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\nTL;DR: It's been nearly a month! I built a terminal multiplexer for ultrawide monitors on a whim, got trending topics working in my feed reader, shared a synthpop mixtape, 3D-printed an uncomfortable amount of hot dogs, and brokered a fragile peace treaty between the cats.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn a whim, I started a new project this month called wideboi to solve a very specific problem: trying to wrangle a stupid number of terminal sessions across an ultrawide monitor. I just want to have a bunch of things running, go zoop zoop zoop between, and vaguely see them chattering away while I stare off and dissociate.
wideboi tries to treat the sessions as a fan of overlapping cards to swipe through:
I took a ton of inspiration from gwae. That's a terminal multiplexer inspired by the niri window manager, which is a whole other rabbit hole down which I started to go but quickly bailed out.
\nBeyond screwing with ANSI animations for BBSes back in the day, I hadn't played much with raw terminal logic before. I figured it would be worth throwing Claude at it to see what came out. In the process, I've learned a ton about how terminal multiplexers actually work under the hood. Turns out there's a lot going on in there, these days.
\nI've just about got this thing to a point where it feels like a potential daily driver for me. Works over ssh and I've just about got the bugs worked out of detaching / attaching. From there, I'm thinking I might try building a web client for it. I know there's already stuff out there that does this, but it's been neat to tinker with it myself.
\nThis week I finally tackled an issue that had been sitting in feedspool-go since January: trending topics. If the server's up and I haven't broken anything, you can see my current trending topics right here. It's a static web site, so hopefully it can take a few hits.
\n\nMy reader groups items by feed, which is great for skimming a blog but terrible\nfor noticing when fifteen feeds are all writing about the same story.
\nSo now it\nruns every item through a local embedding model, stores the vectors in\nSQLite, and clusters them by similarity. A small local LLM then names each\ncluster. The result is a page that says \"here's what everyone's talking\nabout\", with the articles from all those feeds gathered under each topic.
\nThis is me finally using all that stuff I wrote about embedding and clustering, a couple years ago, for something actually practical.
\nIt all shipped as v1.2.0. If I\nget around to it, I might draft up a longer post nerding out about how all the\ngrungy parts work.
\nSince I built a whole thing for it, I keep wanting to share more mixtapes. So, here's one with some of the stuff that's been stuck in my head this month. Semi-random mix of shoegaze, post-punk, dark stuff - oh and Mother Mother, for some reason:
\n\n\nMiss Biscuits and Minnaloushe are finally starting to tolerate each other's presence. They haven't become best friends, but we reached a peaceful detente on the living room floor. And because one can never have too many cat photos, here's Minnaloushe hiding in the yoga mat basket and relaxing in a plush bed on my desk.
\n![\"Fluffy](\"68d725fb59bf.jpg\")
![\"Black](\"9c7a04c82dff.jpg\")
![\"Two](\"75fa4540a14b.jpg\")
![\"Black](\"074def91b0b0.jpg\")
![\"A](\"8f77d30e025f.jpg\")
![\"Black](\"8779f2af7534.jpg\")
I found NASA's incredible repository of 3D models and promptly went to town.
\nI printed a Voyager spacecraft and a Curiosity rover. Having tiny physical representations of humanity's greatest scientific achievements sitting on my desk is weirdly comforting. But I cannot take anything too seriously, so I also printed several highly realistic hot dogs and a completely flaccid, floppy corn-on-the-cob.
\n![\"3D-printed](\"8240eb112529.jpg\")
![\"A](\"621cc402ae1e.jpg\")
![\"Voyager](\"6fd67f4b109d.jpg\")
![\"Mars](\"3efd18184039.jpg\")
I watched someone painstakingly type in an ambitious 1986 C64 game from a terribly type-set magazine:
\nMy most embarrassing technical moment of the month was accidentally filling a hard drive by running an rsync loop back onto the machine itself. Happens to the best of us.
Stop Thinking of LLMs as Next-Token Predictors - An interesting piece arguing that RLHF changes the nature of the model beyond basic autocomplete.
\nAI-Written Code Is Still Your Code. Are You OK With That? - A stark reminder that the accountability for generated code still lands squarely on the developer's shoulders.
\nEngineers grieve a job that no longer exists - A piece from LeadDev that resonated with me about the loss of traditional coding tasks as AI takes over the boilerplate. I wrote about this, back in March, with \"Grief and the AI Split\".
\nStaff+ engineers must rebuild team culture - Discussing how AI shifts the culture toward autonomous work, requiring deliberate effort to maintain collaboration.
\nUSBSID-Pico: Bridging Real Commodore 64 Sound to Modern USB - pretty keen hardware project turning SID chips into USB audio hardware.
\nWeb tech and nostalgia: Newsonaut's defense of Firefox as our last hope for browser engine diversity, Antiquated HTML Snippets (a fun look back at obsolete markup that still haunts the web), and Pure CSS halftone patterns for the 80s/90s printing nerds.
\nMedia archiving rabbit holes: Byte - a visual archive is an incredible zoomable map of every single page of BYTE magazine, and The Test Card Gallery archives old BBC/ITV tuning signals.
\n\"It's time to talk about my writerdeck\" breaks down building a distraction-free writing machine on Linux
\nSPACESHIPS offers a clever inverted Asteroids game where you place gravity wells instead of flying the ship.
\nMy favorite TIL of the month: it turns out that James Cassidy of Information Society is a soil scientist at OSU.
\nThe Verge's Version History did a great episode on How The Oregon Trail became a generational icon.
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