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Dan Finlay

@danfinlay.com
1.5K followers 905 following 756 posts

Just futzing around

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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 10m
My 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16h
And just one pic of the legendary class in which the then real and original Substack invented NodeSchool, and we all gamed through its challenges.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16h
There'd been a "fireworks" show powered by JS on a microcontroller (The "Spark", I believe).
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16h
I'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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16h
This 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16h
Coping 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!)
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 17h
That's a pretty sick humblebrag.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21h
My 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 29/09/2026
The 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!
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 28/09/2026
I 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 28/09/2026
An 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.com
AI Bot Takes over the StarCraft Ladder....
YouTube video by ArtosisTV
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 28/09/2026
Has 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
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 27/09/2026
If I were wanting to smoke meats but stay inside I’d definitely at least watch this video: youtu.be/NnzADfbBBFo?...
youtu.be
I Served Baked Ribs to Texas Pitmasters
YouTube video by Chris Young
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026
I’m sorry, I keep seeing “Weird Al doomsday cult”.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026
Huh! Did it borrow the concept?
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026
We do not, in fact, have to hand it to “getting evil things done”.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026
Ever see The Last Starfighter? 😛 (It’s not as good, but was a year earlier and has a VERY similar core plot).
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026
Ah. 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026
Was? 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026
I'm replacing my running shoes for the first time in ~5 years, and apparently their powerboost chemistry has improved somewhat.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026
Guy who pronounces "Adidas" the way Diane Keaton pronounces "La-dee-da" in Annie Hall.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/09/2026
Ohh 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….
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/09/2026
I forward this to my mother in law.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/09/2026
Weird coincidence, I found myself describing Myst today to someone who'd never played. Was such a weirdly powerful experience. HBD Myst!
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/09/2026
I 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 24/09/2026
Spell: How to become a code witch
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026
>12 recorded versions?
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026
They'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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026
I had *NO IDEA* there was a video series of SICP! ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-00...
ocw.mit.edu
Video Lectures | Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT 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
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026
I’d think it’s the sum of the two. So if one became brief, there’d be more time for the other.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026
You don’t think prototype iteration has an impact on theory evolution?
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026
Awesome 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026
Yeah, 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 19/09/2026
Time 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 18/09/2026
Nice, 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 17/09/2026
That's disappointing. I am completely certain that removing phone number dependence is on the path to solving spam, but...
static.klipy.com
Man with White Hair: Not Like This
ALT: Man with White Hair: Not Like This
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 17/09/2026
I 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16/09/2026
Related front: bsky.app/profile/metr...
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16/09/2026
This, 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 12/09/2026
whoah no recharge?? How long is the battery supposed to last?
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Reposted by Dan Finlay
eliza hamilton @eliza.vg · 12/09/2026
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Frontier Lab Where This Regularly Happens
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 12/09/2026
What if spoiler alerts, but you imposed them on others.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 12/09/2026
If 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 12/09/2026
Mathematicians rn
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 10/09/2026
I 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 10/09/2026
I 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+
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026
The 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!"
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026
I 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026
This 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.
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Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026
Well 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.
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