Notes from October 2026

Happy Halloween! Here’s a little of what I got up to in this spooky month.

Things I did in October

• I moved this site from an Apache-powered VPS to CDN-frontend object storage. This means I pay less money, I do less maintenance, and my site loads faster in most parts of the world. Hopefully nobody noticed this change, except that things should be a little snappier! (Also, my old site had a small amount of PHP, which I’m happy to have removed given PHP’s remote code execution vulnerabilities this month.)
• In an effort to fill in the gaps of the internet, I published a short list of Vim forks.
• At Ghost, my team shipped two additions to our automations feature: analytics and more granular triggers. Both of these should help our independent publishers grow. More automations stuff on the way!
• Like every month, I wrote a few articles at Zelda Dungeon, including a debate over, perhaps, the most trivial disagreement possible.

Tech links I clicked on

• The surveillance state takes another step: pinpointing addresses based on interior photos. Thanks, AI!
• “How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators” is a reminder that technologists have a social duty.
• Two lists of tech fascists: “Fashware” and “Weird little guys of FOSS”.
• Continued to love David Rosenthal’s blog about the (seemingly unsustainable) economics of AI companies.
• “Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs” is a deep dive into Control and Command and Copilot keys.
• Data centers are unpopular, a problem Amazon is trying to spend its way out of.
• “Programming Isn’t Special” argues that programming is art, and that most art isn’t “mystical”, and that using AI to do art has disadvantages. “If we use AI to erase all the copy-writing, all the graphic design, all the boring mundane art, and yes, all the boring custom WordPress theme development, then we will be removing all the practical opportunities for the vast amounts of practice and contemplation required for people to elevate their craft to eventually achieve great things.”
• A fun AGENTS.md that says, “All LLM contributions are strictly forbidden.”

Other miscellany

• Part biography, part memoir, part hopeful, part depressing…Why Fish Don’t Exist captivated me this month.
• I plan to consult The Ultimate List of DRM-free Bookshops next time I buy an ebook.
• Bookmarked this list of “every weird film ever (with a special emphasis on trash)”.
• As a lifelong Diddy Kong Racing fan, I felt personally insulted by “Bloke Who Preferred The Thinking Man’s Mario Kart Growing Up Also A Weird Contrarian In Other Aspects Of His Strange Life”.

Hope you had a good October.