Perry Govier

Occasionally, people ask me who I think will win in a given election. The best indicator I've found is whichever group is having the most fun usually wins. A related thought occurred to me today. If that same rule applies to programming, I think AI-assisted programming is definitely winning.

Congratulations to the Rust community! Rust is now out of its experimental support by the Linux kernel. I think this goes a long ways toward positioning Rust as the low level language of the 21st century. lwn.net/Articles/104...

I’m working on some new material for a class that has a lot of international students and I have a question. People whose primary language isn’t English, does saying “that” help you understand the sentence? “Jack ran so he could catch the bus.” vs “Jack ran so that he could catch the bus.”

Looks like JavaScript is joining Python as a first tier language in the AI space. monkeys.com.co/blog/anthrop...

This little snippet made debugging view transitions a lot easier

“All you need to do is upgrade” is my favorite way to improve performance. When c++11 came out, the language added move semantics. Simply upgrading the compiler was a ~10% perf increase in most codebases. Being able to make big perf improvements without breaking APIs signals good API design.

OK Internet, what are the best Spotify alternatives? I’m currently looking at Apple Music and Tidal. What pays musicians the best? Has the best apps?

AWS outages are the modern snowday

Open Source friends, do you work on or have close ties to an open source project that would like help? Get it here! @uwmadison.bsky.social's Open Source Programming Office will provide paid interns to help you triage issues, verify bugs, and submit pull requests. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

This isn’t going to end well.

Big news in the @react.dev community this week. I think this is a great thing, and addresses some of the tension and fracturing we’ve seen in the community over the past few years. react.dev/blog/2025/10...

This new translation feature with AirPods Pro is a good example of how Apple can turn an existing technology into a must-have feature by improving the UX

📙 📗 📘 📕 The History of Themeable User Interfaces: bradfrost.com/blog/post/th... It was an incredible experience to write this piece. It blurs together the history of computers, video games, the web, design systems, and my own existence on this planet.

This makes a lot more sense to me than MCP servers to help an AI interact with third party data. Rather than create a new proxy that sits between an AI and your API, just create a universal way to describe your API to an AI, and let it interact with the API directly. github.com/universal-to...

TIL: you can copy and paste a table from Notion into a markdown file and it will have the correct formatting. Well done! It’s the little things.

Programming instructors, want students to be able to use GitHub Copilot as an agent to ask questions but not let students have Copilot write the code for them? You can do so with this:

Anyone know of a way to allow @github.com Copilot’s chat functionality, but disable code generation? This is for a class assignment. I want students to be able to ask the AI questions as a sort of tutor, but not write the code for them. At least, not in the intro course.

Huge improvement. The first beta was far from the level of design quality I expect from Apple. 9to5mac.com/2025/07/07/l...

My main thought when reading Project Hail Mary was “I hope they make this into a movie.” When they announced the movie my main thought was “I hope they don’t screw this up.” So far, it doesn’t disappoint. youtu.be/m08TxIsFTRI

I love @apnews.com, but every once and a while, I get a new alert that really doesn’t fit in with the rest

We obtained records showing how an ex-DOGE staffer with no medical experience used AI to identify which VA contracts to kill. “I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says,” he said. Read more: propub.li/4emGV69

God I love the internet outside the US. Suddenly all my feeds are sane again. American social media algorithms are a different world.

@smashingmagazine.com looks like @kagi.com has indexed your production server and your edge node. Might want to make a tweak to your indexing rules.

As an oldschool Digg and Diggnation fan, I’m pretty excited to see this. I am a bit concerned that it will wind up just another manipulated and/or bot-filled site, but I’m hopeful. reboot.digg.com

Woah, Moby released a massive library of open licensed music you can use in video and other creative work. mobygratis.com

The great thing about living through political chaos is the music. open.spotify.com/album/66esRf...

PSA for K12 teachers: You no longer have an excuse to Comic Sans. microsoft.design/articles/int...

@figma.com, I love you but automatically adding a service that loads when my computer starts, and then doing it again, and again, and again is shady AF. No means no.

TIL: The command `npm i` is different than `npm install`. I use them interchangeably. Now I'm wondering how many dependency bugs that were just magically fixed with no rhyme or reason were ultimately due to this. github.com/rogeriochave...

Wow, big day for open source UI libraries and tools

Gorgeous UIKit v3 by the Figma team www.figma.com/community/fi...

Here's the data and code I put together for my live precinct WI model tonight. It's nothing super special and would have benefited from more counties, but got the job done. Figure I'd share in the interest of transparency and educating people about R gist.github.com/elliottmorri...

Programming friends, I've started a new meetup in the Madison area about programming with AI and using AI in the programs we create. Our first meetup will be on May 6th. I hope to see you there! www.meetup.com/programming-...

Before I got into programming, I was into audio and video production. After all these years, programming has brought me back to editing video.

Command and Conquer was one of my favorite games growing up. Pretty cool to see the source code for it now. github.com/electronicar...

Go forth with the confidence of the Microsoft Authenticator app telling you to open the Microsoft Authenticator App to enter a security code provided by the Microsoft Authenticator app.

I can’t believe this fight is still going on. I don’t work with Wordpress, so I haven’t watched closely, but a fight this long and this petty hurts the entire open source ecosystem.

TIL: Git worktrees are a thing. Great idea. How have I not encountered them before now?

Playing around with Cursor.com this afternoon. This is finally mature enough to use as your daily IDE. Really impressive results and massive developer speed increase

It has been a while since I checked to see what CSS frameworks are active. I gotta say, I love the simplicity and style of Pico. picocss.com

There’s so much pent up energy in the market, just waiting for some stability to move. I suspect they’re gonna have to keep waiting or look elsewhere. The next president to be somewhat stable is going to look like an economic genius without even doing anything.

When is -20F a good thing? When you moved here from further north, where they only have science trivia to keep them warm.

Dems, I love you, but the dismantling of our government and constitution is not a fundraising opportunity. In order for things to get better, the party needs to realize this. Stop with the 3-5 texts per day asking for money. I realize campaigns cost money, but this is alarmingly tone deaf.

This is technically impressive, gorgeous, and looks genuinely fun