maker of many things, mostly lists. armchair #cloud documentarian.

🎭 i love any and all live #theatre and try to see every show on #Broadway

🇯🇵 #日本語を勉強してる

☁️ Cloud Appreciation Society member #45994

web: https://notapattern.net
tumblr: https://notapattern.tumblr.com
formerly on twitter as: https://twitter.com/wirehead2501

Last Notes

my fellow seasonal depression enjoyers might be interested to know that in the northern hemisphere we have now experienced the earliest sunset of the year. due to Reasons, we begin to get evening daylight back before the shortest day of the year, which isn’t until the 21st. but from now on, slowly but surely, the sun sets later every day.
it’s just a minute every few days, at first, but things are going in the right direction now. hang in there. we’re gonna make it back into the light.

2025-10-07 21:21:31 UTC

not all heroes wear capes
https://comptroller.weatherishappening.network/media_attachments/files/115/334/976/799/020/809/original/2f971745eb55e231.jpeg
https://comptroller.weatherishappening.network/media_attachments/files/115/334/977/172/040/066/original/956db629a3cc33f9.jpeg

2025-08-07 01:10:47 UTC

is there a webpage yet that lists AI-free software? i don’t mean written without the use of AI, but apps that don’t, and have no intention of, shoving useless AI “features” into something that was working perfectly fine without them.

2025-07-01 21:51:36 UTC

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okay, but why is there a cat? is the cat named Dollar? 🤔

2024-08-03 20:13:45 UTC

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we got this yesterday too! not 15 minutes but long enough that i started to wonder if it was in fact a plane and not thunder at all

2023-10-30 00:10:07 UTC

how should we handle daylight savings time? wrong answers only
(chart co-authored by @npub1fg2…7ygc)
https://comptroller.weatherishappening.network/media_attachments/files/111/319/286/803/348/563/original/91f2cd85328fdb99.jpeg

2023-04-24 00:53:16 UTC

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maybe teaching sand to do math was a mistake

2023-04-24 00:52:18 UTC

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this tweet wasn't about any of that, though i've since misremembered that it was. i wrote it in a fit of exasperation about something else entirely, and it never really "did numbers", but it's been quoted on a pretty regular basis over the years, to my unending delight.
so here they are, the words of wisdom that i am hereby salvaging from the flaming wreckage of twitter:

2023-04-24 00:49:57 UTC

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i think of this situation frequently when users report bugs that, as a developer, i don't think should be possible. it's truly *amazing* the myriad ways computers find to dismay and disappoint us. every piece of software involves so many moving pieces, so many layers of potential bugginess, so many points of failure that are virtually impossible to predict or plan for.

2023-04-24 00:47:29 UTC

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after a lot of bemusement, frantic debugging, and Automatticians questioning our collective grasp of reality, we discovered that one of the default fonts (Merriweather Sans), which was being loaded from Google Fonts, had published an update with some bad ligatures (special characters in a font that even out the space when common letters are joined together, like f and i).
this font was used in one of the default themes so it affected a LOT of sites. but the post editor used different fonts, which is why it didn't show up while editing, only after publishing a post.
since the font wasn't versioned and we were serving it through Google's CDN, this update had silently propagated to any site that was using this theme, without us needing to deploy anything (meaning not only was this hard to track down since we hadn't made any changes, we also couldn't easily revert the change). voila: Fs were going missing on tens of thousands of blogs (as well as other places around the web)

2023-04-24 00:44:30 UTC

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back in January of 2016, we started getting reports on WordPress.com that people were publishing blog posts and the letter F was going missing. they initially thought it was a typo, but when they'd edit the post, the words would be spelled right in the post editor. but on the live site? no Fs
sounds like user error, right? but the reports kept coming in. and it wasn't just missing, sometimes it was switched, like the word "first" would become "ifrst". if you know anything about fonts maybe you can guess what was up...

2023-04-24 00:43:28 UTC

it's sunday night and twitter is still a dumpster fire so i think it's finally time to re-post my all-time favorite tweet (iykyk)
because the original context for this is lost to antiquity, i want to set the stage by sharing one of my favorite absurd stories about software. (🧵)