Weekly Thing 332 / Compute, Avatar, Cryptography
Good morning! ☕️
Missed y'all last weekend. This time I feel like I had a better reason though as it was our annual Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser. We had a great time making over 300 candles and sold nearly every single one of them to raise money for good causes. More on that next week as I wrap up all the proceeds.
I also got glasses 👓 for the first time and am doing my best to learn how to see again. Going from no glasses with off-the-shelf +1 readers to prescription glasses with progressive lenses that have 400 different adaptations in each lens has been way harder than I would have expected. I literally feel like I’m learning to see again. Each day gets better, but it has been hard to read articles and I find working on a computer to be difficult with the progressives right now. Shocker, I tend to do a lot of working on a computer. 🤪
Hope you have a great weekend! 🍂
PS: Don't miss the custom Wordle Thing at the end of this weeks email!
Currently
Playing: I've been getting my four bonus matches in every day in Clash Royale. Usually I’m playing with Tyler right over my shoulder giving me coaching. I’m starting to actually know what I’m doing and thinking more about strategy. It is a lot of fun.
Watching: We recently watched the Australian Netflix series Fisk and enjoyed it a lot. It is a tad quirky. The characters really grew on us, particularly the lead Helen. Just two seasons at six episodes each so we already have finished it!
It is a rare sight for the Northern Lights to be visible in Minneapolis.
November 11, 2025
Minneapolis, MN
Notable
Pagefind — Static low-bandwidth search at scale
One of the more annoying features for a blogger to make for their site is search, and it is one that we all want to have. If you use something like WordPress or something else with a database they all pretty much punt that to the database and use whatever the SQL server can do. This is okay, but not great. Almost no blog uses a true search index.
Static sites have it even harder. There is no database and no SQL server to ask search questions to. You have to do it in the client. Most sites figure out a way to do it but it’s clunky and often involves loading a ton of data in the client via Javascript. Pagefind has a radically better approach.
The goal of Pagefind is that websites with tens of thousands of pages should be searchable by someone in their browser, while consuming as little bandwidth as possible. Pagefind’s search index is split into chunks, so that searching in the browser only ever needs to load a small subset of the search index. Pagefind can run a full-text search on a 10,000 page site with a total network payload under 300kB, including the Pagefind library itself. For most sites, this will be closer to 100kB.
I love this and for now I’m hoping that micro.blog adds this natively or some other plug-in developer takes a go at it. It seems like a much better solution than anything else I've seen for static sites. Found this via a great writeup from Tim Bray.
Your URL Is Your State
Lovely article that dives into the richness of data that a URL can contain. Every developer should learn this structure deeply. So many times you see URLs that just contain a GUID that is obviously a pointer to some caching system in the backend. Obtuse, unsharable, difficult to deal with.
It was one of those moments where something you once knew suddenly clicks again with fresh significance. Here was a URL doing far more than just pointing to a page. It was storing state, encoding intent, and making my entire setup shareable and recoverable. No database. No cookies. No localStorage. Just a URL.
This got me thinking: how often do we, as frontend engineers, overlook the URL as a state management tool? We reach for all sorts of abstractions to manage state such as global stores, contexts, and caches while ignoring one of the web's most elegant and oldest features: the humble URL.
Good URL design is designing "with the grain" of the web.
Mr TIFF
Our digital worlds are filled with programs, algorithms, file formats, and a million other things that have all been created by people over recent decades. Some of those names folks know. The vast majority nobody does. TIFF is an image file format created years ago to help in desktop publishing and other tools. Steve Carlsen made TIFF. This article is about this bloggers search for him. I love this callout toward the end.
Out of curiosity I put Stephen's email address, now that I knew it, into a Duck Duck search and found him helping people online with TIFF queries long after Aldus had been acquired by Adobe. He also contributed to a Google Group called tiffcentral.
That is the Internet I love — where the one person that made TIFF, years later is in a discussion board answering some questions about the thing.
You Should Write An Agent · The Fly Blog
Great article walking through creating an agent using Python and then extending it with tools and capabilities. It is all a pretty simple example, but it is powerful to show how much capability you can create with these. I think it is fair to say that today every developer should know how to author their own agents with sub-agents and tools. Compared to deploying something in AWS, this is easy.
The author correctly highlights what I know to be one of the biggest challenges — managing context windows.
You're allotted a fixed number of tokens in any context window. Each input you feed in, each output you save, each tool you describe, and each tool output eats tokens (that is: takes up space in the array of strings you keep to pretend you're having a conversation with a stateless black box). Past a threshold, the whole system begins getting nondeterministically stupider. Fun!
No, really. Fun! You have so many options. Take "sub-agents". People make a huge deal out of Claude Code's sub-agents, but you can see now how trivial they are to implement: just a new context array, another
callto the model. Give eachcalldifferent tools. Make sub-agents talk to each other, summarize each other, collate and aggregate. Build tree structures out of them. Feed them back through the LLM to summarize them as a form of on-the-fly compression, whatever you like.Your wackiest idea will probably (1) work and (2) take 30 minutes to code.
Great stuff.
Micro.blog offers an indie alternative to YouTube with its ‘Studio’ video hosting plan - HeyDingus
I host all my blogs on micro.blog and in general think it is the best blogging solution on the market today. This new plan is a big addition for video that is really cool. The key here is to allow IndieWeb publishers to host their own video, without YouTube hosting everything that exists, and still have the performance be great. There is a lot of transcoding magic and slicing of video files needed to make that happen and micro.blog now does that with these Studio plans. While not for me, I love that this exists and is a step to publishing video that doesn't rely on Google (aka YouTube).
"Good engineering management" is a fad | Irrational Exuberance
Will Larson with a great article talking about something I've observed and adapted to, but not articulated nearly as well as him. Excuse the lengthy excerpt:
In each of these transitions, the business environment shifted, leading to a new formulation of ideal leadership. That makes a lot of sense: of course we want leaders to fit the necessary patterns of today. Where things get weird is that in each case a morality tale was subsequently superimposed on top of the transition:
- In the 2010s, the morality tale was that it was all about empowering engineers as a fundamental good. Sure, I can get excited for that, but I don't really believe that narrative: it happened because hiring was competitive.
- In the 2020s, the morality tale is that bureaucratic middle management have made organizations stale and inefficient. The lack of experts has crippled organizational efficiency. Once again, I can get behind that--there's truth here--but the much larger drivers aren't about morality, it's about ZIRP-ending and optimism about productivity gains from AI tooling.
The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it's pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you're setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because "good leadership" is just a fad.
This is amazing and I completely "feel" what he is saying. I've been leading technology teams for nearly 30 years and in the big challenges, the waves that are coming over our industry and business environment, have changed many times. As a leader you must also change and adapt. The inputs are many and properly evaluating how those inputs have changed and how that affects what you do as a leader is critical to "staying on the bus" and having impact.
I love his list of core and growth skills. This article is gold for leaders of teams, and while it is written for a technology leader I’m sure is applicable to other leadership roles and domains.
I’m a fan of taking time to refactor your own tools or capabilities. I've shared many times that I think doing an annual start and stop list is a necessary practice. In a faster growing company you may do it every 6 months or every quarter. But Larson is hitting on a bigger thing. When the fundamentals shift in technology, you need to assess differently and literally operate differently. For me this has meant leaning into AI obsessively, amongst other things.
Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line | Ken Segall
Google Maps is filled with ads and paid placements. It is one of the reasons I don't use that product, or much of anything Google makes. I wish that Apple would rid themselves of the advertising offerings they have entirely but I suspect that the advertising in the AppStore both makes a ton of money and is meaningful to app developers gaining audiences. Are Ads in Maps the same as an advertisement playing when I log into my computer? Absolutely not, but it is a slippery slope.
Book Recommendations | book.sv
Book recommendations seem to be a pretty niche thing. There is a similar use case for movie and TV shows, but I think because the time investment is lower I care less about the rigor that goes into them. I also assume they are being manipulated by some algorithmic goal that is unclear to me. This book recommendation engine though is really interesting and in my limited tests gave really good results.
Git AI is now 1.0
A lot of development teams are trying to answer this question — what code in this repo was written by an agent versus a person. There are multiple reasons you might ask this question ranging from finding problem areas in code or just attributing the productivity impact of AI agents. This project is specifically created to answer this.
Git AI Project Goals: build the standard for tracking AI code from development to production:
- Multi-agent from day 0. Most teams use a combination of AI agents -- they should all work well with Git AI.
- Install per-machine, not per-repo. Related: teammates without Git AI installed do not experience a degraded experience.
- Work 100% offline.
- No background daemon, keyloggers or filewatchers. 🤮
- Avoid heuristics. Coding agents are responsible for explicitly marking code they contribute as AI generated. Git AI is responsible for tracking that code going forward.
- Unnoticeable performance impact <100ms for common commands, <1s for large rebases or resets.
- Git Native and compatible with any SCM (stores AI attributions in Git notes)
tl;dr - With a lot of help from the community, we figured out how to reliably track AI code through any Git workflow.
It looks super interesting and well designed.
GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT | OpenAI
This additional level of personalization for ChatGPT seems like a notable add:
Earlier this year, we added preset options to tailor the tone of how ChatGPT responds. Today, we're refining those options to better reflect the most common ways people use ChatGPT. Default, Friendly (formerly Listener), and Efficient (formerly Robot) remain (with updates), and we're adding Professional, Candid, and Quirky. These options are designed to align with what we've learned about how people naturally steer the model, making it quick and intuitive to choose a personality that feels uniquely right.
I would think they would be able to make a guess at the best tone to respond with based on how you talk to ChatGPT with your questions.
I've found success telling ChatGPT what your Insights Discovery profile is and letting it use that in how it works with you. It adapts very well based on that information.
Journal
Making more candles for the Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser for next week! I got the labels a little faster so we can put those on before pouring making it a bit more efficient. ⏱️
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
Nov 1, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Tammy and I were talking about movies from our youth with Tyler and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure came up. Tammy decided this needed to happen so tonight we watched this 1989 classic. I can’t say that it held up that well but there were some good laughs. Tyler thought everything about it was strange and why did they say words like “excellent” so much. We told him it is just like saying “fire” today. He disagreed. Keanu Reeves is so young in this movie. Tyler started to take the plot apart Inception-style with the time travel -- it does not stand up to the test. And just like all movies that are before everyone having a smartphone it is wild how there are no phones in the movie.
6 — 7 Mile Hike
Nov 2, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Tammy and I hopped in the car for Lebanon Hills this afternoon to get out in the woods and hike a bit. Tammy always finds it a touch annoying that I want to have a route planned out and know what trails we are taking. She would rather just start walking and see where the path takes us. Today, we did it her way and just started walking. Turn left here, right there.
About 3 miles in I wasn’t really sure which way we were going and I will admit that I tried to make extra long glances at the trail maps as we passed them. But I stayed true to the task and just followed wherever Tammy was leading us. The trails seemed familiar.
After a while we got on some trails that we both thought we had never been on. There was also long stretches with no intersecting trails which isn’t common in Lebanon Hills. After what seemed like a mile we saw a parking lot and another trail map, but it wasn’t our parking lot.
Somehow with our random turns we had navigated ourselves to the completely opposite side of the park at a different parking lot. We were 4.5 miles in and I admit to considering for a moment getting a Lyft to take us to our car, but it was a nice day and off we went to return to the other side of the park.
Even the kids elementary school has gotten into this “6 -- 7” thing. 🤷♂️
POAP 7487921 at Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser.
Glasses 👓
Nov 7, 2025 at 5:19 PM
I picked up my new glasses today. I've had to use readers for a while but in the last few years my eyesight has gotten worse. It was time to get a better solution.
These new glasses are progressive lenses that according to the marketing have 400 specific lenses for every position you look. They told me it will take a couple weeks to get used to them and so far when I put them on it is definitely something to adapt to. Things are sharp but it all seems strange.
I'm hopeful this will result in my eyes not being so tired at the end of the day. 🤞
Tyler is ready for tomorrow’s United game! ⚽️
We are ready to host our fifth annual Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser today! We are supporting Animal Welfare Institute, Border Angels, The Food Group, and Sandy Hook Promise this year.
My buddy Jim and I enjoying Kramarczuk’s sausages at Allianz Field during the Minnesota United v. Seattle Sounders game. The BEST sausages in the Twin Cities.
Tonight’s MN United v Seattle Sounders playoff match had everything! Without a doubt the most exciting soccer game I’ve ever been to.
- United trailing 2 - 0.
- Tie it up 2 - 2.
- Get player ejected on RED card.
- Go ahead 3 - 2.
- Seattle tie it up 3 - 3.
- Penalty kicks tie at 3 - 3.
- Sudden death penalties go to goalies!
- WIN! WIN! WIN!
An amazing game for the ages!
Realized we had some big usability issues in our donation tracking sheets for day 1 of Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser (right side). I designed a complete redo of it for today’s sale (middle) that I tested this morning and is much better. I also created a candle guide to include with the candles! 🤩
I’ve had a blast learning Clash Royale with Tyler. They just announced a bunch of changes to “the economy” which meant I needed to use my Book of Cards. I decided to “pay to win” and level up my Witch and Cannon to get maximum benefit from the books. Play Clash Royale? Let’s connect.
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Briefly
Time for me to come clean — I've never used virtual environments for my Python projects. Frankly it is all too complicated for me. However, looking at how uv does this I think I could make this work. → uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade - Dr. Emily L. Hunt
There are a million posts on how to get acquired — I love that Pike wrote about how to not get acquired. → How to Not Get Acquired - Allen Pike
I’m a Shortcuts power user for sure and there were some really good additions in the recent releases. The "Use Model" capability of Apple Intelligence by itself is something I’m confident you could get value from and it is right on your phone today. → What’s new in Shortcuts for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26 - Apple Support
This looks like a nice and simple service that could take the place of Gravatar. → unavatar, the ultimate avatar service that offers everything you need to easily retrieve user avatars
Makes total sense that this would happen. Too much upside for both companies to not. → AWS and OpenAI announce multi-year strategic partnership | OpenAI
This is a nice surprise — when linking to an app I would still prefer to link to the publishers own site, but this is a nice fallback. I would think this is also to help search engines, but even more importantly it makes the App Store accessible to LLMs. → The App Store now has a pretty sweet solution for the web – Six Colors
Love this focus on super fast simple sites. My blog will never be this small because I love including images too much. → 512KB Club | A showcase of lightweight websites.
I need to keep this site for next year — this looks like a super detailed way to track fall colors. → Fall Foliage Map 2025: Daily Updates and Forecasts!
I've been an active donor to the Internet Archive for well over a decade. I’m glad that they survived this legal fight but how we are approaching property rights in the digital space continues to be a struggle. → Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost - Ars Technica
More advanced approaches to building out ever more complicated MCP capabilities. Again focusing on managing context. → Code execution with MCP: building more efficient AI agents Anthropic
These "how I use AI" posts are always good reads to amplify your learning building on others experiences. → How I use AI (Oct 2025) - Ben Stolovitz
Deep dive using on-chain data to see how Bitcoin is changing hands. Bitcoin has really stabilized above $100,000 USD at this point. Is another crypto winter coming? Maybe? I’m starting to wonder. → Making Sense of Bitcoin’s Changing Market Rythm
Welcome to the future! 🤪 → Six coding agents at once
I love reading about the incredible variety of programming languages. This one sure reads a lot like C but has some really modern takes on the style. Almost looks Pythonic in some ways. → Why is Zig so Cool?
Interesting. I wasn't familiar with RightToCompute. Curious to read more about them. I did some preliminary AI-assisted comparisons with the EFF to get a sense of them and it is interesting territory. Proactively defending against limitations on what people are allowed to run on computers in the abstract seems like a good thing. → Montana Becomes First State to Enshrine ‘Right to Compute’ Into Law - Montana Newsroom
Incredibly powerful command-line tool that you can use to manage music files with a ton of power. The video is a great overview of the features. Impressive stuff. → beets: the music geek‘s media organizer
Date and time pickers are notoriously unhelpful. This library does a pretty good job. → Pikaday
Wild set of little tools to do odd things with type. → Space Type Generator
Little command line utility notably from Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke that helps you manage a ton of directories for little projects or experiments you want to "try". → try: fresh directories for every vibe
An incredible array of learning materials for cryptography. → Cryptography 101 with Alfred Menezes – Video lectures, notes, and exercises in all areas of applied cryptography
I was bummed to see Minnesota is not one of the states that you can import your drivers license for. However I’m excited to see I can add my passport. → Apple rolls out Digital ID in Apple Wallet for U.S. passport holders – Six Colors
The fact that Ethereum Name Service has a clear plain to work alongside, instead of in opposition to, the traditional Domain Name Service is one of the things that excited me the most about it. Web3 needs to integrate into the web. → How ENS Is Approaching ICANN's gTLD Expansion Program | ENS Blog
Something new for those that read all the way to the bottom. Do you play Wordle? Well Wordle now allows you to create your very own puzzles now. Here is a specific Wordle puzzle for this weeks Weekly Thing. The word is contained in the titles of the links that are in this issue.
Wordle Thing 332 — The clue is: "An Agents Rise or Fall"
Finally, a haiku to leave you with…
URLs mark your home,
Digital states we now roam—
Maps of our own minds. 🗺️
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