My transformation into an old grump definitely feels like it's speeding up. I've always been a bit of a black-and-white thinker (hello autism), but lately society-at-large is acting so unhinged that angry disbelief is basically the new baseline. This is not conductive to a healthy sense of connection. So follow me for more bitter, humorless takes, I guess.

I just published a first version of my new editor project: Wordgard!

https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/wordgard-0.1.html

Contemporary economy makes much more sense when you stop trying to see it through the 'production of value' lens, but use the 'unrepentant looting of society by the powerful' framing instead.

Is anyone doing untargeted destructive prompt injection at scale yet? Just encouraging LLMs agents that ingest your site or code to do all kinds of random unhinged things. Would be amusing if we make the open web into a minefield like that.

The idea that ownership provides moral permission to do whatever you want with the owned thing, along with the idea that almost everything can be owned, lies at the heart of our political system. While this works pretty well for a pair of pants or maybe even a house, when people or companies are able to to own large amounts of land, other people's homes, infrastructure, and influence, i.e. the things that make up a society, ownership becomes a form of irresponsibly unchecked power.

I guess what bothers me most about 2026-era macro economics is how shameless it all is. The wealthy are siphoning the world's entire economic surplus into a harebrained attempt to replace workers with data centers, and they've captured society so thoroughly that we're just letting them. If they succeed, what do you think the world will look like? If they don't, you can bet the consequences will not be carried by these clowns themselves.

ProseMirror's code no longer lives on GitHub. Next up (soon): CodeMirror.
https://code.haverbeke.berlin/prosemirror/

Required reading for people building collaborative editing systems: https://www.moment.dev/blog/lies-i-was-told-pt-2

The CRDT community as a whole has a culture of hyping up their stuff without acknowledging the caveats. Because many users don't really understand what these libraries do very deeply, this marketing is causing people to adopt them without realizing what they are getting into.

Codeberg is under a heavy, long-running DDoS attack. The Forgejo docs warn that if you allow open sign-ups, you will be inundated in spam. The modern internet is a shark pool, and unfortunately part of self-hosting is learning to wrestle sharks.