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stephenlfon /dev/null: social network for developers

Weird, especially because it DOES have likes.

stephenlfon /dev/null: social network for developers

I signed up for TextLog a few weeks ago. I love the text-only social network, but their European infra meant too much latency for my US-based browsing. Maybe this will scratch that itch!

stephenlfon /dev/null: social network for developers

Is this a real question? If so, here’s a real answer:

GitHub is the single most widely adopted, developer-specific OIDC identity provider.

If it’s facetious, then WSL BABYYYYYY

stephenlfon Google Playground: Create and play custom games

I predict a very orthogonal outcome. This is an interesting experiment. If it gains some traction, Roblox and Minecraft are both very well situated to build a similar product and dominate the market.

stephenlfon The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)

I agree with this post. I’ve never found the GitHub wiki experience to be particularly ergonomic. I don’t have any issues with it, but it’s no more convenient than a simple /docs folder. And from there, it’s almost trivial to turn /docs into GitHub pages. Similar effort for a much better end product.

Wikis typically connote distributed, anonymous edits. This feature is partially covered by git already.

stephenlfon The "omarchy" stuff is getting weird and weirder

The whole thing reads like an odd parody. “A modest proposal.”

stephenlfon Cpak – OCI application package format for Linux desktops, servers and devices

> Follow a complete course, change real manifests and see what cpak accepts, refuses or changes. Professional paths lead to an exam and a public, verifiable credential.

Holy Claude

stephenlfon US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs

Robin Hood?

stephenlfon Pandas Should Go Extinct

Besides the performance benefits, I use Polars at work because it’s just (subjectively) nicer to work with. The “pl.col” API lets you create arbitrary generated/virtual columns anywhere you want, declaratively. You can throw in these column expressions in wherever without actually computing their values and storing that in memory. Very powerful stuff.

stephenlfon 118M Queries per Second on Neki

I watched an interview that Casey Muratori did with Tyler Cloutier (SpacetimeDB founder and spokesperson) [1]. One of the points that Tyler is that, given modern CPU architecture with cache lines, a distributed database needs to fan out to at least 50-100 nodes to beat the throughput of a cache-optimized, single node database.

It’s cool to see the flip side of that argument. Planet scale is answering the question, “what does it look like when you DO fan out your workload to >100 nodes?”

There’s a place for both technologies. Very cool stuff.

[1] https://youtu.be/ONxwjqFjP3A?is=awlEJwGLxQmRE25i

stephenlfon I need a clear Python roadmap?

https://stephenlf.dev/blog/python-library-in-2026/

stephenlfon What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?

How is that simpler?

stephenlfon Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

The entire internet is breathing a sigh of relief

stephenlfon Fortune Telling Fraud

This scam has apparently resurfaced among Esty spell vendors

stephenlfon Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution

“Widely regarded” still applies, I think.

stephenlfon Simple Is Not Small

Yeah that example was pretty flimsy and contrived.

stephenlfon It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

Comparatively, this is what it's like getting all of this working across browser versions, platforms, and so many other things:

…<img not found/>…

I don’t know what this picture was supposed to be, but a 404 demonstrates your point perfectly well.

stephenlfon Maybe we shouldn't be reviewing all this code

Pair programming worked well for me in college because my peers had about the same level of background knowledge and the goal was well defined. At my day job, pair programming doesn’t work as well, since the knowledge gaps in different parts of the system are too great. We don’t have a cohesive skill set.

stephenlfon uv: Deduplicate all files in the wheel cache

uv is the backbone of any modern Python library. I’m excited to see improvements.

https://stephenlf.dev/blog/python-library-in-2026/

stephenlfon uv: Deduplicate all files in the wheel cache

uv is the backbone of any modern Python library.

https://stephenlf.dev/blog/python-library-in-2026/

stephenlfon I built a scanner to find a SaaS worth cloning. Its best answer was "don't."

Do you know anybody who wants to read AI-generated research papers? I don’t. Do you?

stephenlfon Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

This isn’t the only ridiculous thing Anthropic does to promote Claude. They still don’t support AGENTS.md

stephenlfon A lightweight Git CLI extension that adds S3:// support

The text on this website cuts off on my browser (iPhone 15 Safari). Phone-width websites have been solved for over a decade, so I’m not sure how the devs missed this. But I’m sure that the developers nailed the git extension.

stephenlfon California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

This IS systemd we’re talking about.

stephenlfon Bug Blindness

Asking others for feedback is absurdly powerful.

stephenlfon POWBlock is a universal bot/DDoS defense primitive for any server

Kudos for finding the perfect name

stephenlfon Show HN: Trading experiments, 5 years, all reproducible. The answer was no

This whole page sounds AI generated. If the author couldn’t bother to write a decent promotion, why would we think that the book was even half decent?

stephenlfon Queryable Executables

Fantastic ideas. The SQL Injection to ACE pipeline is incredible.

stephenlfon Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

Yes. These are funny little quirks, but nobody will ever get tripped up by them.

stephenlfon My Friend Aaron

Spooky and riveting!