yoz

"Rob Manuel is a writer, curator of Fesshole, and co-founder of B3ta. He lives in London."

He also has a BlueSky account, where he posts lots of good links to new indie games: https://bsky.app/profile/robmanuel.b3ta.com

Do you have any recommendations for starting points with the bb ecosystem? As in, good existing components or practices?

I've been using it on and off for a while, but never got around to doing any major customisation mainly because I hate reinventing wheels (and also I was busy with other things). But I now am looking for something like a cross between Warp and Zed's Delta (which is a very nice design), and bb might be able to give it to me.

EDIT: OK, the plugin marketplace is much more browsable than the last time I looked. It'd be lovely to have a gallery where people can show off their own configs. Maybe I should make one...

Amazing work, well done!

I found a weird bug when using the glyph tool on Hebrew text. Where can I file an issue?

Also, are you planning to open the source?

She's gone, sir. They've all gone. And we're back. The incredibly posh people who are still unaccountably waiters.

I tried to pass Mornington Crescent the other day, but I was in Knip; bloody typical. As you’d expect, I ended up double-shunting onto the Victoria Line.

The File System Access API can do this, and it works in local ("file:///") HTML files, but it's only currently supported in desktop Chromium browsers: https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api

However, every browser will let you download a new version of the HTML file and save it over the old one - yes, even from a local HTML file:

   const blob = new Blob(['<!DOCTYPE html>\n' +
      document.documentElement.outerHTML], 
      { type: 'text/html' });
   const a = document.createElement('a');
   a.href = URL.createObjectURL(blob);
   a.download = 'mypage.html';
   a.click();

... but you need the user to do this for every update. So we're back to manual "Save" buttons.

Let's also hear it for David Shire's fantastic theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOXD_g0cSpw

"I figured it out. They're gonna fly the train to Cuba."

Apologies for hijacking an advice thread, but I'm another dad who's had to deal with this incompatibility nightmare, and I really really want to know what the hell happened within Microsoft & Mojang to end up with this mess.

No, seriously, I'm fascinated by the story. It's been over ten years. I'm happy to assume that most of the people involved are smart and good with decent intentions. I also bet there were many kinds of commercial and organisational pressures, especially because it's (a) Microsoft and (b) one of the biggest gaming acquisitions ever.

Does anyone here have any insider knowledge they could share?

This is probably naive of me, but avoidance of a real sandbox sounds like a great idea so far:

1: Apply the Principle of Least Power/Privilege, especially where agents are involved. "With great power comes astonishing fuckupitude."

2: More freedom to diverge from the existing POSIX and bash primitives to something that better suits the data involved

Having logical control of the filesystem lets you do fun tricks like using file paths as a simplistic search API (e.g. /docs/tag1/tag2/ lists all the docs tagged with both tag1 and tag2).

But it might also be worth looking at shells which give you more power over structured data, like nushell. It's written in Rust, but it might be relatively simple to port just the bits you need to Elixir (which I would never have said a couple of years ago). Keeping everything in process sounds like a major win to me, because of both performance and control.

Mind absolutely blown by this

This is FASCINATING, thank you!

This is one of my favourite exploit stories. Incredible work.

Yeah, it's a shame. I usually enjoy Raymond Chen's posts, but this doesn't tell me anything particularly interesting other than that the band didn't know. The main question I have is: why this video? What's the story behind the choice?

Dan Davies wrote a whole book on this topic, The Unaccountability Machine [1]. In it, he creates the concept of "accountability sinks": organisational structures or systems which abstract the source of a decision away from individuals so that no specific person can be held accountable.

Davies writes: "For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system."

For a good short overview, see this piece by Mandy Brown: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799...

oh no, now I really want that too

"The StandaloneWindow module provides a way to create a separate window to display custom content. You are able to control a full-sized webview inside the window, therefore you can use HTML, CSS, and advanced techniques like WebGL to render the contents." [1]

So... someone could make a Webamp[2] plugin?

And Butterchurn[3] for viz? (Assuming one can plumb in a compatible audio node)

[1] https://docs.iina.io/interfaces/IINA.API.StandaloneWindow

[2] https://docs.webamp.org/docs/intro

[3] https://github.com/jberg/butterchurn

Serious question: would it be worth the effort to treat XSLT as a compilation target for a friendlier language, either extant or new?

There's clearly value in XSLT's near-universal support as a web-native system. It provides templating out of the box without invoking JavaScript, and there's demand for that[1]. But it still lacks decent in-browser debugging which JS has in spades.

[1] https://justinfagnani.com/2025/06/26/the-time-is-right-for-a...

I'm talking about network compatibility, so that a Bedrock client can join a Java server and vice versa. It's clearly somewhat possible because GeyserMC[1] exists. It's just ridiculous that it's a third-party addon.

[1] https://geysermc.org/

Thanks so much for sharing your work. Your blog posts are _far_ more interesting and helpful than most of what I'm seeing about agentic coding.

I'm particularly fascinated by those last two links, along with your latest post about READMEs. It makes me wonder about a visual specification editor that provides GitHub-like task chronology around the spec, with the code as a secondary artefact (in contrast to GitHub, where code is primary).

Hey, if we're already complaining about Microsoft products, can someone explain why the Bedrock and Java versions of Minecraft have not been made cross-compatible in the TEN YEARS since the Mojang acquisition?

(... speaking as another dad just trying to play with my kid.)

The joke: https://youtu.be/gi_6SaqVQSw?si=PmVHtMZJyhMQFUar

Thanks so much for writing this up and sharing. It sounds like you've been through a horrific few years, but your perseverance in creativity is inspiring and fascinating. I wish you well in your efforts to make a better life for yourself, and I hope your work finds a wider audience.

Take the spoiler warning seriously. The landing page is fun to play with (once you find the tools in the top right corner) and has at least one amazing/bizarre toy in it.

Yep. Enter The Gungeon is my personal favourite among roguelites but it's punishingly hard to get the hang of, and the huge number of weapons makes it quite likely that you'll only get semi-decent guns for an entire run – even when you're playing as the Gunslinger, who activates all synergies automatically.

The upside of putting in the time is that when you get good, it feels fantastic.

If you haven't tried it, I'd recommend Dead Cells. Yes, it's twitchy action, but it's easier than Gungeon to get good at, and the parkour-like flow looks and feels wonderful from quite early on. TBH it's a better game than Gungeon in most respects.

Dead Cells's "Custom Mode" lets you eliminate loads of objects from the set offered, making it much more likely for you to get weapons you want.

It's somewhat unique among the roguelites I've seen in not only offering this but also treating it as valid play: any wins/achievements in this mode (e.g. more BC) will unlock properly.

So, no need to put up with Spartan Sandals ever again!

I LOVE that you let the player tweak those variables in the mechanics. Many of us want to be able to relax with a nice comfy game for half an hour, and "comfy" means setting the difficulty just right.

My partner used to relax with Flipflop Solitaire[1], which lets you choose how many suits there are in the deck. These days they play lots of Balatro with the checkered deck[2].

[1] http://www.flipflopsolitaire.com/

[2] https://balatrogame.fandom.com/wiki/Checkered_Deck

Disagree. Some abstractions are still vital, and it's for the same reasons as always: communicate purpose and complexity concisely rather than hiding it.

The best code is that which explains itself most efficiently and readably to Whoever Reads It Next. That's even more important with LLMs than with humans, because the LLMs probably have far less context than the humans do.

Developers often fall back on standard abstraction patterns that don't have good semantic fit with the real intent. Right now, LLMs are mostly copying those bad habits. But there's so much potential here for future AI to be great at creating and using the right abstractions as part of software that explains itself.

When I worked at Second Life we'd often have work meetings in-world. It was fun, often silly, but also productive. Ultimately, it was a voice conference with decent audio and tinker-toy visuals, and we could dogfood and demo our work.

But this was around 2010, when most internet video conferencing tools were still terrible, so Second Life was decent competition. For doing work meetings in 2025, the only virtual-world-like competition to Zoom & co that I can think of is maybe Apple's Spatial Facetime, and that's thanks to expensive hardware designed to solve or hide the usual VR usability issues.

Horizon Worlds continues to look like a product with leaders who don't actually want to use a virtual world, or understand the appeal. There is no amount of money which can fix that.

Until that changes, it won't be anywhere near as good as Second Life (which I worked on) or VRChat, despite those systems costing a tiny fraction of what Meta has spent on Horizon Worlds and related projects (Facebook Spaces, Oculus Rooms, etc.). Ex-colleagues of mine worked on this stuff at Meta for years, eventually giving up because of leadership's continual failure to grasp fundamentals of why people like and use virtual worlds.

This looks great! I love that it builds on top of existing tools has so many kinds of export already. Thank you so much for sharing it - I'm always looking for good tools for quick animation and presentations.

Like you, I'm a big fan of Keynote. It would be amazing to have Keynote-style smooth animation here too (tweening, easing curves, Magic Move, etc.), though I'm sure it would be a huge project in itself.