Max 🏳️‍⚧️ 🍉 🪬 🔯 🏳️‍🌈 🖖🏻

"I play Dwarf Fortress so you don't have to!"

very sleepy neoluddite artist, web development curmudgeon, and retro video game enthusiast. burned out gender-averse neurospicy, old and tired and young and mad.

Pronouns: she/they
Computing Shop: https://thingsfittogether.com
Professional Portfolio: https://maxcantor.net
Public GitHub: https://github.com/changemewtf

Last Notes

2026-06-29 18:16:30 UTC

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Sometimes I daydream and imagine what it would be like if the software industry actually optimized for producing quality software and not profitable software.

2026-06-29 18:15:16 UTC

I think Signal's most critical and under-discussed flaw may be backup restoration.
Of the vanishingly few non-tech-industry friends I have convinced to get on Signal over the years, well over half of them have since stopped using it because they changed devices and got mired in the restore process.
It kills me that, as an industry, we're getting even worse at solving for the day-to-day trivialities of living with software, because it makes these longer-term risks seem even more impenetrable.

2026-03-13 21:40:10 UTC

Capitalism is just so fucking depressing.
I don't just mean that in the sense that it's depressing to think about.
I mean it's literally depressing, that the process which we call capitalism is functionally a depressant for all but a thousand lucky few.
"Hey man, I had this idea X for helping people/improving the world/becoming financially independent/any reasonable motivation, really."
"Okay, but how would X make an insanely rich person even more wealthy right now?"

2025-09-29 22:18:24 UTC

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Wow, the Ruby world is really going wild this month! Between this and the Shopify buyout, it's more drama than I've seen since the _whytheluckystiff days.

2025-08-01 01:37:35 UTC

"May your buffers overflow and your bugs be unreproducible." - Traditional Programmer's Curse

2025-07-16 18:28:11 UTC

Holyshit, I disabled JS in Firefox about:config to test a site I'm working on and forgot to re-enable it before going back to browsing.
THIS IS INCREDIBLE. Everything loads SO fast. No cookie popups, no newsletter dialogues, no banners, no content shifting around as asynchronous shit loads. I'm sure most of the web is broken without JS, but why haven't I tried this before? StackOverflow and the MDN docs are a pleasure now.

2025-07-03 01:55:58 UTC

I've been doing the website for one of my wife's clients' small businesses the past couple of months.
Despite, or perhaps because of, a 20-year career in web development, I decided to just hand-write the HTML, JS, and CSS, and dump them wherever needed with rsync.
I've been surprised at how not miserable it is. Does it feel very time-consuming in the moment? Yes. But does it take MORE time overall than if I used Wordpress/Wix/React et al.?
I dunno.
I don't think so.

2025-05-02 00:32:32 UTC

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Damn I thought you were talking about Ruby at first and was ready to go Nerd Defcon 5

2025-03-09 21:17:00 UTC

Are you pro-typo or anti-typo? I'm pro-tyupo. I think it's important to leave visible traces of humanity in everything we do, especially now that generative AI has proliferated across the world.
I'm sure there's a quote from an old master painter or something out there, about how nothing is perfect until there's at least one mistake.
Be pro-typo. Don't fix every typo. You don't need to! At least, not in every post, every text message, every email, etc. ✅

2025-03-09 19:22:36 UTC

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Would you mind sharing the name of that delightful monospace font? :)