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German has a perfect word for when software updates make things worse. We should start using it.

We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering. New data tracked 26,811 students from January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments. Then exam season came. Those same students scored significantly worse when they couldn’t use the tool. The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming. ...

GoToSocial had a bug serving 0-byte images. I could have patched Go source code. Instead, I bypassed the entire fileserver and offloaded 92,000 files to SeaweedFS. Sometimes the best fix is an architecture pivot, not a code change. The Problem GoToSocial v0.22.1 has a confirmed bug where it uses mmap to serve media. On certain configs, this produces EINVAL errors during close(), resulting in HTTP 200 responses with 0-byte bodies. Caddy logs unexpected EOF because the connection drops mid-stream. The bug doesn’t care whether the file exists — the codepath itself is broken. ...

Migrating decades of personal archived email from Thunderbird mbox format into Proton Mail via the Bridge IMAP interface. On Linux. From the command line. Because GUI add-ons kept crashing. The Context I’ve been online since the BBS days on a Commodore 64. Watched email evolve from FidoNet netmail through SMTP, POP3, IMAP, webmail, and now end-to-end encrypted providers. My personal archive contains messages from Outlook Web Access, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Yahoo, and half a dozen defunct providers. Each era wrote headers differently. Each client had its own interpretation of “RFC compliant.” The result is an archive that represents 20+ years of real-world email, which is to say, a complete and utter mess by any strict standard. ...

The Kit Left to right: GL.iNet AR150, Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini, GL.iNet Slate7. Different tools, same principle. I rotate through three routers depending on the situation. Each has a specific job. GL.iNet AR150. The smallest unit. Square form factor. Runs off USB power alone. Pulls maybe 2 watts max. I pull this one out for short flights, quick hotel stays, anywhere I need minimum footprint and maximum portability. It handles five or six devices without sweat. No fancy hardware. Just enough to get the job done. ...