Notes from July 2025
Here are some of my notes from July 2025. See also: my notes from last month , and the month before , and so on… “How I build software quickly” was my marquee post this month. I haven’t mastered the tension between speed and quality, but I’ve learned a few things that have been useful. It sparked a lot of discussion on Lobsters and Hacker News . I worked on this post for months, and I’m glad it did well (for me, at least). I informally compared the download sizes of local LLMs with offline Wikipedia . Seems like Wikipedia offers more value per gigabyte. The Hacker News girlies were all over this one too , probably because it mentioned AI even a little. I wrote a simple macOS-only script to extract text from images . I can now run to grab text out of screenshots and photos, at least on macOS. I read Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet , a book about the invention of the internet, and took a few notes . I also took notes on The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast . Published a few articles over at Zelda Dungeon , including one about a very strange monster in Ocarina of Time . I also briefly participated in the ZD Marathon , an annual variety stream, which (1) raised over $12K for No Kid Hungry (2) was a blast! I enjoyed Ancillary Justice , a sci-fi book about a starship AI betrayed by an emperor. I especially loved all the treatments of language and accents. It was the first book I’ve ever checked out from the Chicago Library, and will not be the last. “Fed up with big legacy news? Here are 13 independent, worker-owned outlets to support.” Quoting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: “I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.” I remain unconvinced that commercial interests map well to the common good, and this article strengthened my belief. “The First Planned Migration of an Entire Country Is Underway” . Searching “Mona Lisa” on DuckDuckGo changes its logo to a Mona Lisa duck. George R. R. Martin, famous author of the series adapted into Game of Thrones , uses WordStar 4.0 on an offline DOS machine . At least, that’s what he said 11 years ago. Open Source Game Clones got a bookmark this month. “Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them.” A great last line from “The rise of Whatever” . “Your Name Is Invalid!” chronicles software that doesn’t accept people’s real names. See also: “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names” . From an article about data sovereignty : “Experts believe the pushback [for data sovereignty] from governments underscores a broader awareness about the economics of data extraction.” “The challenge in an intro-to-programming class was never finding answers. Before ChatGPT, you could find solutions on Google or StackOverflow. Maybe it took longer, but it’s a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one, for elementary problems.” Via “From code reuse to the impact of generative AI” . “While I think the tarot people are wrong, they frankly throw much better parties than the fact-checkers.” Via “The Psychic Question” . Liked this person’s story of switching to Linux . It’s someone claiming to be a “regular person”, not some kernel developer or configuration expert . I liked reading about their experience trying Linux Mint: why they did it, what they liked, and what they didn’t. Glad to see Debian working on the 2038 bug . Apparently, 13% of Godot game developers know about, but choose not to use, version control. This post cheekily celebrates that: “Modern life is so full of handrails and automation and supervision and authority over our platforms and actions that who are we to look at their position and assume they’re in line to learn a lesson.” Hope you had a good July. I enjoyed Ancillary Justice , a sci-fi book about a starship AI betrayed by an emperor. I especially loved all the treatments of language and accents. It was the first book I’ve ever checked out from the Chicago Library, and will not be the last. “Fed up with big legacy news? Here are 13 independent, worker-owned outlets to support.” Quoting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: “I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.” I remain unconvinced that commercial interests map well to the common good, and this article strengthened my belief. “The First Planned Migration of an Entire Country Is Underway” . Searching “Mona Lisa” on DuckDuckGo changes its logo to a Mona Lisa duck. George R. R. Martin, famous author of the series adapted into Game of Thrones , uses WordStar 4.0 on an offline DOS machine . At least, that’s what he said 11 years ago. Open Source Game Clones got a bookmark this month. “Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them.” A great last line from “The rise of Whatever” . “Your Name Is Invalid!” chronicles software that doesn’t accept people’s real names. See also: “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names” . From an article about data sovereignty : “Experts believe the pushback [for data sovereignty] from governments underscores a broader awareness about the economics of data extraction.” “The challenge in an intro-to-programming class was never finding answers. Before ChatGPT, you could find solutions on Google or StackOverflow. Maybe it took longer, but it’s a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one, for elementary problems.” Via “From code reuse to the impact of generative AI” . “While I think the tarot people are wrong, they frankly throw much better parties than the fact-checkers.” Via “The Psychic Question” . Liked this person’s story of switching to Linux . It’s someone claiming to be a “regular person”, not some kernel developer or configuration expert . I liked reading about their experience trying Linux Mint: why they did it, what they liked, and what they didn’t. Glad to see Debian working on the 2038 bug . Apparently, 13% of Godot game developers know about, but choose not to use, version control. This post cheekily celebrates that: “Modern life is so full of handrails and automation and supervision and authority over our platforms and actions that who are we to look at their position and assume they’re in line to learn a lesson.”
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