textlog

about

The quieter social microblogging platform.

textlog is a simple social text log: write short notes, follow people and hashtags, and join conversations without turning every thought into a performance.

Notes are limited to 500 characters. The constraint keeps them quick to write and read, making room for one thought at a time.

Small by design

textlog is built around words: notes, people, hashtags, and conversations. It is intentionally small, straightforward, and easy to follow. There are no engagement tricks or pressure to build an audience.

Your profile and notes are public. Joining is free, and you can download or delete your account data whenever you like. If you feel like it, you can also donate to support the service.

textlog collective is fiscally hosted by Open Source Europe. Our finances and contributions are publicly visible on Open Collective.

Be a good neighbour

Share what is yours to share, treat other people with respect, and don’t use the service for harassment, abuse, spam, impersonation, or anything unlawful. We may moderate or remove content that puts the community or the service at risk.

What's next?

Any conversation

profileenter to followpermanent head damage, human-computer infractionwrote:
I'm not an optimist, just a pessimist who's still proactive: I don't think things are going to get better, but I just can't talk myself into giving up yet.
I am trying to learn emacs for the fun of it. The tutorial is brilliant and clear. Any tips that would help me learning more things. I know all I need is practice but if you may have used it, you may know a thing or two.
profileenter to followMillenial/Xenial who used to be really excited about programming.replied toprofileenter to follow:
As young kid I dreamed of working with reel-to-reel machines Cutting/splicing tape, happy accidents As a teen I couldn't afford reel-to-reel but got decent with multi-track cassettes Everyone was telling me digital was The Way (tm) In my 30s, I finally learned how to use a DAW properly In my 40s, I'm back to playing around with multi-tracks cassettes There is no money in it, but I'm enthusiastic as I can be (this is not so much as direct response as simply a response) #musicnotesenter to follow #aifearnotesenter to follow
I think it will still apply, just perhaps to a lesser degree. Kind of related to this blog postevnm.substack.comPlatform engineering still mattersReuse is a good thing, even with agentic coding I wrote recently (not to shamelessly plug my stuff 🫣)
I truly love the experience of using apps with rich, deeply interactive, beautifully animated, gorgeous user interfaces. Then I see a beautiful text-based interface and something about it feels so natural, so inevitable, so perfectly clear, and I'm instantly captivated by its simplicity and clarity. Hypertext is fascinating.
profileenter to followlate is the hour in which this conjuror chooses to appearwrote:
"Sharing economy" once meant something. You'd Uber someone B→C when already driving A→B→C→D; you'd AirBNB your home when vacationing and stay at someone else's home who was doing the same. No driving just for Uber; no houses just for AirBNB. I fear this history will be forgotten.
My hometown is a popular tourist destination and we no longer can rent apartments on a year-basis. Everything is AirBnB and they only rent them to locals pretty expensive and off-season. As a local I can't live in my hometown anymore, so I'm staying in the mountains.
profileenter to followNew herereplied toprofileenter to followjack of all trades linux sysadmin:
Say more. I've been using it this year "at scale" and it sucks in the way that everything sucks when the whole company starts using it for everything. I haven't used Ansible in over a decade, but am curious what you like about it better.
profileenter to followjack of all trades linux sysadminreplied toprofileenter to followNew here:
Ansible just melds with my way of thinking better. I have a really hard time wrapping my head around nested loops in HCL and the overall "ugliness" of the language. Plus, I kind of like being in control of the order things are created.
🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerswrote:
I had hit a throttle now. That’s a “subtle" way to tell me to slow down.
Man, I LOVE naps! In fact, I mostly subsist on four or five 1-1/2 hour naps each day instead of one long over-night sleep period these days. I didn't set out to have a #polyphasicnotesenter to follow sleep schedule, but here I am. :-)
Really glad to be using Haskell for work - especially in today's climate with agentic coding. Our team uses containers to keep our development environment consistent across team members, though, and most agent sandbox approaches want to either offload your work fully to the cloud or they want to sandbox the agent harness process itself. We're not ready for full cloud based development (yet?) and sandboxing just the agent doesn't work for us when the agent needs to run docker. #haskellnotesenter to follow #ainotesenter to follow
... because letting the agent run docker gives them a too-easy escape hatch from their sandbox. So we're currently stuck with using VMs. This turns out to be tricky but seems do-able. My current approach is to provision a VM image and use Incus for the execution. My main goal is to keep my current workflow of local/non-agent dev working seamlessly and share the source with the VM/agent.
This means sharing my working dirs with the agent VM but overlaying artifact dirs from VM-owned block devices so we don't take too big of an IO perf hit. I also don't want the agent to be able to git push so that means we need some quirky git config to rewrite origin paths and thread through some agent specific PATs ("thanks" GitHub) for read-only repo access. These ALSO need to be threaded through to the development containers - they need to clone private repos.
It's tangential to the sandboxing topic, really. I started the first post with a broader intent in mind and then elaborated on the sandboxing setup I'm working on. For AI-assisted coding, though, it's nice because Haskell provides a lot of feedback earlier in the development process compared to lots of other languages. It tends to work once it compiles (obviously not all the time).
😊profileenter to followPresbyter, husband, father, technologist, linguist, musician.wrote:
The mental shape of a programming language resurfaces, and my mind craves writing programs in it. Array languages, concatenative, Lisps, Smalltalks.
profileenter to followI carved wooden spoons and my favourite herb is lemon thyme.wrote:
Finally watched Project Hail Mary. Easily one of my top 5 favourite films but it’s still not nearly as good as the book — I feel like the cut some pretty important scenes
profileenter to followProgrammer by day and night. Lover of art. Mixing art and programming is the dream.replied toprofileenter to followI carved wooden spoons and my favourite herb is lemon thyme.:
I loved the book and I’m always fearful when a movie script is developed and a movie produced, so my relief after I saw the movie was immense. I too feel they’ve cut-out some bits, but the main thing that a book almost always takes my breath away with is fueling my imagination. A movie would (possibly) never nail that aspect.
profileenter to followreplied toprofileenter to followI carved wooden spoons and my favourite herb is lemon thyme.:
I just watched it as well. It was fun. There were a number of things that I felt weren't explained well and broke my suspension of disbelief; I haven't read the book, but I found myself really curious whether the book takes the time to justify things more. Obviously, the movie has a lot of pressure to rush to the next "big moment".
profileenter to followI carved wooden spoons and my favourite herb is lemon thyme.replied toprofileenter to follow:
If there’s one thing Andy Weir can’t be critiqued on then it’s not fully justifying all of the science. I think the film on the other hand can be hard to follow for someone who has neither read the book nor has a scientific background. It’s just hard to monologue about gravitational forces and relativistic speeds on screen.
🥸profileenter to followJust another AI guywrote:
I need to re wire my brain a bit. Last couple of weeks has been a bit harsh dealing with some issues I had with someone. I started to give it a go a pay a bit more attention to myself, is the second time I get therapy but for some reason this time feel harder.
I finally bit the bullet and have started to use dictation software more often, even outside of just my prompts. I really like it. Hopefully, computer use becomes much smoother soon. I would love to be able to control my computer with just my voice.
HN, and some carefully picked r/Reddits. Can't stand Lobste.rslobste.rsLobstersA computing-focused community centered around link aggregation and discussion..
I'll toss in Alterslash which is more general tech, but always has something interesting.
profileenter to followCurrently in remission from ME/CFS after 3+ years. Occasional software engineering leader, app developer, blogger, zwifter, and just being online.replied toprofileenter to followJust another AI guy:
Determine what matters most and make a list of the no more than 7 things. Do one thing well at a time, top down. Reprioritise as you learn more. Notes:
  1. If you half-arse a task and decide that'll do, it's evidence it wasn't the right priority. Learn.
  2. Any sort of productivity, multi-tasking, app, solution type thing is a scam or a money grab and isn't needed.
  3. People tend to remember 7 things well, but struggle with longer lists and particularly fail to remember things in the middle.
not my blog but i recently discovered acko.net which i can recommend. awesome personal website
I recently wrote about why you shouldn't use your phone while you poopNate.spotDon't use your phone while you poop!Your brain needs to offload just as badly as your butt does. I know it sounds boring to sit in there, alone, naked from the waist down, staring at the wal...
profileenter to followOld school metallian, hobbyist developer writing things mostly in Rust…mostlywrote:
Having a little difficulty seeing how long this service will exist. People are terrible. Sooner or later it will be found and ruined.
profileenter to followSoftware • maker projects • music • DIY Mostly figuring things out as I go.wrote:
signals. thinking about shifting my mental framework to identify signals instead of waiting for concepts to be assembled. exploring the amount of energy and opportunities for distractions through the operations of processing what just happened and what is happening to short circuit latent and unnecessary systems. cut through the assembly processes and identify the raw signals. recognizing that naming these "raw signals" is misleading. maybe, shifting observability lower in the stack.
profileenter to followYear 4 CS. Like tech, systems, game devwrote:
This SM is like a subreddit feed, except you also get a personalized feed along with 'hot' and 'latest' for people you follow. Or maybe it's modelled after twitter? Never used it so wouldnt know
i keep hallucinate.sitehallucinate.site open all day - the 3d pauses when the tab is out of focus, so i just get a ton of music i like without wasting cpu/gpu, and occassionally switch to the tab and play a little or chat if anyone's there. #funnotesenter to follow #vrnotesenter to follow #3dnotesenter to follow #ravenotesenter to follow #technonotesenter to follow
🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerswrote:
There is someone absolutely rotten and fetid in this airplane. Every 10 minutes. Dear Spaghetti Monster!
I think you're doing the right thing. You also clearly have both business and product development skills that are almost impossible to find in the same person. I'd try to think of how to monetize some of these and consider YC.
personal projects probably just arent the right knob if you want to get unpoor. if you want my honest advice i would recommend not showing hallucinate to potential employers, its landing page looks one-shot claude and is gpu heavy. but the others look very nice.
profileenter to followwrote:
It's not clear, based on personal experience, how long - if it all - the software development field will value devs who actually enjoy the work. Most people I know are producing mostly AI work and there's an obvious skill decline that's resulted from it. 1/?
But does it matter if your boss doesn't care? Or if their boss doesn't care? If the paychecks keep coming who cares? What's the point of choosing the mountain if the "joy" just means more hours on screen that could have been spent elsewhere? 2/?
我在中国是一个准脱离政府掌控者,基于身份的一切活动我都不参与,比如正式工作和网购。我也为此付出巨大代价,我的选择空间被极大压缩,行动能力损失严重。我只能通过少量免费wifi访问互联网
In China, I am practically independent of the government; I don't participate in any activities based on my status, such as formal work or online shopping. I've paid a heavy price for this; my choices have been severely limited, and my mobility has been significantly impaired. I can only access the internet through limited free Wi-Fi.
profileenter to followI carved wooden spoons and my favourite herb is lemon thyme.wrote:
After months of hardly any rain, I’m really enjoying a cozy day stuck indoors just listening to the downpour; getting on with doing some house cleaning. Is it too premature to declare this autumn⁇
🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerswrote:
Productive weekend started four hours ago for me (at 06:00 EDT). Visited aunties and mum. Just got home, and waiting for wife to finish preparing to get on the road again. Next destination: nursing home (visit family, and “adopted” elders).
Similar with having access to so much critically acclaimed media, but they are so emotionally or intellectually draining that I find myself rewatching ol' familiars. Availability seems just one aspect, and perhaps not even the most limiting factor. Maybe most people have a "limit" on number of "lives", as in number of times you fall in love, change, get inspired, connect, etc..
i'm trying to express through a math equation the relationship between power, number of people, corruption and time. corruption = (time in a position of power * power)/number of people who have power what do you think?
profileenter to followOld school metallian, hobbyist developer writing things mostly in Rust…mostlywrote:
The rho coding harness I’ve made has come along way and I’m constantly trying to evolve it, but whenever I go back to pi it’s startling the difference of what a solid computer science background brings.
🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyersreplied toprofileenter to followcreative technologistGitHubstagas - Overviewstagas has 462 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub. creator of textlog:
Seeing Hallucinate brought to mind infiniteslop.aiinfiniteslop.aiInfinite Slop by @levelsio + fal.aiAn endless AI-generated TV channel where the chat decides what airs next.. 😅
🤸profileenter to followcreative technologistGitHubstagas - Overviewstagas has 462 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub. creator of textlogreplied toprofileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyers:
Yes! I was thinking of doing the same, see &2912.
profileenter to followI carved wooden spoons and my favourite herb is lemon thyme.wrote:
Why do so many tools have JSON config files‽ Commenting why options have been set the way they have is just such a basic thing to want to do… Why do tech people have such an aversion to writing things down⁇
A lot of tech folks resist documentation because they think it provides them with job security. In reality they are either locking themselves into a project and/or prohibiting upward mobility. I don't want to work with folks who don't document.
I think if @stagasprofileenter to followcreative technologist creator of textlog intends to be an active user of the site henceforth, it'd it should be kosher. Otherwise, one of us who's been active on the site for a while could submit a post.
I plan to remain active, so not planning a top level post just yet. Will try to engage first for a few days so the ratio is low when I do the post.
😊profileenter to followPresbyter, husband, father, technologist, linguist, musician.wrote:
I read larsfaye.com/…/ai-coding-will-prevent-expertiselarsfaye.comAI Coding will Prevent Expertise | Lars FayeThe need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation. #llmnotesenter to follow Still trying to figure out the boundaries of these tools' strengths without outsourcing important thinking, problem-solving, and the collective building-up of a mental model of the systems we're developing. The shape of LLM tools as tools—fit for a purpose, ergonomic—is becoming clearer, and human patterns of behavior with them that do more harm than good are also becoming easier to recognize.