Mark Schmidt

Screenshot of Chatto. It's a chat app!

Today is probably a fine day to mention that I've been working on a self-hostable Discordslacklike called Chatto. It's steadily moving towards feature parity with the big kids, with everything crammed into a single compact 50 MB executable that can run off the cheapest VM you can find.

I have no real comparison, but I choose Fedora recently and can't complain. Not sure about nvidia things, though, mine is an AMD.

I heard omarchy is nice and has a charming leadership 💩

Oh man, at least I'm not alone. Since Hendrik posted that, that's thought is looping in my head...

"Reformatted code" 😬

Agentic Conf Hamburg 2026 · Luma From meetup to conference. After four sold-out meetups and ~ 1000 members, it's time for the next step: The first agentic.hamburg conference on March 22, 2026.…

We’re doing an Agentic Coding conference in Hamburg on March 22nd! 🎉

Not many details yet, but super early bird tickets are on sale and selling fast.

Super excited about this one! #hamburg

luma.com/45lfeyeh

Trump, August 2025 "The United States will not let mean steal trophies from women." January 2026: "Trump accepts illegitimately Nobel Peace Prize from Machado"

🫠

Left iPhone, on the right a new Fairphone with a de-googled OS preinstalled

Let’s see how fast I’m going to regret this… #digital #sovereignty

Interessante Ankündigung, hat leicht vibes der Verzweiflung. Aber das ist vielleicht ein gutes Zeichen, vielleicht gibt es wirklich eine nachhaltige Bewegung Richtung EU Tech 🎉

aws.eu/de/

A great point by @drfranksauer.bsky.social

We should start a similar project, which is tracking which software is not written with a real editor (tm). This VSCode-UI-madness needs to be stopped!!

lol, they even added that project because of a PR which is not even merged yet??

What if using American cloud services becomes untenable for Europe due to deteriorating geopolitics? It's hypothetical for now, but no longer unthinkable. By @quentinsf.com: statusq.org/archives/202...

Local-first software to the rescue?

We Still Don’t Know if Robotaxis Are Safer Than Human Drivers And even if self-driving technology proves to be less dangerous, there are many better ways to improve traffic safety and prevent fatal crashes.

Sorry, but triumphant claims about autonomous vehicle safety are wildly exaggerated.

It's an open question whether today’s self-driving cars are any safer than those driven by humans.

And if reducing crashes is the goal, that isn’t even the right question.

My deep dive, in Bloomberg 🧵

YouTube video by MarcUweKling WIR MÜSSEN UNS TRENNEN | #DIDit

YEAH! Wir müssen uns digital unabhängig machen. Ich habe damit Anfang 2025 begonnen (bin weg von MS Office, Google, Amazon, Disney+) und empfehle euch, das in Häppchen aufzuteilen.

Mein Projekt für Januar 2026: Umstieg auf Linux 😅

#didit #dutgemacht

www.youtube.com/watch?v=N77A...

Introducing Chatto I'm building an Open Source group chat application that's simple to self-host, familiar to use, and easy to customize.

👀 Some words about Chatto, my BIG project. It's a group chat app that

- is incredibly easy to self-host
- has very modest hardware requirements
- scales really well
- apache-2.0 license
- hosted platform launching in 2026

Looking forward to writing much more about this soon.

Let's do this. 🚀

Yes, horrible. But I’m wondering, what’s the practical alternative? Anything Android has the same issues. I preordered the new Jolla Phone (as a backup phone), but I’m expecting a pretty bumpy experience…

It's my birthday, but today *you* get the presents!

Introducing "Beans", a CLI-based, flat-file issue tracker designed for humans and their robot friends. 🫘

Track your work right in your repo, using the CLI. And if you work with coding agents, supercharge them with a full picture of your project!

Nobody is born a great engineer. Great engineers are forged in the fires of experience -- year after year of compounding challenges and opportunities.

Does your org frustrate the pursuit of greatness, or unlock and accelerate it? For whom?

And then yes: shipping is the mechanics of learning.

SVG snippet: <!-- Legs --> <line x1="200" y1="200" x2="190" y2="230" stroke="black" stroke-width="2"/> <line x1="220" y1="200" x2="230" y2="230" stroke="black" stroke-width="2"/> <!-- Feet (holding pedals) --> <path d="M185,230 L180,235 L190,240 Z" fill="orange"/> <path d="M235,230 L230,235 L240,240 Z" fill="orange"/> <!-- Optional: Fun text --> <text x="50%" y="40" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Arial, sans-serif" font-size="20" fill="black"> 🐧🦩 Who needs legs?! </text> </svg>

I know there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the value brought by LLMs, but how can anyone not be slightly delighted by technology you can run on your own (powerful) computer that causes it to draw you an SVG almost-pelican with both visible legs and the caption "🐧🦩 Who needs legs?!"

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

VEO 3

Prompt: Generate a TV news anchor with a British accent, the anchor says "in shocking news, Jake Kaye Rowe ling's yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of turkey" include the announcement in the dialogue.

This took one prompt and 2 minutes to generate.

Being a Software Engineer

Pro:
If the software you need doesn't exist, you can build it yourself.

Con:
If the software you need doesn't exist, you can build it yourself.

Blue hour is starting 😍

Beautiful sunsets are beautiful!

Zero damns given 😱

Bildunterschrift: „A row of legs belonging to people“. Eindeutig etwas zu viel Dexter-vibes…

Elevate your creative workflow to an art form. Frame.io centralizes all of your files, feedback, and people on one secure platform, so you can deliver exceptional creative faster.

Frame.io basiert auf Elixir. Ich bin aber an andere Stelle unterwegs. Ich mache ein paar internal tooling Sachen damit. Wenn man immer nur Java macht, bekommt man ja Depressionen 😉

Great stuff! And perfect timing…

How can you leave us with such a cliffhanger… how was the concert?!?

(Joking aside, I hope all is fine again)