Notes from July 2026

July! What a month!

Things I did this July

• Gave a talk, for ClimateAction.tech’s “Responsible AI Series”, “What I know about local language models”. “Responsible AI” can feel like a bit of an oxymoron at times, but I hope I shared something useful.
• Participated in the Zelda Dungeon Marathon. My first time playing a video game (The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons) on stream!
• Released a new version of Helmet, my Node security headers package. Most notably, it sped up the Content-Security-Policy code by about 7% for common cases.
• Promoted an underrated SQLite feature: strict tables.
• Wrote a data-driven piece about the upcoming Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. Can the wisdom of 32 Zelda experts make accurate predictions about the new game? We’ll see.
• Finished moving most of my repositories from GitHub to Codeberg. A few stragglers—and some mirrors—remain, but they’re my bigger projects that require more coordination.

Links I found

• My favorite read this month: a detailed history of Arabic text rendering, which includes (truly) ancient history.
• “In the near future, AI-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it—the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communicate that fact to you, and provide real-time alerts to any relevant authorities… and maybe also to the general public.” From Bruce Schneier.
• Mary in America, hosted by Mary Childs formerly of NPR’s Planet Money, is the first interview podcast show I actually like. I’ve been devouring it.
• “…it means if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people’s privacy.” A quote from Nilay Patel, via Simon Willison.
• Thought this was a balanced take on the tradeoffs of using AI for software development.
• “Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain. TikTok, Netflix, Instagram…even SeatGuru. Chrome doesn’t. Why is that?” From “Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently”.
• The US government keeps killing people with their racist immigration policy. Abolish ICE.
• Julia Evans taught me about ANALYZE and PRAGMA optimize in SQLite.
• Loved this demystification of SIMD.

Hope you had a good July.