert, Delete (naming it Del to avoid confusion with its own), Print Screen, Scroll Lock, Pause, Num Lock, and Alt: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/21.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/21.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> (Did I miss anything or make a mistake? Let me know !) ⎋ Esc (not printed on keyboards, for some reason) ⌦ Forward Delete ≣ Contextual Menu (only on full-size keyboards) ⇞ Page Up (only on full-size keyboards) ⇟ Page Down (only on full-size keyboards) ↖ Home (only on full-size keyboards) ↘ End (only on full-size keyboards) ↓ Page Down ⇧ for Shift ⇪ or 🔒 or a similar symbol for Caps Lock (on non-US keyboards) ⏎ for Enter – note the same arrow as Mac’s ⏎ Return ← for Backspace – note a different arrow than Mac’s ⌫ Delete ⇥ for Tab (you can also sometimes see ⭾, which is a symbol representing Tab and Reverse Tab together; Reverse Tab used to be a separate key on some 1970s terminals) ⊞ for Windows key – the style of the logo will be different depending on the age of the keyboard, roughly matching the Windows logo at the time; some keyboards also use a more abstract shape, or call the key Start or System instead of Windows ≣ for contextual menu key (a.k.a. Application Key) – just as Apple added that key on its large keyboards, Microsoft started removing it in favor of emoji key , Office key , and then Copilot key ⌃ for Control (especially in nerdy contexts) Windows: Shift+A, Ctrl+Shift+G, Ctrl+F11, Alt+Enter Mac: ⇧A, ⌃⇧G, ⌘F11, ⌥⏎ Alt+F4 – close the app F11 – maximize window F12 – dev tools in browsers ⌃A – move to the beginning of the line ⌃E – move to the end of the line ⌃F – move to the right, or forwards (hold ⌥ to jump through words) ⌃B – move to the left, or backwards (hold ⌥ to jump through words) ⌃N – move down or to the next command ⌃P – move up or to the previous command ⌃L – scroll the window so that the text cursor is in the vertical middle ⌃H – delete (backspace) ⌃D – forward delete ⌃K – delete (kill) to the end of the line ⌃T – swap (transpose) the adjacent characters ⌃O – insert new line, but (contrary to Return) do not move the cursor there Mac keyboard shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts in Windows On Windows, they move the text cursor a screen up or down. On a Mac, they scroll the view up and down, but they do not move the text cursor if it’s present (so, they are more an equivalent of clicking on the scrollbar chute). On Windows, they scroll the contents (and move the cursor if present) to the top or the bottom of a view, or move the cursor to the beginning or the end of an input field. On a Mac, in views they scroll to the beginning or end without moving the cursor. In input fields, Home/End do nothing, but you can use ⌘←→ to accomplish the same. Insert – still used in some contexts for overtyping Print Screen – today taken over by screenshotting Num Lock and Scroll Lock Pause/Break Help – rarely used, and now abandoned in favor of… ≣ Contextual Menu – shows the same menu as right click would ⌧ Clear – a deterministic backspace , these days seldomly different than the actual Delete key
My notes from this talk by Alexander Petros at Big Sky DevCon 2026 . Alex starts by noting how “modernize” used to mean something along the lines of “update this thing that was made before I was born”. But now “modernize” means something more like “update this thing from 5-10 years ago” (hence the framing of the talk, the “modernization treadmill”). Using a real-world example of an incredibly slow website that was required to access state-sponsored programs for welfare, Alex points out the disparity in conditions between those of us who make software and those who have to use them: The people who develop these websites are usually doing so on high-powered internet connections and high-powered devices, but they're not using them in the conditions that the people who most need those benefits are going to be. Then he shows a Reddit thread where somebody essentially posted, “I’m having problems with this website. I’ve been waiting for months for my application to go through. Any suggestions?” And one Reddit user responded, “The best thing you can do is go into the physical office, get a case worker, and your problems will be solved within the hour.” I guess we've come full circle now. It used to be: “Don’t talk to anybody. It’s faster and more convenient to use the website!” But now it’s: “Don’t use the website. It’s faster and more convenient to talk to somebody!” Have we failed at making websites? And is our failure, at least in part, rooted in the fact that we don’t leverage the basic tools for making websites: HTML, CSS, and (in a distant third) JavaScript? Alex goes on to argue that the technologies of the web have an ideological bent and, if used as designed, can solve so many of the performance, accessibility, and usability issues that plague so many websites. The grain of the web’s technologies are rooted in these values: Which means if you use them as intended, they are optimized to deliver outcomes rooted in those same values. So if you like those values and you want those outcomes, use the platform. Take HTML, for example. Here’s Alex: HTML does [performance improvements] for you for free. If you've coded your website in a proper, semantical, structure HTML style, it will just get better over time at zero cost to the people who built that website HTML is your friend. HTML won’t give you up or let you down . HTML will make it difficult for you to make a bad website. Write it in to the requirements of the project you’re doing that it work without JavaScript. Not necessarily that it doesn’t have any JavaScript, but just that the core functionality of the website can happen without JavaScript. If you do this […] you will find that it’s very hard to deliver a bad web page because the structure that HTML requires is one that fundamentally is good for the user, performant, and cost effective. Technologies are imbued with culture, which influences what you do and how you do it. If you can align your ideological beliefs with your technological choices, you might end up with an outcome that aligns with your values — who would’ve thought, eh? A lot of modern software developers come from websites like Facebook, they come from big tech companies [who] fundamentally have a different set of priorities. Their job is to keep you on the website as long as possible so that you consume more ads. But that’s the opposite set of requirements and priorities that the government needs to be doing, which is to build something that is clean, quick, efficient, and gets you in and out as fast as possible. So [I tell people] that the technology they use comes from [an] ideological place. But there are different ideological places that produce different technological results and if we start from those through lines then we can produce services that help people who need them. The ideological principles of the web are well established : users over everything else. If you use HTML as much as possible, you’ll make something that’s as user-friendly as possible on the web. Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky User-friendly Backwards- and forwards-compatibility Long-term viability Universal accessibility
What’s going on, Internet? If you don’t follow my Bookmarks through the feed , then here’s the bookmarks from September. Enjoy. For more, check out the bookmarks archive, and subscribe to the feeds if you want these as they happen. Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP , or send a webmention . Check out the posts archive on the website. MVNDY — THE POWER OF VISION Spend more time on the idea than the tooling. Craft on its own doesn’t change much. I don’t like passkeys I’m not a big fan of passkeys either. I’ve tried them and don’t particularly care for them. Rubenerd: Ban infinite scrolling I’ve never liked infinite scroll. I prefer pagination. I always lose my place in infinite scroll websites. This is my top hate of Discourse. Give me pagination. The Art of Brütal: Inside the Creative Legacy of Sam “Samwise” Didier | MadmadeLabel Fantastic interview with Samwise Didier, the original artist of Azeroth FINDING MUSIC WITH A LITTLE LESS BIG TECH Ways of discovering music when you’re not on DSP’s or social media. I follow local music venues, local online music mags and music writers. Simplest single file webring implementation : Garden of Learning by Juhis Juhis shares how to create and manage a simple webring in a single page. Celebrating One Year on the Small Web Small wins on the small web 😃 Start a Blog Shannon shares how to start a blog 😃 Harry Potter and the Teenage Websites of Yore GeoCities, FrontPage, and diving into creating websites with HTML. Love it. FrontPage was a crutch before Dreamweaver came around. A Creative’s Guide to Personal Websites (Zine) - with words, wonder James hits us with a neat zine angled at those who think they can’t make a website. Such a cool little project!
Made a really nice feature today after a friend requested it, added a new page to BlogCat that will list all the Youtube Channels you subscribed as a thumbnail grid, much like a non-algorithmic version of their home page. That means that you can use BlogCat to subscribe to channels, use the new page to view latest videos from the channels you subscribed, and use an alternative front-end to view the said videos such as invidious or nadeko. By combining these features, one doesn’t even need to have a Youtube account. It is quite neat and it skips algorithms and so on.
Went on a wee photowalk here with my Ricoh GR III camera. I am trying to get used to the 28mm focal length and think I am getting better with it. Decided to shoot digital for a while to save money. I prefer film but it is expensive to shoot. For this walk, I had nothing in mind, I was just listening to an albumn I like and going around town on a kind of extended circle route that ended up back at mine. I’m using some film simulation recipes on these shots, I got them from the Ricoh GR Recipes app. Think the super saturated shots are Royal Supra and the black and white are Dramatic B&W, the other shots are just my standard configuration. I don’t shoot raw, these are all straight of camera JPEGs, life is too short for editing.
An interview with former Facebook Head of Global Elections Katie Harbath about her new book Disrupting Politics, and how things change for the company in the 2010s.
Here’s what happens when you try to update your Android phone if it’s low on battery (even if it’s connected to a charger): = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/playdates-update-interface-takes-charge/1-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> It’s a pretty cheap error UI, a misaligned string thrown carelessly in between existing interface pieces. It doesn’t even bother explaining what “too low” means. Compare this to what the Playdate does in the same situation: = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/playdates-update-interface-takes-charge/2-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> If the device battery is depleted, the software simply charges if first to the necessary minimum (spelled out on screen), before automatically proceeding to the actual update – all without any user intervention. We previously talked about fire-and-forget states, or interfaces which give you confidence that once the process starts , it will finish on its own . (If you don’t like military references , we could call these tap-and-walk-away.) This is a really good example. There is even a nice corresponding version for when your Playdate needs to be plugged in first: = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/playdates-update-interface-takes-charge/3-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Once you do, the process again continues by itself right until the end.
Monte Carlo simulations (or methods ) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1] . In this post I want to provide examples of some simple uses of Monte Carlo simulations. We'll start with the classical example of calculating the value of \pi by throwing darts. Suppose we take a square board and inscribe a quarter of a circle into it. We then proceed to throw darts at the board and record whether each dart hits inside or outside the quarter circle. Having thrown many such darts, we calculate the ratio of the darts inside the circle to the total number thrown. Assuming our darts are distributed uniformly over the square, by the Law of large numbers this ratio should approach the ratio of areas of the quarter circle A_{circ} to the full square A_{square} . With a square side length of 1, we have: Here's a visualization: Change the number of samples (dart throws) and click "Run" to regenerate. The code is very simple - here's a slightly sanitized version: You'll notice that the estimate is relatively poor - even with 1000 samples - if you click "Run" several times, some numbers will be way off mark. While this method does estimate \pi , it's not a particularly good estimate. I find that running ~10 billion samples is necessary to estimate it to 4 digits after the decimal with reasonable reliability. In general, for independent trials like these, the typical sampling error decreases in proportion to 1/\sqrt{N} , where N is the number of trials. This means that halving the error requires four times as many samples. While the \pi estimation may seem whimsical, it's an example of an important class of problems to which Monte Carlo simulation is applied: numerical integration. Our simulation estimates the area under the quarter-circle curve, which is a definite integral. Many integrals are very difficult to solve analytically, and much research has been done in the area of numerical analysis to develop methods to calculate integrals. Monte Carlo methods are particularly useful for high-dimensional integrals, where other numerical methods can become prohibitively expensive. A common use of Monte Carlo methods is estimating complex combinatorial calculations. These often don't have analytical solutions, and enumerating all options is intractable due to the scale of the numbers involved. As an example, let's consider the game of SET . Each SET card has four attributes: And the goal is to find a "set" - three cards that are either all different or all the same for each attribute separately . As an example, here's a hand with a single set; see if you can find it [2] : And the next hand doesn't have any sets: Here's a question: given a freshly shuffled SET deck, what are the odds that the first 12 cards drawn will have no sets among them? This question is difficult to answer without using a computer. It's easy to calculate the number of ways to deal a 12-card hand from a deck of 81: But how many of these hands have no sets? Enumerating 70 trillion SET hands and checking each one can take quite a while, and there is no straightforward counting formula to answer this question. Some clever methods can be employed to leverage symmetries and other mathematical properties of SET to cut down this search space considerably. Donald Knuth himself worked on this problem and came up with a neat program ( setset-all on his programs page ) that found 2,284,535,476,080 such hands. Therefore, the answer to our question is: There's a 3.23% chance that a randomly drawn hand of 12 cards from a full deck of SET will have no set in it. Let's see how we can use a Monte Carlo simulation to answer this question with relatively small effort, without deep knowledge of the mathematical properties of SET that enable cutting down the search space Knuth-style. We can use the following pseudo-code: After running 10 million simulated draws, I got an answer of 0.0323, which matches the real answer very closely. The Monte Carlo approach lets us solve rather complicated problems in a very simple way. Suppose we want to answer the same question for a hand of 15 cards; this would blow up the search space considerably - there are about 100x more ways to select 15-card hands than there are to select 12-card hands. But for a Monte Carlo simulation, we adjust one small parameter and get a very reliable [3] answer (about 0.00037, in case you were wondering). One domain where Monte Carlo simulations are ubiquitous is projections for retirement portfolios. Suppose someone prepares to retire with a total sum of 1 million dollars in their portfolio; they'd like to be able to draw $30,000 a year from the portfolio for their living expenses. Would that work? There's a large number of factors to take into account when analyzing this question, but for simplicity let's focus on just two: portfolio return and inflation. We can run a naive estimate, assuming average values: suppose an average yearly portfolio return of 4%, and average yearly inflation of 2% [4] Let's denote our portfolio return as r=0.04 , and inflation as q=0.02 . Then the real return each year is: Starting with $1,000,000, at the end of the year we'll have $1,019,600 and then draw $30,000 for living expenses [5] , ending with $989,600. If we continue this way, the money runs out after ~55 years, which means that a person retiring at the age of 65 should be reasonably safe, right? But this is very simplistic ; assuming just average returns is risky, because they do a poor job of representing reality, and many factors have uncertainty. For example, the sequence of returns matters a lot; a bad year (-10%) followed by a great year (+18%) would still count as "4% on average" but produces significantly less money than two consecutive +4% years. Inflation is also unpredictable, and sometimes correlated with portfolio returns; there could be bad years of high inflation and low / volatile returns that can wreak havoc on a portfolio. As we add factors (variance in yearly draws, mixed portfolios of stocks, bonds, real estate, life expectancy, unexpected events, changing tax laws etc.), relying on a single average estimate becomes increasingly more fraught. This is why Monte Carlo simulations are very popular in this domain: by drawing from reasonable distributions based on historical data, a Monte Carlo simulation can easily run a million different scenarios and provide estimates: for example, what are the odds of money running out before death. Here's a useful chart from a simulation I ran: In the top chart: In the bottom chart: Looking a this simulation, under the current assumptions the plan sounds much riskier than the average assumption makes it appear. Assuming that a 65-y.o. person would plan for 25 years of retirement until death, the ~30% odds of not having sufficient funds for this duration of time are sobering. Perhaps a change in plans is needed (such as a more frugal lifestyle or securing additional funds in some way). Retirement projection is only one of may ways in which Monte Carlo simulations are used for financial and economical applications; given the high uncertainty of these domains, it's very difficult to plan using analytical calculations. Company sales projections, growth projections, stock offering prices and much more uses Monte Carlo simulations to arrive at estimates with reasonable error bars. All the code for the explorations in this post is available on GitHub . A quarter circle of radius 1 inside a unit square. Samples 200 10 1000 Run π ≈ — Change the number of samples (dart throws) and click "Run" to regenerate. The code is very simple - here's a slightly sanitized version: You'll notice that the estimate is relatively poor - even with 1000 samples - if you click "Run" several times, some numbers will be way off mark. While this method does estimate \pi , it's not a particularly good estimate. I find that running ~10 billion samples is necessary to estimate it to 4 digits after the decimal with reasonable reliability. In general, for independent trials like these, the typical sampling error decreases in proportion to 1/\sqrt{N} , where N is the number of trials. This means that halving the error requires four times as many samples. While the \pi estimation may seem whimsical, it's an example of an important class of problems to which Monte Carlo simulation is applied: numerical integration. Our simulation estimates the area under the quarter-circle curve, which is a definite integral. Many integrals are very difficult to solve analytically, and much research has been done in the area of numerical analysis to develop methods to calculate integrals. Monte Carlo methods are particularly useful for high-dimensional integrals, where other numerical methods can become prohibitively expensive. Combinatorial simulation - the game of SET A common use of Monte Carlo methods is estimating complex combinatorial calculations. These often don't have analytical solutions, and enumerating all options is intractable due to the scale of the numbers involved. As an example, let's consider the game of SET . Each SET card has four attributes: Number of shapes (1, 2 or 3) Color (Red, Green or Purple) Shape type (Oval, Diamond or Squiggle) Shading (Empty, Striped or Solid) The dashed line shows the constant assumptions mentioned before: what happens when yearly return is always 4% and inflation is always 2%. The shaded blue areas demonstrate the outcomes of 1,000,000 simulations where inflation and return numbers are drawn from reasonable normal distributions based on historical data. We see that in 25% of the cases, all money ran out by roughly 22 years. It's even easier to see how long the funds last; if we're interested in knowing, say, what are the odds that this plan will have enough money for 30 years - the chart shows it's about 60% (since in 40% of the simulations the funds were depleted at this point).
The Sting belongs in the pantheon of films I'm deeply embarrassed to have not watched earlier. Not just because it's a great film — and it is — but because it is so incredibly my shit that I feel retroactively spurned for not having watched it sooner. It's a movie to which the Ocean's franchise obviously owes so much, which is a funny thing to say given that the Ocean's franchise is itself a remake. But much like Ocean's, this is a hedonistic, smooth, and perfectly executed act of escapism, relying in no small part on your love and affection for two absolute behemoth actors. Much like Ocean's — and sometimes even more so — it beggars belief. Early in the film, Paul Newman snaps his fingers and assembles, at a moment's notice, a two-dozen-strong team of expert con artists who work in choreographed unison for the rest of the film, never failing or faltering. A part of my brain went: come on, are you expecting me to believe this? And that part of my brain was immediately silenced by the louder, happier part that whispered: shush, and just let it happen. The film ends with two little twists. One of them is so obvious that I think it barely merits mention; the other — the revelation of a certain assassin's identity — actually did take me by surprise, and kudos to them. But God, I challenge you to watch this film and not spend the final six or so minutes with a maniacal grin on your face. It is a movie faultlessly devoted to pleasure. I'm glad that not every movie is like that, but I'm glad that many of them are.
I have written before about my Swedish Colemak hack, but I never explained what makes it so good. This is a better image what it looks like: If you’re struggling to find the difference against normal Colemak, look at the cluster of five keys next to the return key. This layout makes room for the three Swedish letters , , and , by only changing five keys in total, and they have changed very thoughtfully: (Continue reading the full article on the web.)
A fun little video by Bofner talking about how two Castlevania games on the original Nintendo Game Boy achieved a certain visual effect that wasn’t technically possible: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/konami-looked-at-its-restrictions-and-designed-an-entire-level-based-around-it/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/konami-looked-at-its-restrictions-and-designed-an-entire-level-based-around-it/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> What I really liked was this sequence of events: Game Boy introduces a special immovable layer to accommodate HUD /GUI elements within games (such as score displays or life meters), Castlevania programmers come up with a creative hack to use the HUD layer draw a movable spike wall instead, then, they use another hack to draw the HUD anyway, outside of the HUD layer.
As previously promised , here's Anthropic's new fast, low cost model: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5 . The previous Haiku, 4.5, was very much showing its age. It came out almost a year ago , and was priced at $1/million input and $5/million output - relatively expensive even back then, and a full 10x the price of OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna , released last month. The new Haiku exactly matches the price of GPT-6 Luna - $0.10/$0.50 - up to 100,000 tokens. Beyond 100,000 tokens the price increases 5x to $0.50/$2.50. Luna itself has a price increase at 272,000 tokens but only to $0.20/$0.75. Haiku 5.5 also uses a new, less generous tokenizer. My Claude Token Counter tool shows that the same long prompt uses around 1.25x as many tokens with Haiku 5.5 compared to Haiku 4.5, so there's a hidden price increase there. If your workloads fit in 100,000 tokens, Haiku is the same price as Luna and reports higher benchmark scores. Above 100,000 tokens, Luna looks like a much better deal. The most recent release of llm-anthropic finally fixed it so I don't need to ship a new version of that plugin for every new model. I tested the new model like this: Here are pelicans for low, medium, high, xhigh, and max . The new Haiku doesn't let you disable reasoning, and defaults to . I got a good bicycle frame for everything beyond . The low effort pelican cost 0.0936 cents and took 7 seconds. This effort pelican (with a reasoning trace that starts "This is the classic pelican-on-bicycle SVG test...") took 5 minutes 9 seconds to generate, but still only cost me 3.3826 cents : (Since the reasoning trace exhibits awareness of the benchmark, here's Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars (on xhigh) , and the same prompt against some other recent models . Background on that .) For comparison, here's the pelican I got a year ago from Haiku 4.5 (for 0.7583 cents - Haiku 4.5 did not support reasoning levels). It sucked at drawing pelicans: In addition to Haiku 5.5, Anthropic announced today that they are halving the price of cache reads for Sonnet 5.5. They've also added API credits to subscription plans: Second, this week, we’ll roll out a new monthly API credit to all Max and Team subscribers for use on the Claude Platform . Max 5x users will get $100 in credits per month, Max 20x users will get $200, and Team subscribers will receive up to $500, pooled across their users. Claiming this is pleasantly easy: navigate to Settings -> Billing and select the API organization that should benefit from the credits every month: The API credits exactly match the cost of the subscription itself. This is really generous - it makes it much easier for subscribers to use the API. Anthropic also let you disable auto-reload for the API, with the consequence that "API requests will stop when your balance runs out" - exactly what you want if you're planning to burn through those API credits without risk of a nasty billing surprise . Note that the monthly credits do not roll over - use them or lose them. OpenAI still allow you to use your Codex subscription for personal API use, which works out as a better deal for heavy API users. This new credit scheme goes at least some way to overcoming that difference. You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options .
A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM , a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy . What is this superpower, and why is nobody else using it? The tool has quickly grown a source panel, stack frames, bookmarks, a “Compare” tab, a lot more gdb support, thread lanes, which show who held the CPU at every step, and “Check from here”, which helps find the exact step where a race condition happens. I went into each new feature thinking it would be a big code-lift but I kept running into the same thing: the hard part of each feature was already done, and Nix had done it. A debugger for instance, needs the exact inputs of the program, its debug symbols, its sources, the sources of every library under it, and a way for someone else to get all of that on their machine. That’s exactly what a derivation is, and Nix makes that easy. A classic simple example of a race condition is two threads depositing into one bank account. Each deposit reads the balance, writes a line to the ledger, then stores the balance plus the deposit. If one teller runs between the other’s read and store, it writes a stale balance over the other’s deposits. 💥 A teller that runs between the other’s read and store writes a stale balance over the other’s deposits. 1 teller 1 balance teller 2 read 150 read 150 store 200 store 150 + 10 160 teller 1's last deposit is gone Rewind’s VM has one CPU, so its first run passes too. runs the build again under perturbed schedules, each asking the guest kernel to reschedule at different steps, and narrows the first failure down to one step: Running this check on my laptop took 11 seconds. The two runs are the same machine, exit for exit, until step 3237, where only the failing one gets a reschedule. The argument to is a derivation and can be a flake reference. The beauty of Nix is that it knows the inputs of a derivation, so that’s all we need to make sure the run is reproducible. The derivation’s inputs are the source, the compiler, the libraries, the kernel, and the VM’s configuration realises the derivation’s inputs, packs the closure into a read-only erofs image, and boots the VM on it. The run’s id is a hash of its inputs, the way a store path is, and prints the command that makes it again: When the build succeeds, the guest reports each output’s NAR hash, and checks it against the host’s copy and against every binary cache Nix substitutes from, by fetching only the : This helps us validate that the build within the VM is the same as the build on my laptop, and that the VM’s run is reproducible by Nix. Debugging code is much simpler when you are looking at the source. A new panel in the Rewind app or in the terminal shows the source of the program at the playhead, and the stack frames that called it. The debugger needs to know where the sources are, and Nix gives us that for free too. nixpkgs builds the packages with , and the debug info is cached on cache.nixos.org as a output. We can leverage debuginfod to fetch the debug info and the sources by build ID, so we can see the source of any binary in the VM, including the Linux kernel! 😲 Sometimes though, the source is not enough, and we need to see the state of the program. opens gdb on a fork of the run at the playhead, with every thread of the process. The debugger can set breakpoints, watchpoints, and inspect memory, registers and variables. At step 3249, just before teller 2 gets the CPU back, we can watch the variable and continue until it changes. Nothing gdb does changes the recording, and we can rewind to the same step and fork again, or fork at any other step, and gdb will see the same state. If gdb is not enough, opens a shell in the VM at a step with any package from nixpkgs on its . It is one more closure packed into one more image. Rewind makes it very easy to compare two runs. The Compare tab in the app, or in the terminal, shows the last shared events of both runs, and the first event that differs. The Compare tab puts both runs’ events side by side from just before they part, with what differs marked. Teller 2 starts from 150 in the failing run and from 200 in the passing one: Rewind’s VM has one CPU, so at any step exactly one thread is running. A race is a question of order: which thread ran when. The trace does not answer that directly. It records what threads did, a write, an open, a fork, an exit, a signal, but not who was running in the gaps between those events. Rewind can fill in the gaps without recording anything new. Every run replays exactly, so it can walk any stretch of a run one step at a time and, at each step, ask the guest kernel which thread is on the CPU. In the failing run, teller 1 (Thread 140) is interrupted at step 3238, halfway through a deposit: it has read the balance but not stored it. Teller 2 (Thread 141) gets the CPU for a single step, 3239, long enough to read the balance, and then teller 1 gets it back and finishes. 2 Finding one bad interleaving raises the next question: how likely is it? Is the passing run the normal case, or did it get lucky? normally answers that by building the whole derivation again under many schedules. With , it starts from a run you already have instead, at any step you pick_. It forks the run there once per schedule, each fork taking a different order of threads from that step on, and counts how many end differently. Everything before the step stays exactly as it was. We can apply this technique to the bank example, starting from the step where the two runs diverged, 3,221. When we run 16 schedules from there, all 16 lose money 3 : We can do the same thing from the Rewind App with “Check from here” in the context menu of the playhead. It forks the run at the playhead and runs each fork under a different schedule, counting how many end differently. bookmarks the playhead’s step with a note. Bookmarks are kept with the run, and they travel in its export, so the person I hand the run to opens it with my notes on the timeline: Each one is a derivation in the flake, with one bug and one fix: Most of the hard work of a debugger is already done by Nix. Rewind adds a little more, but the rest is already there: the inputs, the sources, the debug symbols, and a way for someone else to get all of that on their machine. When you start with something hermetic like a Nix derivation, you can get a debugger for free. On my 16-core laptop, lost money in 396 of 1,000 runs. Pinned to a single core with , it lost money in none of 1,000: one core alone rarely switches threads in the middle of a deposit, which is why Rewind perturbs the schedule. ↩ It is a little hard to see since the event from Teller 2 is tucked underneath the Orange bar. ↩ Schedule 0 is the run itself, which passed. Every other line is a fork, and is failing because the balance came up short. ↩ read 150 read 150 store 200 store 150 + 10 160 teller 1's last deposit is gone Rewind’s VM has one CPU, so its first run passes too. runs the build again under perturbed schedules, each asking the guest kernel to reschedule at different steps, and narrows the first failure down to one step: Running this check on my laptop took 11 seconds. The two runs are the same machine, exit for exit, until step 3237, where only the failing one gets a reschedule. Free thing one: the inputs The argument to is a derivation and can be a flake reference. The beauty of Nix is that it knows the inputs of a derivation, so that’s all we need to make sure the run is reproducible. The derivation’s inputs are the source, the compiler, the libraries, the kernel, and the VM’s configuration realises the derivation’s inputs, packs the closure into a read-only erofs image, and boots the VM on it. The run’s id is a hash of its inputs, the way a store path is, and prints the command that makes it again: When the build succeeds, the guest reports each output’s NAR hash, and checks it against the host’s copy and against every binary cache Nix substitutes from, by fetching only the : This helps us validate that the build within the VM is the same as the build on my laptop, and that the VM’s run is reproducible by Nix. Free thing two: every symbol and every source Debugging code is much simpler when you are looking at the source. A new panel in the Rewind app or in the terminal shows the source of the program at the playhead, and the stack frames that called it. The debugger needs to know where the sources are, and Nix gives us that for free too. nixpkgs builds the packages with , and the debug info is cached on cache.nixos.org as a output. We can leverage debuginfod to fetch the debug info and the sources by build ID, so we can see the source of any binary in the VM, including the Linux kernel! 😲 gdb, on a fork of any step Sometimes though, the source is not enough, and we need to see the state of the program. opens gdb on a fork of the run at the playhead, with every thread of the process. The debugger can set breakpoints, watchpoints, and inspect memory, registers and variables. At step 3249, just before teller 2 gets the CPU back, we can watch the variable and continue until it changes. Nothing gdb does changes the recording, and we can rewind to the same step and fork again, or fork at any other step, and gdb will see the same state. If gdb is not enough, opens a shell in the VM at a step with any package from nixpkgs on its . It is one more closure packed into one more image. Compare two runs Rewind makes it very easy to compare two runs. The Compare tab in the app, or in the terminal, shows the last shared events of both runs, and the first event that differs. The Compare tab puts both runs’ events side by side from just before they part, with what differs marked. Teller 2 starts from 150 in the failing run and from 200 in the passing one: Who had the CPU Rewind’s VM has one CPU, so at any step exactly one thread is running. A race is a question of order: which thread ran when. The trace does not answer that directly. It records what threads did, a write, an open, a fork, an exit, a signal, but not who was running in the gaps between those events. Rewind can fill in the gaps without recording anything new. Every run replays exactly, so it can walk any stretch of a run one step at a time and, at each step, ask the guest kernel which thread is on the CPU. In the failing run, teller 1 (Thread 140) is interrupted at step 3238, halfway through a deposit: it has read the balance but not stored it. Teller 2 (Thread 141) gets the CPU for a single step, 3239, long enough to read the balance, and then teller 1 gets it back and finishes. 2 Check from here Finding one bad interleaving raises the next question: how likely is it? Is the passing run the normal case, or did it get lucky? normally answers that by building the whole derivation again under many schedules. With , it starts from a run you already have instead, at any step you pick_. It forks the run there once per schedule, each fork taking a different order of threads from that step on, and counts how many end differently. Everything before the step stays exactly as it was. We can apply this technique to the bank example, starting from the step where the two runs diverged, 3,221. When we run 16 schedules from there, all 16 lose money 3 : We can do the same thing from the Rewind App with “Check from here” in the context menu of the playhead. It forks the run at the playhead and runs each fork under a different schedule, counting how many end differently. Bookmarks bookmarks the playhead’s step with a note. Bookmarks are kept with the run, and they travel in its export, so the person I hand the run to opens it with my notes on the timeline: Other examples to try Each one is a derivation in the flake, with one bug and one fix: : the deadlock from the last post. : the lost update above. : a SIGCHLD that arrives between a flag check and , so the parent sleeps until ’s ten second timeout kills it. : one process rewrites a config file in place while another rereads it. On many cores it fails nearly every time; on one CPU only some schedules land the reader between the truncate and the last write. On my 16-core laptop, lost money in 396 of 1,000 runs. Pinned to a single core with , it lost money in none of 1,000: one core alone rarely switches threads in the middle of a deposit, which is why Rewind perturbs the schedule. ↩ It is a little hard to see since the event from Teller 2 is tucked underneath the Orange bar. ↩ Schedule 0 is the run itself, which passed. Every other line is a fork, and is failing because the balance came up short. ↩
For better or worse the web industry is going through a bit of a phase. The reasons are largely irrational. People still need the web, nothing has changed there. Regardless, the financials of this business are a struggle. Longterm career prospects are looking dicey. Because I openly reject the driving force intent on destroying my profession, and ruffle a few feathers doing so, I often get asked privately for advice from like-minded peers. I can only offer an uninspired but sensible reply: don’t quit a paying job without a fallback. Go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over. I’m confident the situation will improve. Before it does, what can we focus on to accelerate past the intellectual slump, and better position ourselves once things calm down? For a sustainable web career, where better to look than critical skills in desperately short supply? My focus is on front-end development, but these areas of knowledge are relevant to anyone in the business of making websites. Accessibility has always been a foundation of web development but it’s never been more critical for everyone to champion it. Understand why accessibility is for everyone. Learn how to talk about accessibility in respect to real needs and practical implementation. Accessibility has unfortunately become a virtue signal for certain tech groups. (I’m told LinkedIn is rife with misinformation.) Accessibility is not a feature that can be tacked on to a website like garnish. Accessibility issues can’t be fixed with an automated process at the end. Web professionals must be able to counter this mindset by respecting accessibility in all decisions from day one. Learn and adopt the guidelines as your baseline. Speak to and test with real people. Defer to specialists who are eager for you to understand the realities. CSS is the most vibrant and evolving of the front-end standards. To architecture a good stylesheet takes deep understanding of the language features. Newer features like cascade layers and selectors that reduce specificity make this much easier. CSS has always been equipped to handle well organised styles, but developers who refuse to learn and respect the language have sought to push complexity elsewhere, using simplified abstractions or “CSS-in-JS” solutions. These are inherently limiting, lead to poor performance, and don’t actually solve the problems they claim. CSS should be hard and learning it will give you the ability to express creativity beyond cookie cutter web design. CSS skills will be highly desirable as more websites wish to stand out against the convergence of a generated aesthetic. Communication is a “soft skill” in short supply (for obvious reasons). It’s a great skill if you wish to stand out as an expert, or simply be heard amongst the noise. Learn brevity and focus on important points. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Address concerns tactfully and early before they escalate. Don’t point fingers, but “cover your ass” — everyone on a project should be working towards the same goal, but some may be misguided in their approach. Remain positive and don’t meet negativity head-on. If you can communicate well you’ll be highly respected in your role. You probably weren’t expecting this one, but here we are. The luxury of not “getting political” has abated. Far-right political ideology is on the rise and dormant hatred is waking up in tech. The epicentre of fash-tech is Musk’s “X” with people like David Heinemeier Hansson spewing racism and abusing authority in communities to push an agenda, and Guillermo Rauch taking a selfie with a war criminal . Large tech giants like Digital Ocean are funding this power grab . Be wary of those denying this threat. If you want to avoid being pushed away from this industry, recognise and reject fascism before it comes for you. Don’t stay silent. I’ve covered topics that’ll see us well for the future, but what should we forget? Facebook’s experiment turned cargo cult is a legacy framework that still lingers, but there’s no reason to learn it today. React has entrenched itself as a lingua franca of code extruders. React code is generated faster than any human can possibly read it. Suffice it to say that despite stale job vacancies still demanding experience, React is not worth investing time. The days of high-paying React development are numbered. GitHub is now a liability. For private repositories use self-hosted git forges. I’d recommend Forgejo . One of the many Tailscale-like services is an easy way to gate remote access. Don’t make stuff public for the dead internet to attack! For CI/CD go local too, or use independent services not tied to tech giants. Take the time to learn basic commands. A little technical and infrastructure knowledge goes a long way. These people are handsome, charismatic, highly personable. I’m talking about: developer relations, youtubers, start-up founders, etc. When the tech industry met us halfway, influencers were entertaining and a good chinwag at after parties. Now the game has changed and we should not allow false narratives to dominate and dictate a closed-web future. Normal people still use the web. Incredibly few can afford to pay for the novelties that influencers peddle. Their attention economy is no longer our concern. So that’s my focus for a sustainable web career, when all this blows over. Remember that above all else: the web is a human creation for human needs. Those needs are not going anywhere. Drop the dead weight accumulated in times of prosperity. Go back to basics and position yourself well for when professional demand returns. Thanks for reading! Follow me on Mastodon and Bluesky . 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How it started: you ever get to your mid fourties and have your eyesight drop off a friggin cliff How it’s going: This is my prescription: I think it means nearsightedness. I’m mostly fine with close-up objects (like my phone/computer), but things 10+ feet away are blurry. The glasses help! Nice for driving and being inside large buildings. As my vision got worse, I honestly thought I just had watery eyes a lot, and that caused the blur. I got prescription sunglasses, too. I got a buy-two discount from Warby Parker, where I went in person to pick out glasses, plus my insurance covered part of it. It was a fairly nice experience, and the glasses arrived relatively quickly. I already want to buy an alternate pair just for styling options. I’m trying to ride the big change to my face with an attitude change too, leaning into the “personality-free dad in the school drop-off line” I was born to be. OK, I’m off to make banal comments about newspaper headlines over white toast.
A teenager from Amman, Jordan suspected of leading the prolific data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has been detained and is reportedly cooperating with the FBI to identify other members of the hacking gang. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the suspect, who uses the hacker handle “ Rey ,” was detained as ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting a business unit recently divested by the global aerospace company Boeing , which manufactures the fleet of planes used by the employer of Rey’s father — Royal Jordanian Airlines . The logo for Jeppesen ForeFlight, a business unit divested last year by the aerospace firm Boeing. On October 3, Reuters cited three unnamed sources saying a suspected ShinyHunters member in Amman named Saif Al-din Khader was detained by Jordanian authorities and was cooperating with the FBI. KrebsOnSecurity identified Rey as Khader in a November 2025 profile , in which the young man admitted working with multiple ransomware groups. Rey was featured again in a September 28 exclusive about the Dutch police arresting 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal Pepijn van der Stap on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by ShinyHunters. The story noted that immediately following the Dutchman’s arrest on the evening of September 15, Rey assumed control over the ShinyHunters brand and boasted publicly about stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the ransomware group Cl0p . Rey taunted both the FBI and Cl0p with memes posted to his longtime account on Twitter/X, while simultaneously including images of the avatar used by Van Der Stap’s former hacker alias “ Umbreon ” in an apparent attempt to frame the Dutchman for both hacks. A taunting meme uploaded to Twitter/X by Rey on Sept. 22. A giant sized version of the Pokemon character Umbreon can be seen in the bottom left. As noted in our September 28 report, ShinyHunters gained access to the FBI site and other victims by exploiting a vulnerability (CVE-2026-35273) in PeopleSoft , a software-as-a-service platform from the tech giant Oracle that is broadly used by companies to manage hiring and human resources, benefits and payroll. Oracle quickly issued a fix for CVE-2026-35273, which ShinyHunters first began exploiting as a zero-day in June, and at the time Mandiant released web application firewall rules intended for organizations that couldn’t apply the security update quickly enough. ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer in June that the original goal behind exploiting the PeopleSoft vulnerability was to breach the FBI’s own PeopleSoft database, but the hackers said those attacks were unsuccessful for some reason. In recent weeks, however, ShinyHunters turned to a well-known URL-encoding trick to bypass Mandiant’s suggested web application firewall rules. In a report released Sept. 25, security experts at Mandiant and the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that ShinyHunters had mass-exploited the PeopleSoft vulnerability to steal data from dozens of systems across a range of industries, including higher education, technology, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and government. Reuters reported October 5 that the FBI has removed a contractor at Accenture over their failure to patch the FBI recruitment website hacked by ShinyHunters, which exposed sensitive data on more than 5,000 FBI personnel, including each’s person’s unit and specialization, as well as medical and psychiatric records. According to two sources familiar with the ShinyHunters investigation, a navigation and digital aviation unit recently divested by the global aerospace company Boeing was among the victims that ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting when Rey was apprehended by Jordanian authorities. Those sources said the FBI’s investigation into ShinyHunters gained renewed urgency with the group’s attempted extortion of the former Boeing unit, which allegedly included the theft of sensitive information that sources said could pose operational safety and security risks. In a brief statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, Boeing acknowledged the extortion attempts by ShinyHunters, and said the incident concerned data stolen from Jeppesen ForeFlight , a subsidiary that Boeing sold in November 2025 to the private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $10.55 billion. “We are aware of claims by a threat actor regarding data allegedly associated with Boeing and our former subsidiary Jeppesen ForeFlight,” a Boeing spokesperson shared. “We are actively reviewing the matter with the Jeppesen ForeFlight team.” A spokesperson for Jeppesen ForeFlight shared a written statement in response to questions, saying the company has seen no impact on their end. “Based on our investigation to date into this claim and proactive security posture, there was no impact to our operations or products.” Rey’s alleged involvement in attempting to extort the former Boeing unit is noteworthy because there is strong evidence that his father works for Royal Jordanian Airlines , which is mostly controlled by the Jordanian government and operates its long-haul fleet on passenger planes built by Boeing. Rey claimed on Telegram in early 2025 that his father was an airline pilot, although that could not be independently confirmed. However, as noted in our November 2025 profile of Rey , his family’s shared computer was at one point compromised by password-stealing malware, and the data collected by that malware clearly shows Rey’s father used the same credentials to log in at multiple online portals for Royal Jordanian Airlines employees. Royal Jordanian Airlines has not yet responded to a request for comment. In advance of our September 28 story, KrebsOnSecurity once again emailed Rey’s father to seek comment and update him on his son’s alleged activities. Neither of the Khaders have responded. But just hours after that request was sent, Rey began deleting his various social media accounts, including the Twitter/X account he previously used to taunt the FBI, Cl0p, and other ShinyHunters victims. Rey may have nixed many of his social media profiles, but his cybersecurity blog on GitHub somehow escaped the purge, and it shows that Rey was fixated on the leaders of the Cl0p ransomware group. In March 2026, Rey’s blog featured a lengthy post that identified two Russian men as the core developers and hackers behind Cl0p. Rey’s blog on GitHub. This post doxes two Russian men as the core operators behind Cl0p, one of the oldest and most established ransomware groups still in operation today. Meanwhile, news outlets in the Netherlands reported explosive new allegations leveled at Van der Stap, whose supposed personal transformation from convicted to reformed hacker has been widely covered in the tech news media. The Dutch daily RTL reported on Sept. 29 that investigators suspect Van der Stap tried to orchestrate at least two murders. According to RTL, the murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and there are indications Van der Stap gave the order for these attacks. Van der Stap was released from prison after serving the better part of a four year sentence for data theft and extortion activity that prosecutors said netted between €1.5 million and €2.7 million. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on September 9, Van der Stap described his new role as “offensive security lead” at the Dutch cybersecurity company Neo Security , saying the job involved probing client networks for security vulnerabilities. Neo Security’s owner Benjamin Korper told Reuters he has hired an outside firm to investigate whether Van der Stap had hacked Neo Security or its customers, but that so far investigators have found no evidence he acted against his employer or clients. Korper said Dutch forensic investigators visited his office on September 15, the night Van der Stap was arrested in a dramatic police raid that reportedly involved flash bang grenades . A screenshot of a Sept 16 story by the Dutch news outlet at5.nl, describing a police raid on Van Der Stap’s residence that reportedly used flash-bang grenades. Prior to his first arrest in 2023, Van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) — even as he was hacking into and extorting a number of large organizations. When asked in a recent interview why anyone should believe the word of a self-described “reformed” cybercriminal who had so casually deceived countless friends, co-workers and journalists for years, Van der Stap replied that his work spoke for itself and there was nothing he could say that would convince his worst critics. “You can throw a bunch of nice words at someone, but you can’t convince them if they don’t want to be convinced,” Van der Stap told KrebsOnSecurity on Sept. 9. “I’m doing what I can to repay victims, and that’s all I can do. If someone doesn’t want to believe me, then that’s on them.” Cybercriminals aligned with ShinyHunters have been responsible for dozens of data breaches involving billions of stolen records, and breaches claimed by the group stretch back to at least 2019. But experts say the people recently operating behind the ShinyHunters name are not the same core members that populated the group in its early days, most of whom are French citizens who have been arrested (if not also imprisoned) on at least one prior occasion for alleged cybercrime activity. More to the point, ShinyHunters has become something of a franchise. Think the Dread Pirate Roberts character in the 1980s cult movie classic “The Princess Bride,” only succession by death is replaced with succession by arrest, and there can be multiple simultaneous Dread Pirate Robertses. Sources close to the investigation say the FBI is focusing on a remaining handful of cybercriminal freelancers or affiliates who have been feeding the group stolen credentials to various software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms used by major companies in exchange for a cut of any data ransoms later paid by victims. In the days after the news broke of Van der Stap’s arrest, a cybercrime-focused chat server on Telegram that was allegedly operated by Rey erupted with hot takes, with most participants heaping ridicule on the teenage hacker after he publicly backed down from threats against the FBI and Cl0p, and again when the ShinyHunters’s darknet website suddenly went offline . Several commentators accused Rey of resurrecting the ShinyHunters brand after its core members were rounded up in France, and making a mockery of the group’s name and reputation ever since. “He bought the old forum PGP key and used it to make new Breachforum websites and Telegram channels larping as ShinyHunters to ransom companies and then sell the used data or resell his forum when he goes broke,” one member recounted. A relatively new Telegram channel called “The Battle” has been doxing and needling Rey and other alleged ShinyHunters members for several weeks, and it has gained a considerable readership among the cybercrime communities operating on Telegram. One of the coordinators of that harassment campaign repeatedly portrayed Rey as clueless greenhorn who sought to ride the coattails of a cybercriminal brand that has long enjoyed a reputation for ruthlessly selling or publishing data stolen from victim companies who refuse to give in to extortion demands. “Rey (Saif Al-Din Khader) made a serious mistake when he started pretending to be a member of ShinyHunters,” wrote the administrators of The Battle server on Telegram. “That group had already been dismantled, with many of its members either arrested or imprisoned, yet Rey still chose to use its name while carrying out his crimes. We’re aware of claims that [Rey] caused over $200 million in damages and helped around 5–6 friend groups in the community make money by using Shiny Hunters group aliases to negotiate deals for a 25–30% cut over the past few months.” In an interview with The Register , ShinyHunters claimed they hacked the FBI to counter the agency’s narrative in a May 2026 alert that advised victims against paying a ransom to the group, which came off looking unprofessional and capricious in the FBI’s advisory. A flash notice on ShinyHunters released by the FBI on May 15, 2026. The public notice warned the group has been known to pursue a number of different victim harassment strategies , from sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members to in some cases swatting victims. The FBI warned ShinyHunters members “may also falsely claim to have sensitive or compromising information, including embarrassing photographs or videos of victims, which frequently do not exist.” The hackers told The Register their attack on the FBI “demonstrated our technical capabilities and directly refuted the misinformation disseminated by the FBI, journalists, and industry researchers.” At the same time, the group’s leaders seemed to acknowledge that the FBI’s warning materially harmed their prospects for convincing victims to pay, saying “this was fundamentally a public relations and marketing initiative for our business.”
I've had lots of hobbies over the years. To name a few off the top of my head, there's been fish keeping , guitar, harmonica, fountain pens, watches, motorbikes, this blog, web development, 3D printing, tattoos, digital minimalism, table tennis, and many more. Some of my hobbies have stuck, but I've never gotten so enthralled into a hobby that I become obsessed. Instead, there's generally 4 steps in the process: I don't always get to step 4. For some hobbies, like watch collecting and motorbikes, I continue to invest some time and money into them, and they continue to bring me joy. But I'm not obsessed. I see someone wearing an interesting watch; it piques my interest and we can have a conversation about it. But I'm not the type of person who can tell a watch brand from across a room (unless it's a Casio). Similarly, I love riding and working on my motorbikes - both bring me genuine joy. But I'm not the kind of biker who has to get out on their bike as much as possible, where driving the car is some kind of punishment. I enjoy driving too. While walking the dogs this morning I was idly thinking about all the random possessions I have scattered around the house that are the culmination of many abandoned hobbies. I started to think about why that is, and it dawned on me… It's not guitars, or harmonicas, or fish, or motorbikes, or watches, or anything else. It's learning about those thing that I find so enjoyable. It's the nitrogen cycle of an aquarium . It's learning to place your fingers at the right part of the fretboard on a guitar. It's learning to ride a motorbike safely and smoothly through some technical twisty roads, or learning how a clutch works and how to strip it down. It's learning. Learning is my hobby. And once I've decided I've learned enough about a topic, I'm good. I don't want to be the next Eric Clapton , Valentino Rossi , King of DIY , or Teddy Baldassarre . I want to be good enough at those hobbies, then move on to the next thing I can learn about. I think that's why computers have always interested me, because there's always something new to learn with them. So in future, instead of going neck deep and spending money on the next frivolous hobby, maybe I'll just spend some time learning about the thing to see if that satisfies my learning hobby. It probably won't though, as I'm something of a magpie when it comes to shiny things. But hey, at least I'm having fun and I'm not hurting anyone, right? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . I decide I want to take up a hobby. I read, watch videos, and obsessively learn about the topic. Invest lots of time and/or money into the hobby. Decide I've learned enough and move on.
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