busybee

Whoops I guess it’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted anything here, how did that happen?

Well, here’s how.

Just sharing two software/workflow changes I’ve made recently, and why they’re improvements over what I had before.

There are a lot of times when the specification says one thing but common implementations do another. Here are some especially common examples to watch out for.

UPDATE (4/14/2026): I was wrong about the source of the issue that led to me writing this article, but it’s still the same issue! It just happened somewhere else in the chain than my investigations led me to believe. Which still emphasizes the point.

So, being unemployed, I have to pay my own health insurance. This is currently around $500/month.

This insurance uses high copays on medication in order to “encourage the use” of cheaper medications. I have four medications which are expensive and get a $100/month copay, so I’m still paying $400/month on those meds.

Two of those meds have copay assistance programs, which present their own set of problems, and insurance companies hate that they exist, because they’re a retroactive incentive to make it easier for people to swallow the high copays on the meds while insurance still has to pay the bulk of the price, and the pharmaceutical companies bake the copay assistance program discount into the retail price of the medicine anyway so it’s not like they’re hurt by it at all.

But if I had to pay out-of-pocket for these meds, I’d be paying more for them than for my house.

Just some quick medical updates.

Okay so Mozilla has gone deep into the AI hole again, so I’ve switched back to Waterfox, a fork of Waterfox that focuses on the core browsing experience and eschews all of the stuff that nobody actually wants.

Waterfox is great, but its app icon is ugly and doesn’t look like a browser to me.

macOS does let you customize app icons but it isn’t super clear how to do it successfully, so here’s a process that works for me, as of macOS Tahoe 26.4.

Today is π day, which is a silly day to celebrate based on a completely arbitrary calendar system that happens to share some concordance with the inferior circle constant in our standard number system¹. But π day is a bit special to me. Or rather, this π day is special to me, because it’s the 10th anniversary of an important thing that happened.

It’s about time I finally write a timeline of how frustrating HRT has been over the years, because I’m tired of re-explaining it and just want something to point folks to whenever it comes up.

Short version: I have historically been done extremely dirty by the healthcare system when it comes to HRT access.

In every corner of my life right now I cannot seem to escape the increasing fervor of the ongoing debate regarding AI and machine learning in general, where on one side you have people who are completely anti-AI and others who are completely pro-AI, and any point made in opposition to either of these things is seen as a hardline stance that is an attack or something to be corrected.

As with basically everything there is nuance, and a lot of conflicting things that tend to be collapsed down into single talking points, and I am getting caught in the middle. Over the last few days this has reached a fever pitch, and it’s gotten to the point that I feel like I’m constantly on the defense and on the edge of a panic attack.

I’m also very tired, and I want to just write this thing in my own little space where I can get some complete thoughts out before someone jumps down my throat in the middle of a series of posts. I’m not sure that this will have any real positive effect, but maybe a public rumination will help me work through the latest panic attack that woke me up after a particularly emotionally-draining day.

There is a growing trend for new protocols to express themselves in the form of a well-known URI. It’s seen as an easy place to stash something where other interoperable software might want to probe for protocol support, as an improvement to the old ad-hoc behavior of things like robots.txt and favicon.ico and the like.

I am not personally a fan of it, for a few reasons.

These days I have quite a lot of ambition but not enough energy to execute on it. I’m trying, though.

It’s okay to not feel okay, especially when your hormones have been out of whack for months and healthcare is slow to try to help you with it.

It’s been nearly a week since I removed Cloudflare from my sites. As a quick followup, I did get a slight surge in traffic that lasted for a day or so after a bunch of bots' DNS caches expired, but they seem to have all given up after the Cloudflare “managed challenge” interstitial turned into an HTTP 401 error for them.

About a year ago I set up Cloudflare as a fronting CDN for this site and my music site because it was the most expedient way of dealing with an AI bot onslaught. It helped a bit but the bots very quickly figured out how to get around all that and while Cloudflare gave me some slightly-better management tools for some stuff, I figured out better approaches to the bot mitigation.

Cloudflare was also super aggressive about caching some stuff that I didn’t want to be cached, and of course, there are many, many political and ideological reasons to not want to use Cloudflare. So my plan was always to switch back to not being under Cloudflare, but the longer I waited the harder it seemed like it would be, due to how SSL certificates work. In particular, I use wildcard Let’s Encrypt certificates, which require DNS to be current, and a big thing that Cloudflare does is… take over your DNS.

But tonight I got a hair up my butt and switched back to my own termination, and it wasn’t too hard to do, with just a little bit of DNS and TLS juggling, and I wanted to minimize my website downtime.

Ughhhh, this has been a heck of a week.

As usual I’ve been full of pain. And my brief surge of enthusiasm for working on music got cut kind of short because of it. But I’m hoping that tomorrow feels better and I can go back to the studio.

I’m also not sure where I stand with my fatigue. The last few days I’ve had to run quick errands by car and those felt fine. But I’m not feeling courageous enough to drive further just yet, especially with how any escape from White Center means following curvy roads which are especially triggering to me.

I worry about where things are and how I’ll be affected by it. I feel like the dominoes are starting to fall.

Wellp, today I got yet another denial from social security, which tells me this ain’t gonna change any time soon.

The previous denial came with a whole bunch of transphobia and also a claim that I am able to work, doing jobs which simply aren’t available and not reflective of the reality of my situation.

I haven’t received the formal denial yet, just the notification that my appeal was denied, so I suppose in a couple weeks I’ll be getting another giant packet from SSA to fume over.

Wellp, I didn’t get a whole lot done on the TODO list but at least I Tried™. (I did call about the sleep study but they never returned my call and it slipped my mind to try calling again. Oh well, next week.)

Back in the day, independent social media enthusiasts were building their own social spaces on RSS/Atom and self-hosted publishing. There was a huge ecosystem of feed readers and publishing software, where anyone could use their own choice of tools to interact with the space, and it was super cool.

Then Google got into it and made Google Reader, which was a really good feed reader, but they couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable and wanted to shove everyone over to Google+, so they shut Google Reader down, and then the tech press breathlessly claimed that RSS was now dead as a result, and because RSS was (in their eyes) dead, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nowadays, RSS is seen as an obsolete thing only used by diehards, and corporate social media has become the norm, with a relatively tiny faction of people settling on ActivityPub instead, despite it being a poor match for the kinds of things that people used RSS for.

Here are the things I need to take care of within the next week:

• Schedule a sleep study
• File my quarterly business taxes
• Edit background video for Saturday talk
• Set up projection mapping for Sunday show
• Start working on specification for game dynamic soundtrack engine
• Take care of the major clutter piles in the office
• Empty out the car at the nearest Goodwill
• Take the car to the mechanic for servicing

Lately there’s been a brewing culture war in the software community regarding the usage of LLM-based coding tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.), and I’m seeing a lot of hardline discourse on both sides, but especially from the anti-AI side of things.

First of all, to be clear, I am not in favor of LLM-based programming. My personal opinion is that LLMs are catastrophic to the environment and to the Internet as a whole (especially due to the added burden of every server being overwhelmed by the relentless AI-focused crawlers), and to the intelligence of the humans who wield them.

However, in the current landscape, I have also found myself (begrudgingly) using them on occasion to a limited degree, and in the mind of some folks, this probably irrevocably taints my code. So I’d like to at least discuss my perspective on them.

Update: Also it bears repeating here, as with everywhere else, that OpenAI is a key, willing part of the war machine, and so I will not intentionally be using any of their products for anything going forward, and taking every step I can to avoid unintentional usage.

Login on this site has been a bit flaky for a while since in my never-ending fight against AI bots I had switched to a multiprocess configuration to give the site a bit more robustness, but which had the side effect of most logins only having a 50% chance of working due to fiddly details inside Publ (or, more precisely, Authl, which defaults to only being safe for single-process configurations).

So, Publ finally implements multiprocess-safe token storage, which is something I’d been meaning to add since approximately forever ago (although it seems I never opened an actual issue to track it, oops), and this should make user login reliable again.

Thanks to Spud who finally lit a fire under my butt to fix this annoying issue.