Can I assume the UK will get Siri AI?

I found a sea shell in a visit to Latamber in Pakistan (NWFP): https://www.flickr.com/photos/hendry/73369720/

Gemini says "As the crow flies (Straight-line distance): Approximately 900 to 920 kilometers (roughly 560 to 570 miles) directly north of the coast at Karachi"

Maybe some geology buffs can correct me, but as I understand it there has been three periods with ocean on top of the crust we call Pakistan today. The Proto-Tethys, Paleo-Tethys, and Tethys Ocean. Many hundreds of millions of years of being ocean.

Because of the Indian subcontinent colliding with the Eurasian plate there's a wide variety of origins for the surface geology in that region.

An incredibly detailed and descriptive map:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/1964_Pak...

Maybe a nitpick but Latamber is not directly north of Karachi and it's about 1000 kilometers away (the closest coast is 950 km but not in Karachi). It's easy to see and to measure on a map.

I noticed an AWS engineer publish a local AWS suite https://github.com/local-web-services/local-web-services which seems comparable.

Great to see Localstack offset a bit thanks to ... AI driven shift left infrastructure tooling? This is a great trend.

Are there successful non-AI artist platforms for works of art?

Agreed! systemd nspawn is actually pretty awesome, though not many people use it.

Timely! I just re-setup my Pi5 with the help of Claude. https://github.com/kaihendry/ai-pi

Tbh I did the mistake of throwing away Ansible, so testing my setup was a pain!

Since with AI, the focus should be on testing, perhaps it's sensible to drop Ansible for something like https://github.com/goss-org/goss

Things are happening so fast, I was impressed to see a Linux distro embrace using a SKILL.md! https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/default/omar...

Wish there was something like Mermaid for typical AWS Architecture diagrams.

Something that doesn't suck like draw.io!

Interesting use case! Mermaid doesn't have native AWS icons, but for v0.3.0's standalone crate, we could potentially support custom shapes/icons. D2 has better icon support if you need that now.

What specific diagram types do you need — network topology, service flows, infrastructure layout?

More service flows aimed at security audits

Service flows for security audits — that's a specific and useful use case!

A few thoughts:

What might work today: - Sequence diagrams can model service-to-service flows (API calls, auth handoffs)

- Flowcharts with subgraphs can represent VPC boundaries, security groups

- C4-style (context, container, component) is sometimes modeled with flowcharts

What would make it better:

- Custom shapes/icons (AWS service icons)

- Annotations for security boundaries, trust zones

- Data flow direction markers

Alternative you might try now:

D2 (https://d2lang.com) has better icon support and was designed for architecture diagrams. It has an AWS icon pack. Structurizr also does C4 well.

That said, if there's demand for architecture-specific diagrams in Ferrite's Mermaid renderer, I could look at:

1. Custom icon/shape support via external SVGs

2. A dedicated "architecture" diagram type with security-relevant annotations

Would a template or example for modeling security flows in Mermaid's current syntax help as a starting point?

Yeah, an example would be good. Tbh the examples on https://d2lang.com/ don't seem to fit the bill of a typical AWS Architecture diagrams! https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/reference-architecture-d...

You're right, neither Mermaid nor D2 really nail AWS architecture diagrams out of the box. Mermaid lacks icons entirely, and D2's AWS pack is more 'icons exist' than 'architecture patterns are easy.'

Honestly, this is a gap in the ecosystem. For now, most people either:

- Use draw.io/Excalidraw despite the pain

- Build diagrams programmatically (Diagrams-as-code Python library has good AWS support)

- Just accept text-based flowcharts without icons

If I add custom icon/shape support to Ferrite's Mermaid renderer (v0.3.0+), AWS icons could be a good test case. No promises, but I hear the frustration.

Same as modals?

Modals are, IMO, the literal worst UX element you can hate your users with. There are certainly valid use cases, but _absolutely not_ should be the default.

How come? I find them nice to allow for certain actions that don't really require navigation, and may want the user to easily return whenever they do anything in the modal or not. I understand it is historically bad due to accessibility, but there's more native support for it now. Assuming it is implemented with that in mind, is it still bad?

Modals are... modal. Popping up a dialog that requires interaction, while blocking access to the rest of the application.

Again, this is sometimes appropriate, but it's desperately wrong in so many places it gets used.

I personally don't find modals inherently all that bad, though they can definitely be implemented poorly. Does anyone have specific reading material on the problems with modals?

Can't believe you're promoting Rust on a Go YT channel. ;)