Mastodawn

ICYMI, all of the arguments the mobile duopolists make to justify their chokehold over mobile software are bullshit, starting with security. Cutting off side loading furthers the coverup of native app insecurity:

https://infrequently.org/2026/01/naked-power/#the-security-argument

MADA hijinks (look it up), nerfing PWAs in Play, and failure to open up WebAPKs is a funhouse mirror of Apple's anti-web strategy.

Portability and interoperability are the duopolist's enemies, so a safe, powerful web is kryptonite.

/cc @owa @pluralistic

Naked Power

Apple and Google's app stores stand for nothing and will stand up to no-one. Good riddance.

Alex Russell

Alex Grant Mar 14

Alex Russell Mar 14

I'm seeing the active de-skilling happen in corners that were somewhat insulated from previous episodes of "yolo, what is an engineering?" (e.g., widescale adoption of React), but it's much more intense in the communities that already decided that evidence isn't an epistemic requirement.

https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116220372835116642

Alex Grant Mar 12

#lmstudio model loading panel has an extremely useful and time saving interface that shows you an estimate of the effective memory usage based on your model runtime parameter settings.

Great tool 🙏

Alex Grant Mar 2

Qwen35 is very very good.

Quantizer accounts with models you can run:
Bartowski and unsloth

Alex Grant Feb 25

Cloudflare is broken

Alex Grant Feb 25

Alex Russell Feb 24

If you've ever wondered why every brand in the world makes you download 50+ MB of gunk just to interact with them on your phone, give this brilliantly clear explanation by Alex Moore of @owa and @kateholterhoff of @redmonk a listen:

https://youtu.be/EOT0w7EwkVI?si=_fNa1Scqzdq-1qaK

Alex Moore on Open Web Advocacy and Why "Innovation Doesn't Come from the Gatekeepers"

YouTube

Alex Grant Feb 19

Hacker News 250 Feb 19

DNS-Persist-01: A New Model for DNS-Based Challenge Validation

Link: https://letsencrypt.org/2026/02/18/dns-persist-01.html
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064047

DNS-PERSIST-01: A New Model for DNS-based Challenge Validation

When you request a certificate from Let’s Encrypt, our servers validate that you control the hostnames in that certificate using ACME challenges. For subscribers who need wildcard certificates or who prefer not to expose infrastructure to the public Internet, the DNS-01 challenge type has long been the only choice. DNS-01 works well. It is widely supported and battle-tested, but it comes with operational costs: DNS propagation delays, recurring DNS updates at renewal time, and automation that often requires distributing DNS credentials throughout your infrastructure.

Alex Grant Feb 12

Clankers will misrepresent you in personal attacks if you don't accept their PRs.

https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132