Week 22 2025

Hello world

Well! That was quite a lot all at once, wasn’t it? It’s so long ago now, Monday. A couple sitting outside the cafe, staring deep into each others eyes, no table between them, interlocked legs. That’s so earnest.

On Monday i wrote: I’m not happier. I am, [becky avery voice] “however”, more productive.. But maybe that is wrong. I am in pain, but maybe I am happier.

Then Kleppman handed Gentle an unmarked manilla envelope. And i’m thinking, this is the kind of stuff i’m into, i read about this, coders at work, these little details, moments. but then there it is, it’s there, it’s here, it’s in front of me and also they know me, they know my name, this is all very strange.

There’s only one socket in the hotel room so I’m sitting on the bathroom floor. It’s a nice hotel, otherwise. The window opens up wide so I can throw myself into the Spree if necessary. Or rent a guitar.

That night Simon said he thought we were going to end up seeing someone one of us know, maybe space buns. We walked down the river, around new parts of Berlin with many different energies. We went to a shop and bought a Fritz and a beer. And to another for a LAUT WASSER and a beer. And so on. We got a burger from a toilet, and it was a good burger. Anyway he was right, we saw each other. I love him. I do still wish we had seen space buns. Midnight toilet arab line bracelets on and home. It felt like something broken had been fixed.

The people of the Local-First community are extremely nice and wonderful. I wish I had little cards that said “you seem nice” on them that I could hand to people when I am too tired to communicate but I like them. Lots of nice warm glows. Everyone keeps saying “lenses”. I don’t know how to capture how surreal it all is. Normally I don’t meet people who know who Alan Kay is. Here they have his phone number.

People I have a huge amount of respect for, who have written papers and posts and libraries and tools—people who, until a few hours ago, were papers and posts and libraries and tools—they talk to me like I am a peer. i’m startled. also startled to learn that i have things to say, and that i believe them, and that they are new and meaningful.

And then I am emotionally exhausted. I have had many extremely wonderful conversations with people I like and respect who seem to genuinely like me and are interested in what I do and have to say. Yet now I am vibrating with self-hate, filled with self doubt, sick with anxiety. I am sick of myself and if the building was on fire I would lie down and accept it. Struggling to mark the good times as keyframes. In this exhaustion it seems so clear that the only things that matter are the moments I fucked up. All of the good things can be explained away or excused. Some sleep and some fish will help, then I can choose the keyframes and see the bad times as the tweens. After some sleep and some fish, then I will be lucky.

On Thursday morning i sat in a little room with some ink & switchies and we talked about the patch api. On Thursday afternoon and evening I sat with some browser people and talked about IWAs* and DMT and ate lebanese food.

do you know about Isolated Web Apps?

they’re like PWAs except instead of being tied to an origin they’re tied to a public key they can create something called <controlledframe>.

it’s like an iframe except the pages inside don’t know they’re in an iframe (they think they are window.top) and you can rewrite their network requests, interogate their dom, inject JS etc

and also in them you can use things like Direct Socket API.

also they have already shipped in chrome behind 3 flags.

many thanks to Luke for passionately and patiently explaining this to me. it’s delightful to meet someone doing devrel for some chrome flags just out of sheer belief that it will give us a layer of the computer that we own, and let us claw computation back from corporation.

do you see what it all means? we can build a web browser. let’s build a web browser, a user agent. for users who cherish agency.

I’m extremely grateful to have been able to sit on little wooden steps, lean against walls smoking cigarettes, and eat burger while listening to these incredibly bizarre and impressive people share their bizarre and impressive thoughts with each other.

At 5am I am standing on a Berlin street corner. A Dutch girl I met around midnight is handing me her phone and a metal straw and saying “three” and “four”. Hurts like hell. At 9am i am in the office in London starting my last day of work. It was a very normal day, I felt very little at all about leaving. There are two people who I might not bump into anymore. Not seeing them is hard. Are things meant to be or do you have to make them be?

A relationship is a form of transport
Change Propagation
It is ten years ago
“select a range of… we’ll call it ‘time’”
“Most software is centralized sadness”.
The distinct feeling that I’m standing in Palo Alto Research Centre
Adversarial Corporate Sponsorship - having a job so you can write code art in your spare time
i am highly available and wifi aware
Been to so much with these eyes, and now I must sleep and gain new eyes.

thanks to pvh, good, mk, bz, herb for making it seem like there is the chance i might say something worthwhile.

thanks to reed, grjte, gentle, jm for giving me the feeling that it is possible to be understood.

thanks to rb, za, sl, cb, ag, js, ac, ab, rm, kb, lg, gp, mb, etc for the parts you played in the seven most rewarding years of my life.

last night i ate lobster linguine at the ivy. tomorrow i start again.

It’s noon already and I’m still where I was when I woke up at 7. I’m going to go outside for a walk and some cigarettes and we’ll see each other next week.