I finally published my Demonschool retrospective. It is without a doubt the most I have ever struggled writing something. Last update I suggested that I “finished” it and that it needed “some” editing. How young and naive I was. Super glad I got there in the end. The first paragraph is still more negative than I would like, but I think it does a good job of capturing my first impression.
We live in interesting times and October 21st was more interesting than most. The big news was a security issue in PHP, now dubbed PHP2Shell. It made international news. Big enough that my grandma called me. Apparently, they were hyping it up on TV. PHP2Shell is worrisome enough to be worth hyping up, mind you. I am just unsure that the messaging needed to be so intense that it got my grandma worried.
A Substack article called “Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.” by The Hack made the rounds recently. It argues that passkeys could be used to restrict the software and hardware freedoms of users by requiring attestation. I didn’t find it particularly persuasive, but it made it to the front page of Hacker News and thus some people felt the need to respond.
And now for something completely different. In late July this year, Anthropic released a substantial update to Claude’s voice mode. Feel free to read that short post by Anthropic if you want to know what’s new. Although, with the speed the industry is currently moving, late July may as well be a decade ago. In fact, voice mode is already out of date again: it still uses Opus 4.8, not the freshly minted 5.5.
If I had to pick one word to describe Demonschool, I would pick cozy. I will admit that it was not the vibe I expected. All this talk of slaying demons and an impending apocalypse made me expect a darker game with some light humor to sand down the edges. Instead, the initial presentation of Demonschool is a demon of the week sort of affair with humor at the forefront. It is the largest difference between the tone I expected a game to have and the one it actually delivered.
Yesterday, I was one of ten thousand and learned about HTML wrapper methods in JavaScript while using the autocomplete of Firefox’s devtools on a string. They do exactly what it says on the tin: they wrap strings in HTML tags. These functions are essentially…
Everything digital you buy doesn’t become yours. You license it from whoever is selling. This is how software, movies, games etc. all work and is true even when there is no recurring fee. It’s simply a fact that you don’t own the digital stuff you … own.
Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is? Insanity is playing the exact same fucking Ubisoft game over and over again, expecting shit to change. That is crazy. The first time somebody told me that, I don’t know, I thought they were exactly right so, boom, I haven’t played one since Far Cry 3 … hence the old reference.
Apple did the tech-company-in-2026 thing and talked about AI at WWDC 2026. For roughly 40 minutes in a presentation that ran 72 minutes, it was essentially the only thing they talked about. I am sure it’s cool, or it’s another step toward the abyss. Your pick, honestly.
