My favorite way to know if a product/service works as advertised is to… use it. The devil is (usually) in the details, and the proof is in the eating. People naturally identify with the software/services they use, so getting an accurate picture (as an outsider) is tricky nowadays. A TOS can also give insight into a company’s product/service.

Every so often I’m reminded of how tricky Wikipedia is — especially for current events. It’s not magically unbiased. Inventing authoritative sources of truth with well timed edits for real world persuasive power is the oldest working trick in the book.

Words and identifiers are at most substitutes for intangibles that cannot be expressed. The power of naming matters more than the name itself.

Am I cool now? :)

“The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”

Remember when it was thought that all combustible materials consist of two parts? Phlogiston and dephlogiston (calx). Goodness, someone today just made me remember the most random thing from chemistry history (from when I was in school).

The ‘best current practice’ category of rfcs beats any blog post you can read for a topic. For example, I recently got tired of my domain host’s dns flakiness and did my own thing.

I couldn’t fully remember how soa serial numbers worked for secondaries and rfc 2182 showed me the money real fast. The alternative is sludging through multiple serps of ad spam.

It’s unusual, but my favorite part of blogging is coming up with the most boring and anti–clickbait titles possible. In another life, I’d be an undercover agent.

Most software, framework, and programming debates online reduce to disputes over company or personal preferences — mindshare. Technical and architectural debates are rare — those fights are the most interesting because that’s the important part, at least imo.

I’ve noticed that ddos attacks are becoming commonplace on my domain hosting provider’s dns name servers (Porkbun).

Looks like they’ve migrated over to Cloudflare to remedy the situation, but the migration was wonky.

In the end, having full programmatic control over dns records, transfers, and zones is priceless. So… with a few glue records and zone files — my dns is now back under my control with bind.

There’s an old article from the developer of NetNewsWire (RSS reader) that questions the idea of the unread count. You can’t read all the unread — so why entertain a time consuming mythos around that number?

It applies everywhere — What narratives might people create around the programming language % numbers on GitHub? Do they waste time thinking/fretting about their mythos? Fun to think about.

Squint hard enough and it sure looks like a command line interface.