I’m running an experiment: I’m 3d printing a bunch of MagSafe stands and keeping my phone’s max charge at 80% to see if we can beat the next wave of planned obsolescence.

it doesn't even have to be a faulty agent doing the work. maybe it worked exactly to spec, just has no intuition for caveats and gotchas - the kind of knowledge you acquire over 20 years of coding. you get a nose for these things.

but here... all driven by juniors. the commits look good. then you run it through the next feature. and so on. each time you risk producing a new corner case, and you do it faster than users can report problems. it's the frequency of changes that is the problem.

Warning for anyone using a custom DNS server via a VPN like Tailscale on iOS 27.

New in iOS 27 is Connectivity Assist (default enabled). When enabled, iOS will randomly ignore the DNS settings of the VPN and use the default resolver, no matter how strong the WiFi is.

This is especially an issue for Tailscale’s “override DNS servers”¹ setting. I have Tailscale do subnet routing to my home network, and have custom DNS names for local IPs. Oops, no local DNS names work.

The band-aid is to turn off Connectivity Assist. I filed an issue with Tailscale² but I’m not sure how to file an FB as I don’t know what mechanism Tailscale is using for DNS overriding and I don’t have the current knowledge to build a sample app.

¹ https://tailscale.com/docs/reference/dns-in-tailscale#:~:text=By%20default%2C%20your%20tailnet%27s%20devices%20use%20their%20local%20DNS%20settings%20for%20all%20queries.%20To%20force%20clients%20to%20always%20use%20the%20nameservers%20you%20define%2C%20you%20can%20enable%20the%20Override%20DNS%20servers%20toggle.

² https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/21345

The ads themselves get served by neutral CDNs so this was 132MB purely of JSON and cookies over the span of… maybe 24 hours?

I’m fuming…

BIG OL HOT TIP for folks like me using PiHole to block ads and trackers etc *and* devices on the latest iOS:

You’re gonna want to turn off “Connectivity assist” right tf now.

This feature used to be helpful when the wifi genuinely had no internet connectivity, but apparently iOS 27 uses it to *re-request DNS queries that failed because you intentionally blocked them*.

This feature bypassed my filters for **132MB** of ads and trackers while I was hunting this down 🤬🤬🤬

There’s lots of doom in the air around AI and climate change.

This conversation with climate tech expert Steph Speirs gave me some hope.

https://youtu.be/xwXM2pHj0g4?si=I0IHWQnbpL3B2_8T

I’m running a TTRPG with friends where we’re mashing up mechanics from D&D and GURPS…

D&DURPS.

Our conversations about badly needed change vs “community character” in cities are completely off-balance.

Far too often I’ve seen “community character” trump not only ONE of the urgent public interests shown in this graphic, but it’s too often allowed to trump ALL of them.

When did we decide that community character is more important than not just anything else, but EVERYTHING else?

Community character shouldn’t be a veto on WHETHER we change. It’s an element of HOW we change successfully.

gahddangit, they sent me a third one right after posting this…

We need ProtonMail to be able to click unsubscribe links for us.

the centrists are subscribing me to all their substacks 🤮

i am not overreacting. i am regular reacting to some shit that is overhappening

This_is_the_way.GIF

#SciArtSeptember day 5: ‘Orbit’

It is well-known that the three-body problem does not have a general closed-form analytic solution. But there are many known periodic solutions of varying complexity. So I offer the attached ‘artistic’ plot of twelve of these periodic solutions, produced using a small Python program and the #Asymptote graphics language.

PNG attached. For the same image in vector format (SVG+PDF): https://ajcain.codeberg.page/posts/2026-09-05-three-body-periodic-solutions.html

(The image was used as an illustration at the start of the main text of my book ‘Form & Number: A History of Mathematical Beauty’ [https://archive.org/details/cain_formandnumber_ebook_large].)

1/2

#SciArt #periodicity

Encountered one of the best emails I've ever seen

Humans understand that missing information is also information. LLMs don't because they were literally built to "fill the blanks". But us humans know sometimes blanks must be left alone and cannot be filled.

Had a cute lake moment with my pup and our friends 💕

Photo by Wyatt, he’s only on insta

There’s just something about microtones that gives me this tingling sensation of… remembering something from another life or another reality. It’s so wild.

This track layers in microtonal components starting around 1:30:

https://wordcolour.bandcamp.com/track/fundamentals

git blame, or as they say in france, g'accuse

RE: https://mastodon.social/@colincornaby/117069185435215102

Holy shit, so the "Claude plagiarised an app" story is actually "Claude produced the same app twice when prompted to do so by two separate developers" 😅