stream

“You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are flowing in upon you.” —Heraclitus of Ephesus, c. 535 – c. 475 BCE

another day, another diss track released by the Vulnerability Apocalypse[^1].

the technicalities around CVE-2026-111497 go way over my head—if Google’s reference C implementation of the Brotli decompression library makes perfect sense to you, then you're probably not here on my site, reading this 🙃

what’s relevant here’s why serving a site as static files—built by static site generators (SSGs)—removes one route for yucky attacks like this[^2]

TL;DR an SSG builds your pages before anyone visits. your hosting serves the finished files instead of running your site’s application code to assemble a page whenever someone requests it.

this vulnerability needs a particular piece of software to decompress malicious data. so if there’s no site application doing that when visitors send requests, there’s nothing at that layer for this exploit to target 🔐

fewer moving parts, fewer things to exploit, less tech drama, happy life[^3]. SSGs for the win! 👇

• HTML + CSS + JavaScript + images sit ready to serve in the Great Big File Cloud in the Sky 🌐💨
• a purely static site needs no application database / runtime secrets on the serving side, so there's less backend baggage to compromise

naturally, build tools + hosting infra still need patching, and compromised hosting could still alter what visitors receive. static files aren’t a force field, though by comparison it sure feels like it! 🦸‍♀️

[^1]: The Patch Apocalypse: Why Traditional Vulnerability Management is Breaking Under AI‑Driven Discovery

[^2]: or on a peripherally related note, [[why I built my website with two static site generators]]

[^3]: SSGs are the key to happiness, right?

a previously undocumented constellation has appeared in the night sky. astronomers have yet to explain the sticky feet 🦎

contemplating stuff with my thinking sleeping partner.

As traditions and legends could be written out on papyrus, people were freed from the burden of remembering the past and were increasingly able to devote more of their cognitive energies to forming new ideas.

Literacy also enables thinking to become more analytical, more complex and more critical. Difficult and abstract ideas are harder to pursue without writing. Just try doing formal logic in your head. Unless you are a savant it is not possible. But once people had a means of setting thoughts down on the page to interrogate them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of thinking was born, one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation.

When we write our ideas down we externalise part of our minds. We can look at our thoughts from the outside. And that means we can walk around them: adding to them, criticising them and refining them.

Writing meant that traditions and received ways of thinking could not only be passed on but also pinned down where they could be analysed, challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation.

—James Marriott, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society

trompe l'œil pâtisserie: mastering the art of camouflage just to end up on a wooden skewer

no amount of chocolate or cream can beat real mangosteen or raspberries tho 🤤

we're all just waiting for the storm to pass 🌧️

missed a shot of the Hunter's Moon by a literal second before a cloud photobombed the scene—not everything is meant to be memorialised! 🏹🌕

hard to imagine that this pretty bubblegum-pink egg cluster is so-coloured to warn off predators until it can manage to unleash yet more members of an invasive species.

first time spotting golden apple snail (Pomacea canaliculata) eggs in the wild! let's see if I'm lucky enough to catch any hatchlings live as they emerge sometime over the next two weeks 😍🐌

came over from the lake to rack up some more frequent swimmer miles 🦎🏊‍♀️

… writing was born only fifty-four hundred years ago in the Fertile Crescent, and the alphabet itself is only thirty-eight hundred years old. These time spans are a mere trifle in evolutionary terms. Evolution thus did not have the time to develop specialized reading circuits in Homo sapiens. Our brain is built on the genetic blueprint that allowed our hunter-gatherer ancestors to survive. We take delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African savanna. Nothing in our evolution could have prepared us to absorb language through vision. Yet brain imaging demonstrates that the adult brain contains fixed circuitry exquisitely attuned to reading. —Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read

journal therapy 🐈

Harvard Business Review (HBR), defining AI slop's professional cousin, workslop, as "AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task," highlights that workslop uniquely passes on cognitive offloading to another human (the 'my LLM created this for me, now you make sense of it' practice we're all painfully familiar with at this point).

HBR estimates an invisible workslop tax of $186/month/employee. for a 10k strong workforce, at an estimated prevalence of 41% of office workers—moat notably in tech + professional services—engaged in this practice, that's upwards of $9 million an organisation of that size will lose annually to workslop productivity.

this is excluding the social + emotional costs that join in as second-order effects of receiving workslop (eg how to formulate a diplomatic response, asking someone to redo it or just do it yourself, etc.)

What a sender perceives as a loophole becomes a hole the recipient needs to dig out of." —HBR, Year in Tech 2027

it's also eroding professional trust; lessening people's perception and views of the workslop sender: less creative, less capable, less reliable, less trustworthy, and less intelligent—aka the competence penalty.

I'm not seeing this yet in companies I'm working with, but it's so incredibly imperative that employees be trained in how to use AI discriminately (eg BetterUp's differentiation between Pilot + Passenger AI users), including in the form of company standards, policies, and best practice guides. AI that replaces thinking rather than augment it, is a cancer not only to any org but a cancer of the mind 🤕

so this is what it feels like to die and go to heaven 🤩

I'm in loooooooooove with my new interstitial reading heatmap!!! this is what happens when a book junkie and a data junkie go on a website building bender and make a baby 📚📊

it ended up being a lot more complex than I thought lol (ain't it always). heatmap was the easy part. it was getting it to auto-update that was a LOT more involved than I could've ever imagined. as in, had I known, there's no way I even would've started this (I BUILT MY OWN OBSIDIAN PLUGIN, PEOPLE!)

all this just to watch my reading habits change colour 😂😂😂

def more data features to add (weekly + monthly stats come to mind); for now, the job is simply to READ 🤓

moon's doing that almost-full thing again 🌕 meeting dinner for a date on the beach to celebrate this week's goodness 🏖️

when you haven't quite figured out if it's a good morning or just morning… only coffee will tell ☕🙃

been thinking about how to visually represent my daily interstitial reading in a reading log. since I do a lot of topic-hopping, I'm curious about how often I revisit certain topics—and also, how my overall reading intensity differs day-to-day.

since I already use a book note template in Obsidian populated with various YAML properties, I'm thinking to use a single log page to update each time I read from a particular book. the plan is to process the reading log alongside the relevant booknote metadata using JavaScript (gray-matter for YAML parsing), generate a JSON dataset containing only the genres/topics/tags + daily reading counts, then have 11ty render the heatmap using a Nunjucks template.

tricky bit will be integrating this into my existing Quartz Syncer publishing flow while keeping the booknotes themselves private.

excited!!! hope it works without injuring my grey matter in the process 🧠😆 cos publishing that way will be sweeeeet!

The life given us by nature is short, but the memory of a life well spent is eternal. —Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106–43 BCE

I REALLY enjoyed this discussion (this is what a podcast interview should be!) between journalist Mary Harrington + columnist/author James Marriott, on his new book, The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society which argues that we’re shifting towards a post-literate culture.

they get into the decline of reading (as someone who was recent-old when I read the stats on how few people read and how how few weekly sales can put a book on the NYT bestseller list, this no longer shocks me… I did used to think it was a LOT higher!); why literacy and democracy go hand-in-hand, You Know Who presidents using visual imagery to evoke larger-than-life iconography that harkens back to Europe's pre-modern monarchies; and what all this means for our collective future.

what I hadn't really considered at length before is how literacy (and actually reading) facilitates critical thinking. I guess that when you work a muscle long enough, you come to see it as independently strong.

I do hope we manage to turn all the brain rot virus around somehow, but I'm preaching to the choir here cos all this has made me want to do is go on an even bigger book shopping spree than I already engage in near-daily 😆

reading is an act of defiance in service of our humanity!

▶play YouTube video

reading Juha-Matti Santala's post on notebooking (one of my happily addicted-interests), it occurred to me that his approach of keeping a digital Mega Index note has a) for some reason just never occurred to me??? and b) is literally the extended mind answer to my physical vs. digital notes conflict.

this definitely deserves its own blog post, but for now I'm parking it here so I won't forget to put it on my Want To Do list! 📑