The best thing about long-lived incumbent technologies like JSON and XML is that nobody really has to think about them much any more. Except for, I do occasionally, because while I’m of eithe

A person watching over my shoulder asked “How are you switching around so fast?” and I realized that while most readers here know this trick, some may not, and it’s awfully useful. [Update: I

Recently I got an invitation from an organization I respect, to a gathering of senior people, unconference format. Yes, it’s mostly about AI. No, it doesn’t reek of boosterism. My guess is that th

War is bad. Don’t start one. But we’re already in a class war and we’re losing. Where by “we” I mean most people; the winning side comprises, roughly, the richest 0.1% of the population, who a

That’s , which is to say Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and their new series , an in-progress work comprising 2¼ or so novels. The Coreys are of course best-known for their deservedly w

On impulse, Lauren and I went out for a short walk around just a few blocks as the grey Spring afternoon shaded to dusk. On a second impulse, I grabbed the camera on the way out the door. — —

Our family has used for many years. Most recently 1Password 7, now at least three years out of date. We didn’t want to upgrade to the latest version, went looking for alternatives, and have b

This will be the 30 Long-Links outing. I’m 100% sure that there does not live a human being who has looked at all those Links, but my logfiles say that quite a few of you, Dear Readers, at least t

What happened was, soon after New Year’s, friends and colleagues in the UK and Germany started letting us know that their emails to us were bouncing. Our “textuality.com” family domain is a

This last weekend we attended a concert entitled at Vancouver’s Catholic featuring the vocal group and the early-music band. The music was fine and it was the most beautiful sound

Recently I read by and by . The language we speak (and text) to each other is at the core of who and what we are, and the Internet is the strongest among the forces that channel

Block announced that it’s cutting 40% of its workforce. It didn’t say it was replacing those people with GenAI. Not out loud. Jack Dorsey did say “I believe the majority of companies will reach th

I’ve run early-spring pictures of these little purple guys almost every year since this blog’s birth in early 2003. Except for last year. Because and the new place didn’t have any. Only now

I’ve been puttering away on my project since 2023. In the last few weeks GenAI has intervened. describes a series of Claude-generated human-curated PRs, most of which I’ve now appr

I described a bunch of incremental-improvement PRs from a colleague working with Claude Opus. Today I want to talk about Rishi Baldawa’s , a Claude-based port of Quamina from Go to Rust.

With 47 years of coding under my belt, and still a fascination for the new shiny, obviously I’m interested what role (if any) GenAI is going to play in the future of software. But not interested

Welcome to the first of this so-far-pretty-lousy 2026. I can’t imagine that anyone will have time to take in all of these, but there’s a good chance one or two might brighten your day.Long Links

There’ve been a few bugfixes and optimizations since 1.5, but the headline is: now knows regular expressions. This is roughly the fourth anniversary of the first check-in and the third o

Developer avoided generating 1.5M lines of Go code by finding a better way to implement Unicode character properties in regexp for Quamina library.

Author lands a PR enabling regexp features in Quamina, continuing a 12-year journey with finite automata that began at AWS with event-ruler.