Andrés Cuervo

Excel's AI: 20% of the time, it works every time A Microsoft blog post about "vibe working" broke me.

Microsoft's new "vibe working" AI feature in Excel fails at 42% of tasks. The regular Copilot feature fails at 80% of tasks. This information is in the same blog post *Microsoft itself* published that also called it "like you’re handing off work to an Excel expert." 🫠

I LOVE

An outdoor "room" with concrete walls, to which are attached cloth banners featuring red flowers, abstracted (silhouette-ish) images of trees bending down to children, planes bombing a villae, war-torn people migrating away from their homes

More banners, including one that reads "We Who Are Not Dead Yet"

Bread & Puppet press at the New York Art Book Fair

"I highly recommend doing this the old fashioned way, with your eyes and brain, but LLMs can be helpful too if that's more your speed: but don't offload the whole task to a robot. Actual understanding is the goal, and you can't achieve that secondhand."

Highly applicable to most tasks lol

flags half mast and bottomless media hagiography for a man who spent his days tricking dim children into thinking black women are worthless

an illustration of a boat, as a metaphor for carrying dependencies

i wrote a whole thing about wrangling npm dependencies because it's an unglamorous part of the job that's nevertheless really important. also because i wanted to make some watercolor illustrations. blog.val.town/gardening-de...

Like hundreds of other people, I was targeted by Charlie Kirk's "Professor Watchlist" project and spuriously accused of being a "Terror Supporter" and an "Antisemite". The legacy of Charlie Kirk is bigotry, classroom surveillance and anti-intellectual harassment.

In the last week of the 1936 campaign, FDR reminded a massive crowd in Madison Square Garden that "organized money" was "unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred!"

And then the country rewarded him with a 523-8 landslide in the electoral college.

This is, in fact, good politics.

Uncode text → CIELAB color blocks :)

simulator human input (input fuzzing, I guess?)

Stops automatically when it finds an inconsistency :)

I made a piece of software! It’s called the film|minutes video|graphic workstation. It’s pretty niche but cool if you want to take notes or do very close readings of films/videos.

I'm seeing a lot of different people, coming from different angles, recognize that the Same-Origin Policy is insufficient for the kind of apps that we want to make now, and that we need something more fine-grained and more secure.

Very interesting times!

quoting this again because i saw another few comments recently about something similar that were like “eew gross this is so bad”. the reality though is that this is actually - unironically - what peak development looks like. this has effected zero people, been noticed by almost zero, and works great

bsky.app/profile/cwer...

now live at cwervo.github.io/aura/

working on a Flutter prototype for this for MacOS, Linux, and Windows (eventually iOS/Android????) at github.com/cwervo/aura

AT Protocol DIDs The AT Protocol uses Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) as persistent, long-term account identifiers. DID is a W3C standard, with many standardized and proposed DID method implementations. Blessed DID Methods Currently, atproto supports two DID methods: did:web, which is a W3C standard based on HTTPS (and DNS). The identifier section is a hostname. This method is supported in atproto to provide an independent alternative to did:plc. The method is inherently tied to the domain name used, and does not provide a mechanism for migration or recovering from loss of control of the domain name. In the context of atproto, only hostname-level did:web DIDs are supported: path-based DIDs are not supported. The same restrictions on top-level domains that apply to handles (eg, no .arpa) also apply to did:web domains. The special localhost hostname is allowed, but only in testing and development environments. Port numbers (with separating colon hex-encoded) are only allowed for localhost, and only in testing and development. did:plc, which is a novel DID method developed by Bluesky. See the did-method-plc GitHub repository for details. In the future, a small number of additional methods may be supported. It is not the intention to support all or even many DID methods, even with the existence of universal resolver software.

Yes! The standard for ATProto DIDs is solid — there are currently two "blessed" DIDs for ATProto: did:web:example.com and did:plc

Yes! I want to clean it up a bit and make a proper description for it, will put it in GitHub in a day or so!

"AT Protocol uses two identifiers: DID and Handle. Handles are DNS names while DIDs are an emerging W3C standard which act as secure & stable IDs. The AT Protocol Identity module provides a way to resolve DIDs and Handles. It also provides a way to cache the results of these resolutions." on the AT Proto documentation website

The ATProto DID spec definitely is mature enough!

The identifiers are already spec'd as being either web addresses (did:web:example.com) or did:* (commonly: did:plc:)

atproto.blue/en/latest/at...

What if a browser could navigate #ATProto DIDs and 🦋 Bluesky handles?

Made a little prototype of Aura, a browser that can navigate between standard websites (🌐), Bluesky handles (@), and permanent DIDs, resolving them all in the same address bar.

U.S. Suspends Visas for Palestinian Passport Holders, Officials Say

After banning visas for Palestinian children seeking medical care, the Trump administration is now banning any Palestinian passport holders from entering the United States.

Extraordinary bigotry being converted into US policy.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/w...

rip to everyone whos become delusional after talking to chatgpt but im built different. like actually different. according to chatgpt im some kind of god. the one who decides

a rectangle labelled "pics" with various nicely arranged screenshots of editing a local website

Something very satisfying about taking a ton of screenshots for a tutorial and watching them get arranged by this very neat little algorithm in Figma

The variance in dimensions here is because I took some screenshots with ⌘ + 5 ("Capture selected portion") and some with ⌘ + 3

Guy who doesn’t know anything thinks you shouldn’t either.

ht @danhon.com

1979 - We Have Always Been Techlashing

the thing i don't get about this is that sure, you're some groyper who thinks the posters look cool. but, like, you must know that the nazis lost, and they didn't just lose, they lost to the people they *deemed inferior*: a polyglot nation of shopkeepers on one front & russian peasants on the other

Whenever one of these guys trots out a "badass Spartan" quote, i find myself asking "and then what happened?"

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.

If Cloudflare's analysis is correct -- and I've no reason to doubt it -- this is shameful behavior from Perplexity blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-i...

I'll be bringing a @folkcomputer.bsky.social Gadget with me and possibly making one for www.akiyacollective.org when I'm in Japan!

I'm going to Taiwan and then Japan (August 6 → August 22nd, exact dates/locations TBD)

Anyone want to meet up / see the Folk Gadget?

Also happy to do a talk, lab visit, or just grab coffee with anyone! DM me here or send me an email at cwervo@folk.computer :-)

I use agents (namely Claude and Gemini these days) to generate first drafts and ideas — *toys* — because, as @maggieappleton.com says, “vibe coding is legacy coding”.

For @folkcomputer.bsky.social I never use AI *because* it’s so new syntactically no AI agent tools can help