Published
Weekend Reading — a24z
Information Is Beautiful "Seems to fit?"
Tech Stuff
kepano/defuddle When you need to clean up a web page and extract only the important contents. This library claims to offer some benefits over Readability.
You don’t need a roadmap, you need caffeine and unreasonable optimism
Writing alt text with AI This is what the prompt could look like:
"Write alt text for this image. This image appears in an article describing Union Station's declining ridership, emphasize the lack of people."
MeetingBar Join and create meetings from the menu bar. Works with the popular meeting apps — Zoom, Meet, Teams, etc — and with different calendars via macOS integration.
HoneyBook Charming AI to help you run your business: contracts, invoices, payments, proposals, and more. It's $36/month for the base pack, so not free but also not expensive for what it does. I like how they use their Chatbot UI to promote the product.
Meet Folio If you loved Pocket (RIP), you’ll feel right at home. Folio is a thoughtful, modern replacement.
Macrowave.co Listen to music together while working with your friends. The UI of this app is just amazingly gorgeous.
Eye for Design
MonoLisa Font follows function. Via rands
If you show stats on your landing page that are animated with JS, and you put zeroes as the initial values in the HTML, you will look like complete failures to the odd weirdo who browses the web with JS disabled by default 😄
Kelmscott Mono The Blackletter programming font you didn’t know you needed. Via Yanone Type.
Peoples
5 Spoons When you need to share with friends that you're running low on spoons without feeling guilty about it. (If you're ND you know what this means and why it's such a useful service)
Experience ADHD This is one’s designer’s interpretation of life with ADHD. And it's not incorrect.
Business Side
The CEOs Who Missed the Future 🤔
It wasn’t just that carriage companies failed to pivot. It’s that they had time and customers—and still missed it. That same pattern happens at every disruptive transition; they were led by CEOs who simply couldn’t imagine a different world than the one they had mastered. (This happened when companies had to master the web, mobile and social media, and is repeating today with AI.)
If you want a long career in the tech industry, you have to embrace whatever is fashionable, no matter how stupid it seems.Learn the new thing, use it, become an expert in it. And then be ready to throw it aside and denounce it when the next thing arrives.
Why Your Brain Gets High on Uncertainty
Social media platforms have figured this out. That's why you can’t stop scrolling through Instagram Reels or Tik-Tok videos. Sometimes you find something amazing, sometimes it's just another cat video. But maybe the next scroll will be life-changing, or the next. And boom - there goes another hour of your life. Cmon, don’t act like you’ve never been there.
Machine Intelligence
Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity This is an interesting and quite realistic research showing how AI could spell the opposite of productivity:
Each task is randomly assigned to allow or disallow usage of early-2025 AI tools. When AI tools are allowed, developers primarily use Cursor Pro, a popular code editor, and Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet. Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%—AI tooling slowed developers down. This slowdown also contradicts predictions from experts in economics (39% shorter) and ML (38% shorter).
However, I do believe that when used correctly, AI could give you an average 10% performance improvement, or as METR's AI productivity study is really good explains:
So it’s not so much “AI makes me more effective at my normal work”, as it is “AI means I can work at times that I otherwise would be able to get nothing done at all”. It doesn’t really matter if it’s 19% or 50% or 200% slower than my normal working pace, since any amount of progress is better than zero.
(Every tool in our toolbox — TDD, diagraming, OOP, scrum, lambdas, Kanbans, serverless, etc — looks amazing at first, yet yields around 10% gain in the long run)
Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs Because it reduces our cognitive load:
We have a rich language to describe human feelings and motivations that maps very well onto how LLMs behave - as you’d expect, since post-training LLMs is the process of restricting their outputs to a single attractor in the space of all possible personalities. It’s just more expressive to call 4o “obsequious” than to try to describe the same behaviour in purely non-human terms.
Everything Else
Weird Estate "Ah yes, that well known "1990s children's TV show" style of interior design."
Tech people don't say "the alphabet," they prefer the term "a24z"
Sometimes you meet someone, and you know from the first moment that you want to spend your whole life without them.
Keepfully macOS/iOS app to keep track of things you’ve lent to or borrowed from friends, family, etc. Because sometimes our memory betrays us.
I'm often mistaken for an adult. I think it's because of my age.
Why do we say 'slept like a baby'? Babies wake up every two hours crying.I want to sleep like my cat. 14 hours, no responsibilities, zero regrets.
I'm looking at some of the extras on my Star Trek Discovery Blurays, and there there is a series of videos about the set design on the show. In one segment, one of the art designers is explaining some design details in a corridor, where some tubes and pipes can be seen. The marking GNDN stands for "Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing"
old guys calling stick shift a "millennial antitheft device" when the reason none of us can drive stick is because none of our parents bought stick shift vehicles
A Day in the Life of the Gen Z Worker
Finally, it is 1:50 p.m. Just 10 more minutes until her Microvacation! To participate in this new trend, she gets up from her desk to travel briefly to a second, more fun location—in this case, a coffee shop—for fewer than 30 minutes. Some workers take multiple Microvacations per week, and employers warn it can be addictive.
Emily Velasco "Who keeps coming up with this stuff?"
Someone's kindness made me cry today. My son's been attending a kids sewing class at a local fabric store. The owner saw how much he loves it, and had offered to sell us a machine at a discount for him to use at home, but it was still out of reach for us financially. I told her we'd save up for it for Christmas. Today she gave us that sewing machine free. She said she wanted him to be able to continue to sew at home. Enabling his passion is such a priceless gift and I'm incredibly thankful.
Love this new sign on the Clyde Walkway, but it definitely falls into the Keep Glasgow Weird category. It's one of a number of signs inspired by Science Fiction movies around the city's Science Centre created by A Sign of Humour.
