iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 23/09/2026

I know *just* enough German that "oestrogen" reads to me as if it start with the German 'ö' sound ...though you know what, östrogen would not be the *worst* metal band name out there

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Problem Machine @problemmachine.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Quoting myself from a day ago - "The problem is thinking that the product of a programmer is code. It isn't, really, the code is just the final stage. The actual valuable thing the programmer produces is the underlying mental model. Without that, the code is just tech debt"

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Space Telescope Science Institute @stsci.edu · 15/09/2026

#NASARoman activated the Wide Field Instrument—a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will allow it to explore wide swaths of the cosmos quickly. This test image captures the very first photons of starlight to reach the instrument—taken as an initial performance assessment: go.nasa.gov/4rg4qEc

$At the top, a grid of 21 panels shows a series of blue images with tiny neon green and yellow circles. A larger image highlights a section of the grid with circular patterns, and an inset presents a detailed star-like diffraction pattern. The colors consist of blue, green, and yellow.$

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katherine @kayserifserif.place · 04/09/2026

📝💝 but what a privilege it is to read your code kayserifserif.place/posts/2026/h...

kayserifserif.place

Handwritten code | Katherine Yang

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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

please just read this slide and know it’s the “drawbacks” to “anything can spawn anywhere” feature lol

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Eniko Fox @enikofox.com · 03/09/2026

People talking about shit like dlss5 and here I am going "I made my real mode x86 assembly better so now my 1 layer tile renderer for 160x120 resolutions runs at 60fps on a 33MHz 386 n_n"

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anoetic 🏳️‍⚧️ @obliqueanoetic.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

lil modular sounds

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 02/09/2026

I love old-timey book covers (from today's Tasting History: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK8I... )

A very old-looking, yellowed page, printed in many different fonts to show off how many fonts the printer could afford. It reads:

APICIUS REDIVIVUS;
or,
THE COOK'S ORACLE:
Wherein especially
THE ART OF COMPOSING SOUPS, SAUCES, AND FLAVOURING ESSENCES
IS MADE SO CLEAR AND EASY, BY THE QUANTITY OF EACH
ARTICLE BEING ACCURATELY STATED BY WEIGHT AND
MEASURE, THAT EVERY ONE MAY SOON LEARN
TO DRESS A DINNER, AS WELL AS THE
MOST EXPERIENCED COOK ;
Being Six Hundred Receipts,
THE
RESULT OF ACTUAL EXPERIMENTS
INSTITUTED IN
THE KITCHEN OF A PHYSICIAN,
FOR THE PURPOSE OF COMPOSING
A CULINARY CODE FOR THE RATIONAL EPICURE,
AND AUGMENTING
The Alimentary Enjoyments of Private Families ;
COMBINING ECONOMY WITH ELEGANCE;
AND SAVING EXPENSE TO HOUSEKEEPERS,
AND TROUBLE TO SERVANTS.

There are a couple of pencilled-in additions: William Kitchiner (presumably the book's owner) and the number 4825.

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 02/09/2026

If you want anything fancier: transparency, or a small logo at the side instead of a large banner, or multiple images, then a) you have to have a fallback because that won't work everywhere, and b) you need to serve different metadata to different sites by detecting the User-Agent strings they use.

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 02/09/2026

There's *one* happy case that more or less works everywhere: a single large banner image, without transparency, specified through *both* OpenGraph and Twitter Card metadata. That gets displayed above/below the text part of the preview fairly consistently.

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 02/09/2026

Recently I've been doing a bunch of experiments on how to configure social media previews for my websites, in particular how to sort out preview images. I'll write up the details properly soon, but a quick thread of what I've found:

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Christian Simmers @xuelder.neocities.org · 01/09/2026

Actually a recent Xkcd for that: bsky.app/profile/xkcd...

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mcc @dryad.technology · 01/09/2026

This is the single biggest physics discovery of my entire lifetime. Or something's wrong with one of the cables. One of the two

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kuraine @lena.fyi · 31/08/2026

the problem about having a lot of interests & a lot of projects is that there are only 24 hours in a day and time moves so damn fast

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Servo @servo.org · 31/08/2026

July in Servo… 🦾🐧 binaries for Linux aarch64 🪶📐 web fonts in inline SVG 🚄🎨 multithreaded 2D canvas 🩹🦮 incremental accessibility 📝🤖 selection rendering (DOM only, not yet interactive) servo.org/blog/2026/08...

servoshell 0.5.0 showing several new features: ‘text-decoration-thickness’, ‘box-decoration-break’, web fonts in inline `<svg>`, and DOM selection rendering

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 30/08/2026

Honestly for all that they suck, I find those kind of funny. Like sure buddy, you keep trying that Wordpress exploit that was fixed 10 years ago in the hopes that one day I'll arbitrarily decide to not only change my whole blogging setup but to use wildly outdated versions in the process.

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Luna @moonbase.lgbt · 30/08/2026

also if the dipshit who keeps probing for common php vulns on my STATIC FILESERVER website would kindly knock it the fuck off that'd be lovely

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Luna @moonbase.lgbt · 30/08/2026

looking at my webserver logs for the first time in a hot minute and like, i know common decency is a dead concept at this point, but putting "example.com" in your scraper bot's user-agent string is ridiculous

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 29/08/2026

(this is about "classic" regex engines. It sounds like the shift-resolve method might be a bit more powerful than "it pins down a definite value early", but again that will have *semantic* consequences on what strings a given regex will match)

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 29/08/2026

So I wouldn't call it a "trick", but rather an implementation choice, which should be (and generally is) explicitly documented.

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 29/08/2026

True, that's very common in regex engines in practice. But it's important to note that that *significantly* changes what language a given regex will match. Because you're pinning down a definite value for each reference group early, rather than trying all options (which is the NP-hard part)

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 28/08/2026

As they note, that restriction *is* common in practice, so it's useful to be able to deal with them efficiently. But the general problem of "match this regex with k captures and arbitrary backreferences to them against this string" is still NP-hard (as a function of k and the string length)

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 28/08/2026

That paper applies quite a strong restriction, that there can only be a certain number of backreference groups and the backreferences can only come up a limited number of times. IOW it can deal with languages like `(thing)abc$1` but not `(thing)abc($1)+`

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 28/08/2026

And then general regular expressions + backreferences are straight up NP-complete, so if you can find a linear-time way to match those you get a cool million dollars for your trouble :P

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 28/08/2026

There are more complex languages which can be recognized in linear time, eg. things with matched bracket pairs, but you lose the nice "convert to an obvious non-deterministic automaton then make it deterministic" approach to build a recognizer: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determi...

en.wikipedia.org

Deterministic context-free language - Wikipedia

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 28/08/2026

If I remember my automata class correctly: /(a?b+)*/ is still a regular language, so can be converted to a DFA which recognizes that regex in linear time, but potentially has a number of states which is exponential in the regex's length (which is what Kate did in the other reply)

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 28/08/2026

I feel that. I still make things because I *have* to, and post about them because I want to connect with other people. But it feels like I started at the worst possible time, when the barrier for just faking it without doing anything real is *so* much lower than it ever has been.

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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

this wave of AI has legitimately killed a huge part of what I loved about seeing stuff online, what I loved about being an educator, and what I loved about sharing my own work I just don't feel like doing it anymore

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Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 26/08/2026

To tell if a maze is solvable, just hang it by its corners If it tears into pieces, you’ve found a solution

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Eric Hallahan @erichallahan.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Good Evening, “RISC-V” was a 12-year, 17-day sociological study conducted by University of California, Berkeley. We are now complete with our study. Thank you for your time.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Reverse engineering a binary with partial RTTI really gives a similar high to deduction games like type help, TR-49, roottrees,... "I know you have to exist, but *where are you*" at a base class' constructor/vtable/default-implementation functions. Such a high when you end up finding it!

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X ΘΔ (Giant Tyrant Overlord) @xkeeper.net · 21/08/2026

i think my favorite xml crime was seeing <keyvaluepair><key>burp</key><value>fart</value></keyvaluepair>. like the platonic ideal of the overflowing tupperware cabinet in the "there has to be a better way!" commercial

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 20/08/2026

I saw one in my logs which rotated between four different fake user-agents, all impersonating different "AI" things. Which is... a choice. Especially because they all get 403'd by my web host *anyway* so it didn't even help them.

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 17/08/2026

I've been working on improving my website a bunch recently, and wrote up a second round of things I did. Featuring: HTTP caching, precompression tweaks, and a teaser of one of my current larger projects! www.rachelplusplus.me.uk/blog/2026/08...

rachelplusplus.me.uk

Tidying up my website, part 2 - Rachel++

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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

subfurface scattering

light scattering in salad's (the cat's) fur

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ESA Earth Observation @esaearth.esa.int · 13/08/2026

Here comes the S̶u̶n̶ Moon 🌑 On 12 August, a total solar eclipse was visible across parts of Europe, while much of the continent experienced a partial eclipse. From space, MTG-I1 recorded the Moon’s shadow moving across Earth: www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed... 📹ESA/Eumetsat

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Mara Bos @mara.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Curious how we've been improving Rust at Hexcat? Starting with June, our monthly updates are now publicly available on our website: hexcat.nl/updates/ #rustlang

hexcat.nl

Hexcat

Rust compiler engineering

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 12/08/2026

Went to water my plants after the eclipse, and look who I caught trying to eat my turnips!

Three caterpillars hanging out on a turnip leaf. The caterpillars are quite long, yellow with black spots, and covered in tiny hairs for defence. They've chewed massive holes in the leaf they're on and the other adjacent turnip leaves.

Intermixed with the turnip leaves are long, narrow leaves from a different species of plant (Salsify) which they have not touched at all.

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X ΘΔ (Giant Tyrant Overlord) @xkeeper.net · 08/08/2026

new blog post: self-hosting in the era of LLMs and cheap compute in general, about the kind of crap traffic i see day to day, as well as a more modern nuisance: claude code blog.xkeeper.net/the-cutting-...

blog.xkeeper.net

Self-hosting in the era of LLMs and cheap compute – Xkeeper's blog

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 02/08/2026

Oh hell yeah, some of the Youtube ethnomusicologists I follow made something I've been wondering if they'd do for a while: A rendition of the opening of the Odyssey which is as historically accurate as possible given our current knowledge of ancient Greek music www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY4I...

youtube.com

The Odyssey's Opening - Ancient Greek Music feat. polýMATHY

YouTube video by Farya Faraji & World Musicians

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DekoNSFW 👀👄👀 @dekonsfw.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

There will always be people who appreciate what YOU make, it just might take them a while to find you.

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 28/07/2026

I did the thing I've been meaning to do for years, finally got the right push to do it: www.rachelplusplus.me.uk/blog/2026/07...

rachelplusplus.me.uk

Moving off Github - Rachel++

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Cliff PervoSCARY @pervocracy.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

today I learned that before steel was invented, the most common way to light a fire was with flint and pyrite, which is why it's called that

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 13/07/2026

I finally sent off something that has been hanging over my head for literal months. Really, really glad to be done with it, and looking forward to having all of that mental space back

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