Published
Weekend Reading — First rule of Eight Club: no typos
Natasha Jay “Biker gang - believe this group are leaders in the illegal cat nip trade ...”
Tech Stuff
looks-same Nice library for visual regression testing, when you need to compare images from different platforms (dev, CI, etc) that are not pixel for pixel identical, using a fairly simple API.
I think many people misunderstand the purpose of code review. The purpose of code review is not for the reviewer to find bugs, and certainly not for them to ensure that the code is bug-free. Anyone who depends on code review to find bugs is living in a fool's paradise. As everyone should know by now, it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code.The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain. The reviewer looks at the code and tries to understand what it is doing and how. If they can't, that means it will be hard to maintain in the future, and should be fixed now, while the original author is still familiar with it.
"You say you are an anarchist yet you keep building state machines, interesting"
Went fully back to Ghostty, VS Code on the side, and Claude Code as my main driver. Here's what actually works after months of experimentation.
Feeding the error messages back into the LLM is the "banging the tv to fix the picture" of our generation.
Today I had to send in some estimates for work, but the estimation took longer than estimated. I overestimated my estimation skills.
Issue counts always go up tick, tock, tick, tock
Build vs Buy in the Age of AI You're not building an invoicing system → You're reverse-engineering 20 years of business rules:
→ 6 months to build basic functionality
→ 18+ months rediscovering the business rules you missed
→ $2.3M average cost when compliance gaps hit
The runway you're burning isn't just cash—it's 20 years of expensive lessons someone already learned. 🤷
"sideloading" is digital "jaywalking". you're still just crossing the street but the corpos have made up a word to make you look bad for it
BBC Breakfast this morning had a long segment about the 30th anniversary of Windows 95. So what vintage computer did they put in the studio as a handy prop?
Eye for Design
The old internet is inspiring new startups A handful of startups are serving up the unfiltered, lo-fi experiences of the early internet as customers tire of today's bloated apps.
Peoples
On this day, MaryShelley's birthday, remember that Victor Frankenstein was the real monster. Today he would have been a techbro and collected hundreds of millions in funding.
Dangerous advice for software engineers TL;DR Most career advice is fake. Mind you, people read career advice because they need a reassuring soundbite, and if the advice wasn't fake, it wouldn't been read as often.
Individual metrics vs team metrics Team, you're doing great!!!
Team feedback improved performance. Individuals that were given only team-level feedback moved more quickly than those given only individual or combined feedback. When feedback was provided only at the team level, members were more likely to coordinate and depend on each other’s performance, and more errors were corrected overall.
Business Side
The startup bubble that no one is talking about This epic drop in "fund i" looks not good.
Selling towards a budget that doesn’t exist
Unfortunately, a $50 K new-category deal can burn the same calories as a $500 K rip‑and‑replace one in an existing category.
UNREAL "That's the spirit!"
Machine Intelligence
Your manager is going to use ChatGPT to do your performance review based on minimal inputs. I guarantee it. Get ahead of the curve and change your middle name to ‘Bigraise.’
With dawn of AI, talk of tech and religion merge for some The Church of The Holy AI
Geoffrey Hinton is sounding the alarm about the risks of artificial intelligence. He believes AI could become a superintelligent entity that might threaten humanity. Known as the “Godfather of AI,” Hinton has voiced concerns since leaving Google in 2023. He urges public awareness to pressure politicians for regulation. Some tech leaders, like OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, describe AI in almost divine terms. Others, like Ray Kurzweil, predict humans will merge with AI, enhancing intelligence. While some praise AI's potential, skeptics like Max Tegmark caution against unregulated development, fearing hubris in the tech industry.
Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don't Exist "We will not honor the Google AI specials."
Can AIs suffer? Big tech and users grapple with one of most unsettling questions of our times The most important question of this generation — should we provide equal rights to a software algorithm?
As first AI-led rights advocacy group is founded, industry is divided on whether models are, or can be, sentient
LLMs will be super cool the moment the bubble pops and they become an underground hipster hobby, rather than a load-bearing part of the economy that oligarchs are climbing over each other to to ram down our throats as hard as they can. I mean they already are super cool but it's hard to notice with all the disgusting pigs surrounding it, trying to become the next GPU slum lords of the 21st century.
AI sycophancy isn't just a quirk, experts consider it a 'dark pattern' to turn users into profit
Experts say that many of the AI industry’s design decisions are likely to fuel episodes of AI psychosis. Many raised concerns about several tendencies that are unrelated to underlying capability.
Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters So is that a feature or a bug? Because i’m thirsty …
One clip on Instagram, which has been viewed over 21.5 million times, shows a man ordering "a large Mountain Dew" and the AI voice continually replying "and what will you drink with that?".
It isn't the first time there have been issues with AI not getting it right when it comes to processing food and drink orders.
Insecurity
Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll - how to check and turn it off
Some Facebook users have noticed new settings that let Meta analyze and retain your phone's photos. Yes, you read that right.
Developer Unlocks Newly Enshittified Echelon Exercise Bikes But Can't Legally Release His Software
An app developer has jailbroken Echelon exercise bikes to restore functionality that the company put behind a paywall last month, but copyright laws prevent him from being allowed to legally release it.
Pentagon Pizza Index The dashboard you never knew you needed.
Everything Else
First rule of Eight Club: no typos.
Is there a German Word for "The Anxiety of Nothing Being Wrong At The Moment"?
David Zinn “Aiden's hairstyle is ‘party in the front, party in the back, and unbridled chaos on the sides.’”
I'll say, "omg, I have so much to do," and then take a nap
My library requires that anyone challenging a book has to read it and discuss it with a panel. That stops almost all challenges.
I've seen many TV owner's manuals, but only one which tells you how you can use an AM radio or camera to check if the remote control is working.
Everything I want I can afford, because if I can’t afford it then I don’t want it. A philosophy that has served me well for decades.
If someone has chronic pain, and your first instinct is to ask "Have you tried--" Stop. "Chronic" means ongoing. It means they have been dealing with it for awhile. If they haven't tried something, it's because it's out of their means. Questioning that they haven't tried everything under the sun implies you think they want to be in pain. If we say we are in pain, we are not asking for advice. We are telling you how the system has failed us. Tell the system, not us, what to do.
Bennie "We have some guests coming over, so we're finally upgrading the TV. I found this handy guide. Sharing it in case others are interested."
Mixing Coffee And Antibiotics Could Be a Bad Idea, Study Shows Apparantly the human body has a gene regulator protein called Rob??? (via Hicsumus)
The analysis showed that a particular protein called Rob played a bigger role than previously thought in controlling what gets in and out of the bacteria cells. It was involved in about a third of all the changes spotted by the researchers, including those triggered by the introduction of caffeine.
Sitting on the deck, I just got buzzed by a hummingbird. Then it landed on a branch about 3m (10ft) away, and chirped at me. Once it had my attention, it flew to a branch near our hummingbird feeder and chirped some more. The feeder was empty. It was asking for a refill. Apparently this is a not uncommon behavior. Wow.
Gen Z seeks safety above all else
Whereas previous generations may have taken safety for granted, today’s youth are growing up in an era of compounded crises — school shootings, a worsening climate crisis, financial uncertainty and the lingering trauma of a global pandemic. Even though our research did not pinpoint the specific causes of adolescent fears, the constant exposure to crises, amplified by social media, likely plays a significant role in fostering a pervasive sense of worry.
On the plus side:
Interestingly, “being kind” was rated No. 2 in our survey, irrespective of other demographics. While safety dominates their priorities, adolescents still value qualities that foster connection and community.
