A map of London King's Cross station, with the locations of platforms 8 and 9 circled in red, as well as Platform 9¾ between and below them, under which is the caption "sort your shit out JK"

A photo of a computer keyboard on a desk in a theatre. It is being lit by a very visible beam of light from the ceiling far above it. The beam of light is shaped to perfectly outline the keyboard.

“I can’t see my keyboard”
The humble 19,000 lumen vl2600 profile:

Melodrama, the album that you are.

i think we can all agree that god isn't setting the foundations of my games through me, but maybe satan is

Beg Bounties When someone passed me hundreds of thousands of records on kids taken from CloudPets a few years ago [https://www.troyhunt.com/data-from-connected-cloudpets-teddy-bears-leaked-and-ransomed-exposing-ki...

*sigh*

www.troyhunt.com/beg-bounties/

Summary of today at work:

IhategpgIhategpgIhategpgIhategpg

A phone in a case absolutely covered with drawings of trains in various pride themed liveries.

Absolutely _had_ to get this phone case from @nattj.bsky.social - think it's my entire personality in phone case form

You’re going to need to elaborate on this one Brannan.

Reflections on the React community | Lee Robinson Some thoughts after working with React for 10 years.

Great read from @leerob.com

leerob.com/reflections

Not sure about RPM, but apt supports HTTP basic auth, so you could have something as simple as a htpasswd for authorised users manpages.debian.org/testing/apt/...

Slack conversation: Someone whose name is blurred: "In prod or dev? I can try testing now if u want?" Marks Polakovs: "Let me put it this way" "We have a dev instance" "It happens to also be the prod instance"

Had an oddly similar experience, except this time the top result was the bug tracker of a popular Linux distro, and the person who has filed the bug was…

me

You know it's good when you're troubleshooting something, you google the error message, get only one result, that being a link to the source code, and said link being purple.

Pseudo-mathematically:

Performance of LLM at task = (Amount of input you give it) / (Amount of output you're expecting)

Great summary of what LLMs are and aren't good at:

* Turn text into less text than you started: great
* Turn text into the same amount of different text: so-so
* Turn text into more text than you started: forget about it

Happy 2025. Have fun, seek out joy, and don’t give a shit. Be your authentic you. Crack on!

A VS Code menu with the "JavaScript Debug Terminal" option selected.

Open the menu to add a Node.js run configuration, select "JavaScript Debug Terminal", hit F5, bosh. Run your Node app and it'll automatically have a debugger attached. Magic.

Things I should have discovered much sooner: the Node.js vscode debug terminal.

Opens a terminal, and any Node process you run from it has the vscode debugger automagically attached. Handles child processes of child processes as well. No faffing about with --inspect, it Just Works.

A cracker of a show | Untitled.mov Episode 6 YouTube video by Untitled․mov

Our Christmas special just dropped - it’s the most wonderful time of the year, so why not spend it listening to @itscfox.bsky.social @markspolakovs.me @mstratford.net @koryanderson.co.uk and Jamie talk rubbish for an hour?

youtu.be/KomMjPaJ75U

Punctuation matters. Way more than you think. Bad punctuation can be devastating.

Don't believe me?

Alright, then gather around, children, because I'm going to tell you a short true story about how not understanding ONE punctuation mark once cost a company millions of dollars in a lawsuit.

Cat.

Cat.

Failing to start a show for 35 seconds YouTube video by Untitled․mov

@un.titled.mov: we’re a serious show having serious discussions about serious topics in serious tech
Also @un.titled.mov: www.youtube.com/watch?v=scKv...

Captain Haddock looking very frazzled, saying, “What a week, huh?” Tintin leans into the frame and says, “Captain, it’s Wednesday.” Snowy is very excited about the drink he has found.

Moonlighting as a podcast editor now apparently.

If you’re interested in some very (very (very)) in-depth football analysis, go listen to these geezers.

@itscfox.bsky.social has an interesting thesis: "twitter" should be a genericised trademark for "social networking site made up of short-form text content". X is 'a twitter'. Mastodon and Bluesky are 'twitters'.

ok, uhhh i've got like 3 more hours in the sky club to kill. every like == 1 hot take about observability

God grant me the serenity to accept I am cooked,

The courage to say fuck it we ball,

And the wisdom to know when we are so back

Nonsense abounds.

Got tired of spending longer making my personal site than writing content on it, so here's the new and improved markspolakovs.me

(still under construction)

And for some reason prefer it to the original.