Back in 2022, I wrote Web technology optimism hour, highlighting the things I thought were cool about the state of technology. Time flies. Let's do it again. It's still easy to be pessimistic, but it's nice to mine your feelings for the positive ones. The elephant in the room is AI, but I don't feel like throwing another post into the gravity field of that topic. Without further adieu: TypeScript 7 It's here, finally, and it's faster. In the last edition, one of the headings was "Rust and Go based tools are making TypeScript development faster." At that point we had a few upstart projects for minifying, transpiling, and bundling TypeScript. Those tools have become standard-issue. But TypeScript, the actual type-checking of the language and the language tooling in editors, was still a bottleneck. There was exactly one implementation of the TypeScript type checker, and it was implemented in TypeScript, so it ran at JavaScript speeds and had limited ability to become multi-threaded. Unfortunately there's still only one game in town for TypeScript type checkers: it's still just Microsoft. But they rewrote TypeScript in Go for TypeScript 7 and it's much, much faster. This is one of the most noticeable changes to my day-to-day coding in a while. Plus, even better: TypeScript 7 supports the Language Server Protocol! As I wrote about in 2024, Microsoft invented TypeScript and also the Language Server Protocol, but TypeScript never implemented the Language Server Protocol. So there was no standard way for other editors, other than Microsoft's VS Code, to provide language tooling for TypeScript. This was suspicious behavior because of the company's history. But now: it just works. Neovim can support TypeScript 7 with its built-in Language Server support instead of someone wrapping the VSCode extension in an LS-protocol shell. So: a big win. Hooray for the new TypeScript: it's faster, it supports open standards, and now there are two TypeScript implementations. Now all we need is one that's made by someone who doesn't work at Microsoft. The Effect ecosystem is exciting I've been writing little development logs about Effect over the last year or two. I'm excited about Effect. It's a big, all-encompassing system, but I think it has a lot of potential and is arriving at exactly the right time. This is an era of supply-chain risk and I think there is, and should be, a swing away from the tiny module ecosystems in NPM. Software that's composed of hundreds of little modules from hundreds of authors is a lovely idea that doesn't work with malicious actors. The swing is toward larger, buttoned-up libraries, and Effect is really well-positioned for that. It has type validation, observability, state management, fancy data types, and lots of functional programming helpers all under one roof, in one package that's pretty well-maintained and heavily tested. It's also very, very typed, which makes it safer to use at scale. And it makes limits a lot easier: you can just stick an Effect.timeout on anything and prevent network requests or database queries or anything else from taking too long. The same with concurrency, it's very easy to limit concurrency. It's ready for a very uncertain world where you have to validate and be careful about everything. But at the same time, it's fun to use, if you're that kind of person, which I am. Bluesky and Mastodon are successful, meaningfully decentralized systems I use Bluesky and Mastodon all the time and both just work. They don't feel like tech demos, it's not all nerds using them. The uptime is pretty good, the featureset doesn't seem limited by the technology choices. And yet both are legitimately decentralized (in different ways) networks, with really interesting ideas about security, privacy, and community systems. Bluesky is aggressively building out its protocol as an independent technology from the social network, and as I learned at their conference, there are lots of creative people building on the technology. There's a big gap between a cool tech demo and a user-friendly popular service, and both of these have bridged it. It's exciting, and shows that you don't have to accept a bad set of tradeoffs to make tech that's both principled and popular. Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, and RCS are meaningfully secure messaging platforms I want to just celebrate the end of a technology: SMS. It's so good that people don't use SMS anymore: it was needlessly expensive and extremely insecure. My texts with friends are almost exclusively on Signal & iMessage, and occasionally WhatsApp. Now, WhatsApp is a mixed bag and nothing's perfect, but it's cool that the secure options recommended by the EFF and other sources are also popular options that people use every day. That's also pretty important from a privacy standard: having Signal installed on your phone is normal because it has a wide userbase, but the same would not be true if it was only used by people attending protests and being wary of government surveillance. Hardware update cycles are slowing People are hanging on to their phones and computers for longer. I'm part of this trend - my iPhone hit its fourth birthday, and I have no reason to even think about replacing this computer. With the exception of their batteries, modern laptops and phones are robust: they're water-resistant, made of durable materials, and basically just work. You could read the same data differently: maybe people are upgrading slower because they have less disposable income. I'm not sure that's true. But either way, it's good that upgrade cycles are longer: it means less e-waste, less pollution, less churn overall.

June was a big month: I went to Porto & Lisbon, and had a lot of life stuff happen. I'll get into the trip once I get my rolls of film developed. Three rolls at a new photo developing place: fingers crossed! Reading I finished reading Intermezzo (of the bag) and it was fantastic. I've always liked Sally Rooney's books but this was the one where the writing style really clicked. Also, The Vegan. Meh. I read Patricia Lockwood's 'A Tradcath Wedding' via Perfect Sentences but found an additional sentence to be perfect: Whenever they rang the chimes, which seemed to be every four seconds or so, a toddler screamed ‘WOW A BELL!’ to the visible displeasure of the celebrants – though isn’t the entire point of the ritual that you’re supposed to be that awestruck every time? Patricia Lockwood is the funniest writer I've read. You cannot grow a pumpkin, but you can improve the odds. Taylor's 'You Cannot Grow a Pumpkin' is a fantastic little prose poem of sorts. Watching I'm always trying to find a 'romp' when it comes to movies. Something lighthearted, pretty easy to watch, so on. We watched The Pink Panther this month and it is a perfect example of the genre. The inspiration for the watch came from the hamburger scene: But there's so much more of this kind of thing in the movie, little bits and physical comedy. Oh, and I also watched The Departed, which everyone says is good and is good. Elsewhere I wrote Accidental Anonymity on the micro blog, and it stirred up some discussion on Bluesky as well as at least one blog response. It was kind of an angry piece, as I said at the start. I will keep trying to stay out of the trap of writing about that topic all the time. Listening The only album I bought this month was Songs of Her's by Her's, which is fine. I wish I had something more profound to say about it given how the band met an unbelievably tragic end. Maybe more influential than that was Know Your Enemy's recent podcasts, especially this one about the pope's encyclical. I've really grown to love that podcast, and it has been part of me intellectually reconnecting with, but not readopting, Catholicism. Art Here's some art I really liked this month: This Hockney piece called 'Picture Emphasizing Stillness' from 1962 was at the MAC/CCB museum in Lisbon. Via Tim Babb, I enjoyed finding Tomás Sánchez's work.

A section of trail in Switzerland May was a big month! The highlight was a cycling trip around Lake Konstanz, passing through Konstanz, Bregenz Austria, Stein am Rhein in Switzerland, and Meersburg. A farm in Bodenseeufer, Germany We passed a lot of operating agriculture, growing apples, strawberries, and other fruits. The route is very continuous, mostly flat, and popular with retirees. It's very idyllic riding: lots of protected and separated lanes. There are some interesting regional differences in the riding. Swiss drivers were noticeably more aggressive and gave a lot less space to bikes, but the Swiss infrastructure was really nice when it was off-road. Also it was interesting to see that the vast majority of other cyclists on most of the route were on ebikes. This only changed when we were close to hip cities and we'd notice more young people on high-end road bikes. Münster St. Maria und Markus Taking the ride in 40-60 mile days left a lot of room for checking out the towns, food, and views. It was very easy being vegan in Germany, and significantly harder in Austria and Switzerland. Some highlights: KERVAN Imbiss in Konstanz: cheap, delicious vegan kebabs Insel Mainau: beautiful botanical garden on an island, recommended to follow up with Biergarten St. Katharina, a beer garden in the woods The Pile Dwelling Museum in Uhldingen-Mühlhofen-Unteruhldingen: very aesthetic museum plus recreations of pile dwellings In Zurich: the Swiss National Museum was gigantic and featured the best-integrated high-tech exhibits I've seen On the final evening we took a cable car up to Panorama Restaurant Falsenegg and it delivered on the name Reading I read The Technological Republic the book by Alex Karp and one of his employees. It was terrible as expected: part sales-pitch, part standard-issue MAGA cultural critique, part implied defense of just war. The last part was the most interesting to me, because Karp spends so much time grandstanding about his intellectual background and telling protestors to quiet down and have a real discussion, and this book confirms that he can't actually have that conversation. He has nothing to say about the moral complexity or justification of war. It's surprising that the only critical reviews I could find of the book are from other right-leaning sources. Providence, an American Christian Realist magazine, found it too weak. The Independent Institute didn't like it based on their Libertarian principles. I guess it's just so far from any left-wing thought that nobody bothers to read it. Democratic governance rests on a bargain so old we’ve forgotten it’s a bargain at all. The governed have something the governors need: labor, tax revenue, military service, consumer spending. This dependency is the source of democratic leverage. The whole system functions because power is distributed, and it’s distributed because the people at the top need something from the people at the bottom. I'm still trying to avoid writing about AI, but this piece by Owen McGrann was worth the time. It takes a lot of points that I've long agreed with and stitches them together into a coherent but miserable whole. On the bright side, I'm just finishing reading Intermezzo and it's wonderful. A totally rejuvenating and inspiring novel. Listening Cheekface is a ~9 year old band in the tradition of Cake, They Might Be Giants, etc. They've got some great hits - part sardonic and ironic, part euphoric and ultra-light pop choruses. It's Sorted by Cheekface Watching Adam Neely's talking about AI and music again, and like always, it's very worth watching. The generational element is especially interesting here: just like the commencement speakers getting booed, there's a consistent theme where Gen Z (and millennials, to some extent) are rejecting the AI hype while older generations are optimistic and coincidentally in a position to benefit from it.

I spent a lot of time outside in April. The first two weekends I did long bike rides: from Brooklyn to Tarrytown along the Old Croton Aqueduct trail, and out to Rockaway Beach via the Marine Parkway Bridge & Cross Bay Memorial Bridge. Then, I ran the Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon. I wrote some notes about the experience over in /micro. I properly trained for it this time, and it felt good and was pretty fast: shaved five minutes off my previous record. And then, the Great Saunter… The Great Saunter is a full loop around Manhattan. The route is 32 miles but it took us 33 with GPS jitter and detours. Ten hours and forty-three minutes. It was very difficult, in a lot of ways tougher than the half-marathon in terms of the stress it puts on the body. I'm getting more comfortable with longer endurance events, but still have no interest in running a marathon, and definitely no ultramarathons. A 200-300km randonneuring ride though could be in the cards. Reading I read The Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, the author of Construction Physics. I learned that I like his blogging better than his book-length writing: for example, this month's article Helium is Hard to Replace is really great, with understandable and fascinating charts and examples. there’s a final layer to this argument that nobody’s quite articulated yet. product quality improvements, at the frontier, are not bounded by how fast you can write code. they’re bounded by how fast you can come up with ideas good enough to push the frontier. I liked claude code is not making your product better, and think it perfectly rhymes with John Cutler's post about maximizers vs. focusers which isn't directly about AI. Maximizers are overrepresented in the top rungs on tech companies, people who are marked by opportunistic, experimental thinking, and for them the ability to implement a ton of features really quickly even at low quality is a gift. Their ability to enact their will was previously gated by the people doing the coding and designing, who mostly dislike pushing low-quality work. Now it isn't, as much. I took the time to thoroughly read through JavaScript has a Unicode Problem and JavaScript’s internal character encoding: UCS-2 or UTF-16? They're from 2013 but still relevant, and really engaging from a technical perspective if you are very interested in text encoding and also JavaScript, which I am. Listening Extra Stars by Gregory Uhlmann An excellent month for music. The new Gregory Uhlman (guitarist for SML) album. Circadia by Mammal Hands New Mammal Hands, too. Dosh, Ismaily, Young by Dosh, Ismaily, Young New album from Dosh, Ismaily, Young. Dosh who you might know from being Andrew Bird's drummer at one point (after Kevin O'Donnell and before Griffin Goldsmith). Complex Emotions by The Bad Plus The Bad Plus's final album from back in 2024! They're on a farewell tour right now, all things must come to an end. Watching This was a great long watch on some math concepts that I've had to re-learn a bunch of times, and it was the first time that the idea of a quaternion really clicked for me. Freya's channel has a lot more great videos. Jamelle Bouie's channel is consistently the best video commentary on the details of US politics I can find.