Colin Charles

Steve Jobs once said: "If you are working on something that really excites you, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you."

any journalists want to write about the suck that is X support, and how people can get easily hacked, etc. and their support is non-existent, so it basically just takes forever to resolve stuff. and plenty of scams get launched this way from account takeovers

I asked ChatGPT what OpenAI's stake in Cursor might be valued at (they invested $8m in the $11m seed round), considering they've just acquired Windsurf for $3b.

Conservative estimate, is that the $8m is now worth between $600-900m after dilution.

interesting mastodon exit interview for bluesky v.cx/2025/04/mast...

What AI iOS app am I missing

Intel is reported to be cutting 1 in 5 staff this week.

Broadcom has slashed VMWare's workforce roughly in half since 2023 (and they more or less ended work from home).

You know what these two companies have in common? Malaysian-born leaders.

Tourists choose London over New York for the theatre now (5 million more). The gap was also consistent with the previous year (so this isn't Trump induced, though that seems anecdotal). £1 spent on theatre, £1.27 into local businesses (spillover effect).

to start something meaningful, you have to end what doesn't serve you.

the beginning is the end is the beginning.

Windows ? lol

The BBC did some legwork for their article on EV cable thefts. This is journalism. Makes it worth reading!

We see lots of guides about how to setup the perfect Linux or macOS development environment, but where are all those writing about Microsoft Windows dev environments?

Are people not realising that source available != open source?

We see this with Gumroad's source code, and Meta's Llama 4.

Just because you can see the source, doesn't make it open source. Has the OSI just gone silent on fighting this?

Licensing matters. Or mattered.

I feel for Studio Ghibli, having once been to the Ghibli museum in Tokyo. It's interesting that copyright laws in Japan and the USA are different (Or more likely OpenAI just cares about lawyers from one area).

Never expected Lovable to look this way either! In-browser resources, yo.

Avid MyFitnessPal user, though I only use it for my 3,554 day streak (note: I don’t like it).

I see a lot of AI-based food recognition software pop up. Can’t say if it’s a feature or a product, long-term (streaks may help).

Oūra ring is doing pretty well here now.

Playwright MCP solves for finance or compliance teams - a real world use case is getting it to take wallet snapshots, on a daily basis to keep track of PnL.

You not only get text, you also get a PDF snapshot.

Do this in Claude, do this in VS Code, anywhere MCPs are supported!

An Interview about MariaDB and PostgreSQL At the Open World Forum two weeks ago I had the pleasure to meet with Colin Charles. We had a nice talk about the current state of both MariaDB and PostgreSQL, and even were both interviewed by the Op...

what a blast from the past - 2013 - An Interview about MariaDB and PostgreSQL

tapoueh.org/blog/2013/10...

Bluesky Friends! · Luma Impromptu and friendly happy hour with peeps from Bluesky! Come say hi and make some new friends. Please register with your Bluesky username, and hit…

Hello #NYC Bluesky friends ... and soon to be friends!

I'm putting together a little Bluesky meetup on Thursday and I'd love to see you there. Very casual, no agenda, just hanging out IRL and meeting peeps while I'm here in the city.

Feel free to share!

lu.ma/lq7x64gd

GIMP 3.0 released pretty much in the same week we got Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental.

Open source, easier to hook up AI rails. I've seen GIMP AI plugins with OpenVINO (packaged in Ubuntu), GIMP-ML, & gimp-comfy-tools (ComfyUI extensions).

What else?

Some people are enjoying a public holiday in malaysia.

Some people are busy grinding away.

You don’t get lucky by chance; you get lucky by showing up, when others aren’t.

Sitting quietly,
doing nothing,
Spring comes,
and the grass grows by itself.

Is this from Matsuo Bashō or the Zenrin-kushū?

Either way, plenty of reading in the future.

Markups are smart. Bluesky should implement it.

You’re highlighting important bits, writing a little comment, and at the same time, it goes back to the original post.

Innovation in the repost!

"The future depends on what we do in the present." - Mahatma Gandhi

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." -- Winston Churchill

If you want something you've never had, you must be willing to do something you've never done.

"Your life doesn't get better by chance, it gets better by change." - Jim Rohn

Be the change you want to see, for this life, for this world.

Never give up. Never let things out of your control dictate who you are.

This may be anonymous, but this is a riff on Winston's Churchill, Never Give In.

Timely reminder: "You are stronger than your challenges and your challenges are making you stronger." - Karen Salmansohn

"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men and women who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it." -- Muhammad Ali

All this can change beyond just VC funding of course; public listed companies, PE firms, etc.

The secret to success is to ensure a good percentage of customers actually pay, ie subsidize the community.

VC funding for open source, depends on rapid growth of a community.

The bet is for the ecosystem to succeed, while you also manage to eek out the right financials.

If the financials aren’t met, you’re thinking hard how to milk the community.

And when all else fails, you rug the license.