nikhil.io

A pretty comprehensive solution! I was looking for this when attempting to learn me some Bun and make a small script that would live-reload a single page (with SASS and Tailwind). And voila: a significantly better solution than the duct tapey thing I came up with 🤣

Found it via this repository.

Watched this with the wife. The first season was an absolute masterpiece. Set design, story, suspense, acting, cinematography, and a favorite thing I look forward to in dystopian/post-apocalyptic sci-fi shows: retro computers and user interfaces 🥰 It makes me very happy to imagine Humanity finally being rid of ads, trackers, unempathetic user-hostile design, and shitty product managers, even if there’s very little else left.

I couldn’t imagine how they built that exquisitely complex and claustrophobic set. Luckily enough, Adam Savage had the same question and met the people who made it. Even if you’re not into this sort of thing, the video is worth a watch to appreciate just how insanely creative people can be.

The soundtrack… oh my the soundtrack. Just so beautiful and befitting. By Atli Övarsson, who joins his Icelandic brethren in creating ‘that’ sound. Think Ludwig Göransson for The Mandalorian, Jóhann Jóhannsson for Sicario, Hildur Guðnadóttir for Chernobyl¹. Don’t work for Pitchfork and will resist a description (which would’ve included words like “congruent”) but it’s one of those things where I now stand a pretty chance of guessing if the composer were Icelandic.

All that being said, the second season was okay and we decided we don’t really care about the unanswered questions and the cliffhanger and won’t be finishing the two others they have planned.

Steve Zahn is an excellent actor.

Saw with KL, UE, and friends. I’ve never written a screenplay and would be laughably shit at it but I genuinely feel that I could’ve knocked this one out in a few days.

There’s a new Captain America who’s trying to find his footing in the MCU following the very dignified and demure exit of Steve Rogers. This new Captain has

• His iconic shield from the old guy
• Wings via someone called the Falcon
• which have been enhanced by Vibranium via a Black Panther/Wakanda hookup, and
• a Helmet from Ant Man

This amazing armor lets him do pretty anything he’d like, even if he didn’t consume serum for spiritual purposes. However, even with all these blessings, he stops the big bad villain by asking him to be nice for a fucking change.

The only saving grace here is Anthony Mackie’s earnest performance.

There’s a villain with a disgustingly severe acne problem whose superpower is his ability to compute the probabilities of various events. He is sold to us as a genius… who is stymied and thwarted non-stop by his nemesis and, presumably due to therapy, is pretty vocal with just how surprised he is at how things pan out. I get that he never exactly says he’d be 100% successful but this is laughable “So you’re telling me there’s a chance” territory here.

There’s also Harrison Ford. We saw this clip of him on Conan before the movie began and this is all I could think of. Yes, he points at stuff. And he slays at 82. It’s rather amazing. I am no probability genius and this is simple arithmetic but: Ford was 50 when The Fugitive came out (an all-time favorite) and he’s capable of as much intensity. What a star.

He plays the President of the United States, who is an unstable character, estranged from his family, addicted to power, and turns into a giant red monster who destroys the White House. Silly stories right?

This child plays a minor character who has as much impact on the story as any one of the random NPC prison guards or soliders who litter every scene.

There’s a coalition of global powers that features France, India, USA, Japan, and a Conspicuous Absence 🇨🇳 Too big of a market to sully with disasters I suppose. The action sequences were really cool though, particularly the Navy battle (between the US and its archenemy Japan).

I had a giant pretzel, a pizza, and two enormous servings of club soda.

One could use one’s talent and platform to speak of issues that really matter in a few ways.

One is to settle a juvenile ‘beef’ on a national stage, making sure to pepper your tantrum with the small amount of lazy symbolism needed for it to be construed to be something more than what it was: a creative and entertaining performance that was mostly an inconsequential middle-school spat between oblivious and unaffected adults with a combined worth of around half a billion dollars.

Here’s another:

Very cool. More CLI than UTM. Another is Lima.

by the inimitable Mr. Lovenstein

Saw with CK. 32-minute, Groundhog Day-style short film that snagged an Oscar in its category in 2021. Symbolisms and motif even a pitbull named Jeter can understand. Lots of violence and many parts were difficult to watch, which I suppose is the point¹. Look at the futility of attempting reason and compromise with a rotten, systemic problem.

Andrew Howard is frighteningly good as the cop (or ‘The System’). Pulls an effortless Racist Pesci and is Welsh!

Controversy over it being similar in spirit to this 4-minute super short film called “Groundhog Day For A Black Man” by Cynthia Kao.

Thing I like about projects like these (another example would be LinuxServer) is studying their humongous list of FOSS apps.

I say ‘little’ relative to all else it finds itself in. Read some place that if the Milky Way were the size of the United States, our ‘little’ Sun would be the size of… drumroll… a grain of sand someplace in the Midwest 🫠🌽

Saw with LD at the theater (on the last day it was playing!) and am really glad I did. I saw the 1922 version in college and have been mesmerized with it since. People are pretty surprised, like I was, to hear that the story is an unlicensed Dracula knockoff.

This is a really immersive movie. It’s Eggers’ fourth and we’ve seen all of them. The Witch is still our favorite, followed by The Northman. Lily-Rose Depp was just terrific and just might be to some lucky director whatever Helena Bonham Carter was to Tim Burton. The movie just kept vacillating between Eggers’ unique style and vision to that of those insipid (but totally fun) “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” flicks. I don’t think Willem Dafoe’s comedic relief was necessary. I also couldn’t stop focusing on how bad his wig was.

Am told that the soundtrack, by Robin Carolan, is excellent. Bill Skarsdard is totally unrecognizeable as Nosferatu. His character’s surprising and ample mustache could not get me stop thinking of how much he looked like Karel Roden as Rasputin in Hellboy (2004)

Might be the only one here…

I decided to log into my old Twitter account after many years on a whim. I follow no one and have 39 followers.

I saw nothing on my feed but its owner’s boosted posts, a ton of crypto content, Pepe and anti-woke incendiaries, and heavily lopsided political ragebait.

It felt like looking through my Spam folder for a misclassified message. Like ending up on one of those SEO-optimized AI-generated websites that exist to make their owners ad impression money. The internet can certainly be a pretty noisy place but in the case of Twitter Under New Management, it’s the same set of signals weakened by a maddening amount of noise.

I can perhaps understand why but I remain unsure of how people continue to use this thing.

Perhaps a bit embarrassing since I’ve read the book so many times¹, but I had no idea that The Count of Monte Cristo was based on a real life story, thanks to this video.

And it might never be. But it’s certainly up to us.

Love a good Ian Hislop interview. I wish LBC’d publish the entire thing but the few snippets they have are well-worth a listen.

The cringe I get from the explanation from someone who truly knows the game is akin to the one I get from “hacking the mainframe” or “tracking the killer’s IP address” or the casual “bypassing the firewall”.

All hat, no cattle indeed. I can venture a guess at the answer but: Why, why is any of this poorly executed, ultra-cringey enhancement to your popular and established mystique even necessary?

Pretty sure Elon could isolate the node and dump them on the other side of the router. Via CM. Come to think of it, he might just do “a total rewrite of the whole thing” with “really high velocity”. He can do anything, this guy.

It’s home to a mere 57,000 people and costs $1.7 Trillion.

BTW: That’s one of my favorite websites on the internet, especially when I watch people play “Geography Tetris” with trying to fit as many countries as they can into Africa 🌍

I finally switched over from Chrome to Firefox, after switching away from the latter over 12 years ago. I’d basically given up on any shred of privacy I might have left on the internet, but the final straw for me was Chrome totally bypassing the DNS blocklists on my PiHole¹ (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Unsurprising, really. You’re encouraged to read this comic (PDF) on the company’s intentionally odious practices².

The usual argument is “why’re you complaining about something that’s free?” Because I deem privacy to be a fundamental right that is to be respected even if you’re giving shit away. We can gripe about its fundamentalness but can perhaps agree that “Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for — in plain English, and repeatedly.” There’s nothing clear about this with Chrome. It’s not hard to quit doing sneaky and evil things without peoples’ informed consent.

The Good

Transferring bookmarks (of which I have very few) and history was a breeze.

Most extensions I’ve depended upon in Chrome are available for Firefox. There appear to be ways to get Chrome extensions to work in Firefox but I haven’t needed them. Pure nostalgia: I was reminded of the Web Developer extension by Chris Pederick which I starting using in 2004 (I think) to live-edit with CSS (which I thought was just magical, in addition to being a giant time-saver). It’s still around and is still fantastically useful. And available for Chrome as well. lol.

Developer tools, which I need for my job, are mostly the same³ but I found myself preferring the Firefox DevTools a little more for aesthetic/ergonomic/design reasons.

Picture in Picture is excellent.

Preventing YouTube and other websites from autoplaying videos is excellent.

The Okay

Syncing is P2P, not centralized, and not as elegant and “Just Works™” like with Chrome. But it’s mostly the small things. Like how toolbar layouts are not synced⁴, and how switching the default search provider on your desktop won’t change it on your mobile device. Not a deal-breaker in the least.

On a Mac, the Emoji entry shortcut ( Ctrl+Command+Space) doesn’t work. For the amount of emojis I use in my personal communications, this is far more annoying than the syncing issues.

AirPlay doesn’t work. Never worked on Chrome either. So whatever. Use Safari.

The Bad

None. It’s a fantastic browser.

Other Stuff

So why not Safari? Extensions. That’s really it. It’s a very limited ecosystem and some things I really need aren’t available for Safari. I suppose I could use two different browsers for work and play but I’m not there yet.

While I do use a PiHole, I’d recommend Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin⁵ to people switching away. Maybe even add NoScript to the mix. I believe Facebook Container is installed by default. The adversarial/defensive relationship we have with the internet feels bit sad to me as a 90s kid who still remembers its magic and promise but that’s how it is.

You can see where Firefox stores your profile via Help → More Troubleshooting Information → Profile Folder

I’ve configured all installations on my laptops and phone to use DuckDuckGo as the default search engine.

You can use System Settings -> Battery -> Battery Health -> Info Icon to toggle this “ML” approach where macOS (and the developers who know more than you about how to care for your Mac) will handle this for you but I’ve never gotten it to work as expected despite docking my laptop repeatedly, and for half the day, over a year.

You can buy it on Gumroad or here’s a download link.

Another is Swinsian which looks like iTunes of yore but doesn’t have dark mode (and, not that this means anything, appears to have no updates since 2018).

Both apps are paid. An Open-Source manager is the Strawberry Music Player

A lovely little book on ghastly parenting by animals that are not us. Gifted this to a family member who just had her first baby and is your normal, apprehensive, anxious, stressed-out, impossibly-in-love first-time parent¹. I loved Priscilla Witte’s witty² illustrations and what I think is the overall message here, which I wrote to her: Try your best and enjoy the ride. All shall be well 🥰

Let’s celebrate the not-so-great and “Wish it had gone better!” Embrace the mediocre family times you share together.

The book has a few notes towards the end. Love a good reminder that Nature is rather hardcore. Two things I thought of as I read short descriptions of why the featured animals do what they do are (1) a minimization of energy/waste and (2) good 'ol natural selection: they just want to make sure they continue to make more of themselves.

Cuckoos are still terrible and I might dislike them more than Canadian Geese, the bros of the bird world. But all this aside, it’s a fact that there is no more worse mom or parent than this nightmare of a human being:

*shudder*

Features two late legends, Sanjeev Kumar (Santa) and Kishore Kumar (singer). Not sure who advised the former to strike a “BRO WHAT’S EVEN GOING ON” expression throughout the song.

Wondered what became of the kids in the video. Assuming they were ~10 at the time this movie was released in 1974 they’d be in their 60s now. Time, yo.

Best I’ve seen in recent memory.

Features the poem “Boots” by Rudyard Kipling, read with this bone-chilling pitch and cadence by a chap named Taylor Holmes in 1915. Here’s the track by itself. Sounds like it was taken from a record; the noise doesn’t help with the chilling of the bones.

The last few minutes remind me of this song.

Not sure what else to add here, other than my head reeling with “How the heck does one even think up this subject?”. And appreciating how the Internet can be such an amazing forum for collective weirdness and joy.

Speaking of fora, the link’s on Twitter so here’s a cached version to save you the discomfiture of engaging with it.

Not completely unsurprising, but yeah: I was struck by how it’s essentially a continuous tone after about 2,000 BPM. Makes one wonder if anything in the Universe is really continuous or if all of it is fundamentally discrete. Also makes you wonder how animals like bees perceive the world.

This is $JASON_STATHAM_MOVIE and I absolutely love it¹. It’s familiar, there’s no pretense, you’re a 13-year old, and it feels really nice spending your evening watching some evil-looking people get their (highly improbable) comeuppance from a single and very determined operator. It’s like huddling under a blanket with the air-conditioning on in the Middle Eastern heat in front of your family TV (a 21" Belson) and your Mum makes you greasy food².

The Beekeeper is next, for days when I say “fuck it” and toss a frozen pizza into the oven after work ✨🍕✨

All the usual suspects (for a movie like this at least): What is memory? Does the past exist? Where and what am I, what the heck is this, and how do I know that it is real? And so on.

No worries there, standard fare so far (for a movie like this that is). What’s truly amazing is how succinctly Chris Marker chooses to explore these questions. If you think your memory of something plays out like a video, he makes you deal with still images that you get to stitch together in your own head. If you think you can ‘hear’ clearly what someone may have said in the past, he makes you deal with this kind of unstructured, abstract (poetic?) narration that kinda makes sense but not really.

LD and I saw this together and, when I asked her what she thought halfway into it, she said she was “very intrigued”. That’s really about it. Takes a few viewings, after which you may avail yourself of the many, many analyses out there¹. I just wanted to take in and enjoy a film-making experience I’d never had before, without worrying myself about a ‘message’ (or even a story for that matter).

Totally Ignorant Sidenote: I don’t know what it is about filmmakers and cinematographers who were young in the 50s and 60s that makes them so freaking good at photography. Arrestingly so. In the age of instagratification the first person I could think of who wants you to wait and immerse yourself in a scene is Denis Villeneuve (who works with legends like these).

Here’s an extreme (and yet shitty) example of the opposite of what I’m trying to say up there. Seven seconds and fourteen cuts of a dude jumping a fence. You know, to add the ‘urgency’ and ‘tension’ missing in the shit script.

Saw with LD. A (really dark) teenage space adventure that made me feel like I was 14 and was watching “Alien” for the first time on our family TV (a 21" Belson). They tugged at every dormant heartstring from our childhood. Graininess, floppy drives, joysticks, lots of CRT displays, and clunky mechanical keyboards¹. Absolutely lush visuals, soundtrack, and cinematography. I’m glad we saw it on a big screen.

Every time I see a space flick I drift off thinking where we’d be as humanity if we got our shit together. I was then brought back to Earth by noting that much of space travel and commerce were enabled and controlled by Weyland-Yutani, the Evil Galactic MegaCorporation that’s responsible for much of the trouble in the Alien franchise beginning, of course, with the Galactic Ego of its MegaRich founder. Not sure why I thought we wouldn’t be in the thrall of unreasonably despotic gazillionaires in a dystopian sci-fi movie…

I last saw Cailee Spaeny in Devs. She’s a most worthy successor to Sigourney Weaver². But David Jonsson just outstanding as Andy the Android³.

I’ll be watching this again and soon 🥰

Super-cool. I look forward to bookmarking this, telling myself that I’ll finally put Pi Zero to good use, and never doing this 🤘

Perhaps not as incredibly astounding as this overlay of Spectre¹ on the opening credits of the movie but this one of How to Disappear Completely over a few scenes from Lost in Translation just fits somehow.

Always on the lookout for good work music. This was suggested by YouTube’s mighty algorithm and more than fit the bill. A few tracks reminded me of 10,000Hz Legend by Air. You can listen to the entire album on YouTube or visit their Bandcamp page.

I was rather mesmerized by the typeface:

and, after some searching, found “Infantometric Pro” to be sufficiently close. Look forward to writing some postcards in this style (while listening to this album of course).

Other things to mix and match include shallots and various bell peppers.

I’m re-watching Columbo after around ten years and this is my maiden episode. Read that Rolling Stone recently rated it the 52nd Greatest TV Episode of all time. There are no other Columbo episodes on that list and I’m not sure that I’d pick this one. The sleuthing is underwhelming compared to, say, an absolute banger like The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case.

Now their description says that Falk was so “superhumanly charming that he could have onscreen chemistry with a doorknob”. This is indisputable, but John Cassavates’ swagger, charm, and presence are truly something to behold. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much his character looked like real-life maestro Leonard Bernstein and whether this was intentional. Like he was a cross between Bernstein and Bourdain.

Oh and Mr. Miyagi’s (briefly) in this too! Not to mention Gwyneth Paltrow’s mom. Unsurprising given the lovely history of guest appearances on the show.

There’s a discussion about how Columbo made $11,000 in 1972. Taxes aside, and according to the BLS calculator, that’s about $85,000 per year. Columbo values the murderer-maestro’s mansion at $750K. That’s ~$6M in today’s dollars. I imagine this is a laughable amount for a mansion that size (with a tennis court (of course)) in today’s Los Angeles though. Cassavetes’ character drives a Jaguar E-Type which I still think is one of the most beautiful cars ever designed.

By Noah Veltman who appears to have impeccable gums.

A cannot-believe-this-is-free collection of Physics videos on everything from Classical Mechanics to QM.

Here’s a Github Gist for a CLI option that uses diskutil.

By Julia Evans. I don’t think an average dev will need anything more than what’s on here.

Was paying a bill on the State Farm website and wondered what they used. Comes in serif and slab serif as well.

Lovely. Uses some kind of sharding to intelligently get ‘pages’ of relevance. The WASM size is only ~70kB, compared to SQLite’s WASM’s ~460kB.

By the same author who wrote The Little Go Book

I will (a) watch the original and this prequel again soon and (b) name a lot of things “Furiosa” (starting with the tillandsia I’m going to get this weekend).

A mad ride like the first one and I’m amazed again by how they managed to arrest my attention for 2.5 hours. Watched on the big screen with MM. They played vignettes of the first movie during the credits and I told him that the mobile wall of speakers and the guitar guy were Top 5 Maddest Things I’ve seen on a big screen, and I watch a lot of old-school, popular Indian cinema.

They aged Anya Taylor-Joy using AI and it was rather magical¹. Chris Hemsworth has fantastic comedic timing. Rictus and Scrotus somehow reminded me of Tweedledee and Tweedledum:

You can’t parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can’t be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool that is insufficiently sophisticated to understand the constructs employed by HTML. HTML is not a regular language and hence cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Regex queries are not equipped to break down HTML into its meaningful parts. so many times but it is not getting to me. Even enhanced irregular regular expressions as used by Perl are not up to the task of parsing HTML. You will never make me crack. HTML is a language of sufficient complexity that it cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions. Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The <center> cannot hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. HTML-plus-regexp will liquify the n​erves of the sentient whilst you observe, your psyche withering in the onslaught of horror. Rege̿̔̉x-based HTML parsers are the cancer that is killing StackOverflow it is too late it is too late we cannot be saved the transgression of a chi͡ld ensures regex will consume all living tissue (except for HTML which it cannot, as previously prophesied) dear lord help us how can anyone survive this scourge using regex to parse HTML has doomed humanity to an eternity of dread torture and security holes using regex as a tool to process HTML establishes a breach between this world and the dread realm of c͒ͪo͛ͫrrupt entities (like SGML entities, but more corrupt) a mere glimpse of the world of reg​ex parsers for HTML will ins​tantly transport a programmer’s consciousness into a world of ceaseless screaming, he comes, the pestilent slithy regex-infection wil​l devour your HT​ML parser, application and existence for all time like Visual Basic only worse he comes he comes do not fi​ght he com̡e̶s, ̕h̵i​s un̨ho͞ly radiańcé destro҉ying all enli̍̈́̂̈́ghtenment, HTML tags lea͠ki̧n͘g fr̶ǫm ̡yo​͟ur eye͢s̸ ̛l̕ik͏e liq​uid pain, the song of re̸gular exp​ression parsing will exti​nguish the voices of mor​tal man from the sp​here I can see it can you see ̲͚̖͔̙î̩́t̲͎̩̱͔́̋̀ it is beautiful t​he final snuffing of the lie​s of Man ALL IS LOŚ͖̩͇̗̪̏̈́T ALL I​S LOST the pon̷y he comes he c̶̮omes he comes the ich​or permeates all MY FACE MY FACE ᵒh god no NO NOO̼O​O NΘ stop the an​*̶͑̾̾​̅ͫ͏̙̤g͇̫͛͆̾ͫ̑͆l͖͉̗̩̳̟̍ͫͥͨe̠̅s ͎a̧͈͖r̽̾̈́͒͑e n​ot rè̑ͧ̌aͨl̘̝̙̃ͤ͂̾̆ ZA̡͊͠͝LGΌ ISͮ̂҉̯͈͕̹̘̱ TO͇̹̺ͅƝ̴ȳ̳ TH̘Ë͖́̉ ͠P̯͍̭O̚​N̐Y̡ H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ

When I was about 13 or so, I was blown away when I learned that ancient Greek and Roman statues used to be painted and were not commissioned to be ghostly-white. An all-time favorite is this Greek sculpture of a Persian archer.

I tremendously enjoy any recreations of color in the ancient world. So when I found this mostly intact home from first century Pompeii, I was tickled pink 🥰

Simply astounding. I got those from Le Sireneuse Journal¹. There’s a nice story of its discovery and a lot more detail on their site but the TL;DR is: Built around 1AD, belonged to a rich family (of course), was buried 36ft under a street for a while because of Vesuvius’ eruption, was discovered by a butcher who was digging out a cellar. Was looted.

I hope to visit one day 🤞