@paulbjensen.bsky.social
“There is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent” - Donald Draper
Today I learned about Small Language Models: www.datacamp.com/blog/small-l...
Quite appealing in terms of the ease of deployment, and more significantly the energy costs.
I have a contract that I want to sign in Sweden, but I have none of the 16 different authentication systems available to digitally sign the document with.
16 different authentication systems? How is this possible?
Makes me appreciate the Estonian e-residency system even more.
The crazy thing is Dice as a ticket platform solved this problem 10 years ago.
If the artists in that letter collectively persuaded ticketmaster to implement the same system or otherwise switch to Dice/Fever, then others could follow suit and kill off touting for good.
The Apple iPad widget for Duolingo, a language learning app. It shows a laughing avatar surrounded by fire, and saying “miss me yet?”
Yep, psycho vibes.
13.11.2025 19:54 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Reminds me of a Dutch joke. A man gifts his parents a holiday to Switzerland in the mountains.
They come back the next day.
He asks “Why are you back, did something go wrong?”
The mother replied “no, it was a nice hotel and friendly staff, but there was just no view”.
Probably not as high and impressive as the Chilean mountains, but up north you’ll get more hilly terrain with nice views.
13.11.2025 11:39 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
This was so good.
youtu.be/MtF4Tc5qDLA
Then the audience can watch it again on YouTube at 0.75x speed.
09.11.2025 15:30 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Talk 1.5x faster and you’ll fit it in.
09.11.2025 14:31 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
An email from Duolingo what the subject “Nobody ignores me… for long”
Duolingo giving off psychopath vibes in their email copy.
09.11.2025 11:37 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
A television with the Apple TV show “Pluribus” on it,
Written by Vince Gilligan, starring the brilliant Rhea Seehorn, and funded by Apple’s giant money cannon.
It’s happening.
What a hero. I hope he gets an award for his bravery. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
04.11.2025 11:47 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0But if you’re a social media app and you’re trying to tell advertisers “look how much traffic we can send to sites!”, let’s not forget about the bounce rate. Traffic quality over quantity.
04.11.2025 08:43 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0When you type a url into Safari, it will start to preload the url in the browser before you hit the enter key, so preloading is a trick to make things appear to load faster.
So there is a performance argument for it.
Apparently X now preloads links in tweets in the background in a webview.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580...
What a great way to juke the stats on traffic referral.
Haha, it’s the James Bond licence plate As A Service.
How is that even legal?
Pun of the week.
www.reddit.com/r/london/com...
Over 1/3 of the market cap of the entire S&P 500 is in just 6 companies.
Their combined market cap of $19.163tn is 34.6% of the $55.379tn market cap of the S&P 500:
- NVidia ($4.461tn)
- Microsoft ($3.818tn)
- Apple ($3.744tn)
- Alphabet ($3.067tn)
- Amazon ($2.272tn)
- Meta ($1.801tn)
Bonkers.
This was a great read.
www.felixstocker.com/blog/talent
Coconuts are banned for 3 reasons:
1 - as sealed objects, the gases inside can become pressurised and lead to an explosion.
2 - biosecurity - fresh coconuts risk contaminating biologically-sensitive environments like Australia and New Zealand.
3 - they are difficult to scan due to the shell.
Such a great comedian.
14.10.2025 07:47 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0TIL about Weather derivatives: financial products that pay out based on weather conditions.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather...
I am rather tempted to introduce the concept into Babsland - it adds an element of needing to think about extreme weather scenarios and how to mitigate them.
A picture of an electricity smart meter.
Even on a cloudy Sunday in Essex, a set of solar panels plus a 5kWh battery and hybrid inverter mean that I’m exporting to the grid right now.
The daylight is enough to meet the house’s electricity needs and send the excess up.
And thanks to that article, I learnt about Bioswales in the Netherlands
urbangreenbluegrids.com/measures/bio...
This long-read article on geoengineering is worth sitting down and reading.
Also, who knew that seaweed absorbs CO2 more effectively than trees?
www.governance.fyi/p/all-natura...
This is a lovely blog post on Will Wright’s thoughts about Game Design, UI, SimCity and the sequel that became the Sims.
donhopkins.medium.com/designing-us...
The numerous lights is impacting the frame rate a bit, so only the day/night toggling is enabled for the moment.
Click on the sun/moon (☀️/🌚) in the top bar to toggle.
Good night from Babsland #gamedev #buildinpublic
09.10.2025 22:00 — 👍 20 🔁 5 💬 1 📌 0If you publish npm packages and want to make sure that the package.json is good, then publint is worth looking at.
www.npmjs.com/package/publ...
Publint.dev
#nodejs
It feels like it’s quite broad though - some people use AI for autocompletion, others for pair-programming, and some with agents which pause at intervals for human-in-the-loop input.
A vibe-o-meter if you will would be a good way to show how much input AI is having in the process.
