I am tired of aggressively pixel art ugly games. It's 2026, I do not want to play a game that looks like this. Screenshot is just an example: half the interesting games coming out seem to be picking this aesthetic.

Something new Claude Code taught me today:

GNU xargs raises its parallelism by one each time it receives SIGUSR1, so the running batch can be sped up without restarting it. Please run this:
! for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6; do pkill -USR1 -x xargs; sleep 0.2; done

Hooray, today is the 25th anniversary of my weblog!

@phanpy my Android PWA keeps losing its icons. Both Samsung tablet and Pixel phone

My sympathies to anyone managing a PHP server today.

So much for my kimchi project this week: the bugs got to my cabbage before I did. #farmersmarket

TIL Plex server has no auto-update on Linux. Windows and Mac do, but Linux expects you to run updates yourself with the operating system updater. That's not unreasonable but it explains why there's so many Plex servers getting pwned right now.

Tesla Roadster: the Star Citizen of electric vehicles.

🆂PICY 🅷APPINESS 🅸N 🅽OODLES

One thing I've learned from Claude: rsync --itemize-changes That gets rsync to print out little character codes for the changes it makes, one per file. I find it inscrutable but Claude uses it to understand what changed.

Here's a sync that updates the directory mtime and sends the file style.css with a different size and mtime.

.d..t...... ./
<f.st...... style.css

Lol at Claude put this in my page Javascript
const $ = (id) => document.getElementById(id);
jQuery ain't never gonna die

If you try to download a directory full of MP4 video files from Google Drive, it says it's zipping it all and then instead of giving you one download it serves a bunch of downloads: several .zips and several .mp4 files. The zips try to deflate the already compressed video.

My least favorite gym machine. It's supposed to give me a better ass. I miss cycling.

I ended up sitting out campaign donations this election. The political fundraising spam is so demoralizing I want nothing to do with it.

I've been doing my new projects with two AI agents: one to write the program, one to build a server to host it. And I've been relaying commands back and forth between the two. I just realized I could have one Claude Code session manage the other for me. I'm delighted to find it knows all about doing that and has a messaging system for the two to talk to each other.

I spent my graduate career in the 1990s working on multi-agent systems. I never imagined anything like this actually working. The language capabilities of LLM have unlocked so many possibilities.

On Sep 4 I placed an order for a Steam Machine (512GB with Controller). It arrived to me in California today. Nothing special, no pre-order or anything, just regular shipping time.

This was AI coded over a couple of half day sessions. A lot of the design came from the AI too. This is the first project where instead of giving precise instructions I asked Claude to come up with its own ideas. I still shaped it but it's a little unsettling how many good ideas the AI had. Like the general design of facets and the slicing UI, and specific ideas like "have a link to highlight queer sf".

New Nelsonsphere product: a page for all my book reviews. This started as Goodreads data but significantly improved in presentation, including neat controls for slicing and sorting.

Happy update: the Nobara updater problem is fixed and it fixed the disk layout on its own. Also I cleared the cache and worked around the repo problem. Linux can fail in mysterious ways but often there are mysterious-but-effective fixes.

@mwichary I saw your blog post how you like the Bojack Horseman gag about "peanut butter is one word". There's a whole subreddit for these found in the wild.