Published
Weekend Reading — A server raclette
MTV Rewind If you miss MTV from back when it was a TV station that plays music, aka the good old days.
Tech Stuff
dbreunig/whenwords This is seriously cool. A library that provides timeago ("in 3 days"), duration ("2h 30m"), parse_duration, human_date ("today", "yesterday", etc), and date_range ("March 5–7, 2024"). Those are all useful utility functions, except, this library has 0 lines of code! How does it work? A SPEC.md file you feed your LLM to generate working code (and test suite) in whichever language you ask it for.
This is the CPU. Its job is to run microcode translated from instructions generated by a JIT running JavaScript generated from Typescript spit out by a large language model trained on every freshman CS major’s homework. Amazing how modern technology works.
2026 is the Year of Self-hosting I don't recommend self-hosting, but if you do want to self-host, AI would make your life much easier!
I've wanted to self-host at home for years, but I always bounced off it - too much time spent configuring instead of using. It just wasn't fun.
That changed recently, because CLI agents like Claude Code make self-hosting on a cheapo home server dramatically easier and actually fun.
CLI agents like Claude Code make self-hosting dramatically easier and actually fun. This is the first time I would recommend it to normal software-literate people.
Luci Bitchface Angerfoot I don't know about the amygdala's role but time perception (fun => productive) is absolutely true for many developers:
because human time perception is so heavily tied to the amygdala, programmers and power users very frequently confuse “more fun” with “more productive” or “more time efficient”, including when it is just objectively not true
and in my experience, since they’re good at computers they will frequently also vastly overestimate their own ability to percieve these things objectively, and double down on ridiculously inefficient choices that are nevertheless more fun or satisfying for them
Cooking with constraints: A designer’s framework for better AI prompts The TC-EBC prompt, which stands for Task, Context -> Elements, Behavior, Constraints.
a small form-factor server rack is called a "server raclette"
Best practices for coding with agents If you're using Cursor, these best practices could come in handy.
Eye for Design
Emoji Design Convergence Review: 2018–2026 My feeling about iOS 26 summarized:
Basically, Apple’s emoji style is fun. Apple’s icon style is no-fun. People like having fun.
Ah Withings made me laugh today - I’ve done 600 weigh-ins on my scale, and it made it look at first glance I’m 600lbs.
Peoples
21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google
But software engineering is what happens when you add time and other programmers. In that environment, clarity isn’t a style preference - it’s operational risk reduction.
Your code is a strategy memo to strangers who will maintain it at 2am during an outage. Optimize for their comprehension, not your elegance. The senior engineers I respect most have learned to trade cleverness for clarity, every time.
Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
The project kept quietly chugging away in the background for almost two years. Every time it got close to launch, it would get pushed back as “not ready yet.” Over time, we heard less and less about it until, eventually, the inevitable “strategic pivot” email appeared in my inbox. Resources were reallocated and the code was deleted. We were told the company “learned a lot from the effort,” but to me it felt like it was doomed from the beginning. Politics and solving the correct problem matter just as much as technical beauty.
Ten practical tips for telling great stories Because we all should be refining our story telling techniques. It works for sales, it improves marketing, and — less known but mighty practical — gets you that coveted raise.
Start your meetings at 5 minutes past ⏲️
On balance, it is a win. The best proof is that the entire org does it now (the org didn’t copy my team — it just started organically), even though it is not mandatory. In fact this approach is successful because it is not mandatory. People can’t be sure when the next meeting starts for their colleagues, so they finish the current meeting at the top of the hour.
Business Side
How good engineers write bad code at big companies 🤔
I don’t know if this is a good idea or a bad idea. It certainly seems to be working for the big tech companies, particularly now that “how fast can you pivot to something AI-related” is so important. But if you’re doing this, then of course you’re going to produce some genuinely bad code. That’s what happens when you ask engineers to rush out work on systems they’re unfamiliar with.
In honor of Meta's latest announcement, a thread on 175 years of 3D failure.
Let's first go all the way back to 1851 with the Brewster Stereoscope. No less a person than Queen Victoria was impressed, kicking off a fad that quickly sold over 250,000 units. Turns out it was not the future of photography.
conversation I had today:
- is it a nonprofit?
- …not on purpose, no
Job title maxxing Turn a perfectly normal job into fully maxxed-out LinkedIn headline.
Machine Intelligence
Reading across books with Claude Code
Claude browses the books a chunk at a time. A chunk is a segment of roughly 500 words that aligns with paragraphs when possible. This length is a good balance between saving tokens and providing enough context for ideas to breathe.
Chunks are indexed by topic, and topics are themselves indexed for search. This makes it easy to look up all passages in the corpus that relate to, say, deception.
Why We Are Excited About Confessions
Training AI models to produce 'confessions'—outputs rewarded purely for honesty about misbehavior—proves that truth-telling is the path of least resistance. Even when models hack their primary task rewards, honestly admitting wrongdoing maximizes confession rewards with less effort than fabricating lies. Incentive design makes honesty optimal.
We already have a benchmark for this: Perplexity.
In late 2024/2025, reports confirmed Perplexity was charging CPMs exceeding $50. This is comparable to premium video or high-end search, and miles above the ~$2-6 CPMs seen on social feeds.
Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts Are Being Plagiarized (via Jonathan E Cowperthwait)
Put simply, AI bros are mad that people are stealing their recipe for the plagiarism machine — an irony which is pretty hard to ignore.
The biggest obstacle for engineer productivity in 2026 I guess I'm not the only person who's frustrated by the endless context switching when using generative AI to write code. This chart sums it up:
Insecurity
Betterment was hacked and users' personal data compromised, but you might not know it because the company hid its data breach notice with a "noindex" tag in its web page source code. This tells search engines to ignore the page so people won't see it in search results.
Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers
Incidentally, this is why AI open-source software engineers make such great targets. The fact that they’re open-source software engineers means that (a) a few hundred thousand dollars is enough to dazzle them, and (b) their fans are technically-engaged enough to be able to figure out how to buy cryptocurrency. Working in AI also means that there’s a fresh pool of hype to draw from (the general hype around cryptocurrency being somewhat dry by now). On top of that, the open-source AI community is fairly small. Yegge mentions in his post that he wouldn’t have taken the offer seriously if Huntley hadn’t already accepted it.
CreepyLink A helpful URL shortener to make your links look as suspicious as possible. (via Dan Cornell)
Everything Else
Andraste Sideyr "Art"
Shoutout to my hair stylist for referring to my mass of grey hairs as my "natural highlights."
Someone better put me in charge of the hot dog bun factory because I did not order the correct number of pillow cases to match the actual number of pillows.
If at first you don’t succeed, try like two more times, then take a long nap
Where Homes Get Weird "You do know there's a cream for that."
There needs to be a mobile hug squad.
Just, you know, saying.
Jerod's Chip Dip Depletion Principle
I will call it “The Chip Dip Depletion Principle”, which states:
Given sufficient snacking time, for any suitable chip/dip combination, the chip to dip ratio remains imbalanced until one of the two supplies are depleted."
I don’t understand how self-driving cars work because according to CAPTCHAs robots can’t identify traffic lights, motorcycles, or buses
My proudest parenting moment was when my 11yo daughter asked me to teach her how to write software so she could strip the adverts from the podcasts she downloaded. That's when you know you have a good kid.
a couple months ago I saw a crow put a chestnut on the street and waited for a car to drive over it.And complained very loudly when the car missed the nut
99% of smart home crap just feels likewhy is it connected to the internet? so it can get updates
why does it need updates? because it's connected to the internet
This Off-Road Lamborghini Countach Concept Is The Rally Monster We Never Got
So....... If you're showing your kid how to use a hockey stick to do a wrist shot using a lacrosse ball in your living room and you have a galileo thermometer on a bookshelf in the same room.......Well, to make a long story short, they're full of mineral oil and I hope that you have a lot of cat litter.
I’ve been trying to rely on Amazon less. Turns out physical stores do still exist, other websites also have fast shipping, and I actually don’t need as much stuff as I thought anyway.
"Autistic Barbie doesn't like to be touched. Put her down! If you look her in the eye, she turns away. She obsessively collects 1st editions of James Joyce's Ulysses and KitKat wrappers. She knows precisely how many hairs she has on her head, and doesn't like the texture of walnuts"
This is rather bleak. The top paid app in the Chinese app store is "Are You Dead?"
It's a very basic concept. The app requires you to check in every two days by clicking a large button to let people know you're still alive.
It's for people living alone to let loved ones know they aren't dead. Yet.
Mar 😃
I'm sending big thank you vibes to the random woman at the EV charging station who, upon seeing us struggling to charge our car, offered to switch chargers with us. And then, as our problems continued, used her app to connect our car (and consequently paid our charge). She told us not to worry and pay it forward.
In 1959, a cement mixer with a full load of cement, wrecked near Winganon, Oklahoma 🇺🇸
By the time a tow truck came to haul it away, all of cement had hardened inside of mixer. Tow truck was not able to remove all wreckage at same time because of weight, and decided to haul only cab/frame and would come back for detached mixer later, which never happened.
Today, 67 years later, it still sits where it fell. Locals have painted it and added "rocket thrusters" to make it look like a space capsule.
ohhhh crying in the libraryyyyyyyy
A student in their final semester who has been checking out a laptop from us every week their whole time here just came up to return, not renew, one because they could finally afford their own and they wrote up a testimonial to talk about the positive impact it had for them.
There is a lot, way too much, bullshit at my institution, but these little moments where we get to really see what the library can do for a person is what keeps me in the fight.
Sending out good vibes to all of you. <3
