Node.js is moving to one major release per year starting with Node 27! 🚀
✅ Simpler: Every release becomes LTS.
✅ Predictable: Version numbers now align with the year.
✅ New: A 6-month Alpha channel for early testing.
https://bit.ly/4rnosLg
Today, we're publishing Don't Steal This Book - a (mostly) empty book from almost 10,000 authors, protesting the theft of their work by AI companies.
🧵 1/3
I was reminded about this delightful educational AI/ML project - a physical hands-on device to train an image classifier using images you draw on paper.
If I wasn't so hardware-incompetent, I'd *love* to build this!
dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Finished Cyberpunk's Phantom Liberty DLC. I've been playing Cyberpunk off and on since last July - it's been fun.
I've been bouncing between having a silly amount of fun building with AI, and feeling sort of weird and uncomfortable with it.
This blog post gets close to describing how I feel in my more reflective moments.
photo of a bass drum, boxes of stands and a speaker - in the back of a van
photo of a marimba and four timpani drums in the back of the van
so far, so good - I don't seem to have broken anything!
photo of the van I'm using
I'm being a white van man again this weekend, driving between Winchester, Eastleigh & Basingstoke to move a load of musical instruments between concerts.
Fingers crossed I don't break any of them! 🤞
Bridge of Spies Ghost In The Shell (the 1997 anime, and the 2017 remake) Bombshell
technically broke my New Year's Resolution (to not rewatch films) with Ghost In The Shell
I hadn't watched it for over 25yrs, and wanted to remind myself before watching the remake, so I'm giving myself a pass
Watching them on consecutive days was interesting!
#LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched
Finished playing The Holy Gosh Darn : a comedy puzzle game where you can time-travel. I loved it - it works so much better than I expected
Enabling pointer compression for Node.js
This looks promising - a lot of Machine Learning for Kids is Node.js containers running in (effectively) k8s, so the prospect of halving my memory footprint is super appealing
I'm repeatedly (positively!) surprised to see the sorts of projects that students make with Machine Learning for Kids.
This project by some year 9 students in Herts, England is a lovely exploration into using image classifiers to identify cancer cells
creating #Kafka and #Flink demos for TechCon 2026 - our virtual event later this month
TechCon is about live and in-depth technical sessions on integration, automation, messaging, and event driven architectures - we can't get away with just slides! ;-)
www.ibm.com/events/reg/f...
Netflix - 13 films Prime Video - 12 films iPlayer - 6 films Tubi - 4 films Channel 4 - 2 films itvx - 2 films Cinema - 1 film YouTube - 1 film
I've been tagging the movies I've watched this year with where I watched them - I was curious where I watch most stuff.
Netflix seems to be winning so far, but it's close.
letterboxd.com/dale_lane/ta...
🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.
This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.
Please spread the word.
🧵 1/4
I'm excited about the future that AI holds, but even I've had the odd moment of disquiet about what it means for being a coder.
"Deep Blue" is a delightful term for it! 🤷
exciting step forward in #Kafka this morning, with community agreement to pursue object storage as the backend for a new type of "diskless" topic
looking forward to seeing the next level of detail evolve!
lists.apache.org/thread/xc91h...
I've idly wondered before about how prompt caching works, as my implicit naive assumption was that it relied on multiple users asking the same prompts.
This helped me to think about it properly and make it clear
out in Southampton for F's 18th - sushi (her favourite) at Sakura's then Legally Blonde at the Mayflower 🎉
Faith is 18 today, which means our kids are now both (technically) adults!
It's a weird milestone - exciting but just a little bit sad.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead I Swear One Life Marshall
Three out of #LastFourWatched were true stories for my #LetterboxdFriday this week.
I Swear was amazing, and my first movie in a cinema this year
letterboxd.com/dale_lane/
"Call Of Beauty". Oh, Nintendo 🤦
Although as much as the never-ending tidal wave of eSlop always makes me sigh, I do appreciate the name a little 🤷
a theory for why LLM's like to use em-dashes so much - not sure if this is true, but it's a fun read
www.seangoedecke.com/em-dashes/
last day in Amsterdam - this trip feels like it was too short, I like this place
A demo that shows what happens under the covers with an algorithmic social media feed. You can see what data is collected and how it is used. This sounds like a great idea for a classroom activity!
#Flink has largely replaced #Kafka Streams for me.
I do miss Streams... maybe I'm getting old and prone to nostalgia, or maybe I'm sad to move on because of the amount of time I spent learning Streams' quirks!
This is a better intro to how they compare than my gut gives :)
photo of Artemis, by Andy Weir - the bit of the book where the character Dale is introduced
Why are fictional Dales always assholes? ☹️
(at least there is Dale from Chip n Dale, who is of course awesome)
www.goodreads.com/book/show/34...
going to Amsterdam for work
The benefit of flying from Southampton is that I got from my front door to the gate ready to fly in 25 minutes. The down side is that I'm on a tiny bouncy toy plane that feels like a minibus with wings. 😬
photo of frogs on a tarmac footpath
photo of frogs on a tarmac footpath
photo of a frog on a tarmac footpath
I have to be very careful where I step on my way home from work because there's a mile-long stretch where *dozens* of frogs have started hanging out! 🐸
Google Gemini does music generation now. Services like this have been around for a while, but most normal people haven't heard of Suno or Udio, so this feels like a big step.
This is Gemini generating a pop song about spreadsheets
gemini.google.com/share/95b579...
blog.google/innovation-a...
