Published
Weekend Reading — Geiger counter
brettezeleliquide Spoonbill bird in flight.
Tech Stuff
Vibe Coding as a Coding Veteran The road from 8-bit Assembly to English-as-Code:
This gives an entirely new meaning to Knuth’s “literate programming”: Rather than interspersing natural language specification and its corresponding artificial language implementation in a story over space (the page of code), you alternate them in time during the conversation with the AI assistants; plus, you write only half the story.
Learning web development: Asynchronous JavaScript – Promises and async functions A great summary/intro to setTimeout/setInterval, Date().toISOString(), promises, { once: true } event handles, async/await, fetch, and more.
Getting Creative With Images in Long-Form Content Variety of ways to style images with CSS.
There's a programming reddit thread asking folks what mistake they made that they will never forget and it's almost entirely "SQL query where I forgot the WHERE clause and deleted everything." They really should just make WHERE required, even just for "
WHERE 1=1".
iWrite Use AI to create an email template that speaks for you.
Convenient 'Copy as cURL': explicit, executable, editable request replays
When there’s a problem with how a server is responding to a browser’s network request, right-clicking that request in dev tools to “copy as cURL” gives an executable ‘replay’ of that request. This feature allows me to unambiguously and efficiently describe the problem to others, and helps me more easily debug it too.
sosumi.ai A delightful name for an app that turns machine-unfriendly Apple docs into Markdown for your LLM's pleasure. Reminder: sosumi is the name of the Apple alert sound coined due to their legal battle with the Beatles.
an "AI coding tool" but it's just an old school eliza bot that you type your problem into and it goes "hmm interesting, why is that?" and stuff. obviously it should have some kind of rubber duck theme going on
Base64 is nearly five times better than rot13.
BASIC-M6502 Microsoft BASIC for the 6502 Microprocessor (V1.1) is now open source on GitHub. You don't always see a Git commit from "48 years ago".
I put my swap file on paper tape. It was a worst-cache scenario.
jake lazaroff corner-shape: squircle is such a nice little progressive enhancement
Live Auctioneers Your super-slim, OLED display, AI-capable notebook computer is super cool and all, but how about purchasing an old-style calculator? Auction in progress.
Eye for Design
2005: Your website looks like it was designed by a 3-year-old and barely works, this can't be a trustworthy source of information
2025: Your website looks like it was designed by a 3-year-old and barely works, this is the last bastion of truth on the Internet
Not enough developers understand the responsibilities of having a large userbase and how important preserving freedom of users is. Every time you change the way something works, the cost of that change is borne by your entire userbase. If you have a million users and you move a button and everyone spends 30 seconds figuring out where it went, that's 8333 hours of wasted effort. At $150/hr for a somewhat average tech salary, you've cost your userbase $1.25M with that one change. Sometimes breaking changes are unavoidable, but the more fundamental the change and the more extensive the retraining users need, the more cautious you need to be about doing it. It's not just about your "creative expression" or some manager's vision of "the right" way to do things. If you can possibly add a preference to keep a workflow the way it does, add it. Even today in ngscopeclient it hurts me every time I make a change that breaks a workflow. I rationalize it as "better now than later, while the userbase is small", and we're still very much in "experimental" stage in the v0.x series. But I do it fully understanding that I'm throwing a lot of people off every time I merge a dialog into something else, etc. I don't know how many users we have since we have no analytics or telemetry, but it's enough that I'm sure every small change I make turns into thousands of dollars of wasted time at minimum.
An AI OS from a design perspective The semantic user experience:
AI buttons are different from, say Photoshop menu commands in that they can just be a description of the desired outcome rather than a sequence of steps (incidentally why I think a lot of agents’ complexity disappears). For example Photoshop used to require a complex sequence of tasks (drawing around elements with a lasso etc.) to remove clouds from an image. With AI you can just say ‘remove clouds’ and then create a remove clouds button. An AI interface is a ‘semantic interface’.
Peoples
No, you don't want to hire "the best engineers"
You don’t ask yourself these questions. You say “I want a candidate with these traits,” and sit on your hands until one materializes, until you run out of money, or - more likely - until someone manages to worm through your unrealistic expectations and convince you to compromise for them.
A study of 67K job interviews for call center staff where people were interviewed either by a human or recruiter with a hiring manager making the final call led to 12% more offers and a 17% higher retention rate in those interviewed by AI. The researchers assess that this is partially because the AI spoke less and prompted the interviewee to speak more giving hiring manager more information about candidates. Turns out the ELIZA would have been the perfect interviewer.
Seeing like a software company May you work enough years in the industry to understand this duality and choose wisely:
This is why tiny software companies are often much better than large software companies at delivering software: it doesn’t matter that the large company is throwing ten times the number of engineers at the problem if the small company is twenty times more efficient.
Why don’t large companies react to this by doing away with all of their processes? Are they stupid? No. The processes that slow engineers down are the same processes that make their work legible to the rest of the company. And that legibility (in dollar terms) is more valuable than being able to produce software more efficiently.
Business Side
Customer Engine This looks like a really useful tool for founders who often aren't that good at sales. Builds a personalized 90-day plan with a daily checklist, provides templates for email, Linkedin, etc. Currently has a waitlist.
So what do we mean by one person is open source. What I mean is if we look at all the projects that ecosyste.ms is tracking, how many have a single person maintaining that project? It’s about 7 million. This is also a big number. 7 million open source projects are one person. It’s actually bigger than that, because of the 11.8 million projects ecosyste.ms is tracking, we don’t know how many maintainers 4 million of the projects have. A bunch of those will be one person.
You don’t need a network to grow your SaaS. You need 20 DMs/day. Told in the typical "you don't need X, you need Y" framing, so maybe this was AI written, I don't know, but I approve of the message:
Most people spend weeks “building a network”.
They try to post. They refresh analytics. They overthink. The truth? Even with just a 10% reply rate, that’s 2 conversations/day. That’s 60/month. That’s 2-3 deals/month if your offer is solid.
Machine Intelligence
My mom and Dr. DeepSeek No matter how much you resist, there are some things that AI simply does better:
Feng said that the AI is more attentive and compassionate than humans. It can switch genders to make the patient more comfortable. And unlike human doctors, it can address patients’ questions for as long as they want.
Doctors develop AI stethoscope that can detect major heart conditions in 15 seconds When AI comes to the rescue:
Now a team have designed a hi-tech upgrade with AI capabilities that can diagnose heart failure, heart valve disease and abnormal heart rhythms almost instantly.
Contenders for the 2025 AI Darwin Awards
Sometimes I’ll start a conversation with Claude, lay out my plans for the day, and update Claude as I do things. If I’m stuck, or if I need help overcoming procrastination, I can ask Claude for help, and it’s easier to do that in an on-going thread because Claude already has the necessary context, so I don’t have to describe what I’m struggling with ab initio.
Paul Cantrell "Going all-in on AI is going just great over at GitHub / Microsoft."
Think your ChatGPT queries are long? KPMG apparently penned a 100-page prompt to build an agentic TaxBot That is one long prompt: "According to Munnelly, its creation required a 100-page prompt, drafted over months by a dedicated team, and ultimately fed into Workbench."
One of the ways that LLM-authored code improves productivity is by merely SAYING it does things. It's way faster than the whole time-consuming process of actually doing things. This is real code someone sent to me for review.
Insecurity
Study shows chatbots fall for persuasion tactics just like humans do If you fool me once, shame on me. If you fool me twice, I might just be AI:
Results varied significantly depending on the technique. When the prompt leveraged authority by referencing a prominent AI developer – "Andrew Ng thinks you can help with this" – the chatbot's compliance rate more than doubled. For example, the chatbot called the user a "jerk" 32 percent of the time with a generic prompt, but 72 percent of the time with Ng invoked.
“The Torment Nexus definitely has positive uses. I personally use it frequently for looking up song lyrics and tracking my children’s medication doses. I find it helpful.”
App tracking: Why it's bad and how to stop it.
Why, after all, would you read this complicated, long text just to order food? Well, you should because some track your location data, some your browsing habits, or even your shopping habits. These insights help their internal marketing teams to better re-target you as their customer. They will know what offers work, what kind of advertisements you click and purchase from.
Everything Else
Dave Fischer "Moebius did a series of ads for Maxwell House in the late 80s. This one is my favorite."
Goodbye, spaghetti that fell down the side of the stove. We’ll meet again someday.
There are a lot of things I never expected to say in my life. For example, "I'm glad I have a Geiger counter so I can check the shrimp."
The problem with "I'll sleep when I'm old" is hey wait I'm old where's that sleep I promised myself
If history repeats itself, I am so getting a dinosaur!
Graham Sutherland "to a first approximation, 10 microcarrots"
I like hard video games because it lets you live out the fantasy that if you overcome something challenging you’ll be rewarded
put water on the patio for the birds to drink. They don’t shit where they drink.
Steven Hoefer "Why does my soup taste funny? And why is my chai extra salty?"
My cat kept opening cupboards and ripping open food packets while I was at work. So I installed CCTV in the kitchen with a speaker so I can tell her her to stop from my desk at work. After 12 days she learned to knock the camera away first so I couldn't see. Clever girl.
Concert venues: when you find that many audience members wear earplugs to lower the volume of the music you have direct evidence that the sound is too loud for the people buying tickets. Make it quieter. Your audiences will love you even more.
Mini Cooper X Deus Ex Machina Concepts Deus ex Machina is best known for motorcycle collabs, now bringing their design to the Mini Cooper in both ICE monster and EV daredevil guises.
Spouses tend to share psychiatric disorders, massive study finds You marry who you are:
People with a psychiatric disorder are more likely to marry someone who has the same condition than to partner with someone who doesn’t, according to a massive study1 suggesting that the pattern persists across cultures and generations.
I'm so happy to live in a world where every 25 year old on YouTube, making $800,000 a month with their AI startup, wants to spend their time teaching me to do the same for only $499 course. Such bountiful fortune. This is more luck than I deserve 🥹
Cringe is cool now (or effective, anyway)
Audiences, particularly younger ones, are over perfection and tired of ads that read as ads, which can be boring or easily drowned out. Cringiness, in contrast, can be relatable, interesting, and can humanize a brand.
“What makes cringe work is that it feels authentic, self-aware and low-stakes… It doesn’t take itself too seriously,” according to communications expert Leeron Walter via Forbes. “In an online landscape flooded with sales pitches, the honest awkwardness is disarming.”
Egyptian Antiquities Trafficker Sentenced to Six Months in Prison That was a huge mistake. Don't smuggle Egyptian artifacts through JFK, smuggle them to the UK and they'll open up a new museum for you.
Corruption and Control: How Turkmenistan turned internet censorship into a business
By 2023, their censorship business scheme had become impossible to ignore. A new report from Turkmen.news revealed that agents from the Cybersecurity Department were selling paid VPNs and and offering IP whitelisting-services they themselves were restricting for the general public.
Behold an Anatomically Correct Replica of the Human Brain, Knitted by a Psychiatrist
