A Machine Code Paradise
I took the day off from work. I wanted to get caught up on some things around the house before company arrives this weekend. Thus far I’ve done nothing but go for walks and work on this blog.
I say I made these updates, but most of the work was done with Opus 5.5 running Claude Code. I spent around 4 or 5 hours and $20 on it. No need for Fable or Artificial Superintelligence.
There’s still some content cleanup and dead links to deal with—and styling those damn <blockquote /> tags—but I think it’s essentially done.
I plan to spend the rest of the day cooking and cleaning over a few rum and colas. Tomorrow morning I’ll start thinking about business ideas. The future of tech is going to look very different. I’ll need a new plan for the long term.1
Changelog
- Phones
- Smaller headings on phones.
- Less space above posts and around photos and videos.
- Swipe between posts. The page follows your finger, and the posts on either side load ahead of time.
- Words too long for the line now wrap instead of widening the page.
- Moving around the site
- Keys and Previous/Next cards fade to the next post with a small nudge in the direction you went.
- The newest post’s Next goes to the archive, and the oldest post’s Previous goes to the On This Day calendar. The chain no longer wraps from one end to the other.
- Every other link on the site cross-fades. Reduced motion and Back/Forward on phones don’t.
- Internal links end in a trailing slash, so they don’t bounce through a redirect.
- On This Day (new)
- A page for every day of the year and a twelve-month calendar.
- Ways in: a footer link, a line on the home page, and the “g d” shortcut.
- Step from day to day, the same way as between posts.
- Newsletter (new)
- A /newsletter page where signing up means sending me an email.
- Linked from the header and the footer.
- Its intro says how sporadic the newsletter is.
- Post layout
- When a post opens with a photo or video, the title and dates line up with its left edge.
- Over a portrait photo, they’re centered instead.
- Listings, tags and search
- No bullets in post listings.
- Listing dates styled one way on desktop and one way on phones.
- Page titles spaced to match posts.
- Quieter link underlines, with none in lists where everything is a link.
- The tag page’s back link is an “#All” pill, and screen readers don’t read out its “#”.
- The tag filter and search box labels moved into their placeholders.
- Footer
- Reorganized into a row of places to go, then a smaller fine-print row.
- The “?” link now reads “Shortcuts”.
Footnotes
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While I may sometimes appear to be an AI enthusiast, my actual position is what I’d call an AI pragmatist. Imagine if a massive fleet of flying saucers showed up on Earth and millions of extraterrestrials hopped out and started mingling freely with human society. Some would no doubt deny any of that was happening, because extraterrestrials aren’t real, and if they were real, they’d certainly be from planets far too distant to ever make it to Earth, let alone a Starbucks in Voorhees, NJ. Meanwhile, others would make it clear extraterrestrials are not welcome at the coffee shop, and attempt to run them off using the power of nasty looks and memes. Only, that wouldn’t be enough. There’d be millions of aliens with an armada of flying saucers and countless death-ray blasters. While I can’t speak to aliens with any certainty, Isaac Asimov’s robots are definitely here—right now. It will be difficult to compete with them in the current job market. Or on the battlefield. We have to start thinking differently. I don’t know what that will look like. ↩