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Craig Hockenberry
Mastodon
Another surprise: the closed (external screen) view has navigation on the right. But it can also be on the left in the side-by-side layout:
navigation layout surprise
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20 September
Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.
Another bug with iOS 27.1: when your app launches in a partially folded state, the view’s traitCollection has a compact horizontal size class. If you close the Duo, and then open it partially, the horizontal size class is regular. This can lead to weird layouts when you launch an app in the partially folded state: only workaround is to close/open device again. Weirdly, auto layout constraints in a storyboard aren’t affected by this. It’s something in the UIViewController transition methods. Related
19 September
Web designer and writer; founded A List Apart and Happy Cog, co-founded the An Event Apart conference, and wrote Designing With Web Standards.
Mastodon Modern Font Stacks: System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS. The fastest fonts available. No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes; just instant renders. modernfontstacks.com
CSS Related
Bluesky Modern Font Stacks: System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS. The fastest fonts available. No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes; just instant renders. modernfontstacks.com
CSS Related
18 September
Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.
Last iPhone Duo observation for the day: Close/Done/Cancel buttons switch sides depending on if you’re in the left or right side-by-side layout. I get the “stay close to the thumbs” mantra that likely guided this decision. But it also moves the most important buttons around and presents the end user with an inconsistent layout. If someone gets used to an X button on the right and it’s suddenly on the left, does it do the same thing? A naive user may think it does not. Related
If you’re seeing incorrect tints for your navigation items on the Duo’s external screen, it’s likely a bug. The tintColor for the UINavigationBar is ignored. A workaround is to set the tintColor on the UINavigationController’s view. Related
Has anyone figured out how to get the Duo Simulator to do the side-by-side app layout? I’d like to see how apps look next to another one (like Safari) and can’t see any way to get the Simulator to do this. Related
Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.
Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Textured; and more! Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/ #Pluralistic 1/ Related
I'm going to come right out and say it: statistical extrapolation is *fine*. One of the most useful ways to understand the present and anticipate the future is to measure the things that happened in the past, find the correlations among them, and extrapolate likely future outcomes from those correlations. - If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read/share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal 1/ Related
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Their words
Freedom of navigation is a global public good, and public goods decay the instant their provider is revealed to be unwilling to pay for them.
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braddelong.substack.com
17 September
London-based front-end architect, web developer evangelist and cloud consultant; Microsoft MVP. Writes at praveen.science and answers on Stack Overflow.
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
Release fastconstmap v0.10.0 — v0.10.0 — PairedVerifiedConstMap, formats shared with Go and Rust — Fast, immutable, compact map from strings to 64-bit integers — for Python. Release notes PairedVerifiedConstMap, a cache-friendlier layout for the verified map, and file formats shared with the Go and Rust implementations. Nothing existing changes behaviour: every class, method and error is as before, and e…
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Release rsconstmap v0.3.0 — v0.3.0: PairedVerifiedConstMap, interoperable formats — A static map from strings to u64 values using binary fuse filter construction. It can be several times smaller and faster t… Release notes PairedVerifiedConstMap, a cache-friendlier layout for the verified map, and file formats shared with the Go and Python implementations. This release is purely additive. Nothing was removed or renamed, and the CMAP0001 a…
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Release constmap v1.2.0 — A fast, compact, immutable map from strings to uint64 values in Go. Release notes PairedVerifiedConstMap, a cache-friendlier layout for the verified map, and file formats shared with the Rust and Python implementations. This release is purely additive. Nothing was removed or renamed, and the CMAP0001…
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16 September
President of the French Republic since 2017.
Quand le pétrole est sous pression, les prix à la pompe grimpent. Je sais ce que cela représente pour les Français. Ce qui se passe à des milliers de kilomètres de chez nous finit toujours par peser sur notre quotidien. Alors j’agis pour réduire les tensions, sécuriser nos approvisionnements et faire baisser la pression sur les prix. Après mes échanges avec le Premier ministre irakien en début de semaine, je me suis entretenu aujourd’hui avec le Prince héritier d’Arabie saoudite et l’Émir du Qatar. La priorité : rétablir la liberté de navigation dans le détroit d’Ormuz, artère vitale pour le… English, from French When oil is under pressure, prices at the pump rise. I know what that means for the French people. What happens thousands of miles away always ends up affecting our daily lives. So I am taking action to reduce tensions, secure our supplies, and ease the pressure on prices. After my discussions with the Iraqi Prime Minister earlier this week, I spoke today with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the Emir of Qatar. The priority: restoring freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for the…
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14 September
Web designer and writer; founded A List Apart and Happy Cog, co-founded the An Event Apart conference, and wrote Designing With Web Standards.
Mastodon Bit o’ nostalgia for the old folks: A List Apart in 2002. (Design, art direction, and early CSS layout by yours truly, with a technical assist on the CSS from Tantek Çelik and Todd Fahrner, who were always smarter than me.) CSS Related
x.com Bit o’ nostalgia for the old folks: A List Apart in 2002. (Design, art direction, and pioneering CSS layout by yours truly, with a technical assist on the CSS from @tantek and @toddfahrner who were always smarter than me.) CSS Related
President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.
I condemn the Houthi attack against Saudi Arabia. We stand in solidarity with our Gulf partners in the face of relentless attacks by Iran’s proxies. We will continue working with our partners for safe, free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and for stability in the Middle East. We all have a stake in this. Related
British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.
12 September
Criminal defence lawyer in New York; writes Simple Justice, mostly about how criminal law works in practice rather than in theory.
We Found The Vandal It will come as little surprise that the $14,700,000 “repair” of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the product of two failures. The first was the typical Trump rush to get this “signature” fix completed before th…
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10 September
Brazilian software engineer, creator and maintainer of GoReleaser; works on Copilot CLI at GitHub. Writes about tooling and his setup at carlosbecker.com.
9 September
Founder and editor-in-chief of MacStories, writing about Apple software, iPad workflows and automation since 2009. He co-hosts the AppStories podcast.
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7 September
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
5 September
Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.
Here's some crazy geometry in 4, 5 and 6 dimensions: The 4-demicube has 8 vertices. It lives in 4 dimensions. You get it from a 4-dimensional cube - which has 16 vertices - by keeping every other vertex, throwing away half. That leaves 8. What are its top-dimensional faces, aka 'facets'? Surprise: there's only one kind! All of them are regular tetrahedra. In higher dimensions the demicube has two kinds of facet - one from the cube's corners, one from the cube's facets. But in 4 dimensions the two kinds happen to be the same shape: the tetrahedron! That's why the 4-demicube is especially symme… Related
2 September
Free software developer and longtime Debian developer; author of git-annex, etckeeper, ikiwiki and debhelper. Lives and works off-grid.
running `pkg install git-annex` on termux. What a nice surprise! #gitAnnex already could be installed on termux, but now it's part of their distribution Related
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
26 August
Thai software engineer; publishes a public digital garden at garden.narze.live and builds developer and productivity tooling.
19 August
Co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic; blogs at ma.tt.
Surprise DM When I saw the Slack notification preview, “Matt, I’m literally crying right now,” I must admit my first reaction was “Oh no, what happened…” Matt, I’m literally crying right now. I just read the Baby & Caregiver Attend…
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18 August
German developer; founder and lead developer of Mastodon, the decentralized open-source social network.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/117117221397911074 After hearing feedback from people struggling with #Mastodon’s layout and navigation for a long time I’m really looking forward to these changes. And I’m really impressed with the work @imanijoy has put into researching user needs with surveys, interviews, and round tables. I feel like the community has never been so represented in the design process before. The screenshots are marked “in progress” for a reason though—it’s a process. Related
4 August
Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
Fragments: August 4 There’s been a fair bit of publicity of the Open AI “rogue agent” that hacked into Hugging Face. This prompted Anthropic to check what their models were up to and, to my complete lack of surprise, discovered three incid…
Anthropic HuggingFace Related
30 July
Thai software engineer; publishes a public digital garden at garden.narze.live and builds developer and productivity tooling.
28 July
Designer and engineer; formerly principal research engineer at GitHub Next; writes at wattenberger.com.
this layout has been living rent-free in my head for a year now. time to try it out Related
24 July
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
Does a PhD Pay Off? Every week, I discuss with people who want to get a PhD. For years, I have been advising people not to pursue a PhD. It may come as a surprise to some. You would expect people with a PhD to earn more money. Individuals…
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22 July
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
OpenAI
Their words
I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes.
Show the whole quote
@tqbf on X x.com
15 July
Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.
30 June
Programmer known for LiveJournal, memcached, OpenID and gearman; worked on the Go programming language at Google and later joined Tailscale.
30 May
American-Polish journalist and historian, staff writer at The Atlantic; author of Gulag, Iron Curtain, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc.
29 May
Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.
Their words
Keyboard: Keychron K7. I've tried the weird keyboards but I still type fastest on the Mac layout. This is one of the few keyboards that's almost exactly the Mac layout - the "Command" key is in the right place.
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macwright.com
13 May
Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.
9 May
Writer and consultant on technology, organizations and history; founded the blog Ribbonfarm and now writes the Contraptions newsletter.
Ribbonfarm has been resurrected as a museum blog with an AI curator. Details: https://t.co/InHymQ7kS3 The old reading experience is preserved intact, with significantly improved speed and cleaner reading layout, but there’s now a lot more intelligent scaffolding for exploring. Related
6 May
Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.
London-based front-end architect, web developer evangelist and cloud consultant; Microsoft MVP. Writes at praveen.science and answers on Stack Overflow.
15 March
American front-end engineer and design-systems specialist; built the Pantsuit design system for Hillary for America and has worked at Slack and IBM.
Better Call Saul. We knew the fates of almost every character from the beginning and yet it still managed to surprise and delight. Quoting @blackazizanansi.blacksky.app Which show do you prefer? Related
28 February
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
Writes Nintil, long researched essays on metascience, biology, economics and whatever he has decided to read the literature on.
18 February
Indian software engineer and co-founder of Skcript; builds web apps and writes at varunraj.in.
omnishare-website — omnishare-website Commits fix: Update contact email in Privacy Policy and Terms components · chore: Remove deprecated icon.svg and update layout metadata for new icon path · feat: Enhance Features, Hero, and Users components with animation suppo…
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20 January
Indian software engineer and co-founder of Skcript; builds web apps and writes at varunraj.in.
6 January
Indian software engineer and co-founder of Skcript; builds web apps and writes at varunraj.in.
1 January
Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.
Their words
The best book I read last year was Mark Lawrence's The Book That Wouldn't Burn, which much to my surprise did not make a single award list for its publication year of 2023. It was a tour de force of world-building that surprised me multiple times.
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eyrie.org
12 December 2025
Co-founder of Panic, the Portland software company behind Transmit, Coda, Nova and the Playdate handheld console.
I really thought after 18 years it would be a simple muscle memory to do text entry / autocorrect / cursor placement / text selection / copy & paste on iOS, and yet somehow it's a surprise every time. Related
19 September 2025
German writer and historian; wrote Blitzed, on drug use in Nazi Germany, and Tripped.
Their words
And the German war machine could only win in so-called speed wars, like lightning war. Only if they would do it very fast and surprise, because they were always weaker, basically.
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youtube.com
5 May 2025
Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.
Their words
That might surprise people. The bigger it is, the less noticeable it is that you’ve crossed the event horizon. One way to think about it is curvature is less noticeable the bigger it is.
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youtube.com
16 December 2024
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.
6 November 2024
Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.
Their words
Declarative layout, rapid prototyping.
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worrydream.com
29 September 2024
Thai software engineer; publishes a public digital garden at garden.narze.live and builds developer and productivity tooling.
Their words
iTerm: Tmux is slow, prompt layout breaks when resizing the window.
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garden.narze.live
25 May 2024
Neuroscientist at UC Davis; studies memory and wrote Why We Remember.
Their words
is this idea that we form these internal models at particular points of high prediction error or points of, I believe also points of uncertainty, points of surprise or motivationally significant periods. And those points are when it’s maximally optimal to encode an episodic memory.
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youtube.com
25 March 2024
Independent policy analyst on space and national security, formerly of the RAND Corporation, who writes on counterspace weapons and rules for keeping satellites safe.
Their words
We accordingly proposed a framework of self-defense zones to “facilitate unilateral defense against a surprise attack on satellites.”
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thespacereview.com
18 March 2024
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
OpenAI
Their words
So part of the reason that we deploy the way we do, we call it iterative deployment, rather than go build in secret until we got all the way to GPT-5, we decided to talk about GPT-1, 2, 3, and 4. And part of the reason there is I think AI and surprise don’t go together. And also the world, people, institutions, whatever you want to call it, need time to adapt and think about these things.
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youtube.com
19 December 2023
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
Their words
To my surprise, I really enjoyed The Republic. It is both well-written and weird, which puts it above many other famous philosophical books that are too obscure to be easily read.
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scotthyoung.com
3 December 2023
Theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, working on particle physics, extra dimensions and dark matter.
energy
Their words
In fact, I would say it’s more surprising that the matter that we know about is constitutes as big a fraction of the universe as it does. We’re limited, we’re human. The fact that we see 5% of the energy density of the universe, about one sixth of the energy density in matter, that’s remarkable.
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youtube.com
6 November 2023
Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
inflation economists
Their words
It is fair to say that, while economists expected the short end of the yield curve to reflect the higher rates needed to win the fight against inflation, the sharply steeper long end of the yield curve in the last few months has come as a surprise. I shall freely admit that I did not predict it.
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piie.com
21 March 2023
Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.
16 February 2023
Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.
8 December 2022
American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.
Their words
Recently though, I went to The Drama Bookshop, which was a delightful surprise. It is the closest I have come to the experience of a Manhattan bookshop as a third place in the kind of Prairie Lights mode.
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blgtylr.substack.com
20 September 2022
Software engineer best known as the originator of the Java programming language.
7 September 2022
Biochemist at University College London; writes about the origin of life and the role of energy in evolution, in The Vital Question and Transformer.
Their words
So, it wouldn’t surprise me any longer if we found life on Mars and it had a genetic code that was not very different to the genetic code that we have here without it just being transferred across, there’s some inevitability about the whole of the beginnings of life, in my view.
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youtube.com
28 May 2022
Indonesian software engineer, educator and engineering manager at Zero One Group; open-source enthusiast writing at ripandis.com.
Their words
Spotlight replacement for macOS with extensions to improve workflow. Accelerates navigation, search, and common operations.
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ripandis.com
25 November 2021
Reviews sports technology at DC Rainmaker — watches, power meters and bike computers — in exhaustive detail, having tested them himself.
Their words
This one might come as a surprise to some, but the reality is that at Fitbit’s more reasonable pricing as of late, the Fitbit Sense is a pretty good option. And it’s a super well-rounded option
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dcrainmaker.com
14 March 2021
Indian software engineer working on Android and React; writes about his setup and side projects at ishubhamsingh.dev.
22 September 2020
Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?
11 April 2019
Designer and co-founder of Lux, makers of Halide, Spectre and Kino; formerly a designer at Apple.
13 April 2017
Distributed-systems safety researcher; runs the Jepsen consistency-testing project and wrote the Riemann monitoring system.
Their words
I use a standard layout Das Keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches, and cannot believe that I'm the sort of person who cares about that.
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usesthis.com
22 December 2016
Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.
Their words
Reedsy - after trying iBooks Author and Pressbooks to write my books, I've finally settled on Reedsy for writing, layout, and publishing of ebooks.
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justinjackson.ca
7 March 2016
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.
Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
Got it