Notes from December 2025

Here are my notes from the final month of 2025.

Little things I did

I predict that Mastodon will outlive Bluesky because the latter is corporate-controlled. We’ll see if my prediction is correct in about 25 years.

I’ve been working on a mystery project that uses Pyodide, the WebAssembly-powered Python distribution. After much toil I figured out how to make it do relative imports.

I made a little audio speed calculator that lets you enter “4 hours, 20 minutes” and it’ll tell you how much time you’ll save listening on 1.5× speed, and 1.6× speed, and so on.

I published my notes on the book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. In summary, private equity seems bad.

I’m slowly trying to drop GitHub. I moved some of my repositories to Codeberg this month.

Finally, I continued writing for Zelda Dungeon. I contributed to their annual “Best Zelda Ever” ranking. 2025 featured a big upset! I’m especially proud of what I wrote about Phantom Hourglass.

Links and bookmarks

I’ve got a lot of links and quotes for you this month.

• “It may sound melodramatic, and maybe it is, but I see the increased dependence on algorithmically-driven entertainment as a symptom of that larger problem, uber-convenience that separates us from our critical thinking. We’re learning to abandon reason for small decisions, and wouldn’t you know it, now it’s easier to ignore reasons for the larger ones.” Via “I stream nothing, and I am happy.”

• The Ghostty terminal emulator is now sponsored by a nonprofit. “A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain. The structure legally binds Ghostty to the public-benefit purpose it was created to serve.”

• “In a recent academic paper, [Ph.D. student Emily Mazo] and two co-authors analyzed dozens of instances of activism at tech companies like Google and Microsoft—over issues like whether a technology would be used for military purposes or immigration enforcement—and found that labor organizing often followed. They hypothesized that it was because employers had cracked down.” From “Despite Crackdown on Activism, Tech Employees Are Still Picking Fights”.

• Liked the overview in “A Survey of Dynamic Array Structures”.

• “I can make effective use of LLMs. It merely costs me my care for my craft, and my joy in its practice.”

• “Today, I want to talk about a special, unadvertised feature of living with a disability. […] It’s the mandatory, non-optional ‘Expert Mode.’ […] What is Expert Mode, you ask? It’s the unspoken mandate that we, the disabled, must become masters of workarounds, collectors of arcane accessories, and grateful recipients of ‘accessibility’ that feels more like a consolation prize.” From a great post about disability.

• It sucks that Y Combinator has such an influence over tech discourse. “The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News” talks about that in more detail.

• John Carmack wrote a bit about inlined code, but the real nugget was a critique of a particular way to write functions. He called these functions “places for bugs to breed.” Love that.

• Bookmarked Napkin Math, which has rough performance/cost estimates for common software operations. “For example, how quickly can you read 1 GB of memory?”

• Also bookmarked the Game UI Database, which is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of video game user interfaces.

• From “Is AI Making Us Stupid?”: “if it’s something I really want to improve or get better at or retain, don’t outsource so much of it to AI.”

• I finished The Red House Mystery, a campy detective novel from 1922. I continue to like Standard Ebooks for reading public domain books. I became a donor this month.

• Learned that you basically can’t make toast messages accessible.

• “A complete guide to the HTML number input” taught me a lot!

• Bookmarked this guide to photographing CRTs.

• “List of flags by design” is a neat catalog of flags from around the world. I think this one was my favorite.

• Played The Collector, a cute and simple browser game about collecting orbs.

• “The best way to learn the capabilities of LLMs is to throw tasks at them that may be beyond their abilities and see what happens.”

• “Can you imagine what the web would be like now-a-days if XHTML had won? Everywhere you go you’d see: ‘XML Parsing Error: mismatched tag…’ Instead, everywhere you go you see ‘Application error: a client-side exception has occurred’, lol.” From this post.

• Learned an EarthBound fact via the Third Strongest Podcast: Mr. Saturn’s font is modeled after Shigesato Itoi’s daughter’s handwriting.

Hope you had a good December and a great 2025.