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Posts by Colin Douch

github.com/swaywm/sway/... I live to be able to achieve this level of snark

7 hours ago 0 0 0 0

Writing a font rasterizer for my operating system and it's like:

TTF fonts contain lines and Bezier curves - ok, fine

TTF fonts contain bytecode for a Turing complete stack based VM - wait what?

1 week ago 4 0 2 0
An image from my esta reminder email that says:

Traveling to the U.S. has never been easier.
DOWNLOAD THE FREE ESTA mobile app

An image from my esta reminder email that says: Traveling to the U.S. has never been easier. DOWNLOAD THE FREE ESTA mobile app

My ESTA is expiring, so the US government deemed fit to remind me that "travelling to the US has never been easier", and like, are you sure about that?

1 week ago 2 0 2 0
Me holding up the cross bar of a gate ala the exorcist

Me holding up the cross bar of a gate ala the exorcist

The nearly completed gate frame, with crossbar successfully lap jointed into place

The nearly completed gate frame, with crossbar successfully lap jointed into place

With the sun out, I've been getting back into doing actually tangible things, like exorcising the demons from my house before building the new garden gate

2 weeks ago 1 0 0 0
QCon London by InfoQ
Debugging Distributed Systems
March 17 / The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre - London

Liz Fong-Jones, Technical Fellow

QCon London by InfoQ Debugging Distributed Systems March 17 / The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre - London Liz Fong-Jones, Technical Fellow

Hosting Debugging Distributed Systems track at #QConLondon next week; thrilled to have @hazelweakly.me, @hakshak.bsky.social, @voidmaze.bsky.social, @colindou.ch , and @palcu.net joining me. And we all want to hear your war stories at the unconference session!

Agenda: qconlondon.com/track/mar202...

1 month ago 43 8 1 1
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My thoughts on AI If there’s one thing that has come to define the modern era, it’s AI. From the early days of ChatGPT, to image generation, to the massive sweeping statements about how AI is going to β€œchange the world...

I wrote a quick thing on AI: blog.colindou.ch/posts/my-tho.... While AI is a semi-useful tool, we also need to acknowledge that the downsides to it are in some cases catastrophic, and no-one pushing AI does that. I miss the days when we used to laugh at Bitcoin using a countries energy supply.

1 month ago 1 0 1 0

Ironically, losing a bunch of subscribers for supporting the US war machine might actually be a really good business strategy for OpenAI, considering by their own admission they lose money on every subscriber

1 month ago 1 0 0 0

The `aria-label` is "Live event happening now: NFL Playoffs" - something live streaming related? That was a thing they announced recently

2 months ago 0 0 1 0
A business card for "The Kiwi", a New Zealander run bar in Amsterdam serving the worst New Zealand beer

A business card for "The Kiwi", a New Zealander run bar in Amsterdam serving the worst New Zealand beer

Always fun to travel Europe and still find home, even if all they have is Tui

2 months ago 0 0 0 0
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It's fascinating reading Hacker News and seeing all the posts about how to protect yourself from the AI tools you're using. How to stop them from deleting things, how to stop them stealing your secrets, has there ever been a tool in the past that we just accept as being actively hostile to the user?

2 months ago 3 0 1 0

Didn't you hear? We're doing install.md now, so you get all the insecurity of running a random bash script, with all the terrifying stochasticity of an LLM in one "makes you want to tear your eyes out" package

2 months ago 0 0 1 0

Hey Perl folks - anyone know if there's a definition of what the file that NYTProf outputs actually _is_? Or am I going spelunking into the C++ that reads it for nytprofhtml?

2 months ago 0 0 0 0

There's so many people lauding the fact that we can produce software so much faster with AI, and so little pushback as to whether more software is even a net positive. We just do it because we can, like a software manifest destiny

3 months ago 3 0 1 0
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My time at Cloudflare: A Retrospective It’s been just over a year since I left my 7 and a bit year stint at Cloudflare, and I’ve had a lot of time to mull over the experience. I have … a lot of thoughts, and I figured the best way to get t...

I've been going back and forth on posting this one, but it's nice to get back into writing. Part memoir, part technical document on my time at Cloudflare: blog.colindou.ch/posts/my-tim...

3 months ago 10 0 1 1
A pamphlet describing "how to complain"

A pamphlet describing "how to complain"

Mandatory reading that should be included in the UK citizenship pack

4 months ago 3 0 0 0

That feature was a major cause of a friend and me having a split for a while when he saw what I _really_ thought before deleting it πŸ˜‚

4 months ago 0 0 1 0

My one comment on the Cloudflare outage from yesterday is that it's ironic that it's almost exactly the same failure mode as the 2019 outage: shipping a config file worldwide without any validation steps. Bets on the 2031 outage reason?

4 months ago 1 1 1 0
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A flat white, on a wooden plate with a Kiwi burned into it

A flat white, on a wooden plate with a Kiwi burned into it

In Nuremburg again for OSMC, and making my yearly pilgrimage to have a bit of a taste of home on this side of the world.

4 months ago 1 0 0 0

There's a great quote from Vonnegut in Player Piano: A step backwards, when you've taken a wrong turn is a step in the right direction. Call me a luddite, but I think about that a lot with modern tech

5 months ago 4 0 1 0
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Lights! Crackers! Action! It's launch week!

The Kickstarter for book 2 in mine and Johnny Schumann's CHEESE! series is launching at 10am on Thursday.

6 months ago 0 1 1 0

Maybe just for a certain age then 🀭

10 months ago 1 0 0 0

I'm flying out at 6 am tomorrow, but am I getting bladdered at a Eurovision party? Obviously. I don't want to lose my queer card πŸ˜…

10 months ago 1 0 1 0
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GitHub - sinkingpoint/onotify: A drop in replacement for Prometheus Alertmanager, built on top of Cloudflare Workers A drop in replacement for Prometheus Alertmanager, built on top of Cloudflare Workers - sinkingpoint/onotify

I'm going to disappear from the internet for a couple of weeks, so before I go, let's drop something I've been working on. A while ago I wrote about the lack of serverless applications in the open source world (blog.colindou.ch/posts/open-s...), so here's one: github.com/sinkingpoint...

1 year ago 1 0 0 0
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GitHub - cloudflare/parquet-tsdb-poc: A POC for a tsdb storage using parquet A POC for a tsdb storage using parquet. Contribute to cloudflare/parquet-tsdb-poc development by creating an account on GitHub.

Even though I'm no longer there, I continue to be proud of what the Cloudflare Observability team is accomplishing. Pushing boundaries to solve unique, and not so unique problems: github.com/cloudflare/p...

1 year ago 1 0 0 0
Pancake Day - Maid Marian
Pancake Day - Maid Marian YouTube video by Swimace

God I feel old youtu.be/gj_aHCpZl4k

1 year ago 1 0 0 0
My stack of pancakes for pancake day

My stack of pancakes for pancake day

It's pppppppp-pancake day!

1 year ago 3 0 1 0
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An OpenAI status page going from "we're experiencing an elevated level of API errors" to "We've spotted that something has gone wrong"

An OpenAI status page going from "we're experiencing an elevated level of API errors" to "We've spotted that something has gone wrong"

1 year ago 0 0 0 0
Chowder - OH NO! IT ALL WENT WRONG!!
Chowder - OH NO! IT ALL WENT WRONG!! YouTube video by ProteinBlob

Obligatory: youtu.be/TIZneWRGxZ8

1 year ago 0 0 0 0

Small things that bring me joy: The OpenAI status page has "we've spotted that something has gone wrong", which is separate from their "we're investigating an issue" update. What happens between those two? What is the transition from "issue" to "something has gone wrong"?

1 year ago 1 0 3 0

Even I forgot they did that πŸ˜‚ What a weird acquisition

1 year ago 0 0 1 0