Ryan Barrett

separate the art from the artist

Hi everyone! Welcome to another Bridgy Fed status update. Since last time, we’ve been focusing on a big new project that we’re almost ready to start beta testing, but we also managed to ship some smaller features and improvements:

As usual, feel free to ping us with feedback, questions, and bug reports, and please support us on Patreon! You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what we’re currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!

Huge.

office

Apologies all, we had a bit of downtime this morning due to a network partition at our host. Bridging out of the Atmosphere (Bluesky) was down for roughly 1h, 7:45-8:45a PT (14:45-15:45 UTC), and bridging into the Atmosphere was also down for roughly 1h, 8:25-9:25a PT (15:25-16:25 UTC).

Sorry for the outage. We have a couple concrete plans for how we can improve our fault tolerance and resilience to network partitions and issues like this in the future. Thank you for your patience with us!

boiling is the worst way to cook food

this includes bagels, shellfish, even hot pot

pasta is only good because you immediately put tasty non-boiled stuff on it before you eat it

I will not be taking questions at this time

at 44 years of age I am just now realizing that my favorite food is fat

High gas and oil prices may be hard on working class people, and on supply chains, but they’re good for progress on the climate crisis.

I’m optimistic that cheap EVs from BYD, Slate, etc will help both sides of this tradeoff.

Ideally gas and oil prices should increase due to price on carbon regulations, not just macro events like wars or inflation, but I’ll take what I can get.

Bridgy Fed is roughly 20k lines of code.

If you add in all the other parts of the stack that we own – granary, arroba, lexrpc, etc – it’s 51kloc total.

(Excluding tests; those add another 81kloc.)

I’m not really proud of this, or embarrassed. Just wanted to put it out there for anyone who thinks more code is better, or worse, or an important metric either way.

All code is liability. Results are what matters. Write code to do what you need to do, try to minimize it in general, but don’t over-index on it. Focus on results.

office

Hi everyone! Welcome to another Bridgy Fed status update. We’ve been hard at work on upcoming projects since last time, but we’ve also found time to work on smaller features and bug fixes. Here are a few we’ve shipped recently:

As usual, feel free to ping us with feedback, questions, and bug reports, and please support us on Patreon! You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what we’re currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!

Surprising but true: in 2025, all net new electricity generation added worldwide was clean, ie non greenhouse gas emitting. 99% was renewable! 75% solar, 24% wind.

It was actually over 100% total. We added 849 TWh of generation overall in 2025, an increase of 4.5%, but GHG emitting (ie fossil fuel) generation shrank by 0.2%. Clean energy covered the gap and then some.

Even more surprising: this was true for China and India individually too. All of their net new generation added in 2025, and more, was non-emitting.

China’s overall generation grew by 5%, but its fossil fuel output fell 0.9%. Its electricity emissions have been flat for two years now. India’s generation grew 2.4%; its fossil generation fell 3.3%!

There’s plenty of bad news on the climate crisis. There’s lots of fear-mongering on energy etc, as always. But there’s more good news, and progress, than we realize.

Much of my career boils down to:

All code is liability. Minimize it.

Feedback loops are everywhere. Speed them up; do them more.

We’re bad at predicting the future. Avoid it.

More tests.

Hire smart, motivated people, then get out of their way.

Find the right thing to turn off and on again.

The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel

– Horace Walpole

Huge, and surprising, and important: dementia is down by almost half over the last 40-50y!

(Also reconfirms that amyloid beta was largely a red herring, APOE4 is real, and – news to me – the shingles vaccine seems preventative!)

every packet is an adventure

TIL: “valley-free” routing

Of all the themes in The Matrix, one of my favorites is needing a land line to call the operator and exit the Matrix.

Cordless phones, cell radios, wireless networking…none of it can be trusted. When you’re doing serious business, you need good old copper.

And not just any land line, either. Inevitably, they end up using anonymous land lines. The front desk phone in a hotel room, an aging rotary dial in an abandoned building, or the holy grail: a pay phone.

Cypherpunks. Gotta love ’em. Immaculate vibes.

Jasper National Park, Canadian Rockies

taking a vacation? forgot which day of the week it is? don’t worry, hotel elevator’s got you

Real-time animated dashboard of SF water and sewage flow at SFPUC  headquarters.

no no, you don’t understand, it’s not a torment nexus

it’s just a torment fidget spinner

It’s so weird that even with this World Cup’s expanded field, China and India still didn’t qualify, despite having the world’s largest populations by far.

Maybe football isn’t historically as important for them, at least within their own countries?

We were lucky to catch Elim Chan’s debut at SF Symphony last Fri after she was named the next music director, and it was really special. She conducted La Mer, one of my favorite orchestral pieces, and one I’ve probably heard them play a dozen times. She said she felt humbled and grateful at taking on the role, and she exuded a really direct, open, youthful energy.

She also conducted Sascha Cooke, a long time collaborator of MTT’s, and they had a pretty emotional passing-the-torch moment in his memory. Everyone felt his presence, and his blessing, so strongly.

No one can replace MTT, of course, and I’m still pretty heartbroken that we couldn’t keep Esa-Pekka, but Chan seems poised to bring on a new era. Can’t wait for the 27-28 season!

The Great Supply Chain Security Paradox:

“every open source lib is getting owned! wait at least a week to patch, let other people find the supply chain breaches before you”

“AI is reversing all these patches, the window to exploit is down to just hours now, patch your shit immediately!”

… 🧐

(Credit to James Wilson and Brad Arkin. Threat intel feeds may be the answer, eg Sentinel One, Checkmarx, Socket, etc. Somehow we came full circle back around to antivirus!)

Scott Werner: The Wizard With the Very Defensible Pond

There was once a wizard who lived beside a pond. It was a small pond. The sort of pond that probably gets called a “water feature” on a Zillow listing by a real estate agent who really knows their euphemisms…

My Google account is heaven@gmail (long story), so I get a steady trickle of emails from people writing to God. Some of them are real winners.

sometimes right, always confident

Consider the world’s simplest database:

#!/bin/bash

db_get () { grep "^$1," database | sed -e "s/^$1,//" | tail -n 1 } >

– Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition, Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini

I’ve been a daily coffee drinker for decades, and I’m taking a break for a month right now. No real reason, just trying it.

Halfway through, not much to report. One mild headache early on. No noticeable difference in energy. (I’m pretty insensitive to caffeine.)

I definitely still miss it though!

A few challenge coins: Long Now, Google NetOps, and our family LLC.

Ellis Island stories

my sentiments exactly

In my 25+ yr career in (systems) software engineering, I can count on one hand the number of real paradigm shifts I’ve seen:

I’m not saying anything new by including AI coding here. I don’t fully know what its long term effects will be. I doubt many of us do. And the industry is obviously far from perfect.

But coming from a late adopter, and a skeptic in general, it’s still very clearly a big deal. And I don’t see those often.

…this produces what I will call the AI Developer’s Descent Into Madness:

Avery Pennarun, Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

Best paper title I’ve seen in a long time:

> Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog

I am Springsteen, going on Spreventeen

– Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

smoke ’em if you got ’em

first law of thermodynamics conservation of energy 🤝 double entry bookkeeping conservation of money

Hi everyone! Here’s your semi-regular Bridgy Fed status update. We’ve been busy since last time!

The two big new features we launched were domain blocklists (GitHub) and responding to unbridged users (GitHub). We’ve seen good feedback and usage on both, especially responding to unbridged users. Please keep the feedback coming!

We also significantly improved bridging speed, especially to Bluesky. For a couple months, it slowed down to an average delay of 3-5 minutes, with outliers that took so long that we occasionally dropped them entirely. Not good. We worked hard to optimize and managed to cut that average delay down to just 5-10 seconds, which feels way better.

We shipped a bunch of smaller stuff too:

As usual, feel free to ping us with feedback, questions, and bug reports, and please support us on Patreon! You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what we’re currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!

https://s0.wp.com/_si/?t=eyJpbWciOiJodHRwczpcL1wvaTAud3AuY29tXC9zbmFyZmVkLm9yZ1wvd3AtY29udGVudFwvdXBsb2Fkc1wvMjAyNFwvMTFcL2Nyb3BwZWQtaXJhcV9zcXVhcmUuanBnP2ZpdD01MTIlMkM1MTImc3NsPTEiLCJ0eHQiOiJSeWFuIEJhcnJldHQiLCJ0ZW1wbGF0ZSI6ImVkZ2UiLCJmb250IjoiIiwiYmxvZ19pZCI6MjM4OTYzODMzfQ.XtFGU0z03TUKAetQTBNSMOpbHoA2LHHPXA5UIXXbiBkMQ

It’s VCs’ job to predict the future in all sorts of directions, and be extremely confident about those predictions, and also be wrong 9 out of 10 times. Remember that next time you hear a VC say…anything.

(Not that VCs are all dumb, or delusional, or malicious! Far from it. But still.)

looksmaxxing is weird (at best) for all sorts of reasons, but one thing I do know: women have been doing it for millennia. guys, you’re late

fresh honeycomb, from friends who keep bees

I know it’s a bad (good) day when debugging takes me all the way down into the Linux kernel docs

the best UI is no UI

Really enjoyed Nat Bullard’s State of decarbonization presentation this year, as always. Reminds me of Mary Meeker’s classic yearly Internet Trends decks, but for climate tech. It’s that valuable, and useful.

Some takeaways, in no particular order:

I did my year, I got my stock, my soul is crispy

When I’m reading a non-fiction book, I know it’s a good one if I constantly feel the urge to post quotes from it.

I miss the Fry’s Electronics days

current status

Art TVs are good technology.

I’m not talking about the hardware, or the software, really. The panels are old, outdated, edge-lit. The interfaces aren’t much better: Tizen is somehow both over- and under-engineered at the same time. I don’t love paying for yet another subscription. And yes, like all modern TVs, they spy on you ruthlessly, at least by default, trying to claw back a bit of margin in a cutthroat business.

But. Since we bought a couple Frame TVs, there’s now way more art in my life. Classics, sure, but also artists and styles and traditions that are entirely new to me, from all over the world. Chinese scrolls from the imperial dynasties. Graffiti and street art. Surrealist photography. The national collections of Zimbabwe -Bulawayo, Korea, Prado, Singapore. For the first time, I got a taste of what it’s like to actually be at Art Basel. I easily spend 15 minutes or so a day ensconced in a gallery in Delhi, or bamboozled by a 19th century trompe l’oiel, or just enjoying whatever pops up on the slideshow. It’s improved my life immensely.

Obviously, TVs are a limited way to experience art. I love museums too, and galleries, and every now and then I fall in love with a print or canvas enough to bring it home, or at least try. Even so, these TVs have added a wealth of art to my life that I never would have experienced before. That’s good tech.

pretty like the devil

It’s hard to believe, but Bridgy is 14 years old today. I launched the first version of it way back in 2012. Happy birthday, little project buddy! 🎂🎈🎉

Ceci n’est pas une poste.

Have you ever alphabetized your hard drive?

– Makers, Cory Doctorow

“You’re absolutely right” 😕

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

– Woody Guthrie

is it complex, or is it complicated

Does a given word rhyme with itself?

Eg, does kitten rhyme with kitten?

Quick appreciation post for checklists.

I had to do a delicate migration in prod recently, so I did the usual SRE thing: step by step checklist, minimize the critical section where things are down, lots of sanity checks throughout, dry run before the real thing. (If I was really serious, I would have found someone to watch over my shoulder too.)

First time through, one of the sanity checks in a critical section failed, so I immediately aborted and rolled back. Turned out to be a trivial bug, but it would have been ugly if I’d continued and didn’t catch it until later.

Fixed the bug, started the procedure again from the beginning, everything worked fine this time through.

Kudos to the humble checklist. Far from the first time it’s saved my ass.

11 year old: “The best thing about Santa Claus is that I don’t have to write him a thank you note!”

pave the cowpaths

Democracy is the worst form of government…except for all the others.

– Winston Churchill

Fun fact: “six seven” traces its roots all the way back to Old English in the 1380s. Geoffrey Chaucer coined it in his epic poem Troilus and Criseyd:

But manly set the world on sixe and sevene;

And, if thou deye a martir, go to hevene."

200 years later, Shakespeare picked it up and used it in his play Richard II:

But time will not permit: all is uneven

And every thing is left at six and seven

The common English phrase “at sixes and sevens,” from an early dice game that preceded craps, is unrelated.

It is thought that the expression was originally > to set on cinque and sice> (from the French for five and six). These were apparently the most risky numbers to shoot for (‘to set on’) and anyone who tried for them was considered careless or confused.

You should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.

– Pete Seeger

TIL: free driver

opposite of free rider

> …solar geoengineering’s economics are almost the exact opposite of climate change’s: While global warming is a “free rider” problem, where countries must collaborate to avoid burning cheap fossil fuels, solar geoengineering is a “free driver” problem, where one country could theoretically do it alone.

WALL·E

Lately I’ve been thinking about orphaned code. Code that’s still running, live, with no remaining developers or users.

Forgotten hardware devices. Deserted VMs on cloud free tiers. Smart contracts whose DAOs disbanded years ago. Old school internet worms. Abandoned, starving Tamagotchi.

Can you think of other examples?

There are obvious conclusions here about maintainability, ecosystem security, etc, but I’m not here to lecture, I have no particular conclusions. Just a vibe.

It’s a very, very…mad world.