A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-11-15 to 2025-11-24, posted on
Ten whole scraps?! That sure is... a number! I expected to fully give up by now tbh but let's keep this cheese-wheel rolling down the hill(?)
When life gives you lemons, ask life "Oh hey, life is a person now. Where have you been? Why lemons? Why not money? Can I get some money? No? Oh, well... Can I get more lemons? Is this a one time thing or are you like on a schedule or something? Can you even talk?" and then make lemon meringue because we've got lemonade at home in the fridge already.
Spotlight
I love reading deep dives, post mortems and incident reports, so here's a treat if you too are that way inclined!
- elite.bbcelite.com is a site dedicated to Elite, the 1980s space trading sim game, containing not only its source code, but also over 130 deep dives on the How's and Why's of the game!
Stuff and things!
A mix of ups and downs this week for the internet. Emphasis on the downs. The dead internet is still alive! For now, at least...
- Rodrigo writes that AI/LLMs in Firefox appear to be something that nobody wants, but Anil disagrees - The important thing is using LLMs safely, and having safe LLMs to use. Can Mozilla fill that need with its integration into Firefox? Who knows...
- Bruce has another javascript-free method to frustrate immoral web scrapers - the more the merrier!
- Uggla is also getting up in the immoral web scraper fight with their own JS-free method and I love to see it
- This GitHub repo will let owners of (some) apple air pods fully enjoy their earphones on non-apple devices. I don't own these but it warms me to see people unlocking the capabilities of a device that are unfairly locked down!
- Cloudflare outages are always interesting, I really enjoy reading their writeups. Here's the most recent (at the time of writing lolol) writeup of the 2025-11-18 outage
- On that cloudfront outage above, you know, the one that took down a huge percentage of websites and apps? Yeah, well rina points out that you're just introducing a single point of failure and you probably don't need it at all
- No cloudfront outage will ever take fyr.io down (i hope?) because I self host! Laura is also a proponent of self hosting, I'm happy to see more people writing about it!
- Careful when building things though, whether through bugs or intent you may find yourself abandoning resources that can not only be claimed by third parties, but are in fact still relevant and potentially trying to be utilised out in the world. This happened to Microsoft recently!
- There's value in fixing bugs, whether you're removing old unused code, resources (see above) or just making the UX a bit friendlier or accessible. Consider a 'FixIt' - Bug-fixing for a week per quarter helps refine the product/service, feels good for the devs, and makes the users happier!
Bonus
- Half Life 2 is my favourite game, and I love learning new things about it, such as how a bug meant an NPC toe broke the game, even time travelling to break older versions that weren't originally broken