Published
Weekend Reading — And a ghostty October to you
The Autistic Innovator "Someone didn't think that design through"
Tech Stuff
LaunchOS Launchpad is back! Not my favorite UI, I never cared to use Launchpad, but I know a few people who swear by it, and now you can brew install launchos on your macOS 26.
The AI-collapse pre-mortem (via Lars Marowsky-Brée)
This post was usefully proofread by ChatGPT, which found several issues that the human proofreaders had not. So take the claims of LLMs being useless with a grain of salt. If you are smart about it an LLM can be useful. But selling to clever people is not a trillion dollar opportunity.
Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Feature From Mitchell Hashimoto:
I've shared the full transcript of every agentic coding session from implementing the unobtrusive Ghostty updates and provided commentary alongside about my thinking and process. I'm regularly asked to share non-trivial examples of how I use AI and agentic coding tools and this felt like a golden opportunity to walk through my process with a well-scoped, non-trivial, real-world, shipping feature. Total cost: $15.98 over 16 sessions.
No silver bullets: Why understanding software cycle time is messy, not magic (via Dr. Cat Hicks)
We find precise but modest associations between cycle time and factors including coding days per week, number of merged pull requests, and degree of collaboration. However, these effects are set against considerable unexplained variation both between and within individuals. Our findings suggest that while common workplace factors do influence cycle time in expected directions, any single observation provides limited signal about typical performance.
Toby 👍
Code is ephemeral. What works right now might get deleted next month. That is no judgement on the code, it is a statement that code isn’t the value prop, the product is. I try and remember this during code review, because even though we call it code review, there is a person at the other end. Sometimes it makes sense to ask for a refactor, for the sake of the code. Sometimes it makes sense to approve it and get on with your day, for the sake of the person.
How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface Detailed blog post about disabling some of Apple’s Liquid Glass UI tweaks.
But be mindful of iPhone 17 Pro Max | iOS26 Is Actually Crazy Battery Nightmare | Power Consumption Deep Dive
And sadly, the “Reduce Transparency” option doesn’t help at all. “Reduce Transparency” makes it worse.
* With Reduce Transparency = ON, most actions added ~+1W.
* Control Center can hit ~10–11W. Feels like a brute-force path under the hood.
Inside you there are two wolves. One of them knows SQL. This is the WHERE-wolf.
I'm bored of these regular expressions. Where can I get premium expressions?
If you want to save your sanity from endless macOS tips, go to System Settings > Notifications > Tips and turn notifications off. It's like Apple is in a competition with Microsoft for annoying its users.
Eye for Design
With its Phone Sleep Collection, IKEA has designed little beds for smartphones. Equipped with an NFC chip, they reward those who disconnect during the night. A clever design that helps to get back to sleep without having to scroll.
Peoples
Ness Letters: The Art of Getting Through to People
- Build credibility through connection, eg “While burnout continues to plague our residents, we as medical educators …”
- Use emotion strategically, eg “A user emailed last week saying they tried to navigate our app with a screen reader for two hours before giving up.”
- Make your logic feel inevitable — each step follows naturally from the last, making people think that they’re arriving at your conclusion themselves.
many times all people want is a little message, a tiny comment on the ticket, that says “I have not forgotten about this, sorry i’m behind, this is still on my radar” and they will think you’re a star that shines bright in the sky
Business Side
If you want to know where Microsoft’s head is at, they’ve added Copilot usage into their Connect (yearly performance review), told sales people their performance is only being based on how much Copilot they sell, and added Copilot usage to Viva Insight so companies can see how much Copilot usage there is in the org and how it compares to industry peers. Basically, only KPI that matters for orgs now: how much you feed the Copilot god.
John Kelly "Every pro-AI presentation I've sat in has included some form of this graph"
Machine Intelligence
AI is a technological inflection point. It's scary, but also exhilarating and fun to live through. Most of the world is as ignorant about AI as people were about personal computing in 1982. It's just breaking in to the mainstream, yet totally mysterious. IMHO, it's a good time to learn about AI.
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?
Maybe the dawn of the new golden era of stupidity doesn’t begin when we submit to super-intelligent machines; it starts when we hand over power to dumb ones.
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP I haven't figured out how to use them effectively — yet — but I like that I can write these skills as Markdown. I just wish there was a better way to share them between Claude Desktop, Claude Web, and Claude Code (CLI). Is it too much to add some Git to the skills?
Insecurity
Eavesdropping on Internal Networks via Unencrypted Satellites (via Taggart)
We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens’ voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet traffic from in-flight wifi and mobile networks. This data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware. There are thousands of geostationary satellite transponders globally, and data from a single transponder may be visible from an area as large as 40% of the surface of the earth.
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month! Please be aware of cybersecurity. If you encounter cybersecurity, DO NOT APPROACH IT. Back away slowly. Protect children and pets. Make noises to scare it away.
Every one of my healthcare providers has an online patient portal, and they are all located on domain names like TotallyLegitPatientPortal dot clown
Everything Else
samw "More of whatever this is please"
heavy is the pinky that holds the phone
my favorite position is juxta
CrazyMyra "This is why they don't let me sit near the emergency doors now"
You’re allowed to ghost people in October. It’s festive.
The real treasure was the clean public restroom we found along the way.
Spurious Correlations One of my favorite web sites.
"Lighthouse" is a misnomer. Lighthouses are actually very heavy. So heavy, you probably can't pick one up.
I don't want to seize the day can't I just cuddle the day instead
Kim Scheinberg "Clever cartoon but I also really love the color schemes here"
A haunted house, but it's all of the important phone calls you have to make
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a thousand additional times? Still, shame on you. Stop fooling me, you evil genius
Photos show polar bears chilling at home in abandoned Russian research station.
Polar bears that have taken over an abandoned polar research station off Russia’s far eastern coast were intimately captured in drone footage by Vadim Makhorov
I'm watching a Godard movie from the 60s and everybody smokes and obsessively reads the newspaper, in case you were wondering what we did before phones
josef The perfect hack:
if you ever want to buy something but the problem is it's too expensive to buy new? create a "saved search" on ebay. then ebay will send you an email every week with a list of broken ones for sale. every week you'll see more and more "for parts or not working" listings of it. within a month you'll never want to buy one at all because it seems like they break really easily. like why would you buy one? they must be built like complete shit!
Award for dog, abandoned five times but now solving wildlife crime Not all heros wear capes, some heros just like receiving treats!
"He's got so much energy and drive and as soon as we trained him for conservation detection we were able to give him focus," she said.
good morning you all! Well, my "secrets" to productivity are:
- accidentally falling asleep at 9:30pm (so that by 5:30am I had already slept 8 hours)
- knowing I can't do much work on a Wednesday because daycare only runs till 12:30pm
Given how long I've already been up and working... and the fact I will be with a little tornado of energy from 12:30pm till 8:30pm, I bet that tonight I will also fall asleep at 9-9:30pm 😅 🤣
shout out to the rainbow-haired woman at the flea market who sold me a hello kitty blanket and a manatee webkin and was SO excited to tell me that haggling is allowed and then got excited when I haggled her price down by two dollars. I have no idea how you make money with your business model but I'm here for it
elle "I wanted to post a funny caption for this picture but I must be in some kind of mood right now because I'm finding it kind of moving"
