2026

Another drop! This time from DJ_Dave: Fail-safe. ヾ(＞ω＜)ゞ

Fail-safe ↳out Friday . #livecoding #algorave #electronicmusic #newmusic

I’m so ridiculously happy that spring is finally here! And at the same time, so sad that I need to shut the blinds and pretend the nice weather isn’t there (even though it is) just to keep my eyeballs from getting blinded and get any work done.

Oh, how I wish I could be in France tomorrow for Lyon’s Algorave. Just look at this poster by Adel Faure! And most of the artists have their own cute websites. Pure joy! The open web has really been on a roll lately.

Even if the music isn’t for you, go explore these lovely artist sites.

Erica’s book arrived this week. It’s been with me on the balcony, on the couch, in a park—and today, I read the last few pages in the sun, on a bench at the south end of Lake Munksjön. Such a cozy slice-of-life read. 📚

Also, this tidbit from the book’s introduction:

I’ve been drawing and writing all my life, but I didn’t think I had enough to fill a book. I guess all I needed was to keep going.

What if, each time you emptied the trash bin, your computer quietly took a screenshot of what was there? Something you could return to later—a small, accidental record of what you were working on or thinking about.

Here’s mine from today:

alt=“A macOS Finder window showing my trash, previewing a handful of files and one folder listed below. The Moon sits quietly in the background as my wallpaper.”

typewriterart.pdf, xkcd-script.ttf, crosspoint-reader-on-m5papers3.jpg, Short stories - E.M. Forster.epub, nyckel.asc, Grace Rocky Save Stars - E…Sample.jpg, elk-master/

Here’s Jeffrey Zeldman on the courage to stop:

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this. I edited. I respected your time more than I needed to show my work.

Made me think of Blaise Pascal’s classic:

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

It kind of feels like there are less and less April Fools' jokes, probably because the whole world is turning into a April Fools' joke.

Maybe we should all take a digital sabbatical day instead?

Important message from Xanthe:

🫵️ YOU should go watch Project Hail Mary in Imax right now. I don’t care what you’re doing. Get on the bus and buy a ticket.

I agree! You should read the book too.

If you’re thinking about applying for a Swedish island, first of all, I’m jealous (as a Swede, I’m not eligible), and second, I highly recommend going for island #1: Tjuvholmen. It’s a charming little island, not far from the cabin where I spent my summers as a kid. I’ll come visit if you win!

Also, I love this bit from the FAQ:

Is the initiative open to everyone?
The competition is open to all international travellers (except billionaires) aged 18 and above.

Here’s Don Knuth:

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 […] ! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.

I’ve seen the movie more than once, but this is my first time reading Carl Sagan’s Contact. 📚

For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless.

I still write my own code, because I enjoy it.

I have never been a normal programmer, and maybe you aren't, either. So, let's just do things the way we want — the way we like.

😌

I enjoyed this conversation between Margaret Atwood and Katie Drummond. Here’s Margaret on large language models:

That is a subject about which I know very little, except that it’s a crap poet and a pretty bad imitator of me.

[…]

It’s like absolutely every other human tool that we have ever come up with, including fire and language. So it has good news, it has bad news. It’s got stupid consequences that nobody was thinking about and they’re all like that. Name one, and that is what you will see.