Published on 2025-12-14
]]>Published on 2025-12-14
Tags: privacy, security, software
I pay for a VPN and use it frequently: Mullvad VPN. It's one of the few pieces of software I gladly pay for and would recommend to others. Having a VPN serves a few purposes for me. First, it provides secure internet communications in insecure circumstances like unencrypted airport/café/hotel Wi-Fi. Second, private internet traffic — VPNs encrypt your traffic until it reaches the exit node, obscuring and batching requests across all of the VPN's users; to support this, Mullvad stores no activity logs and minimizes the data it stores about customers, ensuring that they can't answer who made which requests if they're ever asked. Lastly, Mullvad implements DNS content blockers, including ads and trackers, which help me avoid advertisements inside iOS apps on my phone.
]]>Published on 2025-11-25
]]>Published on 2025-11-25
Tags: amazon, commentary, llm, quote, software
The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it's human, with a level of intimacy that you really don't want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there's a psuedo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it's just a computer. I think AI's should give up the pretense that they're human, and this one should be first.
I very much agree with this, for two reasons. One, "AI" isn't close to intelligence, and it distorts the truth to pretend otherwise, especially for non-technical people unfamiliar with how LLMs operate. Two, on a product level it's a bad choice — given how far from intelligence LLMs are, letting the generated text sound "human" sets up all users of the product to feel dissonance every time the product doesn't live up to its presentation.
]]>Published on 2025-09-25
]]>Published on 2025-09-25
Tags: c, software, zig
Libghostty Is Coming. Mitchell Hashimoto details the roadmap for a new, interesting library: libghostty. It will be an embeddable library containing all of the power currently implemented in the Ghostty terminal emulator. The first release will be a sublibrary, libghostty-vt, providing parsing of terminal sequences and maintenance of a terminal state.
libghostty-vtis extracted from Ghostty and inherits all of the real world benefits: SIMD-optimized parsing, very good Unicode support, highly optimized memory usage, a robust fuzzed and Valgrind-tested codebase, excellent feature compatibility such as parsing Kitty Graphics Protocol or Tmux Control Mode, and more.
The library will be useful for anyone wanting to parse and render terminal output in any context, including websites like GitHub or GitLab.
]]>Published on 2025-09-04
]]>Published on 2025-09-04
Tags: commentary, llm, software, software-eng
The most interesting thing about these charts is what they’re not showing. They’re not showing a sudden spike or hockey-stick line of growth. They’re flat at best. There’s no shovelware surge. There’s no sudden indie boom occurring post-2022/2023. You could not tell looking at these charts when AI-assisted coding became widely adopted. The core premise is flawed. Nobody is shipping more than before.
I love this approach at quantifying such a fuzzy question. I don't think it's the final word on the subject, but it's certainly interesting data. Specifically this doesn't test corporate code production or private repos, but I do think the "shovelware" test against published apps or new domain names is significant.
]]>Published on 2025-09-04
]]>Published on 2025-09-04
Tags: commentary, llm, protocol, software, software-eng, text-editor
You can now run Claude Code directly in Zed and use it side-by-side with Zed's first-party agent, Gemini CLI, and any other ACP-compatible agent.
As a follow up to the Agent Client Protocol post, apparently Zed went with both prongs of the strategy — helping get ACP into another text editor, AND integrating ACP into another coding agent.
]]>Published on 2025-09-02
]]>Published on 2025-09-02
Tags: javascript, software
Came across this fun software project: The ASCII Side of the Moon. They calculated the possible views of the Moon, generated images using a Blender model of the Moon, converted the images to ASCII, and aligned the views with the current date. Very cool!
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a@@B$" ~~"WRux$$@g@@$}L
jLyA$@@$ "0@@@@s@KRM*W{
gyg^@@@R@> _ J X@#$@$@05&3x2=.
$@@@@y@@@@$ggg0= . 9@$P5$$gb#~ \M$.
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@@@@@@@$@@@@$$$g@g@gw_ .w*y#@K_ }W
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@@@$@@@@@@@@@@B@@@@@E@$$gQ ]<W L
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@@g@@@@@$$@@$@@@@$@@B$2R@@@$@Eh(`
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4zR@5g$$EEgBngK"_>-~
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Published on 2025-08-27
]]>Published on 2025-08-27
Tags: commentary, llm, protocol, software, software-eng, text-editor
]]>You can now interact with third-party agents directly within Zed. To make this possible, we created the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), and we've partnered with Google to integrate Gemini CLI as the initial reference implementation.
...
Command-line agents are cool because their simplicity makes them easy to run anywhere—including as a subprocess of another application. Zed was already running Gemini CLI inside our embedded terminal emulator, but we needed a more structured way of communicating than ANSI escape codes. So we defined a minimal set of JSON-RPC endpoints to relay user requests to the agent and render its responses. The result is the Agent Client Protocol, a lean framework that lets any client talk to any agent, as long as they follow the schema.