The Shape of Everything Micro Blog

Yale Environment 360: Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China’s Wind and Solar Buildout

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:04:29 GMT

Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.

The massive buildout is happening across the country, from crowded eastern cities increasingly topped by rooftop solar panels to remote western deserts where colossal wind farms sprawl across the landscape.

These images by Chu Weimin are breathtaking.

Does Software Piracy Exist?

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 23:09:34 GMT

Matthew Butterick ▸ Does software piracy exist?:

From time to time, readers let me know that my fonts are circulating on such-and-such website devoted to some category of software piracy.

Well yes—of course they are. In the font world, as in most areas of software endeavor, there’s been much hand-wringing over the last 40 years about the (supposedly) massive losses to this kind of unauthorized redistribution and copying, and the lack of any satisfying protection mechanisms to prevent it.

A short and enlightening read, and the “Trajectory” examples made me laugh out loud.

Via DF.

Marco Arment on Apple Watch Fitness

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:09:18 GMT

In episode 680 of ATP, at about 6:12 in, Marco Arment goes off on watchOS 26’s fitness app and trashes all the changes. And I couldn’t agree more with him.

I thought it was just me who hated all the changes, and the slow animations, and the workout picker. It’s such a regression I don’t even know where to start. Arment is considering getting a Garmin watch to replace his Apple Watch, and while I’m not that far along in my hate for it - I’m not too far behind. The only thing that’s keeping me using it is the history I have with it.

How much do I use the fitness app? 2-3 times daily. MWF: climbing, PT exercises; TTF: group gym workout; SMTWTFS: 2 mile walk with the dog (usualy); random other times: hikes or snowboarding or weekend climbing.

If I could downgrade my watch safely, I would.

CasNum is Amazing

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:14:33 GMT

CasNum (Compass and straightedge Number) is a library that implements arbitrary precision arithmetic using compass and straightedge constructions. Arbitrary precision arithmetic, now with 100% more Euclid. Featuring a functional modified Game Boy emulator where every ALU opcode is implemented entirely through geometric constructions.

I’m sorry, what?

This project began with a simple compass-and-straightedge 'engine', […]. In compass-and-straightedge constructions, one start with just two points: The origin, and a unit. Exactly as God intended.

Still what?!

#Philosophy

Most modern developers are content with a + b. They don't want to work for it. They don't want to see the midpoint being birthed from the intersection of two circles. CasNum is for the developer who believes that if you didn't have to solve a 4th-degree polynomial just to increment a loop counter, you didn't really increment it.

This is pretty amazing, and just what I needed to see today. The FAQ is great too. Actually, the whole README is great.

If you don’t know what’s going on, you can watch the following YouTube video: The Simplest Ancient Math Problem No One Could Solve. I learned a bunch, but I probably only understood a quarter of what was being said.

Note: I’ve tried running CasNum on my Mac, but got a bunch of Python errors when trying to bring up the UI. I suspect this is only for Windows. The little movie on the project page shows it in action however, sped up quite a bit.

Via hn.

25 Years of Mac OS X

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:10:12 GMT

512 Pixels: Mac OS X Shipped 25 Years Ago.

I still remember using the public betas, and Mac OS Server before that. Display Postscript is the thing that sticks out as being the most amazing to me at the time. And then Mac OS X brought Display PDF, which was a great step beyond that as well.

Happy Birthday, Mac OS X.

Craig Mod Got a Macbook Neo

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 23:06:04 GMT

Craig Mod, MacBook Neo and How the iPad Could Be:

The MacBook Neo is about six years late. Back in 2020, when the iPad Pro’s 4th generation model — the one with trackpad support — was released, there was a group of us who slapped the new Magic Keyboard with trackpad on it and thought, immediately: Give me this machine with macOS.

Like everything Mod writes, I want to quote it all. I won’t but here’s another nugget:

This sense of iPad “not working” has only grown in the past two years with the explosion of LLMs and tools like Claude Code. macOS is the place to run the things because macOS is malleable and its constituent parts fungible, it’s able to embody the role of tool by trusting the user to be an adult.

Make Something People Want

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:14:42 GMT

Joshua Heath Scott on successful bands:

When you’re furious that another entity is successful, when you’re convinced they cheated, when you can’t stop picking apart how they did it , that fury is almost never about them. It’s about you.

I know this because I’ve felt it. Every successful founder has. You watch someone else’s thing take off and your brain, being a survival machine, immediately generates a story that protects your ego. They had rich parents. They knew someone. They hired an agency. They sold out. They got lucky. Anything, anything at all, that lets you avoid the harder question.

The harder question is: does anyone want what I’m making?

Not “should they want it.” Not “would they want it if they knew about me.” Does anyone actually want it? Have I made something people want to buy? Have I made music people want to listen to? Have I made anything that connects to a real human need or desire, or am I making something for myself and expecting the world to applaud?

The same could be said of software.

Zed Is 1.0

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:06:55 GMT

To create a fundamentally better editor, we had to invent a new approach to building desktop software. Our previous editor, Atom, was built as a fork of Chromium, spawning the Electron framework in the process. Electron eventually became the foundation of VS Code (which today seems to be forked into a new AI code editor every other week). Web technology offered an easy path to shipping flexible software, but it also imposed a ceiling. No matter how hard we worked, we couldn't make Atom better than the platform it was built on.

So we started over. Instead of building Zed like a web page, we built it like a video game, organizing the entire application around feeding data to shaders running on the GPU. That meant writing our own UI framework, GPUI, from scratch in Rust.

Even though Zed is not a native AppKit app, and I generally only launch it to see what‘s going on over there*, I like the approach they are taking. More of this please.

* I'm a BBEdit guy in general, and use Nova for its project support.

Artem Loenko on Native Text Rendering

Sun, 17 May 2026 16:49:12 GMT

Artem Loenko: Native all the way, until you need text:

I did everything people say you should do. Native all the way. I know the platform. I know the options. I know SwiftUI, AppKit, TextKit, WebKit.

But I still cannot make a simple thing work properly: a chat with Markdown & the ability to select a whole message.

And suddenly it becomes much clearer why most new chat-heavy apps that depend on one of the most important interface patterns of this era – chat, long-form rich text, flexible typography – are web-based in one way or another.

In the beginning (aka, Mac OS X 10.2 in 2002), there was nothing better than NSTextView.

It evolved, and we eventually got TextKit 2. But something's off about it, and I can't quite explain what or why.

Update: Matt Sephton left a comment on HN about Loenko‘s post:

I recently launched a text editor for iOS that uses TextKit 2 and is highly performant with files of 5,000 lines (I tested with Moby Dick from Project Gutenberg). I made it between Aug 2025 and Apr 2026, development is ongoing.

Every keystroke is restyled in under 8ms: no debouncing, no delayed rendering. 20 rapid keystrokes are processed in 150ms with full restyling after each one.

Free the Icons

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:32:39 GMT

Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba Blog: Free The Icons:

With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes.

I wholeheartedly agree. I get why Apple did it, but I think it's completely wrong for the Mac.

Toilets Are Meditation Time

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:04:12 GMT

Nate (no last name that I can find) - Don't use your phone while you poop:

When we stop feeding our brains constant input, they can finally attend to the housekeeping of the mind. In this state they'll consolidate memories, connect ideas, process emotions, and most likely generate high-scoring Scrabble words.

If our brains were pizza chefs, they would take down those spinning pies you've been juggling and slide them neatly into the brick oven to bake. Then, and only then, could you take new orders from the endless line of customers at the door.

I of course had to link to this because of the analogy used.

But yea, give yourself some time away from the screen whenever you can. And while you’re at it, maybe take a walk or drive without listening to podcasts for a bit.

Jeremy Mann Relink

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:34:44 GMT

Years ago, I wrote a little bit about an artist named Jeremy Mann and how inspiring I found him and his work (visit the post to read my gushing).

I mentioned Mann to a friend today and started rewatching his video Behind the Dark Room, and got sucked in of course. It's required watching for anyone who didn't watch it the first time around. Yes this is homework.

I'm also incredibly happy to see that an archive of his newsletters is now online.

I want to make things like Jeremy Mann does someday.

Keep Making Weird Art

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 23:30:19 GMT

Christine Lemmer-Webber: But where does taste come from?.

Yes, it’s another post about how taste is the only differentiator. But, I liked this one, especially the ending:

I don't know any solution to that, but I guess: keep making weird art. It's the best way to stay interesting, and the best way to add taste to this increasingly averaged world.

It’s a quick good read.