Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 10mMy Oak trees dropped so many acorns this year (total masting year) that I finally have harvested enough to at least try making some basic acorn mush in the style of the Ohlone. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16hAnd just one pic of the legendary class in which the then real and original Substack invented NodeSchool, and we all gamed through its challenges. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16hThere'd been a "fireworks" show powered by JS on a microcontroller (The "Spark", I believe). 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16hI'll share a couple from Nodeconf 2014 also: The foursquare court, and a crowd playing "Time Cat": The Max Ogden invented game where you enter `time cat` into your shell and try to exit the process in exactly 1 second. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16hThis was the year where I got to go free by being an educator-volunteer (I was teaching kids Scratch in an after school program for Oakland Parks & Rec). The great Mikeal Rogers offered me the arrangement, for which I am eternally grateful, as it was pivotal in exposing me to a new community. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16hCoping with the @nodeconf.eu fomo by digging up my only two pics from NodeConf 2013: The menu, and somehow a single slide from Domenic Denicola's speed run summary of all the Star Wars novels (pre-Disney canon obliteration!) 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21hMy dad reading me the Heffalump when I was a little kid, doing the "breathless Piglet voice" may have been the hardest I ever laughed in my life. I hope your local library is celebrating, ours has done some special things. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 29/09/2026The Heffalump was never intended to be seen or drawn, and it's an abomination to have depicted one on screen on par with any casting of Helen of Troy. Happy 100th birthday to Winnie the Pooh! 240
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 28/09/2026I guess we have to define "look up" as a control. I don't even know what we'd choose? Searching stackoverflow? Google already runs an LLM on every query it seems, so I guess that'd be out. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 28/09/2026An AI taking the Starcraft ladder is definitely a milestone. The 6k APM implies instant cursor moves to me. I bet emulating things like the physical constraints of moving a mouse would probably change it a lot, force it towards more human strategies. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vsT...youtube.comAI Bot Takes over the StarCraft Ladder....YouTube video by ArtosisTV 110
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 28/09/2026Has anyone tried measuring how much water they personally consume to look up a novel bash command and enter it? We could probably compare the water impact of programming by meat vs sand. @andymasley.bsky.social 240
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 27/09/2026If I were wanting to smoke meats but stay inside I’d definitely at least watch this video: youtu.be/NnzADfbBBFo?...youtu.beI Served Baked Ribs to Texas PitmastersYouTube video by Chris Young 110
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026We do not, in fact, have to hand it to “getting evil things done”. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026Ever see The Last Starfighter? 😛 (It’s not as good, but was a year earlier and has a VERY similar core plot). 130
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026Ah. That’s probably ok. Some people were bound to use it for both sidesism, and there needs to be a healthy distrust of coercive use. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026Was? Did it fall out of favor? I've also been enjoying it. It's very dialectically balanced. I think my former best phrase for the concept was the much more crassly self-laudatory "The sign of genius is to hold two contradictory ideas at once" or whatever attributed to F Scott Fitzgerald. 110
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026I'm replacing my running shoes for the first time in ~5 years, and apparently their powerboost chemistry has improved somewhat. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026Guy who pronounces "Adidas" the way Diane Keaton pronounces "La-dee-da" in Annie Hall. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/09/2026Ohh you mean open the port on the public internet. Yeah I kinda try to minimize that sort of surface tbh. As totally rock solid as I’m sure jf and the arr stack arr…. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/09/2026Weird coincidence, I found myself describing Myst today to someone who'd never played. Was such a weirdly powerful experience. HBD Myst! 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/09/2026I keep trying to explain to people: We don’t actually understand how burgers work. We didn’t design them, we just grow the cows and plants that constitute them. 0102
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026They're not independent, but they sure aren't a perfect union like you're suggesting. > the freed time doesn't get banked, we spend it generating more. That's just moving the goal post. Good day. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026I had *NO IDEA* there was a video series of SICP! ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-00...ocw.mit.eduVideo Lectures | Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | MIT OpenCourseWareMIT OpenCourseWare is a web based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity 3308
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026I’d think it’s the sum of the two. So if one became brief, there’d be more time for the other. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026You don’t think prototype iteration has an impact on theory evolution? 110
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026Awesome to see Mikola works at Socket now. He’s brilliant. Eager to hear this. Fun fact: He built the 3d svg renderer for the original MMask logo, which allowed an interactive 3d object in browsers that didn’t have webgl in a file smaller than an svg of a single frame of its resulting content. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026Yeah, as a $75 Plex Pass owner, I can confirm they keep adding bloat to Plex, while Jf is just the business. Only pain is there’s more involved in connecting each client since you need the vpn/tailscale, not just their relay. But at least I’m not constantly getting Tidal and B movies pushed on me. 150
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 19/09/2026Time for a human-race-scale rare earth mineral mining union. All that business of enslaving each other to do it was a lark, we actually mean business and have expected standards of living, as a group. 020
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 18/09/2026Nice, that's a new one to me. Why not? The stakes of office are too damn high for anything less. What they're selling instead is so much more costly. 020
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 17/09/2026That's disappointing. I am completely certain that removing phone number dependence is on the path to solving spam, but...static.klipy.comMan with White Hair: Not Like ThisALT: Man with White Hair: Not Like This 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 17/09/2026I wouldn’t consider this an anti-spam measure. An anti-spam measure would be more like using this feature so that people can’t just guess your signal identifier and message you unsolicited. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16/09/2026This, passkeys, & the new age-verification ID stuff all contribute to "pay a major company to prove you're a person". We will be sealing the doors of monopoly until we have widespread adoption of alternatives. 122
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 12/09/2026whoah no recharge?? How long is the battery supposed to last? 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 12/09/2026If the process of wondering is more important to you than the process of growing a truthful model of the world, you can just not read ahead. There can be mathematics for the sake of wonder, and for the sake of discovery. The discoverers’ job will be to continue asking productive questions. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 10/09/2026I didn't know what a cantenary arch was before this, but upon looking it up, it doesn't seem like he knows what it is either. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 10/09/2026I don’t know if any of you saw the new Wallace and Gromit movie, but it’s wildly prescient. The penguin returns and Wallace invents a gardening bot while Gromit preferred gardening as a hobby, and the penguin back doors the bots for nefarious purposes, and somehow comedy ensues. A+ 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026The Trump administration made sure it was perfectly legal to dump meme coins (now demonstrated by Biden, thank you $LAPTOP), but illegal to sell *credible promises*. It's like they said "We need to fix securities law! No, not the part that blocks honest people, the part that blocks scammers!" 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026I have a new mental model that's been growing, which is that the haters are actually just the most passionate lovers. Nobody boosts this stuff like the haters. Like a nuclear irony meltdown, just relentlessly, tirelessly begging for skynet sarcastically. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026This is a lot of the core functionality of Descript. Another fun feature is letting you type, and then inferring the speaker’s voice to fill in the audio gaps. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026Well I've been playing with that a bit, and so at some point I might be looking for brave improvisors willing to try a slightly new form. 000
