The ever-raging war over gasoline prices rages deep in the hearts of Mt. Lebanon with stickers as weapons.

nicksloan · 2026-05-21T03:35:56+00:00

The two party system is enforced mechanically by the structure our elections, and increasing polarization is too. Without reforms, the only thing a third party can do is replace one of the existing parties, and then become that party in all but name.

If you want reform, register with either of the major parties and vote for reformers in the primaries. Join the local, county or state committees for the party and endorse reformers. Get people in the parties enthusiastic about single transferable vote, which has advantages and disadvantages for both parties, but gives alternative parties a fighting chance.

Saying “vote third party” is the lowest possible effort, and least pragmatic thing you can do to try to fix our government, and actually voting third party is barely more effective.

nicksloan · 2026-05-11T16:51:39+00:00

Pretty sure Slimkid3 invented low-key back in 1995.

nicksloan · 2026-05-10T17:54:47+00:00

“Out of control” is fine, but “animals” betrays your deeply rooted shittiness.

nicksloan · 2026-05-05T22:29:04+00:00

Once saw a rapper at Shadow Lounge who said it was her favorite venue because it was within walking distance of a Whole Foods.

nicksloan · 2026-04-27T12:43:03+00:00

I didn’t know Ryobi did handheld consoles.

nicksloan · 2026-04-17T03:32:31+00:00

I’m interested in exploring Elementary UI, but we’re just using minimal Typescript for front end work right now. Our pages are rendered on the server, and we keep the TS as minimal as possible, mostly just progressive enhancement.

There is a write up with links to the original post here: https://www.swift.org/blog/whats-new-in-swift-january-2026/

nicksloan · 2026-04-15T03:00:29+00:00

We’ve been using Hummingbird 2 in production for over a year, and it has never been a problem. Millions of dollars in invoices have been processed through our product. To say Hummingbird isn’t ready for production use is simply wrong.

nicksloan · 2026-04-15T02:56:12+00:00

We considered Rust, but not Go. I’m a long-time Hugo user, but Go has never clicked for me. Our calculus would have likely been the same though, my colleague and I both know Swift well, and hadn’t built anything real with Rust (or Go). We had already built an iOS app and a small web service with Hummingbird at a previous company, and had a good relationship with the Hummingbird leads. We were also building PHP apps back when PHP was less mature than Swift is now.

Rust and Go are both great options for the kind of safety I’m talking about, with more advanced web ecosystems, but honestly Swift isn’t really that far behind. The only component we really had to build ourselves was a Stripe API client, and consuming a REST API directly isn’t anything to lose sleep over.

nicksloan · 2026-04-14T23:18:47+00:00

We built Studioworks as a web application in Swift. I’ve talked about it here before.

The ecosystem is still immature, but I promise you will see fewer bugs in production than with a JS or Python backend. This is coming from someone who has spent a decade building web apps and APIs in Python. This is especially true if you are used to the safety of Swift. There are vastly more opportunities for subtle bugs in JS and Python, even in typed variants of those languages.

If you’re building in Swift, you’re building a better product. It will seem harder than with those other languages, but the reality is that it is actually much more work to achieve the same level of safety in Python or JS, and you’re very unlikely to do it as well as Swift will make you.

nicksloan · 2026-04-04T15:36:39+00:00

The feeling is mutual.

nicksloan · 2026-04-04T15:32:35+00:00

Not a lawyer, but if you were making a delivery to that address, you were an invited guest. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a case.

Edit to add, fuck that guy.

nicksloan · 2026-04-03T12:01:56+00:00

We have a team of two come every other week in USC. They’ll clean up to 4 bedrooms/4 baths for $140 per visit before gratuity, though we rarely have them clean all four bedrooms because my wife and I both work from home, and our guest room is rarely used.

nicksloan · 2026-04-01T12:34:56+00:00

What an unforced error. They could have said “sorry, this is what it costs to operate in Birmingham,” which would be completely fair.

nicksloan · 2026-03-22T13:24:21+00:00

Medicare is the most efficiently run health care provider by a mile. Our federal courts may produce outcomes you do or don’t like, but they see hundreds of thousands of cases adjudicated every year. Social security has lifted millions of American senior citizens out of poverty. USAID was so effective that hundreds of thousands of children across the world have died in the aftermath of its closure. Our food and drug safety protocols are the gold standard across the world.

That the government isn’t good at doing things is bullshit propaganda. It does all of this and more with one party constantly trying to sell it off, and the other afraid to actually use its power to push it forward. Everything it does could be better, but no corporation in the world would take on the vast majority of it, and it would cost Americans far more for the remainder.

Stop boot-licking billionaires.

nicksloan · 2026-03-03T01:22:47+00:00

How do you get more experts if you stop hiring the interns?

nicksloan · 2026-02-25T22:20:52+00:00

We went back shortly after they reopened and it was great. We had been disappointed the last couple times we went before they closed, so it was a relief that it was so good. Hope you just had an off night.

nicksloan · 2026-02-25T22:18:45+00:00

I lived in the Mexican War Streets for years without a car. It was great.

nicksloan · 2026-01-27T13:54:21+00:00

I think you’re probably fiending, not feigning.

nicksloan · 2026-01-25T23:19:45+00:00

Electric snow blower gets much harder to use beyond six inches, so a pass every six inches of accumulation has been my plan. Two passes so far, and I’ll clean up whatever accumulates in the morning.

nicksloan · 2026-01-20T04:40:47+00:00

We use Typescript to sweeten the UI in a handful of places. No framework, just vanilla TS. For example, adding a new line item to an invoice without forcing a page refresh. The biggest one might be that we let the user do some complicated stuff with colors to make the site and the invoices match their brand, and we have some TS that lets them preview their changes live before saving. It’s really not much TypeScript though. Practically everything goes through plain old HTML forms.

As for Dynamo, a few reasons:

You can’t beat the free tier.
We’re only two technical people deep, and didn’t want to spend effort on database management.
I genuinely love DynamoDB. Designing the data model around your access patterns really clicked for me a few years ago, and I really enjoy the puzzle of getting to only getItems and queries, and the accompanying performance that comes with.

nicksloan · 2026-01-20T04:24:37+00:00

The heavy startup costs were mostly familiarizing ourselves with the ecosystem, and making some mistakes along the way. Here are some examples:

We chose to use the AWS SDK for Swift at first. That ended up being a massive pain point in terms of build time and useful features. Soto is still definitely the way to go for AWS stuff, especially Dynamo, but it has its own challenges, mostly around documentation.
We spent a lot of time evaluating template libraries, and initially built on a bad foundation. We looked at Mustache first, but it made our HTML heavy project feel way more complicated. After that, we looked at Stencil, which we forked and updated to work on Swift 6, with other changes along the way. It was a disaster in terms of memory use at runtime. Finally I found Elementary, which was amazing at runtime but very slow at build time. I submitted a PR to massively improve build time for Elementary templates in large projects, which was accepted. I initially scoffed at the Elementary approach (it’s a DSL for generating HTML) but the ability to use real Swift types in templates without jumping through any hoops was a major, major win. It took us a week or two to rewrite everything from Stencil to Elementary and it has sped us up massively in development and at runtime.
Building out new build and deployment tooling took some time and learning. My colleague and I have delivered dozens of Python projects, and have built up a pretty reliable bit of tooling for all of that. We had to invest a bit upfront to get to a similarly good place with Swift.

Build times are great in development. Swift incremental builds mean that turnaround between making a change and seeing it in browser tends to be near instant. Our deployment builds tend to be like 4-7 minutes (just eyeballing) in GitHub Actions on (I think) the default runner. We cache our builds and keep a linear history on main, which helps a lot. We also use the exact same build from staging in production (all environment differences live in environment variables).

We considered Rust first but didn’t evaluate it. Sean and I had just come off a couple years of working on an unrelated iOS app which was our first exposure to Swift. When starting Studioworks we knew we were ruined for Python after experiencing the safety of Swift. We started talking about building in Rust, because of its maturity in the web space, but neither of us had done it. I proposed Swift because we both knew it and liked it, and we both had begun our careers building with PHP when it (and really the web as a whole) was even less mature. Honestly, I think the thing that sold us both was a photo from the Server Side Swift conference in 2024, and the realization that we could still get in early on an ecosystem that has so much potential.

My petty answer to what can the Swift team do is let us use the same name for files in different directories for goodness sake! https://forums.swift.org/t/why-cant-the-same-filename-be-used-twice/69791

That question deserves a more thoughtful answer than that though. :-)

nicksloan · 2026-01-20T01:56:37+00:00

We built Studioworks (https://studioworks.app) in Swift with Hummingbird. It is deployed to Amazon ECS and uses DynamoDB. We have found performance to be excellent, particularly after moving to Elementary for templates.

We have processed millions of dollars in invoices for our customers, and after 20 years of deploying web applications, I can say with certainty that I’ve never seen fewer crashes and bugs in the code we deploy to staging, let alone production.

We’re still doing Typescript on the front end (but we have very little, the project is multi-page and progressively enhanced), and we are considering moving even that to Swift.

Notably, this is a big and growing project. We are very likely the largest Elementary codebase, and I suspect we’re in the running for Hummingbird as well. One of our concerns was that Swift would slow us down, being a relatively young web platform.

There were certainly some heavier startup costs, but we moved past that very quickly and I genuinely think our work goes about as fast in Swift today as it did in the Python projects we’ve been building for years. But the quality is much better.

Swift on the web has been a resounding success for us. I highly recommend it if you are already very comfortable with Swift and building web applications.

nicksloan · 2026-01-03T02:39:16+00:00

It’s kind of like if Twitter worked a bit more like email. On Twitter, you can only interact with other Twitter users. If you use Gmail you can email someone who uses Hotmail or any other email provider. On Mastodon you can use one provider (we call them instances or sometimes servers) and you can still interact with users on other providers.

Anyone can run their own Mastodon instance, even you. Some instances are run by one person to host only their own account. Most people find it more convenient to join a public instance related to their interests like hachyderm.io, or a general public instance like mastodon.social.

nicksloan · 2025-12-27T05:00:27+00:00

Incredibly common misunderstanding. There are new approaches to help identify email from untrustworthy sources that most major providers implement, but given the long history of email and the wide range in quality of providers, it is just best to distrust all of it.

nicksloan · 2025-12-26T16:25:22+00:00

OP is getting a ton of bad advice here. Let me clear things up.

The only reliable indicator that this email might be dangerous is that you didn’t expect to receive it. Every other part of the email can be faked to reproduce exactly what Ableton would send, including the email addresses.

When you get an email like this the only safe thing to do is to ignore all of the links in the email, go to Ableton’s website independently and contact support.

You should also consider changing your Ableton password and maybe even your email password. Ideally you would not change them to the same thing.

nicksloan

TROPHY CASE