Jeff Standen

YouTube video by Cerb KATA avoids YAML's pitfalls

#YAML should never be written by human hands. In designing KATA, we kept the good parts of YAML and tossed the rest.

Text values don't change into random data types, and you never need to escape anything with quotes or slashes. Tag a key with one or more annotations to set the type of its value.

The preferences popup from the Safari web browser showing the ability to override page zoom per website host from Websites->Page Zoom.

Handy tip for Safari screencasts: Preferences -> Websites -> Page Zoom -> (host).

When I started screen recording web apps I always used to Cmd-Plus or CSS override "zoom".

A much better approach is to override the page zoom by host in Safari's preferences.

#safari #screencast #video #tips

Google Cloud is taking a massive outage right now, globally.

status.cloud.google.com

Not to be outdone, so is CloudFlare.

www.cloudflarestatus.com

#hugops

YouTube video by Cerb AI agent searches CRM records in natural language with #Cerb and #Claude

For two decades we've been building a platform for this moment. AI agents can generate search queries and automated workflows using Cerb's browser-based scripting language KATA.

Users describe the data they want in natural language and search results pop up.

#cerb #claude #ai #agents #tools #crm

Here's my 1-minute setup for screen recording 9:16 aspect ratio videos (Shorts) from Safari on a Mac.

This is really handy for demoing features for responsive web apps on social feeds without resizing your entire desktop or using an actual smartphone.

#Screencast #VideoProduction #Mac #CleanShotX

Crash Course is a free educational video series that is used in over 90% of high schools in the US. Because it's free, teachers and students decide for themselves whether they want to use it...and they do.

Also...the world record for most high fives in a day is 15,338.

... the system tablespace could be rebuilt by creating the empty table schemas, using `discard tablespace`, dropping secondary keys, moving .ibd in, `import tablespace`, and adding keys back.

Always use SQL backups!

We had a self-hosted client copy their MariaDB/InnoDB .ibd table files to a new server and then delete the old one -- _without_ also copying the `ibdata1` system tablespace. No SQL backups. Lots of "Table doesn't exist in engine" errors.

Fortunately...

#mysql #sysadmin

I was doing something similar, but switched to Premiere Pro and .srt files.

It creates reliable speech-to-text transcripts, captions, and translations in the same UI. I'm still trying to automate it at the same quality.

That probably fits in your 30 min, but has the usual Adobe disclaimer.

We have a large helpdesk client (120+ seats) who has been experimenting w/ AI drafts in a separate UI through our API. They could eventually be zero seats with the same high resource usage on our side.

I'm loathe to artificially lock features or charge by resolution. A change is needed though.

Per-agent helpdesk pricing is definitely on the way out. It's never felt like a fair metric, and many apps reflect that w/ discount "guest" users who collaborate but don't answer tickets: devs, execs, sales.

We've always used floating "seats", but that also undercounts API/AI integrations.

Cerb is another HelpScout alternative for your list. It's free for a single seat like yours, source available, and can be self-hosted in Docker (or cloud). We price by seats (simultaneous users) rather than usage. You'd recognize teams using it.

Disclaimer: I've been working on it for 20+ years.

YouTube video by Cerb Self-host Cerb with Docker

Cerb automates customer service inboxes & workflows. Code powerful automations in your browser w/ our KATA language, build interactive AI agents w/ tools, create team/private dashboards, & integrate with any API. This 5 min video shows how to self-host Cerb using @docker.com & @caddy.bsky.social.

It's a good rule. I've always admired your approach for maximizing enjoyment and minimizing burnout as an open source maintainer. Thanks for Redis, and continuing to share what you're learning. 👍

Atproto Ethos - AT Protocol A deep dive into the philosophical and aesthetic principles underlying the design of AT Protocol.

This is an article that I've wanted to write for over a year, and I finally got the chance to do it!

Atproto Ethos is a deep dive into how we think about protocol design - its influences, the core innovations, and the opinionated takes that we've adopted

AI voice cloning from ElevenLabs (or even Kapwing) sounds a lot more natural. You can train them on 30-180 mins of audio. They both captured the nuances of my speech really well for video voiceovers. ElevenLabs' model is multilingual & they also let you design voices by prompt rather than training.

It should be noted that markets have underreacted to the tariffs. A 30–50% sales tax (aka tariffs),
will wipe out entire industries.

The -7% drop this week doesn’t reflect the full damage. It’s an optimistic move assuming the tariffs won’t stick. The impact, if enforced, would be far more severe.

This is a deep dive of the AI agent functionality in Cerb 11.1. Create an agent from scratch using the new `llm.agent:` command and add tools for searching a... Build an AI agent with tool use and custom knowledge in Cerb 11.1

Let's build an AI agent in Cerb 11.1. We create an agent using the new `llm.agent` command, which gives us interchangeable LLM providers, memory, transcripts & tools in a few lines of code. The agent can be added to any website w/ a single script tag. #cerb #ai #agents #automation

Update on my life: Last year, I joined my kids' school's PTA, because they needed a treasurer and I'm good enough with numbers. It was a straightforward, self-contained job: balancing the checkbook for an organization that only did a few fundraisers each year.

90s paperback cover to Snow Crash, featuring a Mesopotamian arch looking into a cyberpunk city, with a dude wielding a katana.

1. I'm NOT the sort of SF/F nerd who thinks everyone needs to read a "canon" of older works in genre like they're homework before they get to call themselves a fan, nevertheless the book I'm always mildly surprised when people say they haven't read it is "Snow Crash," which to me is era-defining...

Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, though all of it applies equally to other decentralized social media ecosys…

Have another big post today on the importance of Bluesky/ATprotocol/decentralization, but also hoping to get people to understand the path forward is taking control over their own social media experience... www.techdirt.com/2025/01/27/e...

When I worked at an SV startup, we used to call an investment from SoftBank the kiss of death. SoftBank would pump so much cash into startups that it would completely kill that startup’s need to innovate or develop a financially sustainable business. 21/

Ok, quick thread on why DeepSeek is blowing up assumptions about LLMs and maybe the whole (U.S.) AI industry. DeepSeek is an AI lab funded by a Chinese hedge fund, their AI code is open source, meaning freely available to use, which most big U.S. models (aside from Meta’s) are not. That’s the start…

1. Impact. How much revenue does my work protect or generate?

2. Quality. Does my work meet or exceed customer expectations?

3. Efficiency. Reward making the right buy versus build decision.

4. Reusability. How do others leverage my work?

5. Supportability. How much work do I create for others?

The most subtle form of narrative technique applied to technical writing is also the most powerful one:

Narrating the technical details

Show conflict, solve it.

Unveil one bit at a time, dosing the information carefully, never all at once.

/1

Fixes for a critical rsync vulnerability (CVE-2024-12084) have been released for Stable/Bookworm, Testing and Unstable. Oldstable/Bullseye is not affected. Fixes for other lower severity CVEs have also been released in the same update and can all be tracked at… #debian

So I "monetise" on an open source project, what does it mean for me? · Issue #16 · orcwg/cra-hub should be considered to be making available on the market only if the component is monetised by its original manufacturer Assuming I make such source code available and I have charged money for ser...

If you're a European who sometimes charges for support of your Open Source:

https://github.com/orcwg/cra-hub/issues/16

you don’t necessarily want the system creators to actually write the docs. but if the docs are written by people with no connection to the system that who are guided solely by user feedback, you’ve also failed. docs should be written by people hopelessly torn between the two perspectives

Yes, you should use a Python venv in a container like docker Brought to you by "/r/python answers are so bad I had to write this"

Yes, you should use a Python venv in a container like docker.

And here is why:

www.bitecode.dev/p/yes-you-sh...

It was really valuable for me to stay at a single company long enough to live with the consequences of my own engineering decisions. To come face-to-face with my own technical debt.

It takes a few years for this to play out but IMO it's an important part of engineering growth.