Zellyn Hunter

Uber: you know what’s better than eating the cost if we underestimated? Just wait until the user switches apps to call someone about how long they’re waiting, then when they switch back, pretend you’ve never heard of their ride, and show them a map to pick their destination!

@mcmillen.dev btw, is SemiColin games still a thing? What are you up to these days? I've seen a couple articles lately that take it as given that Memegen determined program success at Google, which is wild, and … possibly correct?

Wow, trying to sign up for Apple's developer program is just awful: - Safari Infinite redirect on signup link: use Chrome 🤦 - Phone cam won't focus when scanning ID (apparently common for years) 🤦 - Redirected to support at end: no support link 🤦 - Safari infinite redirect on support: use Chrome 🤦

Wait, what? IPv8 is a thing? I need @apenwarr.ca to tell me how to feel about that…

The folks on Pod Save America mentioned the ICE shooting in Biddeford, and it's the bit about the daughter wearing Bluey pajamas that's still wrecking me every day. Fucking monsters.

@simonwillison.net very minor nit: "A certain vintage if Python web nerd" → s/if/of/ — I had trouble understanding this sentence reading it while tired, and briefly wondered if it had something to do with interactive fiction 😂

We should standardize something akin to Unicode's rtl (right-to-left) marks, except for AI-generated text. It would carry across copy/paste operations between browsers, documents, etc. You could choose to format it differently.

The Onion, or NYT? This could all be The Onion…

Dear makers of animated movies (and really movies in general). At some point you will have characters dancing. You will feel tempted to make them breakdance and cut the shots as "funny". It is not funny. It just makes you look like you grew up in the 80s like me (ie. old). Same for robot dance…

iykyk

Dammit; now I have to use semicolons, properly curled curly “quotes”, and Silly Jokes™ to distinguish myself from LLMs. What will they come for next, my interrobang‽ It's not just us with a pedantic writing style and unnecessary knowledge of the Mac option-keystrokes suffering—it's everyone.

Glad I was at a stoplight when I hit the part of @grahamformaine.bsky.social‘s amazing interview on @podsaveamerica.crooked.com where he described having come to oppose US wars. “I know what’s it’s like when American-made high explosives interact with children” left me weeping.

www.anthropic.com/news/stateme... It seems hard for everyone to believe that A\, and the founders in particular, simply mean what they say. I guess that's rare these days?

5 authors I've read at least 5 books by (silly answers only edition): - Theodor Seuss Geisel - "Franklin W. Dixon" - Bill Watterson - Jack Chick - Moses

My Soham Parekh coefficient is and always will be ≤ 1, but I swear with Claude Code you could really push it if you wanted to

@simonwillison.net since I’m going to be out of town (so can sacrifice my home network!) and just told hackernews about it, you might find trifling.org cute (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642...)

Days later, I finally finish #adventofcode day 10 part 2, using my matrix reduction library from past years, and then further searching over free variables with the smallest ranges. Imagine my surprise when I got on Reddit, and found that this is _not_ a crazy over-complicated solution! Holy heck…

My modest proposal for Democrats’ messaging in upcoming elections: “Joe Biden proved conclusively that even a dead president is better for the economy than Donald Trump”

@simonwillison.net suggests coding without actually typing the code Honestly, I'm surprised that anyone with an unlimited token budget is *not* doing this. I've been coding since I was 12 (in 1987), but my job is emphatically no longer typing "if" "x" ">" "3" ":" simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/...

Came downstairs from work on Friday, and all three of my brothers were sitting in the living room! They live in Toronto, Waco, and LA, and had conspired to fly in for my 50th… 😍

The “Closing the Loop” images from the always-amazing @amygoodchild.bsky.social are absolutely gorgeous! www.amygoodchild.com/blog/buildin...

Why is "I'd like to restrict outbound internet connections from my project to a small allowlist, but still be able to talk to all the normal AWS/GCP things I _have_ to talk to to operate" such an infuriatingly difficult thing? It can't be uncommon…

That surprising feeling when your `terraform apply` actually works, without errors! So unexpected. And it only took 9 commits in my PR…

Should I listen to the Ross Douthat JD Vance interview? I mean, I know I'm going to, but at the same time wondering why I would inflict that on myself. Then again, this might be a good day for it: I've already seen the picture of “Sam and Jony” so perhaps I've already hit rock bottom?

Good news! As onsite/offsite budgets tighten, constant reorgs guarantee you'll still be able to see your coworkers! a) "annual" team offsite b) semi-annual reorg 2 months later c) "clearly we need a post-reorg onsite"

If you like fantasy, and murder mysteries, The Tainted Cup, and A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett are very good. It's been a while since I felt sad to end a book, wanting to hang out with the characters more. I'm glad I only found out about the series after there were already two!

“Big interviews tomorrow. I'll make sure I go to bed early so I'm well-rested.“ Brain: “I love your enthusiasm, and you always bring great ideas to the table… But I was thinking: how about we lie in bed half-awake until 4am instead?”

Based on my interactions with them as a job _seeker_, if you're a tech company not quite yet large enough to hire your own recruiter, you could do worse than to check out somatalent.com

New "Projects" page on my website: zellyn.com/page/project... (The old page listed things I _wanted_ to do, not things that were done or partly done.)

So far, being in an interview is much more pleasant than waiting around between interviews. Going well so far. Even getting to the point where I can type while being watched. Sort of.

Nintendo just made it impossible for me to play Terraria with my kid 😔 Their new “virtual game card” system breaks the (supported, according to their docs) ability for him to use software on the main Switch while I use it on the secondary. Not even sure how to buy it twice as a fix if I wanted to…

Call me Chihiro was beautiful and slow and sad and you should watch it

Has anyone trained an LLM on single-language documents, using only languages (or just documents) that share no linguistic roots/cognates? Disclaimer: I want to know how infeasible the Star Trek universal translator is: can you just feed it enough new tokens and it can translate a new language? #ai

@apenwarr.ca @crawshaw.io Who should I talk with if I'm interested in working at Tailscale, but don't want to throw a dart at similar-but-different entries on the jobs page and would rather have a conversation to figure out where I might be useful?

If you haven't tried OpenAI image generation recently… give it a try (I'm just using the free quota). My wife's dad always says, "Keep it between the ditches", so I asked ChatGPT to make a card. Prompt in alt-text — it nailed it on the first try. I'm getting weird feels on what images _mean_ now…

Holy shit Pantheon is good. How did I only just learn about this in a Wired "35 best shows on Netflix" article? 😂

You should go listen to @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social ‘s latest podcast episode now. I can’t promise you won’t end up crying in your kitchen over the sink during his opening monologue. But it’s important.