perardi

I walk by a lovely local toy store every day.

https://www.playtoysandbooks.com

I live in the Andersonville neighborhood in Chicago, and it’s a small bit of joy to have a thriving boutique toy store to walk by as I go to the gym.

Hey, long-time Flickr user who migrated to Google Photos for a somewhat specific use case. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/perardi)

I do a lot of event photography as a creative outlet. I want my friends to be able to download individual photos and photo albums easily. As an example, I just photographed a fundraiser for my rugby team last week, and I made all my shots available in a Google Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PfwHpEJejywBRiZp7

And while that works, I don’t necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine. I would rather support a diverse photography ecosystem.

Have you explored making downloading individual photos and albums a prominent feature? Mind you, I realize I am weird photographer who does this stuff for free, and I don’t care about attribution or watermarks. I just want my friends to be able to get their photos easily.

I don’t know if I would go so far as to say “monk-like”. He’s a college football die-hard. But he is a very chill dude.

I wish more tech execs were in Cook’s mold. Reserved. Controlled. Calm. No Twitter beefs, no overt politics, no blow-ups behind closed doors.

It’s a total cliché rite of passage to buy one of these when you move to Chicago.

And I am typing that as I look at the Edgewater poster hanging right there over my desk.

Edit : Sorry I'm asking specifically about paywalled stuff

Ah, you mean, like the NYTimes RSS feed. The NYTimes (and other paywall sites) only render the headline and one-sentence article summary. Like this:

Not All Malls Are Struggling

A certain type of shopping mall has become a surprising bright spot for real estate investors.

You do not…please correct me if I’m wrong…and cannot get a full-text RSS feed from the Times. Or Slate. Or [insert legacy media company here].

Which is deeply frustrating. It’s obviously a way to cut off the most blatant way for a bot to scrape the site, but c’mon, please, media tech teams, we can make private subscription RSS feeds work for podcasts, we can make it work for news. Your most engaged and nerdy and tech literate customers will go for it.

In lieu of that, I use Safari, and I have it set to automatically pop into Reader mode (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/hide-distractions-whe...) when I hit certain websites. While I would prefer to read my news in NetNewsWire, hitting a de-shittified reader view in Safari is a decent fallback.

Office has been ARM/Apple Silicon-native for a while.

It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.

You are not the only one.

I have an ASUS ProArt Display 27” 5K. And I somewhat regret it.

I love the pixel density. But I don’t love the matte finish. Which is apparently a controversial take. But I really don’t. I like the crisp pop of typography you get with a glossy display. And, for UI design, the matte finish just doesn’t “feel” like the average end-user experience. I am constantly pushing Figma between my laptop display and my monitor to better simulate what a design will look like on an average glossy LCD or OLED display.

I still do a double-take when I see Pokémon trading card game vending machines at the grocery store.

I am an elder Millennial with no kids…I knew it was still a popular game, but seeing a great big Pokéball machine next to the shopping carts really drove it home.

Oh, totally, it’s my head canon as well.

Ha, I’d argue it starts right at Pekin.

According to Reddit…so, grain of salt…that is an urban legend, related to a Neil Gaiman short story that appeared on the Matrix promo website.

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1amree7/theres_a_wi...

Also, that should have been the backstory of the Matrix, and not the whole “living power source” nonsense.

I have a real soft spot for Summer of Night.

It obviously owes a lot to Stephen King’s IT. But it stands on its own merits…and I give it extra credit because it was set in my home town. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Night)

I am 42. I came out when I was 19. I’ve worked in tech for 15 years, though no in the Valley.

I have a snarky response, then a real response.

Snark: Oh like a bunch of gays are capable of that level of coordination without it breaking into vicious drama and infighting. We can barely hold together a volleyball team sometimes.

Real: Well, yes, a lot of gay guys do know each other, especially in dense urban cities like SF, NYC, and Chicago, because we are all in the same sports leagues, we go to the same bars, we go to the same circuit parties, and it’s natural to give someone you know an internal referral as a leg up, because it’s a lot easier to hire someone you know versus sifting through 1600 job applications from strangers.

Nope. It is still Electron, and it is not snappy. And I am on an M3 Max MacBook Pro.

I have transitioned off ChatGPT for home use (Google provides me slightly better value in my personal life, as I can pay for a plan that also accommodates my weird photo storage needs) and it’s all Anthropic at work, but I miss the ChatGPT Mac app. I can’t say for certain if it was Electron or not—I never dug into the internals, and it felt very, very fast and “native”.

I dare you to find any analytics, anywhere, that show any IE 11 usage.

It would be utterly negligent to still be running IE in a corporate environment. It’s a huge security risk.

OK, everyone is (rightly) bringing up that relatively small but really glaringly prominent AI boyfriend subreddit.

But I think a lot more people are using LLMs for relationship surrogates than that (pretty bonkers) subreddit would suggest. Character AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character.ai) seems quite popular, as do the weird fake friend things in Meta products, and Grok’s various personality mode and very creepy AI girlfriends.

I find this utterly bizarre. LLMs are peer coders in a box for me. I care about Claude Code, and that’s about it. But I realize I am probably in the vast minority.

Have you tried the relatively recent Personalities feature? I wonder if that makes a difference.

(I have no idea. LLMs are infinite code monkeys on infinite typewriters for me, with occasional “how do I evolve this Pokémon’ utility. But worth a shot.)

And in Musk’s case, “longer” means “abandoned”. Like the cheap model 3. Or the Hyperloop. Or swappable batteries. Or X as an everything app that includes banking.

Oh, well let me get in my sub-$30,000 Model S, with a swappable battery and full-self-driving capabilities, and take a fully automated trip to the Hyperloop downtown so I can catch a quick ride out to O’Hare so I can fly out to watch a successful Starship launch…

…oh wait. I can’t. Because for all his successes, Musk has also sowed quite a lot of bullshit that has gone precisely nowhere.

Yes, there is a sandbox.

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/12/claude-cowork/

That’s the point of this gist, and the related blog post.

Also, it’s a bit of a stretch to call Claude Code, which isn’t even a year old…old.

5 anti-AI posts on the home page of Hacker News…yeah, plenty of insecure evangelism amongst the skeptics, too.

Even with search mode, I’ve had some hilarious hallucinations.

This was during the Gemini 2.5 era, but I got some just bonkers results looking for Tears of the Kingdom recipes. Hallucinated ingredients, out-of-nowhere recipes, and transposing Breath of the Wild recipes and effects into Tear of the Kingdom.

Strongly disagree.

Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft all have a very confusing product naming strategy where it’s all lumped under Gemini/ChatGPT/Copilot, and the individual product names are not memorable and really quite obscure. (What does Codex do again?)

Nano Banana doesn’t tell you what the product does, but you sure remember the name. It really rolls off the tongue, and it looks really catchy on social media.

That doesn’t reflect my (I would say extensive) experience at this point, nor does it reflect the benchmarks. (I realize benchmarks have issues.)

Are you using Claude as an agent in VSCode or via Claude Code, or are you asking questions in the web interface? I find Claude is the best model when it’s working with a strongly typed language with a verbose linter and compiler. It excels with Go and TypeScript in Cursor.

Ugh. Sigh.

My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements.

It feels…gross…inappropriate…it feels weird to use a UI covered in green gamer UI slime.

https://imgur.com/a/eoa8arH

There are a lot of resources.

I am a fan of: https://www.youtube.com/@KevinPowell

Kevin is a no-nonsense no-hype educator. He will keep you up to date without a lot of engagement hacking.

I have been developing web stuff for 20 years now and I also can’t believe comments like these.

Flex and grid enable layouts that are far beyond anything we could do with table layouts. Anyone who claims otherwise has obviously not done any amount of serious, production FE UI design and development.

Are there bits of DX ergonomics I’d like in flex and grid? Of course. Does the syntax sometimes feel a bit arcane? Yeah. But the raw power is there, and anyone who claims the contrary is either a gormless backend developer, or some troll who is trying to design things in MS Word.

I did.

My startup did.

And now we’re going to rip it all out and move to a React front-end.

HTMX makes response handling much more complex. Every endpoint returns 3–5 different HTML fragments. Frontend and backend must agree on every scenario — success, validation errors, system errors, partial updates, full reloads.

And HTMX is still a fairly obscure library. The documentation and examples are lacking, there isn’t a real set of established best practices at scale, and not for nothing, LLMs aren’t great at it.

React is mature, used at scale, provides separation of concerns, and is great for agentic AI coding. HTMX has its place for simple projects, but for anything non-trivial, it’s a no for me.

It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of complex codebases.

This is precisely my experience.

Having the AI work on a large mono repo with a front-end that uses a fairly obscure templating system? Not great.

Spinning up a greenfield React/Vite/ShadCN proof-of-concept for a sales demo? Magic.