Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

The honest truth about leaders who want to replace their workers with AI - Werd I/O

2026-06-10T22:19:28.000Z

Link: CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs, by Mike Masnick in TechDirt

I second this sentiment:

“It seems pretty clear to me that companies that think they’ll be able to layoff huge swaths of workers because of LLM tools are going to find out they’re mistaken pretty quickly. The power of LLMs is that when used well and used willingly it can help employees to get more done, but that doesn’t mean you need fewer humans. You need more humans who know how to work productively.”

I’ve seen some pretty dumb stuff out in the wild: leaders who have expected their engineers to dramatically increase their output to inhuman levels, company-wide token leaderboards, product managers who believe they can replace real user research with synthetic personas, and, of course, high-level leaders who think they can replace their human workers with AI agents. (None of this, I should say, has been at my job, where our work is primarily done by humans and AI, when it is used at all, is an assistive tool.)

I think Mike Masnick’s prescription is accurate: many CEOs are so distant from the actual productive work of a company that they miss the complicated nuance of what goes into it. So if they can produce something with Claude Code that feels analogous to it, a bad CEO might start wondering why they’re hiring all these people.

A good CEO will understand that they’re missing a ton of expertise that goes into building something well, doing work with skill, or even just exercising humane human judgment. The others will find out the hard way that they’re wrong to underestimate their employees.

Home Brew Presents: Last Week - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-06-10T20:50:03.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? Last night I headed out by myself to catch the Home Brew Crew perform their first project Last Week at the Auckland Town Hall.

I was supposed to go with my wife, but last minute plans saw her and the kids head to Waiheke for the long weekend. Solo gig? No problem!

I started my night solo by hitting up Low Brow on K Road for a burger and beer before making my way down Queen Street to the venue. Sitting at the bar with my beer waiting for my burger, it wasn’t long until a group of people out for the night approached the bar and hovered waiting for a table. I started talking with one of the group and quickly discovered that they were out for a work social club event and also heading to see Home Brew. I ended up chatting with them and a couple beers later I headed off with them for the walk down Queen Street to the show.

We arrived just before 7pm as the doors opened, and there was a line all the way down the street. We headed across the road to an Irish Pub for another drink and wait for the line to clear out. In the pub I was introduced to more people and had some more chats with other concert goers. It was great to have a chat with others about Tom Scott, Home Brew and the other music associated with him and Young Gifted & Broke (YGB).

As we finished up our drinks and headed across to the venue, it was time to part ways as I was heading up stairs to my seats while the group was heading inside to the floor. I said my goodbyes, exchanged phone numbers with a quick txt message and made my way to find my seats.

Once orientated I headed back downstairs to check out the merch stand. I was hoping for a copy of the vinyl which has only been available during its first pressing in 2010 and a hoody.

I made it to the front of the line and was able to get a copy of a recently repressed vinyl in pink, a black “LISTEN TO HOME BREW” t-shirt, and a Run It Back lyric book. No hoody though.

I grabbed a couple drinks, a bottle of water balanced in my hands with my merch and made my way back to my seats.

I had seats up in the circle which proved to be popular as many people hovered nearby, some asking if they could sit in the vacant seat that I had also purchased for the night. I kept the seat occupied with my jacket and merch haul.

The place was heaving with people. The stage design was fantastic. Set up to resemble the Sandringham flat where Tom lived at the time when they created and recorded the EP complete with fridge full of beer. They also had the egg cartons on the wall as mentioned in the closing track on Run It Back, “Run It Back Again”:

Remember when we first started this shit?
(Yeah run it back)
Studio with the egg cartons and shit
(ha ha yeah)

The stage soon filled up with what Tom describes as his favourite people in the world. I saw Team Dynamite, Brandan Shiraz, Mellowdownz (I think?) up there on stage.

It wasn’t too long before Tom burst onto the stage and started spitting the words to the hit, Monday. The crowd went wild, the floor was heaving under a cloud of smoke (not ciggis). He continued through the EP setlist including all the hits, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Once Last Week was finished he dived into the rest of the Home Brew hits, Drinking In The Morning, Alcoholic, Datura/White Flowers and many more!

I had a super fun time, even though I was solo, there were enough people around who were happy to talk so I never felt alone. I’m super happy I got to see Home Brew perform live finally as with them all off in their own musical directions we might not get to see them perform together again, especially not Last Week, front-to-back.

Listen to Home Brew, laterz.

Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP, or send a webmention. Check out the posts archive on the website.

📝 2026-06-10 21:05 - Kev Quirk

2026-06-10T20:05:00.000Z

I'm quite liking #Vivaldi, especially now I have dark/light mode switching working in #Ubuntu.

If it sticks, I'll play with their email and RSS integration next.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

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To build the future, we need theories of change - Werd I/O

2026-06-10T14:05:04.000Z

Link: Change Agent, by Gina Chua in (Re)Structured News

Gina Chua is one of the people in news who is doing the most to push the conversation forward and prepare the industry for the future. This piece of hers outlines what I think is a necessary skill for survival.

We’re in the fastest period of technology change — and, consequently, the fastest period of journalistic change — in decades. Building takes time; if we aim to build for today, we’ll always be behind. So we need to consider what the future looks like.

That doesn’t necessarily mean having one singular vision for the future, although it may be that one stands out as the most likely or compelling. It may be wise to juggle multiple possible futures, each with their own probabilities, prerequisites, and outcomes. If we deeply research them based on the work of experts in their fields, and then articulate them well, we can share them, and use them organizationally to prepare for what might become true.

Will our information ecosystem radically change in the face of agentic systems? Will people look to community as AI intermediates everything else? Will the open internet fragment in the hands of authoritarianism? None of those things are necessarily the future, but it’s worth considering what all of them might mean.

What we can’t do is assume that the world will stay the same. I would like to burn Gina’s words into the walls of every newsroom and every mission-driven organization in the world:

“You can hear that thinking if you roam the halls of any journalism conference. Get the platforms to pay for content. Do more original journalism. Build deeper relationships with audiences. Drive more direct traffic. But those aren’t theories of change; they are theories that the world won’t change that much, and that the strategies of the past will serve us well in the future, if only we execute them better, faster, and cheaper.”

Each possible future is a kind of speculative fiction. It takes creativity — and bravery — to break out of existing frames and qualitatively consider what might be. These explorations must be informed by how things have played out already, where we are today, and what we know is coming down the pipeline, but they also must be generative and open. In doing so, we uncover ideas that can help us not just navigate what the future might be, but get in front of it and help to shape it — according to our own values and needs.

The world won’t stay the same. Journalism isn’t staying the same. In addition to the rapid change in the platforms we depend on, trust is declining; engagement is declining; for many newsrooms, revenue is declining. A bet on the present is not a winning one. So we need to reach further.

Book Review: The Husbands by Holly Gramazio ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-06-10T11:34:55.000Z

Ooooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute.

This isn't like how Groundhog Day became On The Calculation of Volume or Sliding Doors became The Names, instead this is a new and twisty concept rendered through the lens of a chick-lit comedy.

It's proper laugh-aloud funny, while playing with all the clichés of both sci-fi and romcoms.

The thing I liked most is that Lauren is an active and intelligent protagonist unlike, say, Carol Sturka from Pluribus. Sturka never engages with the premise of her odd situation, she doesn't try to discover the rules of the world she's living in and is content to let things happen to her. Lauren spends a good deal of time at least trying to get to grips with the (un)reality of her husband-dispensing portal. I found that made for a rather gratifying story and didn't leave me shouting at the pages "JUST TRY SOMETHING!"

It's also refreshing to follow the adventures of a (slight) antihero. Lauren mostly knows when she is being monstrous. She flings between feminism and self-directed misogyny - with a smattering of misandry. Her discrimination against those of us men who wear socks with individual toes is, of course, an unforgivable sin.

The pacing is excellent - with an perfectly timed plot twist just as things are settling down. The afterword talks briefly about the multiple possible endings that were considered. I'd love to know what ideas were rejected although, in retrospect, there's only one narratively satisfying conclusion.

I read a lot of science fiction - probably more than is healthy - and The Husbands is a welcome addition to my shelf. The practicalities of the plot-device are as unimportant as how Warp Drive works; science fiction is about exploring the possibilities of a fantastical situation. If you could instantly swap your spouse because they lost the TV remote again - would you? In a world of no consequences, what would you get away with? If you discovered a break in reality, what would you try in order to exploit or understand it?

The Husbands gets fairly dark. Never grim, exactly, but it gnaws away at the cosiness proffered by domestic bliss. Although Lauren can be a bit of a bitch, the story just about strays away from making her morally repugnant. An exemplary piece of storytelling.

It's not enough to have better ideals. - Werd I/O

2026-06-10T10:00:15.000Z

Last week I was privileged to contribute to the PublicSpaces conference in Amsterdam, which discussed the impact of technology on democracy. I was there all-too-briefly, but I was reminded how wonderful Amsterdam really is as a city: both culturally rich and a reminder of how a city’s infrastructure can work if it receives the investment and thoughtful attention it deserves.

PublicSpaces itself is a marvel: a conference that dives into the underlying power dynamics behind tech and aims to create space to discuss alternatives. Robin Berjon’s ‌We Build On Hope and Erin Kissane’s ‌Holdfast were both standout talks that were both excellent in themselves and representative of the tone of the entire event.

On Friday, I participated in a panel that asked whether journalism can use the Open Social Web to strengthen democracy. I shared the stage with Catherine Tait, expert in residence at New_ Public and former president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; Robert Amlung, the Senior Innovation Advisor at ZDF; and Björn Staschen, the founder of the European non-profit Save Social.

The conversation was spirited, taking in the rise of authoritarianism, what we are hopeful about, and generational shifts in how people seek out news and information. We did plan for one more question that we sadly didn’t get to. It’s a point that I think is important to make, so I thought I’d go into it here.

As an early-stage investor in media startups at Matter, and Founder of Elgg and now in your role as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica you probably have had to balance ideals vs business. What would you advise us when we talk about ‘Technology for democracy’: what kind of strategies should we use / explore to combine our lofty ideals while still being able to earn a living?

If we have lofty ideals — and we should! — we probably want these three things:

To build tools and networks with pro-social values
To have lots of people use them
To be able to keep doing it

The message I’d send to anyone who wants to build a pro-social tool or network is: we are not absolved from doing the complex product work of building something people need in a way that has the potential to be self-sustaining. But the good news is, doing that work is also how we reach more people and get to keep building.

In product, we sometimes talk about vitamins vs painkillers. Vitamins are always optional, but if you’re actively experiencing pain, you’re highly motivated to find something that will solve it. Painkillers are the products that truly drive value.

Although pro-social values are important, it’s never enough to build something that is ideologically better. We need to build tools that are practically better for people today, based on people’s actual needs. “Twitter but decentralized” is not a particularly useful idea. You need to figure out who you’re going to help first, get to know them, understand what is painful for them, and solve that pain.

Extractive networks have literally brought down democracies and enabled genocides, so we know we need software that encodes better ideals — but to most individuals, those ideals alone are vitamins at best. If your project has better ideals but the experience of using your software compared to the incumbents is the same or worse, you’ll only attract the most dedicated idealists. To attract more, you need to both provide better ideals and solve a real need better than the alternatives.

And you have to offer it sustainably. Sustainability isn’t a thing you think about after you’ve designed a product. Your product’s business model is an integral part of it: whether your solution is valuable or not to a user depends in large part on the business model you use to provide it. Its cost, and the friction of using it, are a key part of the equation a user will use to determine whether your solution is worth using. If you’re doing something good, you need to be able to keep doing it, so figuring this out very early is really important. You can’t hand-wave it away.

A lot of pro-social developers yearn to be paid for building something with great values and distributing it for free in the commons. I like that idea too! It sounds like a great gig. But in reality, that’s almost never how the value exchange actually works. Not to belabor the point, but people will pay you because doing so is an easier way to solve their pain than anything they might be able to do themselves.

What about government grants? you might ask — but this harsh reality includes grant funding. For example, the EU is highly motivated to build an alternative tech stack this year because it’s begun to see US tech as a security risk. But it’s only going to pay you if it sees your work as a plausible way to accelerate its path towards getting there in measurable ways. National security risk is certainly pain, but you have to be able to prove you can reduce it.

So you always need to understand who your customers will be; you need to know who your users will be (if they’re different); then you need to figure out what their needs are; and you need to serve them better than anyone else. Nobody gets to hunker down and just scratch their own itch or build something they believe in. Not in a vacuum.

Most idealists are not that excited to think about money. Me included! And we make all kinds of excuses to avoid having to think about it. Here are two fallacies I’ve seen over and over again:

Startups don’t need to consider sustainability from the beginning
Open source contributors do it for the love of it

First, the startups. Years ago, Twitter famously decided to grow as fast as possible and worry about a model for sustainability later. It spent years just building product without even so much as a word dedicated to how it would make money. That set the tone for a lot of idealistic founders — I’ve met many who want to do the same thing.

What they missed is that Twitter had Ev Williams, who had previously sold Blogger to Google. That gave him both the capital and the investor goodwill to experiment — he used his Blogger proceeds to buy Odeo, the startup that became Twitter, back from its investors. Even then, the lack of attention to business model meant that when Twitter eventually did get serious, it pulled back on the open APIs and libraries that had built its ecosystem. So while many founders and builders find it distressing to think about money, I don’t think avoiding the topic is wise.

Meanwhile, we often look to the open source ecosystem as a beautiful ecology of people building things and releasing them for free. The entire internet is based on open source libraries, tools, and radical collaborations. Couldn’t we have a nice life doing the same?

It’s kind of an illusion. Over half of contributors are paid to write open source code directly, usually for larger corporations. In these cases, open source software solves infrastructure pain for these employers: the code is required for them to realize their strategies but isn’t a core part of their competitive advantage. Collaborating in the open lowers their costs and allows them to build better infrastructure more efficiently.

At the same time, Tidelift found that 60% of open source project maintainers aren’t paid at all. We’ve all heard stories of open source contributors building load-bearing infrastructure without any real compensation. Between the corporate backed contributors and open source’s deep bench of starving artists, there are very, very few people actually managing to find sustainability building open source code projects independently.

Despite these dynamics, if you release a project on an open source basis, you’ll find that lots of people celebrate your work. They’re very happy that you’ve done this, because they share your values and are excited to see more people build with them. Sometimes they’ll help spread the word in ways that help more people discover your product, and they’ll often have useful technical ideas.

But they’re almost never going to be your customers themselves. Some of them may even get angry if you choose to sell a service in order to achieve sustainability. “The community” is helpful in terms of figuring out shared values and connecting to other projects, but in terms of solving concrete needs and providing value, they’re rarely who you should optimize for. Pro-social developers often worry that they shouldn’t add a feature because “the community won’t like it”, without asking the wider group of people who have a real problem the software could solve whether they need it. Allies are not the same as customers.

To be clear: pro-social values matter. Open source matters. It’s just, if we want to build something with pro-social values that will reach a lot of people, and do it in such a way that it can continue to exist for as long as it needs to, they’re not the only things that matter. Doing great product and business work is how you achieve those things.

And make no mistake: those things are fully achievable. I have so much hope. When we build something that solves a real problem better than anyone else and we do it with pro-social values, we further those values in a meaningful way. The values themselves give us a meaningful lift: nobody wants to be locked in or to otherwise be at the mercy of big tech companies. They subject themselves to those things when they have a problem that can’t be solved any other way. They’re actively looking for great solutions that aren’t in opposition to their values. And we can meet them where they’re at.

We should all have hope. We also need to have discipline. The discipline is how the hope becomes reality.

Making a valuable product isn’t in opposition to having lofty ideals. It’s how we bring those ideals to the world.

Posts I did not write in one go - Joel's Log Files

2026-06-10T03:40:00.000Z

I am one of those who prefers to get something done in the span of a day or else whatever I publish will need way more work on my part, to make sure the tone stays consistent and the flow of what I write makes sense.

I actually write most of these posts in a single big text file that I then copy paste to a final post.

So, by looking at this text file, I have an idea of a few drafts that have been around for a very long time. Some are super long, and I decided to just talk about these ideas for once. Some are still definitely works I want to complete, but it may be months until that happens, I may as well share some of these.

The post right above this one was about apps I wanted to share, three apps—maybe more in the future—that well, I am currently using and liking. These apps are cool and all, and a lot of my earlier blogposts were about app recommendations! But it just felt like I was writing filler and that just leaving links to those apps would be better.

So yeah, the three apps I was mentioning were:

Image Toolbox, a super complete… image toolbox, which I use for my weekly collages.
Buran, a great client/browser for gemini capsules (whenever I check one of those links).
Screen Time, a neat app that tracks the time you spend on each app of your phone.

The next post was about the Max Steel franchise of toys, and its movies that were part of my childhood. This one is a bit more complete and it’s about a topic I am passionate about, so I’m definitely going to keep going.

What stopped me on my tracks here was the research I started to do. I learned about a lot of things such as other toylines from Mattel that influenced Max Steel, such as Big Jim, as well as competitors like Action Man. It kind of overwhelmed me and I lost the focus which should have been on my personal experience with the franchise.

I’ll definitely return to this, and I also want to watch the movies I still have pending, before I continue.

Another of my uncompleted drafts was a response to Dom Corriveau’s post about letting go of old hobbies, a theme that really struck me, given the amount of hobbies I have had over the years.

I was going to talk about yo-yoing, card magic, origami and some other things that have ended up abandoned when compared to my reading and gaming. I used to spend hours with a pile of paper sheets and watching endless tutorials on YouTube, sharing pictures taken with a 480p webcam on Flickr, where every cool origamists uploaded their work circa 2011, I guess.

I should revisit that post, it’s literally a single paragraph right now.

The next incomplete work was an entry for The IndieWeb Carnival March 2026: Museum memories. One of my favorite ever trips in my life was a visit to Houston TX, where we visited the NASA museum, and it was a once in a lifetime experience for young me. We also went to another more regular museum with bones and paintings and the like, but I can’t recall the name of that one and I’m too lazy to check right now.

I was going to do (and I can still do) a fourth entry on my series on Videogame Franchises, but I should probably start with a tag to compile all of them first. I won’t spoil the series I was going to mention there just yet. It’s not a difficult post to start over after all.

One of my favorite drafts that I started back when I was absolutely focused on Breath of the Wild. I had a pretty fun adventure where I went up a huge hill, and I tried to turn it into a complete narrative journey, talking about what I found and did to reach the summit.

This was fun and all, but I couldn’t bring myself to post it, it felt a bit childish to talk about it especially because I was describing it as if it actually happened, and then do a fun reveal where I was like surprise! it’s all Zelda

Now that I wrote it, it makes even less sense to do so, but if I ever return to finish that game, I might try it anyway. Or post a different thing.

One of the longest posts I’ve written and haven’t published yet is a huge ramble on block puzzles in videgames. This was actually caused by my love for the level and world design found on Soul Reaver, one of my favorite games I completed last year.

I talked about the first puzzle designs games and also focused on the latest game with block puzzle elements I’ve been playing: CrossCode. It was a bit of an extra ode for my love for Soul Reaver, seeing the shortcomings present on a lot of modern titles (CrossCode included) that lack some of the nice mechanics included on that game from 1999—like moving a cube from side to side instead of always having to push it.

It was already about 1400 words and would include screenshots of plenty of games, but I felt it would work better as a video essay for some reason.

I am yet to do a yearly recap for 2025, no comment.

This is day 78 of #100DaysToOffload

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Bringing people together with the web - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-10T00:00:00.000Z

At Homebrew Website Club this evening we had a conversation about how to encourage people to make things together using the web. This could mean writing a blog post with someone, responding to someone’s blog post to continue a conversation, contributing to a wiki, creating a list of links, and more. There are so many ways to create with others on the web.

My recent blog post about categories was inspired by a discussion with Thomas about work he was doing on his site. Thomas then wrote a blog post in response to mine, and several people reached out with their ideas. I was delighted to see how much discussion and inquiry can come from a single blog post.

The discussion this evening got me thinking more broadly about times when websites have brought me closer with people.

On the weekend of IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf this year, a few people did my “What HTML element are you?” quiz. It was a joy to see people compare results and to hear the extent to which each person’s results resonated. It was delightful to see a website bring people together in the real world. (Side note: I felt a sigh of relief every time someone said their results were meaningful; making quizzes is hard!).

Another example of the web bringing me closer with people comes to mind. Earlier this year, I was on a call with several people playing a game that invites players to match as many related concepts as possible on a web page. There were dozens of groups and over a thousand labels to match. Despite the scale of the task of matching them all, the game was fun, perhaps because there were so many dimensions to explore: figuring out groups, finding labels to go into a group, realising some of your groups merge together, and more. The website brought us together to do something fun and challenging.

The IndieWeb Carnival – and all the other carnivals going on – bring people together. In the case of the IndieWeb Carnival, dozens of people from all over the world get together to write about the same topic.

Maybe every blog post brings us a little bit closer together. I have read blog posts that have made me curious, excited, validated, inspired, and more. I have read blog posts that have made me feel closer to others. I make a point of writing emails as much as I can to tell people with personal websites I enjoy how much I appreciate their websites.

With the web I can see photographs of Earth that a friend shared in a chat, awe-inspiring reminders of this wonderful place in which we live.

The more I think about it, the more I see the web as a place to bring us together.

Which makes me wonder: do you have any stories of the web bringing you closer together with people?

Also posted on IndieNews.

IndieWeb Carnival Homebrew Website Club this evening What HTML element are you?” quiz My recent blog post about categories Also posted on IndieNews photographs of Earth Thomas Thomas then wrote a blog post in response to mine

Read "Under the Trump crypto playbook, the family always wins. Investors don't" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-06-09T13:19:40.000Z

Read:

“Under the Trump crypto playbook, the family always wins. Investors don't”.

Tom Bergin, Michelle Conlin, Koh Qing, and Tom Wilson in Reuters. Published June 9, 2026.

Risking little of their own money, the US president and his sons have added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while the investors they've wooed have taken a $2.3 billion hit, a Reuters examination found.

📝 2026-06-09 13:00 - Kev Quirk

2026-06-09T12:00:00.000Z

Yep, I definitely won't buy a bigger #3DPrinter. 🫣

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

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Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 5 - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-09T00:00:00.000Z

The fifth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:

In Episode 5, I chat with Mike, the author of Shellsharks. We talk about, among other things, balancing personal and professional identities on personal websites, curating interesting content on the web, and creating bridges between disciplines with curation.

I hope you enjoy the episode!

Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.

Mike Shellsharks The fifth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed

In isolation, Metroid Prime, rainy days - W23 - Joel's Log Files

2026-06-08T21:45:00.000Z

This week went by in a flash, I don’t even know what to put on my weeknotes here. I was just playing Metroid Prime Remastered.

Okay I remembered a few more things I guess, here we go!

🧳 My parents went on a trip for medical reasons (everything was fine!) and I stayed home alone once again. It was a rather chill time and all I did was go to work, come back, and play Metroid Prime, everything else is a bit fuzzy in my memory.
🚗 I saw this car that was like, super pretty and classic, and I had been saving up for quite a while… I know I just got into bicycles lately and I understand why they are a better sort of transportation, but… I could not help myself. I am now the proud owner of a Hot Wheels Toronado from 1966.
🎁 I received an early birthday gift from Wouter, who recently released a physical version of his website, containing ten years worth of selected blog posts! I shared the post about this in the last section of these weeknotes. I was actually confused at first because I rarely order stuff from Amazon, and I didn’t realize until a couple hours later that it was a package for me!
🌧️ This week has been full of rainy and cloudy days! It has been fun and very nice to see the temperatures lowering for a bit. It’s crazy that we are already in June, midway through the year. Life’s going so fast! See also my post on the bike commuting I did this week
🎮 I’ve been cleaning up my room more and recently recovered an old shelf that my parents were going to throw away. It now houses my collection of Nintendo Switch games! I had to do quite a bit of organizing in my bedroom, and I also took the time to sort the games in alphabetical order, it’s kind of great. Should I make a post about my physical collection…

Gaming

I actually did not expect to see my commitment to the Summer Game Challenge actually working out. But after beating Hades last week, I immediately jumped into Metroid Prime Remastered, and I was greeted by one of the most impressive videogames of all time, running excellently on the Nintendo Switch.

This game looks absolutely gorgeous, with basically zero compromises. It is what a remaster should look like! I have had so much fun, jaw-dropping visuals, wonderful performance, the world design is awesome, and the way every power-up carried from the 2D games to the 3D and first person perspective is literally perfect.

As a game originally made in 2002, that saw basically no changes to its world layout, there are definitely a few things that may annoy a modern day gamer. But after playing through two Resident Evil titles—and many other retro games over the years—this just feels like the sweet spot to me. I’ll save any complaints for my review—very few anyway.

For now, I am just finding a some last upgrades—I don’t plan to 100% the game so just those I figure out myself—and will head for the final battle soon enough.

Another game I played, this time with friends, was Minecraft! We are building up things on our server, but I must admit I’ve not done a lot myself. I really need to focus on it, but I am currently busy with other games, as you may be able to tell.

Lastly, we played Full Metal Furies for another bit, this time we completed three levels! After upgrading some abilities and getting stronger on it. As fun as ever!

Reading

Because of all the gaming I did this week, my reading suffered a bit, I didn’t even get to finish Tiamat’s Wrath yet, but it’s okay, I’ll get it done for sure this time.

Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse #8) - Up to chapter 42. This week is it, I am going to finish this book and I am going to like it a lot! I hope, at least, I am a bit scared about what will be accomplished by this ending and how things will turn out. I guess we’ll see!
My Wife is from a Thousand Years Ago - Up to chapter 285. Decided to return to this rom-com after quite a while. It’s still quite funny hehe.
Blue Lock - Up to chapter 348. After the France vs Japan match, we switch completely to a different place and characters doing their own practice and getting ready to become better strikers.

Around the web

Blog posts

The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book - This is the blog post where Wouter announced his new book! I got my copy, you should get yours as well.
Updates Recently - Oh hey! Orbital made a post for once, and he shared a few cool things going on with his website and other things he’s been doing.
Chat community for web writers? - James wrote this piece and I couldn’t help but send an email. We have not talked much before until then, now we are in contact and that’s super cool!
I want my friends to have blogs too - Daniel decided to write for once, and he came up with an absolute banger of a post. I wish everyone had a blog, here are some reasons why. Beautiful piece.

YouTube

Why Does GTA San Andreas Still Feel Bigger than GTA 5? - I never really thought a lot about how map design helps a game feel bigger than it is. I don’t play much GTA, but the PSP ones and San Andreas were my childhood.
Why Does Everyone Think “1984” Agrees With Them? - This was an incredible video essay with a question that I’m sure you’ve asked yourself too. Give it a watch, absolutely worth it.
When Games Want You to RUN - Enemies that surpass you in every way are a very interesting game mechanic. I was familiar with a few mentioned here, but some characters like Nemesis from RE3 were missing! Still a great essay though.
Stop Trying to Fix Genre Names (You’re Only Making it Worse) - A bit of a ramble on a thing that I’ve noticed myself. It’s just a Metroidvania, don’t try to force a change!

This is day 77 of #100DaysToOffload

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An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement - Kev Quirk

2026-06-08T18:06:00.000Z

An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement

by The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation shares its history to rebuke claims made by Euro-Office about being Europe's first open-source office suite. They argue that by hiding its code provenance and defaulting to Microsoft's proprietary format, Euro-Office actually undermines European digital sovereignty rather than supporting it.

Read post ➡

All this post does is make The Document Foundation sound petty and butthurt, especially this part:

Euro-Office defaults to the fully proprietary OOXML document format, developed and controlled solely by Microsoft. This makes it a de facto ally of Microsoft in its content lock-in strategy, with control remaining firmly in Redmond and far from Europe.

Saying that Euro-Office are an ally of Microsoft is a bit of a stretch. I assume they defaulted to MS format because that's what 99.9999% of the world uses, like it or not.

If Euro-Office are going to be successful, they need to be compatible with MS out of the box. That's just a fact. Maybe that's why LibreOffice has never been able to eat Microsoft's lunch?

I dunno. But this isn't a good look for TDF in my opinion. Sometimes it's just better to say nothing, yanno?

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Published on Citation Needed: "I’m launching Tech Influence Watch as AI follows crypto into politics" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-06-08T17:57:15.000Z

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

I’m launching Tech Influence Watch as AI follows crypto into politics

Most voters don’t know that crypto and AI companies have spent more than $400 million this cycle to buy Congress. Let’s make that spending visible.

📝 2026-06-08 14:22 - Kev Quirk

2026-06-08T13:22:00.000Z

So I've been listening to #Spotify most of the day while working. Instead of playing my liked songs, I've just let it play whatever.

This is the way! It's been banger after banger, and lots of great news tracks.

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How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name? - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-06-08T11:34:59.000Z

A seemingly simple question which sent me down into the murky depths of standards. How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name? It probably isn't sensible to name your online presence a----------hyphen.com - but is there anything technically stopping you?

History

Let's do some history!

This is 1978's "HOST NAMES ON-LINE". Early Internet standards described the - character as "minus" rather than hyphen.

RFC 608

up to 48 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z),

digits (0-9), and the minus sign (-) ... specifically, no blank or space characters allowed;

no distinction between upper and lower case letters;

the first character is a letter;

the last character is NOT a minus sign;

no other restrictions on content or syntax.

So, originally, you could have as many hyphens as you wanted after the first symbol - which had to be a letter. The last symbol had to be a letter or number⁰.

That was later formalised in 1981's "DoD INTERNET HOST TABLE SPECIFICATION"

RFC 810 GRAMMATICAL HOST TABLE SPECIFICATION

<name> ::= <let>[*[<let-or-digit-or-hyphen>]<let-or-digit>]

That's carried in the the slightly more modern RFC 952.

By the time we hit 1987, the word "minus" has gone. Note, there are no restrictions on the number of hyphens - just as long as your domain name doesn't start or end with one¹.

RFC 1035 2.3.1. Preferred name syntax

The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen.

By 1989, the "DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION AND SPECIFICATION" was tweaked again:

RFC 1123 2. GENERAL ISSUES

The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952. One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a letter or a digit. Host software MUST support this more liberal syntax.

And, from then on, things stayed pretty stable until the futuristic year 2010. That was when Internationalised Domain Names (IDN) became available. They use the xn-- string at the start of the name so, the spec now says:

RFC 5891 4.2.3.1. Hyphen Restrictions

The Unicode string MUST NOT contain "--" (two consecutive hyphens) in the third and fourth character positions and MUST NOT start or end with a "-" (hyphen).

What they really mean is that "--" is banned in position 3 & 4 unless the first two characters are "xn"².

So, in theory, you can have up to 59 consecutive hyphens by ensuring that they start in position 4 and end at position 62.

Something like abc---[…]---z.com should be fine.

OR IS IT?!?!?

TLD Restrictions

There's what the RFC's say, and what a Top Level Domain (TLD) will allow. The Registry (the organisation which administers the TLD) may set their own, more restrictive, policies. Some will ban naughty words, or refuse IDN registrations, or prevent impersonation of Public Suffix domain, etc.

For example, South Sudan's .ss policies refuse to allow any hyphens.

Nominet, who run the .uk Registry, don't have any restrictions on the use of hyphens other than refusing to register xn-- domains.

But, in general, you can register multi-hyphened domain names with most Registries.

Anomalies

Of course, the mighty Internet mostly runs on spit and hope³. Naturally there are going to be mistakes, glitches, exceptions, and anomalies.

My delightful friend Q Misell had a rummage through her archives and helped track down some of the domain names which violate the modern rules. It's somewhat difficult to query every domain name, nevertheless, there are hundreds of multi-hyphened domains lurking within DNS.

Some, like ok--computer.com are long dead, but some are still active⁴!

Possibly the most consecutive hyphens belongs to http://a-------------------------------------------------------------a.com/

Sixty-one hyphens! The maximum possible, and it still works! The website looks like it hasn't been updated since it was first registered in 2000.

But what about more modern domains? The spookily named http://zz--icann-monitoring.uk/ was registered in 2024 - long after the rules were updated. But as Nominet doesn't allow xn-- domains, I guess it is fine?

There are some domains like bq--3bhauz7frjrgbka.com which look like they were pseudo-randomly generated. Perhaps as command-and-control servers?

Here's a quick table showing some of the ones Q found:

Domain	Creation Date	Status
`0-------------------------------------------------------------0.com`	1999	Down
`0-------------------------------------------------------------5.com`	2001	Live
`0---------------------0.com`	2000	Live
`0----------------0.com`	2000	Live
`0---------0.com`	2000	Live
`pr--newswire.org.uk`	2005	Down
`0o--o0.com`	2000	Down
`a-----a.net`	2000	Down
`pr--newswire.uk`	2019	Down
`uk--domain--names.uk`	2019	Live
`zz--icann-monitoring.uk`	2024	Live
`cd--storage-shelves.co.uk`	2012	Live
`mb--uk.co.uk`	2015	Live
`o---t.co.uk`	2016	Live
`om--tat-sat.co.uk`	1999	Live
`pr--newswire.co.uk`	2005	Down
`uk--domain--names.co.uk`	2000	Down
`we--buy--any--car.co.uk`	2009	Down
`i---i.net`	2001	Down
`a-------------------------------------------------------------a.com`	2000	Live
`a---b.com`	2000	Down
`v---v.net`	2000	Down
`we--care.net`	1999	Down
`b---h.com`	2001	Down
`bq--3bhauz7frjrgbka.com`	2000	Down
`bq--3bhauz7frjrgbkdcia.com`	2000	Down
`bq--3cbpcty2rjyq.com`	2000	Down
`bq--744a.com`	2000	Down
`bq--abs7czi.com`	2000	Down
`bq--abxgt4lb.com`	2000	Down
`bq--azbukkckjavdc.com`	2000	Down
`bq--azdecny.com`	2000	Live
`bq--eh7xj73b75xp62x7mh7xgah7ad7xj73b75xa.com`	2000	Down
`bq--gbbpy2enmnhq.com`	2000	Down
`bq--gbtfs2a.com`	2000	Down
`bq--s7z76.com`	2000	Down
`bq--zzzz.com`	2000	Down
`c-------7.com`	2001	Live
`f---you.com`	1998	Down
`id--design.com`	1999	Down
`ok--computer.com`	2001	Down
`t---28.com`	2000	Live
`t---taz---t.com`	2001	Down

Note, "Live" just means an HTTP request returned something. There may, of course, be other services running on that domain, or on subdomains.

So What?

Without a full list of every domain name, it's rather hard to draw firm conclusions. But, in the absence of anything better to do, here are some thoughts.

Most people don't want multiple consecutive hyphens in their domain names. They're unwieldy but mostly not prohibited.
If the authors of RFC 5891 had access to a full list of domains, might they have chosen a different syntax for Punycode?
Why is it so hard to look through every single registered domain name anyway? Even Certificate Logs no longer seem to be easily searchable.
Are there any other weird restrictions which are violated by older domain names?
When will DNS finally go all-in with Unicode rather than this kludge? (Probably around the same time as IPv6 adoption!)

If you know of any weird multi-hyphenated domains, please stick a comment in the box 😊

Way back in the year 1999, several domains were registered with trailing hyphens. This was swiftly corrected and the domains deleted. ↩︎
Note, I think this is when domain names expanded from 48 characters to 63. But that's a different Yak to Shave. ↩︎
I wonder why this isn't zero-based like so many other computery things. But that's a different rabbit hole. ↩︎
And, so I'm told, a cabal of vicious Furries waiting to pounce. ↩︎
There are also quite a few for sale. ↩︎

I Love F1 - Kev Quirk

2026-06-08T08:22:00.000Z

I Love F1

by Gordon McLean

Gordon has been hooked on F1 for 45 years, from childhood memories of Murray Walker to booking a trip to the Madrid GP. It’s a great look at how much the sport has changed and why he's still obsessed.

Read post ➡

I discovered Gordon's blog after he commented on my recent note about F1. I always check people's sites when they comment, as it's a great way to discover new blogs.

Gordon's blog didn't disappoint - lots of great content on there, including this gem all about his love of the sport of F1.

I've been following F1 for around 25 years now, and have similar memories as Gordon when it comes to thinking about some of the great drivers from the past.

His post has me thinking about booking some ticket's to next years practice sessions for my wife and I (who's also a big F1 fan).

Anyway, fun read. Thanks, Gordon.

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📝 2026-06-07 22:11 - Kev Quirk

2026-06-07T21:11:00.000Z

Why does everyone in #F1 love #Monaco? It's by far the most BORING race on the calendar.

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First Impressions of the Fitbit Air - Kev Quirk

2026-06-07T13:26:00.000Z

A little over a week ago I took delivery of my new Fitbit Air, so I thought I'd jot down some of my thoughts after using it every day to track my health.

I recently started running again, for which I use my Suunto Run to track. I've had it for a little while now and it tracks all my walks and runs. It's pretty good, but I wanted something that I could wear along side a proper watch, so it needed to have no screen and just silently track my health as I'm not interested in replacing a proper watch with a wrist phone.

The Whoop band was an obvious contender, but the £200+ per year subscription that leaves me with a brick if I ever cancel is a deal-breaker and there was nothing else that I could find on the market...that was until the Fitbit Air came along.

Fitbit Air on one wrist, watch on the other

Price

The Fitbit Air costs £85 (~$100) and unlike the Whoop, is a one-off purchase. You also get 3 months of Fitbit Premium, which basically adds Gemini to the app to help provide context, motivation, and workout schedules. After the 3 month freebie it's $10/month, but crucially the device and app work fine without Premium. You just don't get the "AI Coach" which is probably a positive for lots of people. 🙃

I already have a Gemini subscription that gives me access to Fitbit Premium, so I get it with no extra cost anyway.

AI Coach

Although the "Coach" has made basic mistakes a few times - like referring to my Suunto watch as a set of smart scales, or incorrectly stating I'd done a 10km run instead of a 5km one - generally speaking I've found the extra context and advice it gives to be very useful. It has helped me to tweak some of my strength sessions and improve my form while running.

My hope is that the basic mistakes the AI is making is down to teething problems. If so, I'd like to think they will improve with time. Like anything AI generated though, it's important to not take the feedback and advice it gives as gospel.

Whenever it's made mistakes and I've called it out, it's always responds with the correct data and context afterward.

Comfort

Most of the time I don't even notice I have the Air on. It's so small and light - it just chugs away in the background, doing its thing. It's also about half the width of the Whoop.

I bought the rubber strap for mine too, which is more comfortable while running, and less absorbent than the standard canvas strap, so hopefully no sweat will sink into it.

The OEM straps are super expensive though, so I'm looking forward to aftermarket ones becoming available.

Battery life

Google advertise the Air as having a 1 week battery life. I can attest to that - I'd easily get a week out of this.

It's also super quick to charge. Earlier in the week I was down to around 30% battery, so I chucked it on charge while I jumped in the shower. 20 mins later when I put it back on, it was nearly fully charged.

This is great news as I'll be able to keep it topped up when I shower, then pop it back on when I go to bed so it can track my sleep.

The Google factor

This is the major downside to all this - Fitbit are owned by Google, so they're likely to use the data in all kinds of unscrupulous ways.

But the way I'm looking at it is that the gamification, the data, and the motivation that this little thing provides is helping me to get out and exercise. That's because I love data, so being able to review it all after my workouts, and see progress is hugely motivating. So if it helps me to get fit, and stay fit, it's a price I think I'm willing to pay.

I'm kind of at the point in my life now where I just want things to work for me. If there's tradeoffs, so be it. Anything for an easy (and healthier) life.

Final thoughts

This post was a little all over the place. But overall, I really like the Fitbit Air. The data is keeping me motivated, and although the AI Coach makes mistakes, it is helping me navigate the data and improve my training, so I'll take that as a win.

For me, it's an easy decision between this and the Whoop. The Fitbit wins out.

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A couple of bike commutes - Joel's Log Files

2026-06-07T03:40:00.000Z

Today I used my bike as a tool and not just for excercise or hobby!

My mom wanted me to go with her to some place, and even though she would just take me with her on the car, I decided to simply go ahead and take my bike to meet her there.

It has been raining lately, but that only made the weather comfy and cloudy overall. Riding with a purpose felt quite cool, and as always, the ride itself was awesome and freeing. I must admit though, I felt a bit sluggish, as the air was going against me and I had to work my legs a bit more than expected. Still comfortable enough.

I took the ideal path and even though I did arrive later—cars are fast after all—the timing was ideal. And just like that, I had done the first actual trip from X to Y. We went to a park for a class my mom gives to some kids in that neighborhood, it was in a public park and I just left the bike nearby on sight, since there were no good spots to lock it.

When we were done, I took the bike and returned. All this time I’ve rode my bike and went pretty much on a circle, never staying anywhere, simply riding and then going home, until now, a trip with a destination!

Later my church was going to do a small charity at a nearby hospital, giving away food and praying for those in need. I decided to head there using my bicycle once again. This time things got fun.

The waters were set free, and rain fell upon me, but honestly? That just felt awesome, it was a light rain and it didn’t really disturb me much. The feeling of the raindrops against my face felt rather great, I didn’t bring any sort of jacket, just the usual shirt and jeans, but I didn’t care. I made my way to the hospital and this time I decided to actually park the bike. I bought a u-lock a while back, so I locked things up against a hand rail nearby. Since we were outside the building I had it in sight at every moment anyway.

There were not a lot of people outside this time, but after announcing it to some people, even nurses and doctors showed up. It was kind of fun a dozen of them in a row with their medical attire. Don’t worry, there plenty of food for actual patients and people waiting outside.

Then the rain got stronger.

I decided to unlock the bike and bring it closer with me, all the rain soaked it completely, and my seat was not in the most comfortable state. A couple minutes later I was told I couldn’t have my bike in the entrance area—where we were—and that I should go park it in a different place. The guard explained to me that she had no problem but she was told by a superior and I kind of understood. Instead of parking it, I just carried it with me and stayed with it nearby as I judged what to do.

I didn’t want to leave my bike in the rain, but I also couldn’t stay there forever—maybe I could but I didn’t want to get the guard in trouble. I saw a trash can that was located far from the entrance, and decided to just put it there. It was still covered from the rain, although I couldn’t lock it properly. Still, it was on sight and soon enough we were done.

The return home was quite fun! I went ahead and the rain was much stronger, there were puddles everywhere and I had to go through a couple of them. Alas, the commute was very fun! Not a lot of cars to cause me trouble in any of my trips either.

It was not until I got home when I realized my back, and the lower section of my jeans, was full of mud stains…

So, I need to buy fenders now, I guess!

This is day 76 of #100DaysToOffload

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