micahrl.me

Wed, 06 May 2026 13:50:34 -0600

You know, if someone really wanted to build and own a universal platform layer, they’d start a cellular company that sold by the byte and not by the device. Like imagine if you could add a cell connected gadget and it adds to your bill incrementally, like AWS instead of Rackspace, but for IoT.

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:29:33 -0600

It gets more true every year: “enshittification” is a word for disney adults

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:33:43 -0600

every time chat prefixes something obvious with “this is the subtle part:” I think “that haughty bitch is talking down to me”

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 06:59:28 -0600

Would CloudFlare or CloudFront please rename to something that doesn’t start with CloudF, I don’t care which.

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:29:48 -0600

The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner. Now, I am the master.

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:35:38 -0600

Always disappointed to click a link on a .blog domain and find a Substack :(

This isn’t an anti Substack post I just have very different expectations for a blog vs a Substacks and I have plenty of Substacks and I do not have enough blogs.

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:58:06 -0600

I haven’t had a laptop in several years, and I haven’t worked from a coffee shop basically since my last bout of bad RSI in 2019. Today I spent a bunch of time working from a couple of coffee shops, including a lot of typing. The Advantage 360 is… amazing. It’s wireless and easier to move around than my ErgoDox and easier to hook up than the Voyager, and has built in palm rests. I was expecting the tables with the wrong height to bother me (bc my elbows aren’t at 90 degrees), but that hasn’t really happened, at least not yet. I don’t want to overdo this… I still probably will never work all day in a coffee shop ever again. But it looks like I can take a laptop to a coffee shop for as much as several hours and get real work done. That’s really huge for me.

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 07:16:24 -0600

I didn’t realize that every blog hosted on Typepad has been deleted. What a fucking disaster. It is sad to see such poor stewardship.

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 12:04:08 -0600

I’m really excited that Uel is back www.greaterrealityarea.net

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:04:00 -0600

all you monitor people seem miserable. ‘i bought a 27" 8k monitor i hate for $1900’. cool, i bought a 32" 4K Samsung that i run at a non native resolution and never think about for $300

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 20:36:37 -0600

2 years apart, merry ☧mas

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 08:11:58 -0600

has anyone with conference room naming authority been bold enough to call their building’s largest audience hall Security Theatre

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:57:59 -0600

Speaking obliquely, I’m currently working on a project to demonstrate that I can write infrastructure code. I hadn’t seen devicemapper’s thin provisioning support before - this seems pretty cool!

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 10:19:47 -0600

domain owners should get a TLD email address; i own micahrl.com and so i should be able to receive email at micahrl@com.

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 09:07:00 -0600

Testing some domains, all of these render as punycode in the browser, I wonder what micro.blog does with them

⍼.testpuny.micahrl.com ꙮ.testpuny.micahrl.com 🌙.testpuny.micahrl.com θ.testpuny.micahrl.com ə.testpuny.micahrl.com ɔoɯ.ɯᴉɔɐɥɹl.testpuny.micahrl.com

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 09:00:59 -0600

see if you buy a fun domain you have to at least do something with it, like this is the bare minimum imo iso8601.date

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 08:47:56 -0600

DNS would be so much more fun if Unicode didn’t show up as punycode so often

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 08:11:00 -0600

Testing some domains, all of these render as punycode in the browser, I wonder what micro.blog does with them… now in Markdown format

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 22:21:31 -0600

it is outrageous to me that the domain chex.quest is registered and just parked. theres only one thing that domain could possibly be for

Idea: HTML for shortcodes

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 06:49:06 -0600

I have a lot of experience with Hugo and I like the concept of static site generators in general. I am not really a fan of the shortcode syntax, though. I’d love to see a version of shortcodes that uses HTML instead.

E.g.:

# Example post

Here's my post. It was built at <shortcode-buildtime format="iso-8601"></shortcode-buildtime>.

<shortcode-quotefig
  cite="https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-between-FU-and-Welcome#830421"
  caption="<a href='https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-between-FU-and-Welcome#tangerine'>tangerine on MetaFilter</a>"
>
  This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture....
</shortcode-quotefig>

The shortcode engine I’m thinking of might convert that to this HTML

<h1>Example post</h1>

<p>Here's my post. It was built at <time datetime="2025-10-10T00:05:04-12:00">2025-10-10T00:05:04-12:00</time>.</p>

<figure class="quotefig">
  <blockquote cite="https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-between-FU-and-Welcome#830421">
    <p>This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture....</p>
  </blockquote>
  <figcaption>
    <a href='https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-between-FU-and-Welcome#tangerine'>tangerine on MetaFilter</a>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

HTML already has all the things shortcodes have to have: a name, optional attributes, and an optional body. They also automatically work great in any editor, and mix well in Markdown. And if you’re using an SSG, you’ll already know at least a little HTML.

It would be kind of like web components implemented as static preprocessor macros. Or, to be spicy, you could call it “Unreactive Server Components”.

Startup idea: tackle builds across the stack

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 13:24:01 -0600

We need a single tool that does all of:

local builds (replace Make/Gradle/etc)
CI builds (replace GitHub Actions)
LLM sandbox builds (replace Claude Code terminal frontend)
Cloud LLM builds (replace GitHub Workspaces)

These are weird bedfellows, but build systems touch all of these.

Local and CI builds both have to encode artifact dependencies, and doing this for both local and CI builds usually requires a lot of fragile code generation.
(Plus, iterating on CI build changes is awfully painful, considering the execution time; reducing duplication means that most CI build system changes can be tested locally in a much tighter loop).
It was pretty wild to launch Claude Code outside of a container, but I probably would have done the same to be first to market. What’s crazy to me is that GitHub has just followed suite. No! Put the LLM in a container and stop asking me if you can execute make or find! (oh and by the way, you can depend on a suite of tools instead of first trying rg and recovering from a missing command with find -exec grep, etc) But then, wait, now my LLM container has to have all my dependencies in it. And there you go: the LLM tool has to be integrated with the build system.
In exactly the same way, the cloud LLM tool needs access to all those same dependencies, and it has to know how to build the code anyway, and it might even be hosted by the same vendor that hosts your CI (i.e. GitHub).

My spicy take is that the build system is the hard part, all the LLM stuff is just dressing. Here’s my proof: no one has made a good build system yet, but all the other pieces that exist (Actions, Workspaces, Claude Code, containers) are fine. I’m not sure why this is: every time I set up builds I can’t believe I have to do it twice. The only project I’m aware of that even tries to do both local and CI builds well is Bazel, but they’re really up front that it’s slow for small local stuff, and this tool would need to embody the principle of making easy things easy and hard things possible. That first clause means it has to be fast for local builds, and also easy to install (no separate JVM install step). Bazel has whiz bang features like pulling build artifacts over the network for local builds, which is nice if you’re a company that is already big enough to fund your own build system(s), but not a feature I would start with.

Microsoft has all the business pieces to make this pencil: CI builds, LLM CLI tool, and LLM cloud tool. But could it get adoption by tying it all to their proprietary services like this, or would it have to be an open ecosystem?

Would also be an interesting product space for a startup, but how to make money on it? No idea, I’m just the technical cofounder, see, that’s what I rely on all you idea guys for. Hop to it, please, the downtown office I’m eyeing for our fully remote company won’t pay rent on itself!

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 05:53:02 -0600

Working on a polyglot (Java/Go/JavaScript) at work, it really seems like build and CI systems are two halves of the same thing, which should be built together. I built my dependency graph once for make, and now I have to do it again for Gitlab CI… and keep them in sync forever.

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 05:59:59 -0600

Decided that being able to easily insert work before my working copy is worth using a new tool. I keep reaching for a commit command and feeling disoriented. Going to take some getting used to.

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 11:32:50 -0600

I suspect there may be architectural software decisions that have cost human kind more time and money than Douglas Crockford’s intentional removal of comments from JSON, but I don’t believe there are very many

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 21:47:25 -0600

the idea that the government should step in to prevent 12 year olds from asking the cloud for images of darth vader c walking or whatever is just silly www.wired.com/story/dis…