![[syndicated profile]](/makepkg/implementing-https-www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
askamanager_feedIt’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Two coworkers stopped talking to me after I mentioned my wife
I’m a man who is friendly and open at the workplace, I like to discuss any and all (safe for work) subjects with my coworkers, and I strive to treat men and women the same. Thus, more often than not I’ve managed to increase the number of people I call friends, keeping in contact with them after leaving the organization.
However, recently two female colleagues who used to be as friendly to me as I am to them have radically changed their demeanor to nothing. No “hello,” no small talk in the offices, both pass me in the hallway without even looking at me. Nothing.
In both instances, the change in demeanor has come afterwards I mention my wife (same company, not in the same department) in passing. Something along the lines of, “My wife also loved that movie, she mentioned it was great!” and then the conversation steered in any other direction.
Am I overthinking it? Should I say something to them? I seldom work with both (they are in my department), but recently we have not been together in any assignment.
I’m stumped. Sometimes someone will mention their partner in a way that comes across as very awkwardly “I am specifically mentioning my partner to let you know that I am not interested in you romantically” — but (a) that doesn’t sound like the case from your example, and (b) even if it was, it wouldn’t explain them then freezing you out.
Any chance there’s something entirely unrelated that could explain it? That could be anything from it just being a stressful time at work for each of them to you doing something totally unrelated to your wife that they’re upset about. If you worked with them more frequently, I might suggest saying at some point, “I might be misreading, but have I done anything to upset you? If so, I’d welcome the opportunity to make it right.” But since you don’t work with them often, I’d just give it some time and see if anything changes.
2. Is it okay to hug my coworker goodbye?
I have a coworker who’s moving back home (overseas) after working together for four years. I have known about her planned departure for a month, and have restrained myself from giving her a hug goodbye but I find myself regretting waiting so long, as she’s given me a great deal of useful advice and has been the sort of wonderful person you love to know.
Am I correct in assuming that this sort of affection is very contextual? There are fewer than 10 of us in the office, and we’re a pretty close knit group. Is it appropriate to hug her on her last day, or in the lead up to the last day, such as getting the heads up that it’s coming? I think I’d regret it far more if I didn’t let her know how much she’d be missed.
It’s very person-dependent! Some people are huggers and some people aren’t, and a person’s preference for not hugging always trumps someone else’s preference to hug.
With that said: it’s not inherently inappropriate to hug a coworker goodbye, but you should pay attention to their physical cues and what you know about them generally. If you’re not sure, you can always ask, “Can I give you a hug goodbye?”
Just don’t be this person.
Related:
hugging at work: okay or not okay?
3. Is it OK for your boss not to mention her maternity leave until the last minute?
A while back, I took on a marketing role at a tech startup because I thought it would be good for some skill building and training. Sadly, it wasn’t and I was only there for 10 months. I was a huge misfit in the company culture (It was very much a “live to work” environment, which I can’t stand; the CEO would message me at 10pm about typos in old pages on our website uploaded months before I started, but that’s another story) and I had literally no teammates save for my boss, the marketing director (who I never met until I started, which in hindsight was probably a red flag).
The first two months on the job were really rough. It was a lot of my boss offloading work onto me, her not really having enough time to explain our process or procedures (or train me on things that seemed necessary), and then critiquing everything I did (meanwhile she would AI generate almost everything and call it good).
At around the two-month mark, she messaged me that she was pregnant. I, of course, congratulated her. Then she dropped the bombshell that she was due in about a week. I hadn’t known because the job was remote so when I saw her on calls it was just her head. I panicked because I didn’t have the marketing chops to run anything on my own.
A consultant the company brought on and I kept things afloat for the six months she was gone, but I was already frustrated with the work before her announcement and after that, I just felt nothing for the job. I just can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would wait until that late to tell a new hire on a team of two that kind of news, especially when the hire mentioned they needed training in some aspects of the role.
Is it okay for someone you report to not inform you that they’re going on an extended leave of absence? My male friends (I’m a man as well) agree with me that she should have mentioned it much earlier, while my female friends were a bit more torn, mentioning that it’s her decision to not mention anything and it’s not my place to be upset. What are your thoughts?
If she was sure about her plans for leave, she should have mentioned it to you earlier than the week before the leave was supposed to start. That’s true with plans for any type of leave that’s known about in advance, not just maternity leave.
It’s possible that her situation was more complicated for reasons we don’t know, so I wouldn’t rush straight to condemning her — we don’t know what else might have been going on — but absent something that would explain it, it’s weird that she waited that long to tell you. It sounds, though, like there were far bigger issues at that job, and this was a relatively minor one in the scheme of things. It might be the easiest one to focus on, but this on its own would have been salvageable if all the other stuff hadn’t been going wrong.
Related:
my employee didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant until she was about to give birth
4. Applied for a job, then found out the org engaged in union-busting
I’m a subject matter expert interested in moving upward into a role with more decision-making and leadership. Unfortunately, my field has been especially hard hit by cuts in federal grants. While I’m fortunate to be in a position that I generally like, it comes with frustrations, including relatively low pay for someone with my particular focus. I was really excited to find an opening at a high-profile, well-funded nonprofit in my region, and thrilled when I was offered an interview a couple of weeks after applying, as the market is currently packed with competition. The posted role would mean a substantial salary increase for me, and be a real career bump.
After scheduling an initial interview, I started catching up on news from this nonprofit and was alarmed to find that they appear to have engaged in some pretty egregious union-busting around a year ago: furloughing employees who were active in unionizing efforts (despite having a substantial endowment) before ultimately terminating them and “restructuring” the staff. The position I applied for is in part a result of that restructuring.
I’m pretty conflicted at this stage in that I don’t have direct information about what happened — just things that I’ve gleaned from social media posts and following digital breadcrumbs. If this nonprofit did engage in union-busting, I don’t want to get entangled with them, but they do have a high profile within the field, and I will encounter staff and leadership somewhat regularly and need to have good working relationships with them. Do you have any advice on how to determine what happened from a less biased source than the organization itself/the people who were laid off, or how to navigate disentangling myself if I can’t bring myself to work there? At this point, I’m considering seeing the hiring process through and directly asking about the unionization efforts, but I’m not sure there’s anything they could say that would convince me they acted in good faith (and worried I would burn a bridge.) Should I just make an excuse to withdraw entirely?
If you have any connections to the people who were laid off and/or people who are still there and who might be willing to talk to you off-the-record, talk to them before you decide anything. It’s true that people who were laid off might bring their own biases to the discussion, but those are still conversations worth having. It’s even better if you’re able to talk with people who are still there — or people in your field who know some of the players involved. You might or might not learn enough to make you confident about moving forward, but you’ll have more data than you have right now. I’d at least try that before deciding to withdraw.
And if you are at the point where you’d rather withdraw, you really don’t have much to lose by asking your interviewer about it directly. You’re not likely to burn a bridge for future contact if you calmly say, “My understanding is that there were some unionization efforts on the staff last year but some of the roles involved were restructured; what can you tell me about that?” They might decide you sound too sympathetic to unionizing to want to hire you, but if you’ve already decided you’d withdraw anyway, that doesn’t really matter. It’s not the kind of question that’s likely to make them bristle at ever encountering you in a non-employee capacity in the future.
5. Recruiter told me they have flexibility on the salary
I had a recruiter interview and, when asked for my salary expectations, I asked them for the budgeted range and if there is any flexibility in the posted range. They said there was flexibility but didn’t give a top number, and I blanked and just thanked them but also didn’t give the salary I’m looking for.
If I get to the offer stage, would it be okay to mention the flexibility when I ask for the salary I want? What I’m looking for would be 11% over their top range. It’s a little higher than average market for companies of their size but not outrageous, especially as my experience matches everything they are looking for.
The recruiter’s mention that they have some flexibility is useful background info for you to have, but not something it will help to cite in the actual negotiation.
So rather than saying, “The recruiter said you have flexibility on the number,” just ask for the number you want. Either they have flexibility or they don’t, but citing the recruiter doesn’t give your request any additional weight.
The post coworkers stopped talking to me after I mentioned my wife, should I hug my coworker goodbye, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.
paper in the wind
Jul. 12th, 2026 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](/makepkg/implementing-https-www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishI left Blacksburg before I learned to hate it, though it was a close thing. DC ... I was never in any real danger of hating DC. DC was first the golden land of childhood from which I was rudely snatched, then a safe haven for high-school me to start learning who I was, and finally my material just desserts for dragging myself across the finish line of university and into The Real World. I never spent enough time in DC to get a real sense of who it is. I hated the heat, and I hated the traffic, and that was enough to convince me to leave.
I fell in love with Vancouver the first time I visited in 2009. I was lonely as hell when I moved here but I figured that was just me having trouble finding people. I still loved the city.
When I started spending time with Erin in 2016/17, I didn't understand the anger and vitriol she had for this place. From listening to her, I started to understand it. I began to see how the city doesn't care about its residents, how every year it squeezes you tighter, how much of what I loved was surface.
It's not only the money, of course. Turns out I am a houseplant and I don't do well when there's no sunlight for eight months of the year. Too, I blew up my social circle in the last half of the last decade, and haven't really been able to put it back together. It's not entirely fair to lay the blame for that on Vancouver... but it's not wholly unfair either.
This past six months or so has been a pleasant reminder of the city I fell in love with. Downtown on a sunny day, The Drop (one of my favourite pieces of public art) and Douglas Coupland's lego orca. The Cinematheque. Farmers markets. Mountains and water, and whatever it is about the sunlight out here that just feels brighter and more vibrant than anywhere else. Touristing with Steph, Granville island market and Queen Elizabeth park, revisiting places I've forgotten how much I liked.
I'll miss the Wednesday night sessions at Hynes. I'll miss a handful of people, probably more of them than I think I will. I still don't belong here, though.
I fell in love with Vancouver the first time I visited in 2009. I was lonely as hell when I moved here but I figured that was just me having trouble finding people. I still loved the city.
When I started spending time with Erin in 2016/17, I didn't understand the anger and vitriol she had for this place. From listening to her, I started to understand it. I began to see how the city doesn't care about its residents, how every year it squeezes you tighter, how much of what I loved was surface.
It's not only the money, of course. Turns out I am a houseplant and I don't do well when there's no sunlight for eight months of the year. Too, I blew up my social circle in the last half of the last decade, and haven't really been able to put it back together. It's not entirely fair to lay the blame for that on Vancouver... but it's not wholly unfair either.
This past six months or so has been a pleasant reminder of the city I fell in love with. Downtown on a sunny day, The Drop (one of my favourite pieces of public art) and Douglas Coupland's lego orca. The Cinematheque. Farmers markets. Mountains and water, and whatever it is about the sunlight out here that just feels brighter and more vibrant than anywhere else. Touristing with Steph, Granville island market and Queen Elizabeth park, revisiting places I've forgotten how much I liked.
I'll miss the Wednesday night sessions at Hynes. I'll miss a handful of people, probably more of them than I think I will. I still don't belong here, though.
It's time to move on
It's time to get going
What lies ahead
I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, babe
The grass is growing
Yeah, it's time to move on
It's time to get going
Architectural terms, stairs
Jul. 12th, 2026 09:45 pmoldshrewsburyian posting in ![[community profile]](/makepkg/implementing-https-www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
little_detailsHello all, I'm trying to find specific vocabulary for staircases. I'm looking at an interior staircase in a Georgian home (but the stair itself might be later.) The thing that strikes me as distinctive is that it surrounds a hall on three sides, having one landing that runs along an exterior wall. I love the look of it, and I'm trying to find vocabulary more specific than risers, balustrades, landings, which is what I tend to get when looking for glossaries.
My one (1) Medium secret
Jul. 12th, 2026 11:46 pmunsung_feedWhen I was at Medium, over a decade ago, I really enjoyed going deep on typography.
People seemed to generally enjoy what we did. Writers really loved automatic em dashes and range dashes, discovered the beauty of hanging punctuation, and as funny as it might sound today, the smart quotes were a huge hit, too. I was proud of the tight drop caps, the underlines brought me some notoriety, and we even supported ligatures at a time when not only this wasn’t the default, but it also had some mildly scary performance consequences.
But for every two things that worked well, there was also something that in retrospect proved to be me trying too hard, and had to be quickly undone.
I was really excited about resurrecting pilcrows, but many users saw them as rendering or escaping errors.
I briefly added vulgar fractions to all the places where Medium rounded numbers, but that made those numbers confusing and weird in practice.
(And I already mentioned the strange, rare bug with system fonts, although I suppose there are always bugs.)
It was an interesting calibration process. And somewhere in between successes and failures was one thing that I have never mentioned before, and one nobody ever brought up.
I recently shared the story of 2015’s typographical redesign of Medium. As we were exploring the candidate typefaces, we fell in love with one in particular: Charter, a font designed by the industry legend Matthew Carter – and no, this is not a bug, Google Search switches to using Carter’s own Verdana to honor him.
Charter had this perfect balance of “casual” and “refined” we wanted for Medium at the time. Unsurprisingly, it also came with a bunch of typographical niceties – among them lowercase (old-style) digits, which I really wanted:
But there was a problem. Those lowercase numerals came with a “medieval 1,” a particular style of a lowercase digit 1 that resembled an uppercase I. People hated it and were confused by it, thinking indeed that a bug caused a letter I to make its way to the numbers.
No amount of pleading would get us to push that digit through. The backup plan was going with uppercase numerals, but I hated the idea; those digits felt so ugly and pedestrian to me – they were not just uppercase, but also monospace! It was a frustrating situation, being so close and yet separated from a warm Charter embrace by one glyph that it didn’t happen to have.
And so… I drew one.
I, someone who has never ever designed a typeface, decided to vandalize Matthew “The Most Widely Read Man In The World” Carter’s typeface and plop in a new digit 1 of my own creation.
The internal complaints stopped. Weeks later, we launched the new fonts, Charter front and center, my fresh non-medieval 1 attached. I don’t remember the exact details, but we found a way to do this that was compatible with the font’s licensing – and yet I never talked about it because… well, I think you can understand why.
I believe my rogue 1 lasted until a subsequent redesign in 2022, long after I left the company. A decade in, I still don’t know how to feel about it. Did I save Charter as a candidate for Medium by mutilating it a bit, am I writing this post just to launder my own ego, or is this the equivalent of a perp coming back to the scene of the crime? Was I ambitious (laudatory) or ambitious (derogatory)? Maybe you can tell me. But I hope either way it makes for a fun story.
“Animating something and animating something well are two very different things.”
Jul. 12th, 2026 11:26 pmunsung_feedFrom Jakub Krehel, a new blog post about self constraint in the era when AI makes it easy to ignore constraints altogether.
My caveat is that the post doesn’t fully come together for me – jumping from AI to animations and then back to AI the way the author did does not feel cohesive.
At the same time, in the middle of the post, there are some nice examples of animating juxtaposed with overanimating that caught my attention. We talked about sugar and juice before, and this adds to that conversation. Here’s one example:
Not all animations need to be wholly meaningful and functional – just like not all graphic design, iconography, and typography have to be – but part of growth as a designer is knowing how to limit your budget of “superfluous” stuff even if no one else tells you to, and then how to spend that budget really, really well.
WorkOS Pipes
Jul. 12th, 2026 10:17 pmdaringfireball_feedMy thanks, once again, to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. Users expect apps and agents to reach the tools they already work in. Every integration that gets you there is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, and weeks of infrastructure before you write a line of product code.
WorkOS Pipes handles it with one API call. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time.
Paulo Andrade: ‘A WWDC 27 Update on Building a Mac-Assed App With SwiftUI’
Jul. 12th, 2026 09:18 pmdaringfireball_feedPaulo Andrade:
My last post on using SwiftUI to build a Mac-assed app got a bit more traction than I expected. It was mentioned on Mastodon several times, included in iOS Dev Weekly, inspired May’s edition of the Swift Blog Carnival, and was eventually mentioned by John Gruber, arguably the person most to blame for popularizing the term “Mac-assed”, on Daring Fireball.
All this attention also resulted in an engineer from Apple reaching out with some notes. We exchanged a few emails, I filed a few radars, and now that WWDC 27 is behind us, this post serves as a small update to the issues I wrote about before.
There’s real progress here, but I think my main point still stands: SwiftUI is now seven years old and it does not make it easy to create great Mac apps.
Little House, The Rooster, and sigh, migraine headaches...
Jul. 12th, 2026 03:51 pmshadowkat1. Lindsey Graham died at 71 after a short illness. (I don't know he looked a lot older than 71.) I know it's probably wrong to be glad this man is dead and gone, but I am glad he's dead and gone. He hurt a lot of people with his policies and politics, more than he helped. The world will most likely be better without him on it any longer. But I do feel for anyone who is grieving him - that he left behind, knowing full well that people are more than one thing, and life much as I'd like it to be - is never that clear cut.
2. Been battling a migraine headache all weekend long. ( Read more... )
3. I binged the Little House on the Prarie reboot or the new adaptation of it this weekend and was pleasantly surprised by it? It's very close to the books and historical record. And does a decent job of showing (not telling) what happened in the Kansas land trades of the late post-Civil War 1800s.( vague spoilers )
It's not gritty, but it is more realistic than the original television series adaptation, and is much closer to Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels. I'm not sure where the series is going though? This felt like a limited series that was self-contained? ( vague spoilers )
I've not read the reviews or responses online? I went into it blind. I've seen various adaptations, and read the original novels as a child. ( Read more... )
It's well cast, well written, and produced. Slants towards hyper-realism, but comforting, and for a family audience. Worth a look, if you like that sort of thing?
4) Started Steve Carrel's Rooster on HBO MAX, I don't know if I'll stick with it or not? I'm admittedly curious to see what happens next? I don't necessarily find it amusing, and I feel like I've seen it before? It feels very familiar, I have the oddest sense of deja vue. The set-up is a divorced popular author is asked to be a guest speaker at a college and agrees to it - mainly to check up on his daughter who is a professor there, and whose marriage is falling apart. In reality, the Chancellor wants him to become a "writer in residence" and teach. To which he responds? "But I never went to college."
[I looked it up - turns out that I have seen this before?
Notable Films About Authors Becoming Professors:
( yes, it is a popular trope - they made not one, but four films about it )
The small college professor comedy/drama trope is very popular in books, plays (theater), films and television shows. Why? A high percentage of literary writers (or writers in general) who get traditionally published by literary imprints (or publishing companies or University Presses), never did anything other than write, get divorced, have dysfunctional family issues, and teach (something) at small liberal arts colleges in the North East and Midwest (of which there are an insane amount located - the upper Midwest and Northeast have a lot of small town pricey liberal arts schools, you can pretty much find one in any given direction. The entire North Eastern US is littered with them) - so we get a lot of novels and films about this. I've read and seen a few - they are, unfortunately, all alike - usually a man's coming of age story. Occasionally we get a woman's, it's rare, but it happens.
I'm not necessarily criticizing the Rooster? I've only seen one episode. I'm critical of the trope. Which I wish was a little less...repetitive and predictable? I tried the one with Sandra Oh, but it didn't work for me.
I wish they'd do the Secret History - but at the same time, I'm kind of glad they haven't? They'd probably ruin it.
[I'm in the mood for comfort food - low violence, no monsters, no horror, and just kind people trying to help each other. It might be a side-effect of the migraines. I'd wanted to work on my novels and painting this weekend, and walk about more - but alas migraine. So, just doing my best to get sleep and keep it at bay. If you are sick and tired of hearing about my migraines? Think about how I feel? LOL!]
2. Been battling a migraine headache all weekend long. ( Read more... )
3. I binged the Little House on the Prarie reboot or the new adaptation of it this weekend and was pleasantly surprised by it? It's very close to the books and historical record. And does a decent job of showing (not telling) what happened in the Kansas land trades of the late post-Civil War 1800s.( vague spoilers )
It's not gritty, but it is more realistic than the original television series adaptation, and is much closer to Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels. I'm not sure where the series is going though? This felt like a limited series that was self-contained? ( vague spoilers )
I've not read the reviews or responses online? I went into it blind. I've seen various adaptations, and read the original novels as a child. ( Read more... )
It's well cast, well written, and produced. Slants towards hyper-realism, but comforting, and for a family audience. Worth a look, if you like that sort of thing?
4) Started Steve Carrel's Rooster on HBO MAX, I don't know if I'll stick with it or not? I'm admittedly curious to see what happens next? I don't necessarily find it amusing, and I feel like I've seen it before? It feels very familiar, I have the oddest sense of deja vue. The set-up is a divorced popular author is asked to be a guest speaker at a college and agrees to it - mainly to check up on his daughter who is a professor there, and whose marriage is falling apart. In reality, the Chancellor wants him to become a "writer in residence" and teach. To which he responds? "But I never went to college."
[I looked it up - turns out that I have seen this before?
Notable Films About Authors Becoming Professors:
( yes, it is a popular trope - they made not one, but four films about it )
The small college professor comedy/drama trope is very popular in books, plays (theater), films and television shows. Why? A high percentage of literary writers (or writers in general) who get traditionally published by literary imprints (or publishing companies or University Presses), never did anything other than write, get divorced, have dysfunctional family issues, and teach (something) at small liberal arts colleges in the North East and Midwest (of which there are an insane amount located - the upper Midwest and Northeast have a lot of small town pricey liberal arts schools, you can pretty much find one in any given direction. The entire North Eastern US is littered with them) - so we get a lot of novels and films about this. I've read and seen a few - they are, unfortunately, all alike - usually a man's coming of age story. Occasionally we get a woman's, it's rare, but it happens.
I'm not necessarily criticizing the Rooster? I've only seen one episode. I'm critical of the trope. Which I wish was a little less...repetitive and predictable? I tried the one with Sandra Oh, but it didn't work for me.
I wish they'd do the Secret History - but at the same time, I'm kind of glad they haven't? They'd probably ruin it.
[I'm in the mood for comfort food - low violence, no monsters, no horror, and just kind people trying to help each other. It might be a side-effect of the migraines. I'd wanted to work on my novels and painting this weekend, and walk about more - but alas migraine. So, just doing my best to get sleep and keep it at bay. If you are sick and tired of hearing about my migraines? Think about how I feel? LOL!]
How UIs Degrade Over Time
Jul. 12th, 2026 07:51 pmdaringfireball_feedThese examples are from Windows, but the same degradation is true for the standard look for MacOS alerts too. There was a time when system UI chrome was improving in clarity, everywhere. Today we live in an age when it’s degrading in clarity, everywhere. It’s rather inexplicable.
‘Every Frame Perfect’
Jul. 12th, 2026 07:48 pmdaringfireball_feedNikita “Tonsky” Prokopov:
The rule of thumb is:
If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, you should be able to explain what I see.
Why care about every frame? It builds trust. Users can’t see the code, so UI is the only way for them to judge the quality of the app. If UI looks good, that means developers had time to polish it, which means that they probably spent a comparable amount of time to iron out the code. It’s a heuristic, but a reasonable one.
Now, what does it mean in practice? I can think of a few things:
- No white flashes between screens.
- No partially loaded content.
- No relayout while content loads.
- Internally consistent. If one part of the UI says “1 update available”, another part should not say “Checking for updates...”
- Precise animations.
Animations often end up being forgotten. A UI might look great in both start and end states but very janky in between.
“Every frame perfect” is a great mantra for UI craftsmanship. If you care about every frame, that discipline will be palpable, even though almost no users will ever examine your animations and transitions frame-by-frame, and most will happen too quickly to see in real time. If you cut corners on interstitial states “because no one will notice”, you’ll start cutting corners elsewhere.
Various and Sundry, 7/12/26
Jul. 12th, 2026 06:55 pmscalziwhatever_feedWhat now?
South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham Dead: And it must be said, not especially missed by most people on Bluesky and Threads, although I have to admit not going to X to see how the bots there are reacting to his passing. I remember him mostly for not having a spine with regard to Trump, but in that he’s not materially different than nearly any other Republican, inside of Washington or outside of it. As far as I know there has been no cause of death announced; the more responsible speculation I’ve seen suggests a blood clot and/or deep vein thrombosis caused by the extensive travel he’s recently undertaken, most recently to Ukraine. We’ll know eventually, I would assume. He was 71, there are lots of ways for a 71-year-old to suddenly die of mostly natural causes.
His death complicates matters for the GOP in South Carolina, since they have to now hold a special nominating session to replace him on the ballot. I understand Nancy Mace is making noises to get his senate chair, for the interim and/or for as the new candidate. I don’t know what South Carolinians have done to deserve that, but I guess we’ll see.
Anyway, he’s dead and I’m sure someone somewhere is sad. Others are saying “Cool, do McConnell next.” 2026 is year not exactly brimming with tender sympathy for sycophants.
Meta walks back its plan to let people use their “AI” to do non-consensual horrible things with your Instagram pictures: Mind you, this is not how Meta itself would have characterized its plan to let anyone do anything with your photos without telling you. It says it was to “provide a useful creative tool and to give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way.” This is a mash of words that if it means anything, means the opposite of what Meta was actually doing. The backlash was intense enough that even the sociopaths who are running Meta couldn’t ignore it, which is good, but don’t worry, I’m 100% certain they’ll find another avenue to make sure awful people will be able to use Meta’s “AI” in shameful and defaming ways. A business model is a business model.
Live-Action Moana is a bit of a flop: Which I’m not entirely surprised about? It’s been slightly less than a decade since the original came out, and there was an apparently lackluster but rather financially-successful sequel a couple of years ago, which would have driven viewership back toward the original anyway, so the pent-up desire wasn’t there for it like it apparently was for the “live-action” Lilo and Stitch from last year. I would have waited, but then, I wouldn’t be doing “live action” retreads in the first place, so there’s a reason I’m not a Disney high-up.
Don’t feel too bad for Disney, since the new Spider-Man movie is a couple of weeks away and its first weekend will likely cover any losses Disney will incur from Moana underperforming. Anyway, the Moana marketing juggernaut, where the actual money is for Disney in this franchise at this point, will continue unabated. Even an underperforming “live-action” Moana will do serviceably enough as advertising in this particular endeavor. Disney will be fine. Disney is always fine.
I do love the original, though.
— JS
TwoMillionKit: Use Private Cloud Compute in MacOS 27 Foundation Models Without an Entitlement
Jul. 12th, 2026 06:04 pmdaringfireball_feedGuilherme Rambo:
Apple ships the
fmcommand-line tool in macOS 27, which can be used to run inference with the local system model or Private Cloud Compute from Terminal or scripts. You know what else can run command-line tools? Mac apps! 😃I decided to spend some of my Codex tokens and take GPT 5.6 Sol for a spin. I asked it to create this Swift package. All it does is provide a
LanguageModelimplementation that uses thefmcommand-line tool under the hood, meaning that any Mac app can use the Private Cloud Compute model without requiring a special entitlement from Apple.The main limitation is that this will not work for sandboxed Mac apps, so any Mac app distributed via the Mac App Store won’t be able to use it.
But for developers of Mac apps distributed outside the Mac App Store, this provides a simple and entitlement-free way to use Private Cloud Compute in their apps.
Use sparingly and at your own risk.
This is a workaround for Apple’s current limitation that only grants access to Private Cloud Compute to “developers in the App Store Small Business Program with fewer than two million first time App Store downloads”. Hence Rambo’s clever name for the framework.
Sam Altman and Elon Musk Argue Over Who’s Running the Bigger Scam
Jul. 12th, 2026 05:45 pmdaringfireball_feedElon Musk, linking to his own tweet from March that “Sam Altman is super good at scamming”:
He takes scamming to a whole new level
homeboy you’re the one sellling public market investors on short-term space datacenters
Musk:
We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves.
After stealing an open source AI charity, you then stole all of Apple’s phone technology! Wow.
What do you plan for an encore? That’s tough to beat.
(All spelling, capitalization, and punctuation sic.)
These are two of the CEOs of the most valuable companies on the planet. Say what you want about it, but Musk’s Twitter/X is like nothing else that’s ever existed. Screenshot of the thread for posterity, and an XCancel link for those icked by X itself.
Lunacy — Jeff Halter’s Lunatic Fringe Player
Jul. 12th, 2026 05:19 pmdaringfireball_feedAfter linking to Stacks, his remarkable new modern HyperCard player, I made the terrible mistake of clicking around the rest of Jeff Halter’s website, and fell upon Lunacy:
Created by Ben Haller and released in the early ’90s as part of the Macintosh More After Dark software package, Lunatic Fringe was unique among screensavers in that it was not just a passive animation to watch, but an interactive game! Toggling the Caps Lock key while the screensaver was running popped you into a space shooter where you could fly around, collect power-ups, and blast a variety of baddies all in pursuit of a high score. It was a blast.
Running Lunatic Fringe on a modern computer has been a challenge. Fringe Player by Greg Parker filled this need during Apple’s PPC and Intel era, but is not supported on modern Apple platforms. Lunacy brings Lunatic Fringe to the present: a native Swift app with a built-in emulation engine that runs the original module, unchanged, on modern Apple platforms.
Lunatic Fringe is one of my all-time favorite classic Mac games. Lunacy is a great modern player, including CRT simulation to make the game look a lot more like it did back in the day.
On ZIL indentation
Jul. 12th, 2026 05:28 pmzarfhome_blog_feedI tried to give this post an eye-catching title like "The Power of Indentation!" But my fingers wouldn't have it. Blame the fingers.
I don't know much about the text-editing tools used at Infocom. The Witness source directory includes a tantalizing mention of TECO, an editor used at MIT in the 1960s and 70s. Going back a couple of years, there's a map file in the 1978 MDL Zork repository which seems to about managing TECO keybindings.
TECO's editing macros later evolved into their own editor, naturally called "Emacs". Wikipedia notes:
By 1979, Emacs was the main editor used in MIT's AI lab and its Laboratory for Computer Science.
It seems certain that Infocom folks used Emacs at some point, but I don't have any evidence about when.
Whatever editor they used, we can ask: Did it auto-indent their ZIL code? The ZIL code we have is very consistently indented, so it seems like a good bet, but I don't know for sure. The only reference in the 1989 ZIL manual is:
Also note the spaces at the beginning of the TELLs in the DESCFCN. If your describers are of the indentation flavor, your DESCFCN must supply its own indentation.
"Describers" are explained as:
[...] a small package of programs which handle the descriptions for the player's environment: current room and visible objects.
...Which is interesting, not least for saying "programs" for what we (and ZIL itself!) call "routines". I think that "indentation flavor" is not about source code indentation, but rather the indented style of object listing:
Sitting on the kitchen table is:
A brown sack
The brown sack contains:
A glass bottle
The glass bottle contains:
A quantity of water
A clove of garlic
Some Infocom games used a more sentence-like listing format, particular if they were less container-heavy.
But I digress. Let's go back to the source code.
This is what the Infocom devs saw as they wrote their code:
FIND-IN, from Zork 1.
(But probably in black and white. Or black and green. The syntax coloring is my addition.)
ZIL, like Lisp, is built around deeply-nested lists. Indentation is purely decorative, but it's a huge part of making ZIL/Lisp code readable. You can see that function above is indented to indicate nesting and what lines up with what:
The same function showing alignment guides.
As I said, this is very consistent through all the ZIL code I've looked at. The only exceptions are long spans of text, which are left-justified for readability:
DAM-FUNCTION, from Zork 1.
This indentation style seems to be designed specifically for ZIL game code. The ZIL compiler (which is MDL code, same idea) has similar code indentation; but multiline text spans are handled quite differently. So my guess is that someone built an indentation routine (or "program"!) specifically for Infocom game source.
That's all great. Unfortunately, when I launched the Visible Zorker, it rather mangled the indentation.
FIND-IN as shown in the original Visible Zorker. Some of the vertical alignment is wrong.
That's entirely my fault. The original source files were indented with tab characters, and assumed 8-column tab stops. A very classic format, to be sure. But I'm used to 2-col or 4-col tab stops. When I wrote my ZIL-display code, I told it to transform tabs into four-space sequences.
When I made that decision, my only thought was, "It'll take up less space that way." The Visible Zorker app is divided into two or three text columns. They can be awfully narrow. Anything that reduced horizontal whitespace seemed like a good idea. But as you see, the vertical alignment went completely flop-bott.
Someone pointed this out on the forum last week (thanks squam!) I cranked on some reindentation logic, and eventually settled on this:
FIND-IN as shown in the Visible Zorker today.
It's roughly the same as Infocom's style, except that the first level of indentation is always two columns. (Rather than trying to line up with the routine name.) This saves some space while keeping everything else aligned. It's particularly good for object definitions:
The SWORD definition in Zork 1.
For large functions it can be wider than my previous (four-space) code. But I think the improved clarity is worth it.
All the Visible Zorker games have now been updated with the new format. Let me know if you see any problems.
(This article is cross-posted to my Patreon.)
Casino table games
Jul. 12th, 2026 05:42 pmelisheva_m posting in little_detailsIs there anyone here who knows enough about betting on casino table games to help me work out a few things for my novel? Table games please, not slots. Sitting at a machine stuffing coins isn't that interesting in prose and doesn't provide much room for interaction.
One scenario is that he loses big and blames another player for it. Or something else happens which is plausible for a casino and makes him mad but doesn't involve the gambling directly. I have no experience. It doesn't have to be justified anger, he's hair trigger. My one idea is that another player scatters his chips, but I'm not sold on that. Spilling drinks happens in a hotel bar five chapters earlier.
One scenario is that he loses big and blames another player for it. Or something else happens which is plausible for a casino and makes him mad but doesn't involve the gambling directly. I have no experience. It doesn't have to be justified anger, he's hair trigger. My one idea is that another player scatters his chips, but I'm not sold on that. Spilling drinks happens in a hotel bar five chapters earlier.
The other scenario is that someone is intentionally egging him on to bet badly. This isn't necessary, just a slightly wicked idea. It would be a later scene.
He favours simpler games as he's always drunk & high. From what I've been able to find, roulette might be the best - simple mechanism but a complex set of betting options. I could pick and choose from pages about the game but I have no idea how the flow of it might go and it would be cool to write the scene around a plausibly realistic sequence of bets. The other players know what they're doing and how to play the odds.
If you can suggest something around another simple table game, please do. I'm not attached to roulette - his eyes can go blurry watching it go round and round another time. Poker is probably too complicated, blackjack is easy and I use that for a scene where there's little detail about the gambling.
Thanks for any help.
Stacks — HyperCard Player for Modern MacOS
Jul. 12th, 2026 03:42 pmdaringfireball_feedWell this is just delightful:
- Run HyperCard stacks directly on your modern Mac. No emulator required!
- Browse the Internet Archive’s HyperCard collection and run stacks with one-click.
- Period-accurate typography.
- Sound, instruments, and MacinTalk speech synthesis.
- Cross-stack navigation.
Stacks is a really beautiful native Mac app, and its presentation of classic HyperCard stacks is exquisitely faithful to the era. It’s simultaneously Mac-assed 2026-style and Mac-assed 1987-style. Crackerjack work from developer Jeff Halter.
