Published
Weekend Reading — 🦩 Flamingo
Street Art Utopia "Whales in the sky! 🐋✨ From the beach to the clouds at the 38th International Kite Festival in Berck-sur-Mer, France. Absolutely surreal!"
Tech Stuff
The EU is introducing an energy label for phones, together with mandatory requirements for phones sold in the EU;5 years of software updates (AFTER they stop selling the device in the EU)providing important hardware parts (during sale and for 7 years after), including free software (if needed), to every repair shop, within 5-10 business daysbatteries have to make 800 charging cycles and still be above 80% original capacity
And on top of that, phones and tablets need this energy label (which also includes a fall damage durability and repairability score), and abide by the above requirements, from 20 June 2025.
How to Understand a New Codebase Quickly
Don't start by reading the tests. Tests are historical documents of pain, and of mortal combat with persistent bugs. Or, sometimes, they are obligatory reiterations of the code itself, generated or written by rote in order to satisfy the dictums of a coding standard.
The best way I know to get acquainted with an unknown codebase is to fire it up locally (this alone may be very hard). Then approach softly, humbly, as a mere user. Start making theories about how it works, and what parts of the code are responsible for the behaviors you see.
Then deliberately start breaking it.
Magnitude An open-source test framework that lets you write E2E tests in natural language. Supports a bunch of providers: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and more. Looks interesting enough, I'm going to try this on my next project.
YAGRI: You are gonna read it 💪
In general, these are some useful fields to store on almost any table:
• created_at
• updated_at
• deleted_at (soft deletes)
• created_by etc
• permission used during CRUD
This practice will pay off with just a single instance of your boss popping into a meeting and going "wait do we know why that thing was deleted, the customer is worried...".
redirect.pizza Domain redirects as a service – supports HTTPS, provides an API, updates analytics, has path and email forwarding, and with a free plan that gives you up to 100K requests a month, enough to try it out on a small project.
Software engineering under the spotlight Tech companies have limited focus:
• Tech companies can only focus on one or two things at a time; this is the "spotlight"
• Engineers who perform well under the spotlight get more visibility, rewards, and career growth
• Some engineers chase the spotlight and become known quantities to leadership, at the cost of stability
• Others avoid the spotlight and do good technical work quietly, but tend to be under-recognized
• Either strategy can work, but you should be honest about the tradeoffs
Badge AI As a concept I think it’s cool — a badge to identify how much of the content is AI (assisted, mostly, all generated, etc). But I don't get the specifics of each badge, maybe I need an AI to help me figure them out?
What type of UUID should I use? And why it’s most likely UUID type 7:
This type of UUID was designed for assigning IDs to records on database tables.
The main thing about type 7 is that the first block of bits are a time stamp. Since time always goes forward [citation needed] and the timestamp is right at the front, each UUID you generate will have a bigger value than the last one.
Glyph Related:
TIL that if I ever lose a UUID there's a website I can use to go find it
Anders Eknert "lol, no"
rands 👍
Robot fun yesterday. Had Claude.ai write me a hockey score scraper, converted it ot a JSON service emitting HTML. Switched to Claude Code to debug a bit and add additional small features. I didn't write a lick of code — I built and debugged it precisely as I had imagined. It's easy and fun.
Daniel "rare pic of a container deployed to Amazon's de-east-1 region"
Eye for Design
Randahl Fink I love this feature:
I love how accessibility features keep improving in our digital world.
Netflix have subtitles on all their shows, but these subtitles have focused on providing good audio cues about sounds, a deaf person does not hear, such as [music], [wind is picking up], and [car driving off].
These descriptions are great for those who need them, but unnecessary for people who just need translation support. So now Netflix is adding simplified dialogue only subtitles as well.
Neat!
They made computers behave like annoying salesmen 🤔
I understand that it's not the "YouTube program" having its own agency and making this decision - it's the team behind it, driven by engagement metrics and growth targets. But does the average user understand this distinction?
Ethan J. A. Schoonover “finally took a few minutes to solve a real world UI problem”
Peoples
i've been told that i'm great at giving standup updates
my one "weird trick" is a few mins before the meeting Ireview my top 3 ticketswrite a short sentence capturing
What/So What/Now Whatthen literally read those notes aloud with very little ad-libbing
that's it! a few minutes of prep spares me jabbering away (which I am very good at) and keeps the meeting moving
My youngest son starts his first full-time job on Monday as an economist. It's work from home four out of five days, moving to nine out of 10 days. He just got his equipment from the company, and I have to say I've never seen a company that provides a laptop, a docking station, a very nice headset, two monitors, a keyboard, a mouse, as well as a bunch of company swag. I guess there are still companies that recognize the value of working from home.
Business Side
Senior engineers should make side bets
What is a side bet? It's a project or task that you think will be valuable to the company, but that isn't on anyone else's radar. It could be a new feature, or a performance optimization, or a change that will speed up development - as long as it could provide a concrete benefit.
Wicked features Why is working at large tech companies so hard? Because a small subset of "wicked features" dominate everything else:
• Wicked features are requirements that must be considered every time you build anything else
• They massively increase implementation complexity and coordination cost
• Some wicked features are unavoidable, especially when selling to high-paying enterprise users
• Others are self-inflicted by overengineering, dogma, or poor taste
• Good engineers limit the blast radius: they prevent unnecessary wicked features, and factor the necessary ones so they don't pollute everything
Backblaze: A Loss-Making Data Storage Business Mired in Lawsuits, Sham Accounting, and Brazen Insider Dumping Shit. I use Backblaze to backup my computers, and I generally would recommend the service as useful and not too expensive, but Morpheus Research is going to short their stock, so publishing the true story behind the company, and it doesn't look like a bright future:
Backblaze, in our view, is the archetype of a failed growth business and its latest "restructuring" will do little to resurrect the company's woeful capital market performance or transform its undifferentiated storage offering. Its capital markets story has been kept alive by allegedly inflated cash flow forecasts, hidden internal investigations and accounting tricks, which appear to fuel exit liquidity for insiders.
Meta Cuts Jobs at Reality Labs/Oculus Studios Amid Financial Strain Sadly for Facebook, the metaverse is not versing:
The company confirmed job cuts affecting an unspecified number of employees within the unit responsible for Quest headsets and metaverse development. These adjustments come as the division continues to operate with substantial financial deficits.
Related, "efficiency" is now the codeword for "firing people en masse": “Meta frames these personnel changes as part of an efficiency drive.”
The Man Who Wants AI to Help You 'Cheat on Everything' According to this article, 700 people were already cheated out of their money by paying for this thin layer over ChatGPT:
Roy Lee used AI to beat challenging technical interviews, now he wants people to do the same thing with every human interaction. We tested the tool and it kinda sucks.
Machine Intelligence
The OpenAI house style is exhausting ☹️
I think it's the obsession with rhetorical tricks. ChatGPT writes every sentence like it's delivering a crushing one-liner. Everything is "punched up", way past the point of good taste.
…
Claude doesn't talk like this. Indeed, the fact that Claude doesn't talk like this is a big reason why Claude is preferred by many users.
When you should lie to the language model
Here's an unreasonably effective trick for working with AIs: always pretend that your work was produced by someone else.
The problem is that current-generation AIs are too agreeable. They're trained to tell you that your ideas are novel and excellent, that your writing is clear and well-expressed, and even that your IQ is ~135.
Brodie Robertson "Wait it's actually real, O'Reilly has a Vibe Coding book coming out"
Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief—judge finds nearly 30 mistakes (Don't blame the AI for people doing stupid things)
A lawyer representing MyPillow and its CEO Mike Lindell in a defamation case admitted using artificial intelligence in a brief that has nearly 30 defective citations, including misquotes and citations to fictional cases, a federal judge said.
Related, AI helped write bar exam questions, California state bar admits “The bar says it will ask the state supreme court to adjust scores after test-takers also faced platform crashes” — Two wrongs don’t make a right!
Ziff Davis trying to replace their journalists with generative AI, realising nobody wants to read generative AI, then suing the same generative AI provider for copyright infringement is pretty funny.
o3, o4-mini, o4-mini-high, o My The toughest challenge when it comes to AI is naming your models:
And that presumes that GPT-4.1 is the heir apparent to GPT-4o, at least until GPT-5 arrives. Again, everyone assumed that GPT-4.5 would be the hold-over, but now it seems like GPT-4.1 might be. Yes, even though GPT-4o has the coveted 'o' and GPT-4.1 does not. Or maybe they'll go with GPT-4.1o – but perhaps only if it has the reasoning chops that 'o' implies. But not enough reasoning chops to be an actual 'o' model like o3 or 04-mini or 04-mini-fast.
Neil Sardesai "Read the first line and thought I was finally getting my break into organized crime"
Insecurity
Employee monitoring app leaks 21 million screenshots in real time Who did not see this coming?
The app, designed to track productivity by logging activity and snapping regular screenshots of employees' screens, left over 21 million images exposed in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket, broadcasting how workers go about their day frame by frame.
If you heard about that hacking of the voices of traffic light crosswalks in the US recently, the root cause is the devices all had the password '1234' and an app to reprogram the devices was on the Apple app store.
When /etc/h*sts Breaks Your Substack Editor: An Adventure in Web Content Filtering WAF is giving the author a WTF moment.
Today Melissa Lewis over on BlueSky pointed out that the font used in the infamous "You wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy campaign was actually designed by Just van Rossum, whose brother, Guido, created the Python programming language.
She also pointed out that the font had been cloned and released illegally for free under the name "XBAND Rough". Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded.
So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!
Everything Else
Sol R. "Hello, today April 26, is World Pink Flamingo Day. Happy name day to Alda and Riquier."
That thing where a 25-year-old checks whether I understood the Seinfeld reference.
In reality, plants are actually farming us by giving us oxygen daily until we eventually decompose so they can consume us.
Andy "good for her"
OMFG.
I JUST REALISED A FOOD TRUCK IS REVERSE DRIVE THRU.
Accidentally bought no-purpose flour :/
iFixit "Apple's Polishing Cloth hasn't been updated in YEARS. They must be working on something big."
I never know what the chatty five year old will tell some random person he just met, but tonight's conversational highlight was when I heard him say something about his "mom's extra bodies." I was just as confused as his interlocutor.
Dress forms. They are dress forms
Slate is the American truck scene's Ctrl+Alt+Del moment I think this experiment will turn out quite successful. One, it's cheap — around $20K for a new truck and no need to buy gas at the pump — and we're heading into a recession, so price will be a huge factor. Two, it's super basic — no radio, manual windows, no large screen — which makes it a good choice for business fleets. Three, it's designed for DIY upgrades — from painting the outside to adding back seats to extending the EV range. And US drivers love to customize their "me mobile". Also, it's pretty good looking.
✅ my
✅ work task checklist
✅ refuses
✅ to end
With both Eurovision and the Papal conclave happening in May, it's gonna be a big month for Europeans who love overly complex, confusing and dramatic ways to select a winner that are run by international bureaucracies, include smoke for dramatic effect and feature excessively extra outfits
Fold 'N Fly A database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions.
I'm super excited to announce something I've been working on for many years! Brain™: the natural intelligence engine that's always with you.
Brain™ works on any platform, with any app. The more you use it, the smarter it gets! Brain™ trains only on data you feed it and it's powered by a renewable caloric process. Start using yours today!
Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science "Modern science wouldn't exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can't let it go."
